"Empty Shelves Everywhere At Meijer! This Is Ridiculous!"
"In today's vlog we are at Meijer, and are noticing Empty Shelves Everywhere! We are also noticing ridiculous price increases, and a major food shortage! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
"The unraveling continues. In one sense, what’s happening is predictable. Looking back in history, while not everything happens in the same way, things very much rhyme. That’s why certain aspects of the current financial collapse are very, very familiar.
The Fed® still has enough influence that it can stop a snowball. Can the Fed® stop an avalanche? Not so much. They may have some tricks to push the day of reckoning down the line if it isn’t off the rails. Again, like a presidential election, it’s a short-term solution to a long-term problem. If it were merely financial a financial problem, the actions might be enough. But it’s not just financial.
Other problems include extreme societal decadence. Decadence is a strong word. When I was a kid, it was applied to places like the late Roman Empire, or Willy Wonka’s® Chocolate Factory where those Umpa-Loompas wore those scanty tight outfits.
Whatever fetish sex act that any individual wants to do “because it’s Thursday” now seems to take the place of virtue. Replacing the idea of actual virtues with temporary individual passions is exactly what every single functioning society in history has avoided to in order to remain functioning. When people follow passions that are productive, like building rockets, they add to society. When people act on passions counter to virtue? Those passions consume and destroy society. Period.
We don’t live in a world where “if it feels good, do it” can ever be a policy that lead to a productive society. At some point, we must be guided by virtue, we have to have a shared vision for a future, and a shared desire to build. Can you imagine a single event that would bring us all together again? I can’t. We have to have that shared vision – if nothing else, to survive. Do we have it?
We do not. We are divided. The idea of a selfless devotion to duty seems to have (in many places) evaporated. Cops are supposed to put themselves into danger to save the innocent – that’s the only reason we put up with the rest of the nonsense that they get up to. If they have changed their motto from “Protect and Serve” to “Hide Until We Can and Give Traffic Tickets to People That Don’t Scare Us” then they’re not much use.
Globalism is likewise something that sounds good, but isn’t. I can understand the need for some places like, say, deserts to import grain and Alaska to import medicine and export oil and good vibes. But can someone tell me that we’re in a better and safer position as a country now that we depend on far-flung nations for things. When I talked to The Boy about careers, the advice I gave him was simple – don’t do anything that someone can do over the Internet. If you do, you’re competing with a job with millions or billions of people.
We have reached the stage of cultural collapse. I’m in favor of capitalism – but amoral capitalism is different. When capitalism is allowed to meet any need, the result isn’t good. Like any system, it needs boundaries. As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Freedom needs boundaries. Freedom needs responsibility. Liberty, real liberty, requires obligation for stability. Otherwise? It descends into chaos. So, we’ve established that we’re in a difficult place. The things that we depended upon are slowly slipping away. The economy is in a very precarious place, culturally we’re shattered to the point that not even another 9-11 would bring us together. The difficulties that we see from here on out won’t serve to bring us together, they will bring us apart. How about the economic difficulties related to just high fuel prices alone?
The Lefties love it, even as it destroys our economy. Heck destruction of the economy might even be the point. But stresses have consequences. If I drop an orange, it will fall. If we destroy an economy, it will fail. Some parts of it will be predictable: interest rates going up will make housing prices go down. Simple. We can talk about other correlations on Wednesday (feel free to bring up more below).
The one thing that I can tell you, is what comes next won’t be like what came before. The problems that we have rhyme with the problems of the past, but they’re not the same. During the Great Depression, we were at least (mostly) homogeneous as a country. Now, not so much.
The end state is tied to the initial conditions. And the initial conditions of the Great Depression were greatly different than they are today, so there’s no way that we’ll see the same results. And things will never go back to “normal” because we simply cannot go back in time, and there isn’t any such thing as “normal” nor any time period which is “normal”. They will be different. What we have, though, is the rhyme. It won’t allow us to predict perfectly. But it will allow us to see, dimly."
"Did Europe's Latest (& Little Noticed) Anti-Russia
Move Just Push The World Closer To WW3?"
by Tyler Durden
"Quite possibly the biggest Russia-West provocation of the entire four-month long war in Ukraine has occurred this weekend, but few in the media establishment seem to be taking notice of the singular event which has the potential to quickly spiral toward a WW3 scenario.
Baltic EU/NATO member Lithuania has implemented a ban on all rail transit goods going to Russia's far-western exclave of Kaliningrad, after transport authorities initially announced the provocative measure on Friday. "The EU sanctions list notably includes coal, metals, construction materials and advanced technology, and Alikhanov said the ban would cover around 50% of the items that Kaliningrad imports," Reuters wrote.
This has given way to fears of panic buying breaking out in Kaliningrad Oblast, which is Russian sovereign territory on the Baltic Sea, but which is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, and is thus reliant on overland shipping for passage via its EU neighbors.
Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian oblast which has a total population of some one million people (with Kaliningrad city including almost 450,000 - and 800,000 total if outlying suburbs are counted) is urging calm: "Urging citizens not to resort to panic buying, Alikhanov said two vessels were already ferrying goods between Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburg, and seven more would be in service by the end of the year. "Our ferries will handle all the cargo", he said on Saturday."
