"A Winter of Anger"

"A Winter of Anger"

by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

"It is very simple: if you’d ask most citizens of whichever EU country if they are willing to risk being unable to feed and heat their children in order to support Ukraine and Zelensky, they would say NO. Hell no! But that is what they’re all being pushed towards. Food prices look to at least double from here, after they’ve doubled once already, while energy prices are set to triple or worse. And there’s no logical reason for it.

This is not due to some inevitable market mechanism, it’s because the west decided to halt all Russian imports after the latter’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine. All western leaders found that reason enough to cut all, or nearly all, imports from Russia. Gas, oil, fertilizer, food. Essentials. They could have been sitting around a negotiating table, but chose not to. Which only works as long as things remain sort of affordable. And then, it does not.

Problem is, they had and have no alternative to the Russian supplies of these goods (and there’s many more). See, this is how we know they don’t make their own decisions. Those are made in Brussels and Davos, and then the “leaders” have to carry out the preconceived programs, and they will.

No elected official on his/her own would risk to destroy their own country’s energy or food safety, with elections coming up every few years. But their WEF/Davos connections have changed that “logic”. The WEF makes sure no western leader gets elected who is not a member of their club. There’s only one path to power these days.

But these people grossly underestimate the effect that hunger and cold - will - have on their citizens. The first signs of that are visible in the protests of truckers and farmers, but that’s just a start. You just wait till the cold sets in, and the running blackouts, and the hunger. Wait till people have to feed their kids scraps from a bare table in a cold dark home.

That’s when you will see who people really are. People in the west are overfed, and lazy, and not too sharp, but wait till their kids, and their families, are truly suffering. They’ve seen the example of the farmers and truckers. Wait for people to see the link between their own lives, and the farmers; then you will see who they really are.

“Leaders” like Trudeau and Rutte think they have this under control, that they can make the farmers do what their governments say they must, if need be with assistance from police or even the army. But you cannot send cops and soldiers against your farmers, because 1) they make your food, 2) the people support them, 3) they have a centuries-old democratic right to be farmers, and 4) they don’t take no sh*t for an answer.

This goes back 100s of years, much longer than the right of any politician to tell them what to do. The Dutch farmers on Friday told Rutte to prepare for the hardest actions yet, and they’re still not joking. My guess would be this time they will paralyze the country. Not because they are crazy; 10,000 of them would need to close shop if Rutte gets what he wants, and they won’t let that happen. Farmers will not idly stand by while their neighbor is forced out of business.

No, they are not crazy. They refuse to talk to Rutte, in a sign a of how much they trust him. He assigned a mediator, from his own political club, and all farmer org’s but one refused to talk to him too. The one that did, found the talk useless. Rutte wants the 10,000 scalps no matter what, but it’s just not going to happen. He is shown the limits of his power. Having been PM for 12 years, that’s a bit of a shock.

Obviously, this is all strongly connected to the past 2,5 years of measures and mandates and all. The political class got a taste of power that they did not have before, and got carried away. Well, they went too far this time. One telling number was that of US parents letting their youngest kids be vaxxed: what was it, 0.45%?! And 220 million adult Americans have either never been vaxxed or never boosted. No connection to the farmers? You wait and see.

The game is over. People’s patience with their politicians is ending. But the politicians themselves don’t see that; how could they when they censor all discontent and reports from doctors and scientists who don’t follow the “official” line? They’ve lost touch with the very world they’re supposed to represent. All they get to see is the info that is left after their own “norms” have censored the rest. They see only what they like to see.

In Europe, the Germans and Dutch will manage to be sort of OK, but only at the expense of poorer EU countries. And that won’t even be their main problem; that problem will be at home; their own farmers will come for them. And their poorest. Countries will leave the EU (and the euro). Hungary first to go?! In Greece, there’s already talk of rolling blackouts this winter, and they get most of their electricity from hydro. Italy is a shambles. How many present “leaders” will still be in place January 1 2023? How about June? After a winter of great discontent?

And they’re all telling you that “we” have to win in Ukraine first, and everything will be alright. But “we” have already lost in Ukraine, we did on February 24, and “we” should be talking to, and making peace with, Russia. Why are we not? Because we don’t want food and energy? The folks in Brussels and Davos will not be hungry and cold. But in other EU places they will be. And they will come to balance this thing out.

As for the US, I’m scared there too. Energy prices may not get as bad as in Europe, but food will be real bad (and how about housing?!). And there’s this fight between two factions going on, that starts to feel like what went on before the Civil War. I hope I’m wrong, but I feel it everywhere: Overreach."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"What a Privilege!"

"Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment - not discouragement - you will find the strength there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures, followed by wreckage, were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You'll see this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes."

~ Joseph Campbell

"What's in a Word?"

"What's in a Word?"

A ruse by any other name would still be deceit...

by Joel Bowman

"Welcome to another installment of your Sunday Session, dear reader, that time of the week when we gather at the virtual saloon, cast a wary eye across the world before us... and quietly wonder, what the hell happened?

When we last left you, one week ago, we were scrambling to catch a plane from Houston back to our home city, here in Argentina. From summer to winter, modern to classic, beltway to sidewalk, the two locales could hardly be more distinct from one and other. “It’s almost like going back in time,” wife Anya remarked as our airport taxi careened along the broad Avenida 9 de Julio. “Whenever we come home, I get the feeling like we never left.”

Indeed, Buenos Aires is the kind of city you could leave for two weeks and come back to find everything changed... or leave for two decades and return to find it just the same. Prices, for example, fluctuate daily. But the country remains firmly rooted in the past. Its Belle Epoch-style buildings. Its cafe culture. Its firm resistance to anything “politically correct.”