Russian officials and media have long warned against what they dubbed Western aims to "blockade" Kaliningrad. Crucially, the EU enforcement measure being implemented from Vilnius marks a complete break in a three decade long treaty that's been in effect...
Ahead of the new Lithuanian transit ban taking effect, the state railways service was reportedly awaiting final word from the European Commission on enforcing it: "The cargo unit of Lithuania's state railways service set out details of the ban in a letter to clients following "clarification" from the European Commission on the mechanism for applying the sanctions. Previously, Lithuanian Deputy Foreign Minister Mantas Adomenas said the ministry was waiting for "clarification from the European Commission on applying European sanctions to Kaliningrad cargo transit." Brussels then ruled that "sanctioned goods and cargo should still be prohibited even if they travel from one part of Russia to another but through EU territory," according to Rueters/Rferl."
In Moscow's eyes, this is tantamount to laying economic siege to part of Russia's sovereign territory and one million of its citizens. When the EU first proposed the blockage of goods as part of the last major sanctions package in early April, Kremlin officials warned of war given Moscow would have to "break the blockade" for the sake if its citizens.
One escalation step closer to WW3 today. The West by de facto putting Kaliningrad under seige is goading Russia to roll into the Baltics. https://t.co/Q6wIGz6xFb
According to an April 6th statement in Russia's TASS by a state Duma official: "Statements from the West about a possible blockade of Kaliningrad is testing the waters, but Russia can ‘break the blockade’ in case these threats become a reality, it has an experience, Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy head of the Federation Council upper house’s Committee for International affairs, said on Wednesday.
"I think that for now, this is a game, testing the waters <…>. In case of a blockade, as they are saying, the Soviet Union knows how to break the blockades, we (Russia as the successor of the Soviet Union - TASS) have vast experience," the senator said. "If they want to go to the length of making us break this blockade to save the lives of our people, who live there, we can do this," Dzhabarov said in a video interview at the press center of Parlamentskaya Gazeta (Parliamentary Newspaper). He expressed hope, however, that the West "will have enough brains to opt against this".
Kaliningrad's governor Alikhanov has already called on Russian federal authorities to prepare tit-for-tat measures against Lithuania in wake of the transit ban. The blockade of the Kaliningrad🇷🇺region may become a reason for the outbreak of war B/T Russia & NATO. 🇪🇺has published a PR on the fifth package of sanctions against🇷🇺. The document,in particular, prohibits transit of goods by 🇷🇺&🇧🇾 transport operators through the territory of 🇪🇺 pic.twitter.com/M7k2XAxP0S
"These steps are illegal and may entail far-reaching implications for Lithuania and the European Union. In particular, I would like to quote a few paragraphs from the Joint Statement on EU Enlargement, with references to international agreements, the documents which both the European community and the Russian Federation acceded to," Alikhanov said Saturday.
Additionally he cited a key condition that was part of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to the EU. He quoted the prior agreement saying that the Baltic state "will apply in practice the principle of freedom of transit of goods, including energy, between the Kaliningrad Region and the rest of Russian territory." "In particular, we confirm that there shall be freedom of such transit, and that the goods in such transit shall not be subject to unnecessary delays or restrictions and shall be exempt from customs duties and transit duties or other charges related to transit," Alikhanov quoted the Joint Statement further as saying."
"For three decades, since the old Soviet Union ended in a whimper, reincarnated Russia asked “the West” for very little, almost nothing, really, certainly not the kind of “aid” that the USA used like a fungo-bat to beat lesser states around the world into hegemonic submission. All Russia asked, after seventy-five years of mass formation communist insanity, was to be treated once again like a normal European nation. Early on, Russia even floated a possible application to NATO, which NATO laughed off - among many other insults to follow.
But slowly after 1991, and then all at once, Europe and the USA fell under their own mass formation spell, apparently at the instigation of a certain Schwabenklaus and his WEF factotums implanted throughout Western Civ, like poison raisins in a fruitcake, rendering the EU members and the USA insane, which is to say no longer normal nations able to entertain normal relations with others.
And so, by February of 2022, you get this coalition of lunatic countries - preoccupied at home with the rankest political degeneracy disguised as virtue - provoking a proxy war in Ukraine with the aim of impoverishing, humiliating, and weakening Russia. And despite the massive funding and training of a 200,000-man Ukrainian military poised against the Donbas, the whole thing collapsed in misadventure as a strategic Russian meat-grinder chews through the West’s proxy army like so much lunchmeat… bringing us up-to-date.
As the psychologist Mattias Desmet points out in his just-published book, "The Psychology of Totalitarianism", the people tragically locked into a mass formation develop, among many other delusions and psychopathologies, the grandiose idea that they have an ethical duty to destroy other nations. Hence, perhaps, you can see how the dangerous mischief of RussiaGate, Hillary Clinton’s spoofish punkery that Russia “interfered” in the 2016 election, mutated into an American foreign policy psychosis.
By “Hillary Clinton” you must understand I refer not just to the Flying Reptile of Chappaqua herself, but the Party of Chaos she helped create out of the diverse-and-inclusive body parts stitched together from the graveyard of Leftist politics - socialists, communists, feminists, anarchists, Maoists, and Gawd-knows whatever other diverse ists this increasingly crazed coalition of Jacobin maniacs could enlist for beating a path straight into World War Three.
Now, having flopped in the Ukraine theater of conflict, and to the tune of their anthem, Get Russia, the Party of Chaos enters into a suicide pact with NATO as its useful idiot. They are using recent NATO draftee Lithuania to block the movement of railroad shipments between Russia proper and the geographically stranded province known as Kaliningrad Oblast shoehorned on the Baltic Coast between Lithuania and Poland. Kaliningrad had been swapped around by the principalities and kingdoms of the region from time immemorial. Its valuable ice-free port was annexed by Russia in 1758, traded variously to Poland and Prussia since then, and landed back in Russia’s possession after the Second World War. Thus, blocking transport from Russia to Kaliningrad Oblast might be construed as an act of war. Smooth move, NATO….
Britain is banging war drums the loudest at the moment. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, having made a suet pudding of his country’s economy, apparently thinks that World War Three will be a welcome diversion from Old Blighty’s nauseating whirl down the drain of broken empires. Germany, led by the empty suit Olaf Scholz, begins to squirm a little as it contemplates its blunder of going along with “Joe Biden’s” anti-Russia sanctions - which comes down to burning the furniture to stay warm this coming Christmas. France’s Macron just got drubbed in the National Assembly elections and is calling weakly for talks with Russia, as if…. Anyway, Mr. Putin is no longer in the mood for that, having been dissed, demonized, without relent for years, and lately demonetized by the West’s banking system. I love my country and all (though not so much the regime currently running it), but can you blame the Russian president? Hillary can, of course, and still does to this day, and where’s her credibility at now, exactly?
“Joe Biden,” meanwhile, acted out the perfect metaphor illustrating where the USA is at when, on Saturday, in perfect weather, and on-vacation (as usual) at the Delaware beach (because there’s so little to do in Washington these days), he cruised his bicycle into a gentle stop for a photo op with the locals and proceeded to flop over on his side like a 99-cent gyroscope that just can’t keep a’spinnin’ on its poorly-machined axis. That’s kind of like how America will fight a land war in Europe with our army of “vaccinated” myocarditis victims hoisting the rainbow battle flag into the fray.
Speaking of war… the Joe Biden” regime is already at war with its own citizens, you know, so we’re poised on the edge of the worst sort of a two-front war: at home and abroad. Late last week, and surely with the connivance of the FDA, CDC, and the NIH, the American Board of Internal Medicine threatened to yank Dr. Peter McCullough’s medical license for “providing false and inaccurate information to patients.” Dr. McCullough has been at the forefront of the battle to provide early treatment protocols for Covid-19 that were systematically banned by US government public health agencies for the sole purpose of preserving the emergency use authorization that protects pharma companies from liability for “vaccines” that don’t prevent transmission of disease and have produced millions of injuries including thousands of deaths.
They are messing with the wrong doctor. He has the goods on these malevolent idiots. If he brings a case against them in a court of law, Dr. McCullough, the most published, peer-reviewed cardiologist in the world, is going to prove definitively just how the people of the USA were defrauded and injured by Big Pharma and our own government, and eventually a lot of the people involved will go to jail, or worse, and they know it. That is, if anything is left standing in our country after “Joe Biden” starts World War Three."
Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite,
with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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"Homo sapiens is a spider trying to crawl out of a basin. The higher he crawls, the steeper the hill. Sooner or later, down he goes. So long as he's on the bottom, he can get along quite nicely, but as soon as he starts climbing, he begins to slip. And the higher he climbs the farther he falls. It doesn't matter which direction he tries. He can make civilization after civilization, but every time, long before he begins to be really civilized, skid! "
"Does A 1904 Geopolitical Theory Explain The War In Ukraine?"
by John Wilder
"When I look at the war in Ukraine and other world events, I see evidence of Sir Halford John Mackinder. It would have been cool if he was the frontman for a 1910s version of Judas Priest, but no. Mackinder was a guy who thought long and hard about mountains, deserts, oceans, steppes, and wars. You could tell Mackinder was going to be good at geography, what with that latitude. The result of all this pondering was what he called the Heartland Theory, which was the founding moment for geopolitics.
What’s geopolitics? It’s the idea that one of the biggest influencers in human history (besides being human) was the geography we inhabit. Mackinder’s first version wasn’t very helpful, since he just ended up with “Indonesia” and the rest of the world, which he called “Outdonesia”.
Mackinder focused mainly on the Eurasian continent. Flat land with no obstacles meant, in Mackinder’s mind, that the land would be eventually ruled by a single power. Jungles and swamps could be a barrier, but eventually he thought that technology would solve that. Mountains? Mountains were obstacles that stopped invasions, and allowed cultures to develop independently. Even better than a mountain?
An island.
There’s even a theory (not Mackinder’s) that the independent focus on freedom flourished in England because the local farmers weren’t (after the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Mormons, and Vikings were done pillaging) subject to invasion and were able to develop a culture based on a government with limited powers, along with rights invested in every man.
Mackinder went further, though. He saw the combination of Eurasia and Africa as something he called the World Island. If the World Island came under the domination of a single power, he thought, it would eventually rule the rest of the world – it would have overwhelming resources and population, and it would have the ability to outproduce (both economically and militarily) everything else. “Pivot Area” is what Mackinder first called the Heartland.