Local, independent supermarkets – run largely by the city’s Asian population – are still called “chinos.” People call each other, affectionately, nicknames like “gordo” (fatty), “flaca” (skinny) and even “loco” (crazy). And, contrary to what progressives in the English speaking world would have you believe, Latinos largely despise the cringeworthy “Latinx” mutilation of their elegantly gendered language.

A 2020 Pew Research poll found that, while a quarter of Hispanics in the US had heard of the gender-neutral term, only 3% actually used it themselves. Outside the US, that figure quickly approaches zero. Turns out, Spanish speakers don’t appreciate self-righteous virtue signalers (many of whom do not even speak Spanish) colonizing their language and rewriting the rules. Gee, who would have thought?

Speaking of words, you’ve no doubt heard of the hullabaloo over the dreaded “R-word” by now. It was enough to send armchair economists back to their old Funk & Wagnalls for a quick refresher. Of course, the semantic struggle regarding the technical definition of recession represents just one front in a much larger battle. More in today’s feature essay, below...

"What’s in a Word?"

by Joel Bowman

"That which we call a rose


By any other name would smell as sweet..."

~ Joan Shakespeare’s eldest brother, from Romeo and Juliet

"That which we call a ruse


By any other name would still be deceit..."

~ Joel (with apologies to William)

"As a man who has spent much of his adulthood aspiring to the life of a failed novelist, your weekend correspondent believes the right word can paint a thousand pictures. We cultivate an appreciation for words as a cobbler tends to his sole or a fencer his foil; with care and respect for their utility and precision. They help us navigate the murky, ethereal realm of ideas, allowing us to communicate complex concepts with ease and accuracy, facility and fidelity. At least, that’s the aim.

It is with a leaden heart, therefore, that we observe the wanton corruption of the English language on an almost daily basis. Words we once found reliable, dependable, credible, are routinely conscripted, pressed into service by linguistic vandals, made to abet one or another insidious agenda. Words like transitory... racism... vaccine... female... and now recession... have been strapped to the Procrustean bed and either amputated or elongated to suit the villainous whims of their abductors.

Witness the most recent of these lexical distortions, a definitional brouhaha bordering on the farcical. In the week preceding the second quarter’s GDP read – widely expected by “experts” to be slightly positive (consensus was for a 0.03% expansion) but which actually came back negative by 0.9% – the White House and their lapdogs in the mainstream media began a “forward messaging” campaign to defang the commonly used term, recession.

Most people, most of the time, define recession as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Not so this time around. The situation was “complicated,” chorused the neutered neckties across all the usual media outlets. The White House even put out its own blog post:

"What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data - including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes. Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year - even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter - indicates a recession."

~ White House

Wax and Blindfolds: Who are these “holistic economists,” American workers must have wondered as they waded through an economy that looked, sounded and felt very much like it was in a recession. Bonner Private Research’s resident macro analyst, Dan Denning, went through the jobs numbers on Friday and found that, not only was the real unemployment rate closer to 9.6% – as opposed to the 3.5% figure spruiked by the administration and their pets in the press – but real wages, adjusted for 40-year high inflation, were actually falling. Moreover, a meaningful portion of the jobs “created” were second and/or part time jobs, taken by people struggling to make ends meet with their primary employment. Far from the “roaring recovery” Americans are constantly assured they are experiencing, the labor force participation rate is actually the same as it was back in March... of 1977.

Never mind all that, says Mr. President. What we’re actually witnessing (if you’ll kindly close your eyes and plug your ears with wax) is the “strongest rebound in American manufacturing in over three decades.” (All together now!) “It doesn’t sound like a recession to me,” the apparently tone deaf president added after the negative GDP figures were published.

Mercifully, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was on hand to help further complicate, obfuscate and otherwise pontificate, explaining the situation from her podium: “We’re not going to define a recession from here,” Madam Secretary went on to say, insisting that the White House would instead defer to the National Bureau of Economic Research to make the call. Good move.

As it happens, the NBER has been making the call now... for over 70 years. In fact, they made the call in every single instance where GDP fell for two consecutive quarters going all the way back to 1949. That is to say, ten times the US economy logged two consecutive quarters of negative growth over the past seven decades... ten times the NBER called recession.

Words Like Weapons: Of course, the majority of those official recessions occurred before the advent of the Internet, where facts are confused with opinions and everyone claims the right to their own. Gone are the days when people consulted actual, physical, hard to doctor encyclopedias, for example, as opposed to “living” reference repositories, such as Wikipedia, which blow with the prevailing political winds.

Until as recently as July 11, to follow the current thread, the world’s largest online encyclopedia had featured the commonly accepted definition of a recession. Tucked away under the subtitle, “Definition,” it read: “In a 1974 New York Times article, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Julius Shiskin suggested several rules of thumb for defining a recession, one of which was two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Over time, the other rules of thumb were forgotten.”

As of July 25, however, all mention of the “two consecutive quarters” had been scrubbed from the site. An administrator also locked the page, barring users from making any edits or corrections. From July 27 onward, the wiki world would feature a new, rather more pliable definition: "In the United States, a recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."

In one section of the website, a Wikipedia user claimed the change was made to reflect the “change in posture and the definition at the United States since the White House’s experts are expanding the meaning of it.” That section has since been deleted. Nothing to see here, citizen. Move along. (h/t to the folks at Unherd for screen-shotting past posts and publishing the story.)

Needless to say, there are those among us who say that it matters not what we call a thing. “A rose by any other name,” and all that. There is a certain amount of truth there. And yes, language evolves over time. Always has. Always will. “Change,” as ol’ Heraclitus observed, “is the only constant.”

Only, we’re not talking here about the kind of natural, gradual, consensual idiomatic evolution that is always and everywhere underway... during which informal words like “dank” and “fat” and “dope” acquire positive connotations and others, such as “elite,” “skeptic” and “Brandon” morph into pejoratives. Rather, we refer to an artificial, abrupt, aggressive transformation of our language for explicitly political purposes. There is a world of difference between the two.

Unlike schoolyard slang and barroom colloquialisms, which change from venue to venue, month to month, what we are witnessing is something far more nefarious, a creeping tendency of those who “know better” to constantly redefine the key terms by which we guide our own lives and by which we are governed. Far from a case of “mere semantics,” such corruption of the language has real world consequences for millions of people.

In the end, honest people will decide for themselves the weight of a word and whether they are being deceived by their self-serving leaders. It is during these times we call to mind the words of Mr. Thomas Jefferson: It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

And that’s all from us today, dear reader.  Bill will be back with his regular daily missives from tomorrow. In the meantime, we’re heading off to grab a milanesa and a long overdue glass of malbec at one of our favorite local restaurants, Massey Familia. Whatever you’re doing this weekend, be good… or be good at it."

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

"How It Really Is"

• "Democrats’ $80 Billion Wager: A Bigger IRS Will Be A Better IRS"

• "Treasury Confirms: Biden Plans to Hire 87,000 New IRS Agents"

"How America’s Economy Was Destroyed"

"How America’s Economy Was Destroyed"

by Paul Craig Roberts

"In 1945 the United States emerged from a world war with the only intact industrial economy in the world. The British, European, Soviet, and Japanese economies were in ruins. China and the rest of Asia, Africa, and South America had undeveloped economies, later renamed third world economies. Additionally, the US held most of the world’s gold reserves. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had used WW II to destroy Britain’s control of international trade and the British pound as the world reserve currency. The US forced breakup of the British system of trade preferences and the coerced Bretton Woods Agreement gave those roles to the United States.

Four years of war production gave the US a large, disciplined, and skilled work force, and war time consumer shortages provided enormous pent-up consumer demand to drive the postwar economy’s growth. Jobs were plentiful, and US real income rose strongly in the 1950s and into the 1960s.

But then things started to go wrong. President Johnson’s program of “guns and butter” ( the Vietnam War and “Great Society” welfare spending) resulted in a proliferation of US dollars that eventually forced President Nixon to close the gold window and terminate the right of foreign central banks to redeem their holdings of US dollars for gold. Additionally, the Keynesian demand management macroeconomic policy began breaking down. High marginal income tax rates resulted in weaker supply increases to increases in aggregate demand. Expansionary monetary policy pushed up consumer demand, but high tax rates curtailed supply response, culminating in the “stagflation” of President Carter’s administration.

President Reagan’s supply-side economic policy cured stagflation and the worsening “Phillips curve” trade-off between inflation and unemployment, and real economic growth resumed throughout the 1980s and into the Clinton years, an administration that piggy-backed on Reagan’s success.

But in the last decade of the 20th century things turned for the worse. The success of Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies created excessive confidence in unregulated free market economies. In the US the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking and had served the country well since 1933 was repealed. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Clinton Treasury claimed that “markets are self-regulating.” The repeal set in motion the 2008 financial crisis that launched the largest and longest money printing activity in the US in history. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet increased by $8.2 trillion as the Fed printed money with which to buy up the troubled investments of the large banks in order to keep the banks solvent. The massive increase in the money supply went mainly into the prices of stocks, bonds, and real estate, thus dramatically worsening the income and wealth distribution in the US and creating the One Percent. 

Years of pumping up financial asset and real estate values with money creation has left the Federal Reserve today in a precarious position now that Covid lockdowns and economic sanctions against Russia have broken supply chains and caused shortages that are raising prices. The Fed is trying to overcome supply problems by nonsensically raising interest rates, which threatens the financial wealth created by years of Quantitative Easing. Simultaneously, the sanctions policy is driving countries away from the dollar which will eventually reduce its value, thereby forcing the Fed to chose between the stock market and the dollar.

Soviet collapse in 1991 compared to American success was an even worse development. It convinced China and India that capitalist markets, not socialist planning, was the way to economic success. Both countries with their large under-utilized labor forces opened themselves to foreign investment. This sped the era of “globalism” or jobs offshoring. American manufacturing corporations, under pressure from Wall Street of takeovers if they did not increase their profits by moving their manufacturing operations abroad where labor was cheeper, abandoned their work forces and their communities and began making abroad the products they marketed in the US. This separated Americans’ incomes from the production of the goods and services that they consumed and dismantled the ladders of upward mobility in the US that had been erected by a vibrant manufacturing economy.

American economists with grants from Wall St and the offshoring corporations produced “studies” allegedly showing that it was good for America to lose its high productivity, high value-added jobs and for American communities to lose their tax base. Manufacturing jobs were denigrated as “dirty fingernail jobs,” and the work force was promised better, higher paying, high-tech jobs. These studies and promises comprise the worse kind of junk economics.

One study by a Dartmouth academic, Matthew J Slaughter, concluded that offshoring American jobs, that is, by giving them to foreigners, created twice as many US domestic jobs as jobs for foreigners. He did not arrive at this conclusion by consulting the BLS payroll jobs data or the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics. Instead, he measured the growth of US multinational employment and failed to take into account the reasons for the increase in multinational employment. US multinationals acquired many existing smaller US domestic firms, thus raising multinational employment but not overall employment, and many US firms established foreign operations for the first time and thereby became multinationals, thus adding their existing US employment to multinational employment.

In 2006 Michael Porter, a Harvard professor, used a press conference to hype the benefits of globalism, that is, the offshoring of American jobs. His report for the Council on Competitiveness showed falsely that Americans were benefitting from giving their jobs to Asians and Mexicans. He did this by stressing US economic performance over a 20-year period. As jobs offshoring was relatively new, the 20 year period went all the way back to the Reagan 1980s. Thus Porter used the strong performance of the Reagan years to soften the economic deterioration from globalism.