Mackinder, being English, had seen the Great Game in the 1900s, which in many cases was a fight to keep Russia landlocked. The rest of Europe feared a Russia that had access to the sea. Conversely, Russia itself was the Heartland of the Mackinder’s World Island. Russia was separated and protected on most of its borders by mountains and deserts. On the north, Russia was protected by the Arctic Ocean, which is generally more inaccessible than most of Joe Biden’s recent memories.
Russia is still essentially landlocked. The Soviet Navy had some nice submarines, but outside of that, the Russians have never been a naval power, and the times Russia attempted to make a navy have been so tragically inept that well, let me give an example: The sea Battle of Tsushima between the Japanese and Russians in 1905 was a Japanese victory. The Japanese lost 117 dead, 583 wounded, and lost 3 torpedo boats. The Russians? They lost 5,045 dead, 803 injured, 6,016 captured, 6 battleships sunk, 2 battleships captured. The Russians sank 450 ton of the Japanese Navy. The Japanese sunk 126,792 tons of the Russian fleet. Yup. This was more lopsided than a fight between a poodle and a porkchop.
Mackinder noted that the Heartland (Russia) was built on land power. The Rimlands (or, on the map “Inner Crescent”) were built on sea power. In the end, almost all of the twentieth century was built on keeping Russia away from the ocean, and fighting over Eastern Europe. Why? In Mackinder’s mind, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland (Russia); Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” In one sense, it’s true.
Mackinder finally in 1943 came up with another idea, his first idea being lonely. I think he could see the way World War II was going to end, so he came up with the idea that if the United States were to team up with Western Europe, they could still command the Rimlands and contain the Soviet Union to the Heartland.
There are several reasons that the United States has responded with such an amazing amount of aid to Ukraine. $60 billion dollars? Some people don’t work a whole year and get that much money. No, the idea is to bleed Putin as deeply and completely as they can. Why? If they’re following Mackinder, this keeps Russia vulnerable. It keeps Eastern Europe from being under Russia’s control – if you count the number of “Battles of Kiev” or “Battles of Kharkov” you can see that it’s statistically more likely to rain artillery in Kiev than rain water.
This might be the major driver for Russia, too. A Russian-aligned (or at least neutral) Ukraine nicely plugs the Russian southern flank. And this is nearly the last year that Russia can make this attempt – the younger generation isn’t very big, and the older generation that built and can run all of the cool Soviet tech? They’re dying off. Soon all their engineers with relevant weapons manufacturing experience will be...dead. If Russia is going to attempt to secure the south, this is their only shot. Depending on how vulnerable the Russians think they are, the harder they’ll fight. NATO nations tossing in weapons isn’t helping the famous Russian paranoia.
I think that the United States, in getting cozy with China in the 1970s, was following along with Mackinder’s theory – I believe Mackinder himself said that a Chinese-Russian alliance could effectively control the Heartland and split the Rimland, given China’s access to the oceans. And that’s what China is doing now, with the Belt and Road Initiative. Remember Mackinder’s World Island? Here’s a map of the countries participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative:
"Halford Mackinder, Heartland Theory and Geographical Pivot 1"
by Geopoliticus
"In this presentation we discuss the theory for Geographic Causation in Universal History proposed by Sir Halford Mackinder in his paper - "The Geographic Pivot of History" delivered as a lecture in 1904. The theoretical propositions in the paper regarding how natural geography controls the flow of history of civilizations - with nature acting as a stage for man to act upon - was the most relevant contribution of Halford Mackinder towards developing a philosophic synthesis between geography, history and statesmanship, leading to the development of modern geopolitics.
In this part we see how he proposes the beginning of a new era in the international system from the 1900s, predicts (in a way) the break out of the First World War, and builds a unified model based on Geo-history for understanding the emergence and evolution of European civilization."
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Full screen recommended.
"Halford Mackinder, Heartland Theory and Geographical Pivot 2"
by Geopoliticus
"In this presentation we view Mackinder’s historical analysts by looking at the interactions between different Geographic zones, seeing how the Mongols used land power to unify the core of the World Island and how Europeans circumvented nomadic heartland power by investing in sea power. The core idea of Halford Mackinder’s Thesis was that in the beginning of the 20th century, geographers needed to develop a philosophical synthesis of geographical conditions and historical trajectories of nations over long ranges of time.
He attempted to do this for the history of Eurasia, which he called, the World Island. According to his theoretical model, there was a link between geographical conditions and the nature of geopolitical order, for one, but for further depth in understanding historical trajectories we need to do a wider scale analysis of interactions between different geographically influenced political orders by building a model of Heartland-Rimland interactions across history."
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Freely download "The Geographical Pivot of History",
Why is this important? Consider history, from which we learn nothing...
"The earliest evidence of prehistoric warfare is a Mesolithic cemetery in Jebel Sahaba, which has been determined to be approximately 14,000 years old. About forty-five percent of the skeletons there displayed signs of violent death.[6] Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe. The advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare. According to Conway W. Henderson, "One source claims that 14,500 wars have taken place between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, costing 3.5 billion lives, leaving only 300 years of peace." An unfavorable review of this estimate mentions the following regarding one of the proponents of this estimate: "In addition, perhaps feeling that the war casualties figure was improbably high, he changed 'approximately 3,640,000,000 human beings have been killed by war or the diseases produced by war' to 'approximately 1,240,000,000 human beings...&c.'"