I could go on at length presenting the fake claims used to block opposition to America’s loss of its pre-eminent manufacturing status. Today 16 years after Porter’s promise of better jobs, former well-paid US manufacturing workers have lowly paid retail jobs at Walmart and Home Depot. Their health insurance and pension benefits disappeared with their manufacturing jobs. The fact of the matter is that today American economists are either engaged in writing propaganda for their benefactors or they are playing games in their professional journals modeling scenarios that do not exist in the real world.

Another disastrous consequence of the repeal of Glass-Steagall is the acceleration it gave to the financialization of the economy that had been creeping up on us for decades. A financialized economy is one in which the financial sector has succeeded in getting most consumer income committed to paying interest and fees on debt – mortgage payments, car payments, credit card payments, student loans – leaving little to drive economic growth with expenditures on new goods and services. Many people live on their credit card, paying only the minimum payment as the balance grows with compound interest.

According to a Federal Reserve study of a few years ago, 40% of US households cannot raise $400 in cash without selling personal assets such as TVs, cell phones, clothes, or pawning tools.

The full extent of the over-indebted US economy, and here I do not include the government debt, can be understood by going back to 1945 where this essay began. Michael Hudson reports that in 1945 homeowners’ equity in the properties on which they were mortgaged was 85%. Today homeowners’ equity in their properties has fallen to 33%. Additionally, American home ownership has declined from 70% to 63% as the result of President Obama’s policy of bailing out the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 crash, while foreclosing on their victims.

Once upon a time long ago the Democrat Party was honest. The party tried to protect the American South from invasion for its refusal to finance at the South’s expense the cost of Northern industrialization. As the North saw it, it was the South’s responsibility to pay the tariff that would protect Northern industry from Britain’s better made and less costly products.

Until 1965 the Democrats continued to try to protect the working class. But in 1965 the Democrats betrayed Americans on two fronts. They passed an immigration bill that has flooded America with third world immigrants who are alien to our culture and whose numbers suppress wages. Simultaneously, the Democrats passed a Civil Rights Act that itself did not permit preference to “preferred minorities,” but was used for that purpose by Alfred W. Blumrosen, compliance chief of the EEOC. Blumrosen reasoned that he could stand the Civil Rights Act on its head and require the prohibited racial quotas, because the federal courts traditionally since the 1930s “deferred to the regulatory authority.”

Racial preferences for “preferred minorities” have developed into the aristocratic rights of an otherwise bygone era. Today in the Western World “preferred” peoples such as blacks and sexual perverts have special protections that do not extend to white heterosexual persons. A white person who objects to verbal or physical aggression by a black is declared a racist. A white woman who accuses a black of rape is in danger of being arrested for a hate crime in the Scandinavian countries and Germany. In what was once upon a time Great Britain, a white British citizen has been arrested by white British police for reposting a meme that shows disapproval of the ever growing collection of sexual perverts. - reclaimthenet.org/

Today in the Western World the situation is this. The ethnic composition of the Western countries is under fierce attack by the liberal-left elements of their own ethnicity. The rights of the ethnic base of the population are ceasing to exist in the areas of free speech and due process of law. People are fired for using gender pronouns. Scientists are terminated for challenging a fake explanation. People are coerced into accepting violations of the Nuremberg Laws. Wherever a person turns for information, the media lies.

This is a hopeless situation for the Western World. As awareness spreads slowly but gradually among the ethnic populations of the West that their governments are against them, the ethnic majorities begin to realize that they are targeted for dispossession. Some of the French have realized this, and also farmers in Holland and Italy. Once the ethnic composition of a country realizes that the government does not represent them but represents their enemies, a revolutionary situation develops. All that can possibly save Western Civilization is revolution across the entire front. The entirety of governments and the vested interests they represent must be overthrown. Otherwise we face institutionalized tyranny and economies run for the benefit of the One Percent."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

"Is Target Flatlining? Prices Are Crazy, And Empty Shelves Everywhere!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures with Danno, 8/7/22:

"Is Target Flatlining? Prices Are Crazy, 

And Empty Shelves Everywhere!"

"In today's vlog we are at Target, 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!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: Rigged!"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/7/22:

"Markets, A Look Ahead: Rigged!"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

-  youtube.com/watch?v=iZxvY2GFpao

"All That Matters..."

"Angel: Well, I guess I kinda worked it out. If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters... then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy, but I never got it.

Kate Lockley: And now you do?

Angel: Not all of it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help, because I don't think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

Kate Lockley: Yikes. It sounds like you've had an epiphany.

Angel: I keep saying that, but nobody's listening."

"Angel", 2001

- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0512846/quotes

"The Point Of No Return"

"The Point Of No Return"

by Dr. Thomas Sowell

"This is an election year. But the issues this year are not about Democrats and Republicans. The big issue is whether this nation has degenerated to a point of no return - a point where we risk destroying ourselves, before our enemies can destroy us. If there is one moment that symbolized our degeneration, it was when an enraged mob gathered in front of the Supreme Court and a leader of the United States Senate shouted threats against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying "You won't know what hit you!"

There have always been irresponsible demagogues. But there was once a time when anyone who shouted threats to a Supreme Court Justice would see the end of his own political career, and could not show his face in decent society again.

You either believe in laws or you believe in mob rule. It doesn't matter whether you agree with the law or agree with the mob on some particular issue. If threats of violence against judges - and publishing where a judge's children go to school - is the way to settle issues, then there is not much point in having elections or laws.

There is also not much point in expecting to have freedom. Threats and violence were the way the Nazis came to power in Germany. Freedom is not free. If you can't be bothered to vote against storm-trooper tactics - regardless of who engages in them, or over what issue - then you can forfeit your freedom. Worse yet, you can forfeit the freedom of generations not yet born.

Some people seem to think that the Supreme Court has banned abortions. It has done nothing of the sort. The Supreme Court has in fact done something very different, something long overdue and potentially historic. It has said that their own court had no business making policy decisions which nothing in the Constitution gave them the authority to make.

Get out a copy of the Constitution - and see if you can find anything in there that says the federal government is authorized to make laws about abortion. Check out the 10th Amendment, which says that the federal government is limited to the specific powers it was granted, with all other powers going to the states or to the people.

Why do we elect legislators to do what the voters want done, if unelected judges are going to make up laws on their own, instead of applying the laws that elected officials passed? This is part of a very long struggle that has been going on for more than 100 years.

Back in the early 20th century, Progressives like President Woodrow Wilson decided that the Constitution put too many limits on the powers they wanted to use. Claiming that it was nearly impossible to amend the Constitution, Progressives advocated that judges "interpret" the Constitutional limits out of the way. This was just the first in a long series of sophistries.

In reality, the Constitution was amended 4 times in 8 years - from 1913 through 1920 - during the heyday of the Progressive era. When the people wanted the Constitution amended, it was amended. When the elites wanted the Constitution amended, but the people did not, that is called democracy.

Another great sophistry was using the federal government's authority to regulate interstate commerce to call all sorts of other things interstate commerce. In 1995, elites were shocked when the Supreme Court ruled - 5 to 4 - that carrying a gun near a school was not interstate commerce. States had a right to ban carrying a gun near a school, and most of them did. But the federal government had no such authority. Nor did the Constitution give the federal government the right to make laws about abortion, one way or the other.

What both state and federal laws do have the right to stop is threats against judges and their families. This is not a partisan issue. The Republican governor of Virginia is providing protection to Supreme Court Justices who live in that state. But the Republican governor of Maryland seems to think that harassing judges and their families is no big deal. Voters need to find out who is for or against mob rule, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. We are not going to be a free or decent society otherwise."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

A "free or decent society?" Surely you jest...

"Have You Had Enough? A Million People are Boycotting Paying the Gas Bill"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 8/6/22:

"Have You Had Enough? 

A Million People are Boycotting Paying the Gas Bill"

"When is enough, enough? People are fed up with high energy prices around the world. There is a group of people that are boycotting paying their gas bill right now. Is this right? Plus, we ran into Mark Cuban in Laguna Beach. What a great guy."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

○

Related:

"Here Is What Stagflation Looks Like"

"Here’s What the Government Should Really Do in the Greater Depression"

"Here’s What the Government Should Really 

Do in the Greater Depression"

by Doug Casey

"It’s hard to have a conversation today, or even overhear one, without being exposed to moronic – and I now use that word in its colloquial as well as its clinical sense – opinions about what “we” should do. “We,” of course, is the government. Everyone believes it should “Do Something.” And it is.

But why deal in half-measures? Why only send everybody a check for $1,200? Why not buy everyone a new Cadillac to get Detroit back to work, a big new house to help builders, and a $10,000 check that must be deposited at a failing bank and then spent at Victoria’s Secret. A plan like that certainly sounds like more fun than what I’m going to propose. Especially since Americans are going to be a bit short on fun over the next little while. They used it all up over the last generation.

I’ve explained elsewhere why we’re embarked on the Greater Depression. That’s a done deal. But here is what needs to happen if the depression is to be as brief and as therapeutic as possible.

1. Allow collapse of bankrupt entities. They’re uneconomic (as their bankruptcy has proven), their managements are overpaid and are proven incompetents. The bailout money going into them is simply wasted. Most of the real wealth now owned by the bankrupt will still exist. It will simply change ownership. If you’ve dug yourself into a hole and want to get out, the first thing to do is stop digging. But that’s not nearly enough. At this point, it would be a half-measure. Perhaps only a 3-foot rope over a 12-foot gap. If you allow the collapse of unprofitable enterprises without changing the conditions that created the problem, recovery is going to be even harder. So…

2. Deregulate. Contrary to what almost everyone thinks, the main purpose of regulation is not to protect consumers but to entrench the current order. Regulation prevents new institutions from arising quickly and cheaply. Does the Department of Agriculture really need 100,000 employees to regulate fewer than two million farms in the U.S.? Has the Department of Energy, created in 1977 to somehow solve a temporary crisis, done anything of value with its 110,000 employees and contractors and $32 billion annual budget? How about the terminally corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had by 100 years.

The FTC, SEC, FCC, FAA, DOT, HHS, HUD, Labor, Commerce, serve little or no useful public purpose. Eliminate them and the entire economy would blossom – except for the parasitical lobbying and legal trades. There are hundreds of agencies like these. Most aren’t just useless. They’re actively destructive.

3. Abolish the Fed. This is the actual engine of inflation. Money is just a medium of exchange and a store of value; you don’t need a central bank to have money. In fact, central banks are always just engines of inflation. They benefit only the cronies who get their money first. What would we use as money? It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a commodity, that can’t be created out of thin air. But gold is the obvious choice. The whole idea of a central bank is a swindle. Massive bailouts couldn’t and wouldn’t have been done without it.

4. Cut taxes 50%… to start. The economy would boom. The money won’t be needed with all the agencies gone. Certainly not if the next two points are followed.

5. Default on the national debt. I realize this is a shocker, unless you recall that the debt will never be paid anyway. And why should the next several generations have to pay for the stupidity of their parents? A default sounds dishonorable - and it is, in civil society. But government is different. It hasn’t been “We the People” for a long time; it’s now a self-dealing behemoth, run by cronies. It’s like a building with a rotten foundation - better to bring it down with a controlled demolition, than wait for it fall unpredictably. Governments default all the time, though most defaults are subtle, through inflation. In an outright default, however, the only people who get hurt are those who lent money to an institution that can only repay them by stealing money from others. They should be punished.