The lower figure is more plausible, but could still be on the high side considering that the 100 deadliest acts of mass violence between 480 BC and 2002 AD (wars and other man-made disasters with at least 300,000 and up to 66 million victims) claimed about 455 million human lives in total. Primitive warfare is estimated to have accounted for 15.1% of deaths and claimed 400 million victims. Added to the aforementioned figure of 1,240 million between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, this would mean a total of 1,640,000,000 people killed by war (including deaths from famine and disease caused by war) throughout the history and pre-history of mankind. For comparison, an estimated 1,680,000,000 people died from infectious diseases in the 20th century."
"Housing Crash Imminent: As Mortgage Rates Explode
Price Cuts Soar And Buyer Demand Collapses"
by Epic Economist
"We obviously didn’t learn from our past mistakes. And today, we are seeing another massive housing bubble – even larger than the previous one – falling apart right before our eyes again. The Federal Reserve has created the perfect conditions for another financial disaster to occur, and the next housing market crash is about to wipe out millions of American families whose main asset is their home, while the economy faces a dramatic slowdown, and chaos takes over Wall Street. Even after economists, real estate experts, and market strategists relentlessly warned that this bubble would inevitably burst, authorities just continued to fuel its growth month after month, and year after year. But a reckoning has come - and the crash we’re going to witness will be absolutely breathtaking. Home sales have been steadily falling for the past six months, and prices just started dropping like a rock.
About a month ago, when mortgage rates surpassed the 5% mark for the first time in nearly a decade, real estate agents and industry executives shared a series of devastating anecdotes validating the worst fears of millions of Americans: the U.S. housing market was imploding again. Since then, the downfall has gained speed, with subsequent observations confirming that property values were sharply dropping, a dire outlook for the most popular asset class among middle-class families.
Last week, however, things have gone from worse to catastrophic as 30-year mortgage rates surged at the fastest pace ever recorded, hitting 6.28% - a rate last seen just before the last housing bubble burst. As ZeroHedge analysts recently highlighted, the latest rate hike sent the average mortgage payment on a median mortgage up by almost $800 in just the past 6 months, resulting in the most unaffordable housing prices in the entire history of America. On top of that, new home sales have plunged at the fastest pace since the peak of the health crisis, right after facing the longest negative streak since 2010.
Right now, homebuyer sentiment is at the lowest level in generations, and conditions continue to deteriorate with each passing week. According to the latest housing market summary released by real-estate brokerage Redfin, things are not pretty at all. The report shows that after a period of unprecedented gains for home prices and a uniformly sellers' market, conditions have drastically flipped, and now real estate agents are seeing the highest share of sellers on record dropping their list price as mortgage rates shoot up to levels not seen since 2008, shrinking the pool of potential home buyers.
Most of the markets that benefitted from pandemic migration patterns and recorded massive price gains have started facing a correction. Realtor.com released a report that shows the top ten cities across the country where the median price has dropped. On average prices have fallen by 20%, with asking prices “plummeting by up to $400,000 in wealthy areas while poorer neighborhoods have seen house values nosedive by as much as $115,000,” it revealed.
As inventory piles up, and demand hits a wall, sellers are left with only one choice: cutting the price enough to where the next buyers can afford the mortgage.The Federal Reserve, on the other hand, is stuck in a crossfire. After letting inflation run wild, their only choice is to keep on raising rates and triggering chaos in financial markets. They have repeatedly told us that they had everything under control over the past few years. They said they knew exactly what they were doing. Once again, they lied. And the truth is that the Housing Bubble Burst 2.0 has begun. And sadly, it is already too late to reverse course."
"The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (also known as M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual skygazers can't appreciate the galaxy's impressive extent in planet Earth's sky.
This entertaining composite image compares the angular size of the nearby galaxy to a brighter, more familiar celestial sight. In it, a deep exposure of Andromeda, tracing beautiful blue star clusters in spiral arms far beyond the bright yellow core, is combined with a typical view of a nearly full Moon. Shown at the same angular scale, the Moon covers about 1/2 degree on the sky, while the galaxy is clearly several times that size. The deep Andromeda exposure also includes two bright satellite galaxies, M32 and M110 (below and right)."
"Do you believe," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools? "
"Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?"
“In the early summer of 1914, Albert Einstein was about to start a prestigious new job as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. The position was a big deal for the 35-year old Einstein – confirmation that he was one of the leading scientific minds in the world. And he was excited about what he would be able to achieve there. But within weeks of Einstein’s arrival, the German government canceled plans for the Institute; World War I had broken out, and all of Europe was gearing up for one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.
The impact of the Great War was immeasurable. It cost the lives of 20 million people. It bankrupted entire nations. The war ripped two major European powers off the map – the Austro Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire – and deposited them in the garbage can of history. Austria-Hungary in particular boasted the second largest land mass in Europe, the third highest population, and one of the biggest economies. Plus it was a leading manufacturer of high-tech machinery. Yet by the end of the war it would no longer exist.
World War I also played a major role in the emergence of communism in Russia through the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Plus it was also a critical factor in the astonishing rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Without the Great War, Adolf Hitler would have been an obscure Austrian vagabond, and our world would be an entirely different place.
One of the most bizarre things about World War I was how predictable it was. Tensions had been building in Europe for years, and the threat of war was deemed so likely that most major governments invested heavily in detailed war plans. The most famous was Germany’s “Schlieffen Plan”, a military offensive strategy named after its architect, Count Alfred von Schlieffen. To describe the Schlieffen Plan as “comprehensive” is a massive understatement.