6. Disentangle and disengage. The entanglements the U.S. needs to escape prominently include the UN and NATO. The U.S. combat troops now in over 100 foreign countries can come home. They’re not “defending” anything, except for local collaborators, and are just picking up bad habits and antagonizing the locals. The U.S. spends more money on the military than most other countries in the world put together. Since the government is bankrupt, spending on the military and its sport wars significantly adds to the economy’s problems.

What the Government Will Actually Do: The chances of any of these things happening, however, are slim to none. And Slim’s out of town. So let’s look at what will actually happen.

1. Let enterprises collapse? No way. Every corrupt and failed institution, instead of being allowed to turn into compost to be recycled by the economic worms into fertilizer for a new generation of businesses, is going to be propped up like a zombie. They’ll continue doing the same stupid things that got the country into the current mess. The wave of collapses is going to get much worse. Lots of banks will fail, so the FDIC will need hundreds of billions more in funding. They’ll try bailing out everything - they already are. Who knows where they’ll stop?

I play poker. Sometimes you see a player undergo a temporary psychotic break. They’ll make totally irrational, wild, stupid bets in a desperate attempt to get out even. It’s called “going on tilt.” The U.S. government, as an enterprise, is now on tilt.

2. Deregulate? No, that’s out of the question. Everyone is convinced a lack of regulation allowed the financial collapse that started in 2008. It must, they feel, have been a lack of oversight that allowed “The Virus” to invade the country. And so, with the approval of the public, the government will set up lots of new agencies. The 70,000 degraded beings who crawled out of the woodwork to work for the TSA - for the terror crisis of 2001 - will be the model. I just hope one of the new organizations doesn’t sport a black uniform with silver flashings. Of course, the largest agency of the U.S. government is now Homeland Security, so anything is possible.

3. Abolish the Fed? Despite having been debauched, and turned into a veritable money-printing machine, the Federal Reserve has become far more important than ever. Why? Without it the U.S. government would only be able to borrow funds from citizens, who are tapped out. Or foreigners, who increasingly see it as irresponsible. And who else would buy the securities of failing corporations to support them? Multi-trillion-dollar deficits are now the norm, and a central bank is needed to fund them.

4. Cut taxes? No. Taxes on the rich, or those the government decides belong in that category - people like you - are going through the roof. Herbert Hoover - who is somehow painted as a free-marketer - exacerbated the last depression by raising marginal rates from 25% to 63% in 1932. With multi-trillion dollar deficits for the indefinite future, taxes will rise.

Initially, it’s likely to be on politically incorrect things, like tobacco, alcohol, guns, oil, coal, and luxuries… but that’s just be for starters. Taxes on imports will be permanent, justified by saying it will not only generate revenue for the government, but save U.S. jobs, and punish undeserving foriegners. Smoot-Hawley, the Hoover innovation that sealed the fate of the economy in the ‘30s, will ride again.

Along with this, we’ll likely see foreign exchange controls, starting with a tax on spending and investing abroad. The rationale will be the same: it generates revenue, and keeps capital (and jobs) in the U.S. Better yet, FX controls only affect the rich (who else can afford to do things abroad?), and the unpatriotic (who else would even dream of doing anything abroad during a crisis like this?).

6. Default on the national debt? Actually, this will happen. But through inflation. Which, believe it or not, is much more destructive, and less honest, than simply saying “I can’t, and won’t, honor my obligation.”

7. Disengage? No way. War is the health of the state. Like almost nothing else, it gets people to pull together. It doesn’t matter if we’re marching to hell; it’s important to be united, they say. The U.S. has a huge, bloated, military machine which will just rust away, if it’s not used. So of course they’ll use it. It’s like owning a giant hammer: after a while, everything starts to look like a nail.

Good News? So the prognosis is not good. In fact, it’s not just going to be bad. It’s going to be worse than even I think it’s going to be. People have come to rely on the government as if it were a cornucopia, when it’s more like a cesspool.

If we moved rapidly and radically toward a free-market society, we’d still have a depression – the distortions and misallocations of capital are massive and would still have to be liquidated – but although the correction would be sharp, it would also be short. Like the downturn of 1920-21, not the one of 1929-46.

As serious as the financial and economic problems are going to be over the years to come, adequate attention hasn’t been focused on potential social problems in the U.S. Don’t forget that during the last depression, there was little consumer debt (people actually bought things using “lay-away” plans, if anybody remembers those). Almost everybody had some savings… as opposed to a lot of debt. People were much closer to the farm, and most actually knew how to plant a garden.

Families tended to be geographically closer and more mutually supportive – a function that’s been usurped by things like welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and such, which have given people a false sense of security.

Labor was much less productive, but average monthly expenses were much lower, not just in absolute but in relative terms. If you lost your job, you went out to get another, at some wage, any wage. Society was vastly less regulated in those days, so it was much easier.

It’s a good question what millions of people who lose their jobs are going to do now, especially if they’re stuck in a suburb or exurb, surrounded by many thousands of others like themselves. People in Blue counties and Red counties don’t like each other, blame each other, and can’t even have a conversation anymore. Could the natives get restless? Actually, it would be a surprise if they didn’t."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Groupthink: We Are All Victims" (Excerpt)

"Groupthink: We Are All Victims" (Excerpt)

by Robert W Malone MD, MS

“Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.”

Fredrich Nietzsche

Excerpt: "We all seek to understand the root causes of the COVID crisis. We crave an answer, and hope is that we can find some sort of rationale for the harm that has been done, something that will help make sense out of one of the most profound policy fiascos in the history of the United States. In tracing the various threads which seem to lead towards comprehension of the larger issues and processes, there has been a tendency to focus on external actors and forces. Examples include the Medical-Pharmaceutical Industrial complex, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Foundation, the Chinese Central Communist Party, the central banking system/Federal Reserve, the large “hedge funds” (Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Corporate/social media and Big Technology, the Trusted News Initiative, and the United Nations.

In terms of the inexplicable behavior of the general population in response to the information which bombards all of us, the denialism and seeming hypnosis of colleagues, friends and family, Mattias Desmit’s 21st century update of the work of Hannah Arendt, Joost Meerloo, and so many others is often cited as the most important text for comprehending the large scale psychological processes which have driven much of the COVID crisis madness. Dr. Desmit, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University (Belgium) and a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist, has provided the world with a guide to the Mass Formation process (Mass formation Psychosis, Mass Hypnosis) which seems to have influenced so much of the madness that has gripped both the United States as well as much of the rest of the world."

Please view this complete article here:

- https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Realms of Splendor"; "Feast of Immortals"

2002, "Realms of Splendor"

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2002, "Feast of Immortals"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex.

 

About five light-years "tall", the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100513.html

The Poet: James Baldwin, "Amen"

"Amen"

 "No, I don't feel death coming.

I feel death going:

having thrown up his hands,

for the moment.

I feel like I know him

better than I did.

Those arms held me,

for a while,

and, when we meet again,

there will be that secret knowledge

between us." 

- James Baldwin

"Humanity Today..."

"Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."

- Edward O. Wilson

"Overcome Frustration, Don't Believe The Lies; Economic Instability; Recession Mongers; McDonald Fries"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 8/6/22:

"Overcome Frustration, Don't Believe The Lies;

 Economic Instability; Recession Mongers; McDonald Fries"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"WWJ(P)D?"

"WWJ(P)D?"

The ugly truth behind Friday's jobs report, interpreting 

mainstream media and figuring out what would Jerome do?

by Joel Bowman

“We used to have Bob Hope, Steve Jobs and Johnny Cash… now we have no hope, no jobs and no cash! Let’s just hope Kevin Bacon doesn’t die soon!”

~ Popular Internet joke

Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Jobs up... stocks down. That was the take-away from yesterday’s headlines. After all the experts had tortured their numbers, the consensus predicted 258,000 new jobs were added in July. Then, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which, without the Labor, is really just BS), announced that, in fact, 528,000 were added.

Stocks promptly sank on the news. Here’s CNBC: "Stocks wavered Friday in a volatile trading session after the July jobs report was much better than expected, as investors assessed what a strong labor market would mean for the Federal Reserve’s rate tightening campaign."

Both the S&P500 and the Nasdaq were down for the session. The Dow was up a smidge. Wait... what gives? Aren’t jobs good for the economy? Isn’t a strong economy good for the companies that operate within it? Isn’t 528k a bigger number than 258k? Let’s back up a moment, to get a clearer picture...

Truth vs. Power: First of all, the mainstream media – at this point little more than a virtual bullhorn for establishment opinion – has become expert at burying the real story. Once a proud and noble profession, which aimed to “speak truth to power,” to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” the fourth estate has largely deteriorated into muckraking partisanship, where everything is viewed through the warped looking glass of Team Red vs. Team Blue politics. Joe Biden could announce tomorrow that 2+2=4 and half the country would be up in arms. Same for Trump, Obama, Bush, et al. Nothing new there. Every aspect of modern life has come to be presented through the lens of one or another political party... even (and sometimes especially) things that seemingly have nothing to do with politics.

Curious about the origins of the virus that (was used to) shut the world down for two years? That’s political. Wonder about the efficacy of masks and/or vaccines? That’s political, too. Confused as to the accepted definition of a recession... and whether or not the country is actually in one? Again, such a consideration is not merely a matter of interpreting the relevant economic data, but a question of political allegiance. (More on “mere semantics” in tomorrow’s Sunday Session...)

An earnest reader, looking for “just the facts, ma’am,” has a long way to go to get to the truth, if he can even find it at all. Instead he gets “narratives,” “talking points” and “positions.” Modern day mythology, in other words, concocted by insiders to coral outsiders into manageable formation.

WWJ(P)D? As if that weren’t enough, investors must also take into account the likely action of the biggest para-market actor of them all, the mighty Federal Reserve Central Banking System of the United States of America. Every inflation print... every GDP read... every fleck and mote of economic data that comes down the pike must be interpreted in light of the all-important question, “What Would Jerome (Powell) Do?” (WWJ(P)D?)

As Dan Denning explained in yesterday’s note to Bonner Private Research members... “Good news is bad news when it comes to monetary policy,” he wrote. “If the economy is stronger and wages are going up (BLS reports average hourly wage growth of 5.9%) then the economy can handle higher interest rates and Quantitative Tightening from the Fed, right? Higher rates and lower liquidity are bearish for stocks.”

But might investors have missed the story for the headline, the truth behind the myth? What if wages were not growing... but actually sinking? What if the unemployment rate was not 3.5%... but 9.6%? What if all were not as it appears?

Digging deeper into the actual numbers, Dan helps readers get to the bottom of the story. Here’s a choice snippet from his note from yesterday..."The Bureau said the US economy gained 528,000 jobs in July. Consensus forecasts were for a gain of 258,000. By all accounts it was an incredible result. And I do mean in-credible.

Here’s the bad news. The real unemployment rate is 9.6%. Nearly 100 million Americans are out of the workforce. Much of the gain in jobs came from people taking a SECOND or part-time job. The labor force participation rate is at the same level it was in March 1977. And with official inflation at 9.1%, wages are still getting crushed by cost-of-living increases for ordinary Americans. Don’t take it from me. The following facts come straight from the BLS report (emphasis added is mine):

"The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job was 5.9 million in July, little changed over the month. This measure is above its February 2020 level of 5.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job.

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons increased by 303,000 to 3.9 million in July. This rise reflected an increase in the number of persons whose hours were cut due to slack work or business conditions. The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons is below its February 2020 level of 4.4 million. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs.

The labor force participation rate, at 62.1 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.0 percent, were little changed over the month. Both measures remain below their February 2020 values (63.4 percent and 61.2 percent, respectively)."