As AJP describes in his book "War by Timetable", the Schlieffen Plan called for rapidly moving hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the front lines, plus food, equipment, horses, munitions, and other critical supplies, all in a matter of DAYS. Tens of thousands of trains were criss-crossing Europe during the mobilization, and as you can imagine, all the trains had to run precisely on time. A train that was even a minute early or a minute late would cause a chain reaction to the rest of the plan, affecting the time tables of other trains and other troop movements. In short, there was no room for error.
In many respects the Schlieffen Plan is still with us to this day – not with regards to war, but for monetary policy. Like the German General Staff more than a century ago, modern central bankers concoct the most complicated, elaborate plans to engineer economic victory. Their success depends on being able to precisely control the [sometimes irrational] behavior of hundreds of millions of consumers, millions of businesses, dozens of foreign nations, and trillions of dollars of capital. And just like the obtusely complex war plans from 1914, central bank policy requires that all the trains run on time. There is no room for error.
This is nuts. Economies are comprised of billions of moving pieces that are beyond anyone’s control and often have competing interests. A government that’s $30 trillion in debt requires cheap money (i.e. low interest rates) to stay afloat. Yet low interest rates are severely punishing for savers, retirees, and pension funds (including Social Security) because they’re unable to generate a sufficient rate of return to meet their needs.
Low interest rates are great for capital intensive businesses that need to borrow money. But they also create dangerous asset bubbles and can eventually cause a painful rise in inflation. Raise interest rates too high, however, and it could bankrupt debtors and throw the economy into a tailspin. Like I said, there’s no room for error – they have to find the perfect balance between growth and inflation.
Several years ago hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio summed it up perfectly when he said, “It becomes more and more difficult to balance those things as time goes on. It may not be a problem in the next year or two, but the risk of not getting it right increases with time.” The risk of them getting it wrong is clearly growing. I truly hope they don’t get it wrong. But if they ever do, people may finally look back and wonder how we could have been so foolish to hand total control of our economy over to an unelected committee of bureaucrats with a mediocre track record… and then expect them to get it right forever. It’s pretty insane when you think about it.
As Einstein quipped at the height of World War I in 1917, “What a pity we don’t live on Mars so that we could observe the futile activities of human beings only through a telescope…”
"You cannot kill me here. Bring your soldiers, your death, your disease, your collapsed economy because it doesn't matter, I have nothing left to lose and you cannot kill me here. Bring the tears of orphans and the wails of a mother's loss, bring your Jesus on a cross, bring your hate and bitterness and long working hours, bring your empty wallets and love long since gone but you cannot kill me here. Bring your sneers, your snide remarks and friendships never felt, your letters never sent, your kisses never kissed, cigarettes smoked to the bone and cancer killing fears but you cannot kill me here. For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. Because you cannot kill me here. "
"Welcome dear reader to another Sunday Sesh, that time of the week where we solve the world’s problems – financial, political, economic, philosophical, etc. – one glass of Malbec at a time. This week we write to you from Bill Bonner’s country residence here in rural, southern Ireland. The Emerald Isle is gorgeous this time of year, with lush, rolling pastures and hilltop copses stretching off into the distance.
Down by the back of the property runs the Blackwater River, up which the Vikings once sailed… to pursue their “commercial endeavors.” If only these waters could talk. Ruins lay scattered in and around the property, too, testaments to times long gone… a nearby abbey, a Norman tower, a Church of England cemetery, resting place of souls long since departed from this mortal coil. We wonder what they saw, in times of plenty and of few… the famines, the struggles, the ceremonies along the way… births, baptisms, confirmations, weddings and death. This is a land with many a yarn to tell, and many an author and poet to tell them.
But let’s not get waylaid… we asked if you had questions for Bill, and you responded. Gold… interest rates…dollar strength…Fed policy…Russian rubles…trust in governmental institutions, from Argentina to the Nordic nations to the US of A…you-name-it, your fellow readers asked it! So before lunch today, we sat down with the man whose name is on the door, and put your questions (and a few of our own) to him. Please enjoy this special, in-person Sunday Sesh with Mr. Bill Bonner at this link":
"In 9 AD the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus led three legions across the Rhine to teach the barbarians a lesson. In what the history books call the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, the barbarians ambushed the Romans and wiped them out in what the Romans would call the Varian disaster. This event ended the expansion of the Roman empire into what is now Germany. Other than some retaliatory excursions, the Rhine became the de facto boundary for the empire.
We may be seeing another Varian disaster in Ukraine. This time the empire moving east is the Global American Empire and the battle is the Donbas. This is the disputed region in the east of Ukraine that has historically identified with Russia. They revolted against Kiev in 2014 after the American State Department toppled the Ukrainian government and installed a puppet regime hostile to Russia. The resulting civil war in the east and the south culminated in the Russian invasion in January.
A few months ago, every cable shout show host was festooned with Ukraine flags while spinning tales about the evil Russians. Ukraine was who we were as a people, willing to bear any burden to defend democracy. Every expert assured us that the Russians would revolt against their evil dictator and the Russian army would quit in the field, once they knew the Twitter mob had cancelled them. It was just a matter of time before Zelensky was taking selfies in Moscow.