From a high-level point of view, it’s great news that the 22 million jobs lost between March and April of 2020 are back. It’s also great news that the official unemployment rate is the lowest since 1969. But remember, the government response to the pandemic created an economic calamity for Middle Class Americans. The market economy has repaired some of that damage. But the pandemic did not ruin the job market. Government policy did. You have to read beyond the headline figures to get the full picture about the state of the labor market in the United States.

It’s not political, dear reader. Them’s just the numbers. But you do have to take the time to find them. Reading behind the headlines is a big part of what we try to do at Bonner Private Research. Whether you’re investing your money or your time (or both!), it pays to take a step back, question accepted wisdom and reevaluate what you thought you knew... “Come to think of it, how do I know what I think I know... other than that’s what I’ve been told?” We won’t always get it right, of course... but, as our founder Bill Bonner says, “Sometimes right. Sometimes Wrong. Always in doubt.”

- https://bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Frankfort, Illinois, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"A Long March..."

"The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair."

- Bertrand Russell

"The Worst Of Them All..."

"Science may have found a cure for most evils,

but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -

the apathy of human beings."

- Author Unknown

○

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.  When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me."

- Ralph Ellison, "Prologue to Invisible Man"

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○

Full screen recommended.

Phil Collins, "Another Day In Paradise"

"How It Really Is"

 

"One Of The Most Tragic Things That I Have Read In A Long Time"

"One Of The Most Tragic Things 

That I Have Read In A Long Time"

by Michael Snyder

"Things have never been harder for America’s farmers and ranchers than they are right now. Their relentless hard work keeps us fed, but now many of them are being financially ruined by forces beyond their control. Prices for fertilizer, farm equipment and diesel fuel have spiraled to absolutely absurd heights, and meanwhile extremely bizarre weather patterns are making it almost impossible to operate successfully in many parts of the nation. A lot of farmers and ranchers have already gone out of business, and many more will go out of business in the months ahead unless some sort of a miracle happens.

Back in 1900, there were approximately 5.7 million family farms in the United States, but at that time the total population of the country was just 76 million. Today, there are only about 2.2 million family farms in the United States, but the total population of the country has grown to 329 million.

Agriculture is slowly but surely being consolidated, and the big fish have far more power than the little fish do. It has gotten to a point where it has become nearly impossible for many small farmers and ranchers to survive. To illustrate this, I would like to share something that a farmer named Sheila Payne Blackburn recently posted on Facebook…

I am the last one left on our farm and ranch here in central Texas. It has been in our family and in our blood for over 150 years. I was raised to never back down, never give up, get back in the saddle, cowgirls don’t cry, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, hang tough, and every other cowboy expression you can think of.

I have watched my great grandparents, grandparents and my parents die young. Their bodies run down and weak, their minds overwhelmed with stress, and their bank accounts empty. They gave everything they had for our way of life. I have survived drought, floods, excessive heat, -4 degree winters, broncs, bulls that want to kill you, and death of beloved livestock.

But today – today, I think I’m finally broken. Today my body, heart, spirit, and strength are gone. When my dad left this world, he left me holding the bag. He didn’t want to! But he did. Massive debt, tractors that won’t run, old broken down equipment, pickups that barely make it through a pasture. But he also left me the land that I love, the cattle, my heritage, my dream, my knowledge, and passion. But I feel I can’t go up from here.

Our government wants to destroy us. I can’t buy another 20 year old tractor at $120,000 for something that will not even probably make it a week. I can’t afford the diesel to fill up that tractor for $600 to just have to do it again tomorrow.

I can’t afford the fertilizer, the seed, the oil, the grease, the parts. Why should I spend $700 an acre to plow, plant, fertilize, weed kill? A grand total of $140,000. To only lose it in a drought. And really never make that money back! Hell my calves will only bring $800 to $900 a piece. But that same whole beef will cost the consumer $5,000 at the grocery store.

Today my pride means nothing to me anymore! Today I want to live to see my grandchildren grow older! Today I am tired of the heat, the wind, the drought! Today I know that it is only me, and no one will probably take over! Today I wonder what I’m fighting for! Today I am weak. Today I think I am through.

I know I am not the only one that feels this way anymore! Say a prayer for your farmers. Some of us are barely hanging on."

That is truly one of the most tragic things that I have read in a long time. Small farmers and small ranchers are the backbone of this country, and without them we don’t eat. Unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to notice that more of them are going under with each passing day.

Many Americans simply do not care about the plight of our farmers and ranchers right now, but they will definitely start to care when the price of beef doubles or even triples. The following was recently posted on Facebook by a rancher named Brad Allison…"$125 a roll, crap is getting real. The cattlemen doesn’t have a chance. Lick tubs almost $140 a tub, cubes close to $14 a bag. We are getting priced out of existence… Pray for your ranchers to be able to hang in there. Meat prices at the grocery is not their fault, it’s above their head, they surely are not making the profit. 10,000 head of cattle sold in three counties here in the last three weeks from cattlemen drowning. Middle age cattle going to slaughter because we can’t afford to feed them."

This is a very serious national crisis, but most Americans don’t realize it yet. But once these cost increases start showing up at the grocery store in 2023, everyone will finally realize what we are facing. For decades, we have been able to take our farmers and our ranchers for granted. Now everything is changing, and a trip to the grocery store will soon be far more painful.

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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Yeah, "most Americans don’t realize it yet." And don't care, and deliberately won't, until, in horror, they realize what's happening as an unimaginable new reality viciously slaps that smug smile off their faces. Look around, think it's getting bad now? Well, "you ain't seen nuthin' yet." But you, and all of us, will...

- CP

"Shopping Trip To Kroger Marketplace! Prices Are Crazy!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures with Danno, 8/6/22:

"Shopping Trip To Kroger Marketplace! Prices Are Crazy!"

"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, 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!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/