Like the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, the Battle of the Donbas is shaping up to be a humiliating defeat for the empire. The Ukrainian army is now trapped in various pockets with limited supplies and no chance to escape. The Russians have maneuvered them into a position where their artillery, what little remains, cannot reach the Russians, but the Russian artillery can reach them. The Russians have a lot of artillery and they are incredibly good at the use of it in siege warfare.
No one knows for sure, but reliable estimates going back a couple of months suggest the Ukrainians have been losing up to one thousand troops a day. These estimates are based on known figures for Ukrainian units at various places like Mariupol and then comparing them to areas that have come under Russian control. The Zelensky government has been slowly raising its own estimates, suggesting they are losing close to five hundred troops per day.
Until the war ends and there is an official effort to count the dead, we are left to guess about the casualties, but what is clear is that this is a one-sided war. For reasons no one has yet to explain, the West instructed the Ukrainians to take up positions in fortified cities rather than go out to meet the Russian army in the field. The Ukrainians had more battle ready troops at the start of the war than the Russians and they had the advantage of working on their own territory.
Choosing to fight a defensive war allowed the Russians to maneuver the Ukrainians into pockets around the east and south. They could then pick and choose their targets, bringing superior fire power to destroy the defenders. The West poured in weapons but it turns out that anti-tank weapons are of little use against an artillery barrage from over the horizon. Once the Russians sorted out what the Ukrainians were doing, it has been a turkey shoot since the spring.
Just from a military perspective, this is a disaster. War doctrine says that an invader needs a significant advantage in men and material. Because of the blunders of the Ukraine’s Western handlers, the smaller invading force will end up obliterating the larger defending force. It is not just about taking territory. The Russians are systematically destroying the army so that it can never regroup. This will be one of those events that military historians study for years to come.
The military aspect is the smallest part of this unfolding disaster. The absurd triumphalism of last winter has now given way to panic in Europe. Their economy is in an inflationary spiral that is only going to get worse. The sanctions on Russia have wreaked havoc on the EU economy. Energy prices are ratcheting up and serious food shortages are on the horizon. Compounding it is the fact that the sanctions are just starting to bite. Things will get worse by autumn.
The scene is not much better in the United States. The added element is that the people in charge look like the day room at a rest home. The economic woes have highlighted the fact that the people in charge are old and stupid. People will suffer bad economic time if they assume the ruling class has people who will eventually rise up and put things in good order. What the unfolding economic crisis is doing in America is revealing the dearth of competence in the ruling class.
Things are about to get worse. At some point this summer, the Ukrainian army will cease to exist as a practical matter. Observers think the Russians will wrap up the Donbas in the coming weeks. They will have achieved most of their goals when the conflict started plus a couple of extra items. They will be free to take control of Odessa, thus turning Ukraine into a landlocked country. It will also be an economic basket case entirely dependent on Western aid.
In other words, the West will be saddled with an exceptionally large humanitarian disaster at a time when the West is facing terrible economic conditions. The West may have no choice but to sit down with the Russians to hammer out a solution. On top of the loss in the field and the economic debacle, Western leaders will have to endure the humiliation of shaking hands with Putin. Whatever credibility Western leaders have left will evaporate at that moment.
In the grand scheme of things, the Varian disaster was more of an inflection point than a disaster for the empire. It was the point at which the empire shifted from expansionism to a defensive posture. For the Global American Empire, the Ukraine disaster may be much more consequential. This debacle undermines the fundamental logic of the global American system. In time it could be the point where the Cold War finally ends for the West and a great retrenchment begins."
"Diogenes, one of the ancient world's illustrious philosophers, believed that lies were the currency of politics, and those lies were the ones he sought to expose and debase. To make his point, Diogenes occasionally carried a lit lantern through the streets of Athens in the daylight. If asked why, Diogenes would say he was searching for an honest man. Finding an honest man today in Washington, D.C., is equally challenging. Diogenes would need a Xenon Searchlight in each hand.
Still, there are brief moments of clarity inside the Washington establishment. Having lied prolifically for months to the American public about the origins and conduct of the war in Ukraine, the media are now preparing the American, British, and other Western publics for Ukraine's military collapse. It is long overdue.
The Western media did everything in its power to give the Ukrainian defense the appearance of far greater strength than it really possessed. Careful observers noted that the same video clips of Russian tanks under attack were shown repeatedly. Local counterattacks were reported as though they were operational maneuvers.
Russian errors were exaggerated out of all proportion to their significance. Russian losses and the true extent of Ukraine's own losses were distorted, fabricated, or simply ignored. But conditions on the battlefield changed little over time. Once Ukrainian forces immobilized themselves in static defensive positions inside urban areas and the central Donbas, the Ukrainian position was hopeless. But this development was portrayed as failure by the Russians to gain "their objectives."
Ground-combat forces that immobilize soldiers in prepared defenses will be identified, targeted, and destroyed from a distance. When persistent overhead intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, whether manned or unmanned, are linked to precision guided-strike weapons or modern artillery systems informed by accurate targeting data, "holding ground" is fatal to any ground force. This is all the more true in Ukraine, because it was apparent from the first action that Moscow focused on the destruction of Ukrainian forces, not on the occupation of cities or the capture of Ukrainian territory west of the Dnieper River.
The result has been the piecemeal annihilation of Ukrainian forces. Only the episodic infusion of U.S. and allied weapons kept Kiev's battered legions in the field; legions that are now dying in great numbers thanks to Washington's proxy war.
Kiev's war with Moscow is lost. Ukrainian forces are being bled white. Trained replacements do not exist in sufficient numbers to influence the battle, and the situation grows more desperate by the hour. No amount of U.S. and allied military aid or assistance short of direct military intervention by U.S. and NATO ground forces can change this harsh reality.
The problem today is not ceding territory and population to Moscow in Eastern Ukraine that Moscow already controls. The future of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions along with the Donbas is decided. Moscow is also likely to secure Kharkov and Odessa, two cities that are historically Russian and Russian-speaking, as well as the territory that adjoins them. These operations will extend the conflict through the summer. The problem now is how to stop the fighting. Whether the fighting stops in the early fall will depend on two key factors.
The first involves the leadership in Kiev. Will the Zelensky government consent to the Biden program for perpetual conflict with Russia? If the Biden administration has its way, Kiev will continue to operate as a base for the buildup of new forces poised to threaten Moscow. In practice, this means Kiev must commit national suicide by exposing the Ukrainian heartland west of the Dnieper River to massive, devastating strikes by Russia's long-range missile and rocket forces.
Of course, these developments are not inevitable. Berlin, Paris, Rome, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Vilnius, Riga, Tallin, and, yes, even Warsaw, do not have to blindly follow Washington's lead. Europeans, like most Americans, are already peering into the abyss of an all-encompassing economic downturn that Biden's policies are creating at home. Unlike Americans who must cope with the consequences of Biden's ill-conceived policies, European governments can opt out of Biden's perpetual-war plan for Ukraine.
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The second factor involves Washington itself. Having poured more than $60 billion or a little more than $18 billion a month in direct or indirect transfers into a Ukrainian state that is now crumbling, the important question is, what happens to millions of Ukrainians in the rest of the country that did not flee? And where will the funds come from to rebuild Ukraine's shattered society in a developing global economic emergency?
When inflation costs the average American household an extra $460 per month to buy the same goods and services this year as they did last year, it is quite possible that Ukraine could sink quietly beneath the waves like the Titanic without evoking much concern in the American electorate. Experienced politicians know that the American span of attention to matters beyond America's borders is so short that an admission of defeat in Ukraine would probably have little or no immediate consequences.
However, the effects of repeated strategic failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are cumulative. In the 1980s, General Motors wanted to dictate the kind of automobiles Americans would buy, but American consumers had different ideas. That's why G.M., which dominated the U.S. market for 77 years, lost its top spot to Toyota. Washington cannot dictate all outcomes, nor can Washington escape accountability for its profligate spending and having ruined American prosperity."
"Massive Shrinkflation At Dollar Tree! This Is Getting Crazy!"
"In today's vlog we are Dollar Tree, and are noticing massive food products that have shrunk in size! We are also noticing a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
"Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), publisher of "The Solari Report" and former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Admin.), contends this is what the so-called “reset” looks like. High food and fuel prices along with crushing interest rates are no accident. CAF explains, “To me, this is part of the ‘going direct reset.’ There is an official narrative, and the official narrative is they’ve got to stop inflation. Let’s look very simply at what happened. They voted on the direct reset. Then they injected $5 trillion into the economy that went to the insiders. Then they used Covid to shut down the economy run by the outsiders. Now, the outsiders want to open another business, and they are going to radically raise the cost of capital to the outsiders. What’s going to happen is that $5 trillion is going to buy more assets more cheaply. To me, this is part of centralizing the control of the economy. They are asserting very significant central control. This is not a turndown – this is a takedown.”
CAF’s view of the economy is simple and tangible. CAF says, “This is a world where people are trying to get into real assets that can generate a yield. Let me tell you what the problem is. Doing things that create value on assets requires the rule of law. We are watching a very significant financial coup d’état. We have talked about this for years. That financial coup d’état is turning into a coup, and you are seeing a fundamental breakdown of law and order in many places. It is related to people trying to pick up assets. We see cities where crime is off the charts, and speculators are out having a field day picking up assets with that $5 trillion.”
CAF says, “At some point, you have to realize we are in a war. We have an enemy. We have the power to win, but we are going to have to fight. If you look at our ancestors in the last 10,000 years, I dare say we have it in us. Let’s get out of fear and get into fighting mode. There are two roads. We can preserve, rebuild and protect the human civilization, or we can become slaves. If you look at what these guys are up to, death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Do not fear death. Fear slavery in a transhuman society.”
CAF also talks about gold, silver, the CV19 injections and the fallout from them. She also talks about why it’s more important than ever to hold onto the 2nd Amendment and your guns. There is much more in the 1 hour and 5 min. interview."
"For many great deeds are accomplished in times of squalid struggle. There is a kind of stubborn, unrecognized courage which in the lowest depths tenaciously resists the pressures of necessity and ill-doing; there are noble and obscure triumphs observed by no one, unacclaimed by any fanfare. Hardship, loneliness, and penury are a battlefield which has its own heroes, sometimes greater than those lauded in history. Strong and rare characters are thus created; poverty nearly always a foster-mother, may become a true mother, distress may be the nursemaid of pride, and misfortune the milk that nourishes great spirits."
