American compassion and concern at it's finest, until the new
reality viciously slaps the stupid smug smile from their faces...
And it will.
So, we rise from the rubble...
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
"Strange Day At Walmart! Crazy Prices, And Someone Drives Car Through The Front Door!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 8/17/22:
"Strange Day At Walmart! Crazy Prices,
And Someone Drives Car Through The Front Door!"
"In today's vlog we are at Walmart and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a giant hole where someone had driven their car through the front entrance of Walmart on purpose!"
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "Global Inflation Continues To Surge With No End In Sight"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/17/22:
"Global Inflation Continues To Surge With No End In Sight"
Comments here:
"Every Generation..."
"Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?"
- Scott Adams, "God's Debris: A Thought Experiment"
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Of course, everyone has their own unique perspective...
Full screen recommended.
Steve Cutts, "Man"
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"Don't worry about saving the earth. The earth will be fine.
However, humans will probably become extinct and no
longer habitate the earth. Which is probably a good thing. "
- Blake Newman
"The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?"
"The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?"
by John Wilder
"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."
- Lucius Anneaus Seneca, "Letters to Lucilius", n. 91
"I have written before about Ugo Bardi’s (Living Italian Economist) theory that he called Seneca’s Cliff. Seneca’s Cliff is a restatement of something Seneca (Dead Roman Dude) philosophized about. It was a simple idea: stuff gets built only slowly. But when it comes down? It comes down all at once, like falling off of a cliff, hence Bardi calling it Seneca’s Cliff.
A house is a good example of Seneca’s Cliff. A house is built over time – in most cases it takes several months to build one. But if there’s a fire, that same house can be burned to the ground in a manner of minutes. There are exceptions, of course: in a Mexican neighborhood in Canada, the house might be saved by a hose, eh.
So, that’s Seneca’s Cliff. I wrote about it myself back in the day, when I was trying to write a novel. It started, “The world had been a web...” This is a metaphor that has always stuck with me – the web of interconnections required to maintain society as we know it.
The world is a web. As I write this, I’m writing it on a laptop that was built halfway around the world, with components and materials sourced on nearly every continent. Dude, I got a Dell®, but the Dell™ came from everywhere. When everything works, that’s great. People communicate with each other through price and supply and demand and produce things like computers and cars and wedding rings and beer and PEZ® and the burrito that Amber Heard ate before she left a “grumpy” in the bed.
Unfortunately, we’ve been working at a world that’s based in efficiency, too. Efficiency is nice if you’re a company that’s trying to put together a lot of iPads® or Funko Pops©, but in reality efficiency sucks. Why do you have two lungs? Two kidneys? Two bellybuttons? Because those are really, really important. I have a buddy who lost 90% of his lung capacity in one lung due to the flu back in ’92. Guess what? He conducts a full life like it never happened. He coached a wrestling team, and rides bicycles long distances.
When something is important, you don’t want an efficient system, you want an inefficient system. This is why the water department can make more water than it needs to. But our global systems, at the top level, are efficient. We don’t produce 10% extra oil. We don’t have that capacity. In spring and fall we generally have plenty of excess electricity generation, but tell me how summer looks? Lots of spare capacity?
No, not so much. Sure, there are substitutes for lots of things – we can have Wheaties® instead of Rice Krispies™. But in the end, we have to produce enough food to feed 7.96 billion people, and enough energy to grow the food and move it from place to place as well as make clothes and iPods© and pantyhose.
But this means that we’re in a world where there is simply less food because there is less energy, and also because war took out production of a significant amount. This was added to by the Biden sanctions on Russia. They are strange sanctions, indeed. So far their result is that it actually resulted in more cash going to Russia every month. Oh, higher prices on energy mainly to Europe and the United States. The shortages we’re seeing now in food, which will soon become much worse will have an even larger impact.
It has already created stress in the developed world. But in fragile places, like most of the Middle East and all of Africa, food prices will increase to the point where many of the poorer governments will simply cease to exist as the revolutions start. The last time this happened, mass migration into Europe was the result. It’s possible that this time, violence will be exported to Europe, as well.
These are the conclusions if things go well, based on where we are now. From everything I’ve seen, we’re not on the trajectory of things going well. The capital markets are slowly failing in the West. Why? All the spending from the decision to print all the cash to paper over the previous holes in the economy that were caused from all the cash printed to paper over the holes before that is a game we can’t play anymore. The holes are too big.
The delicate web that keeps goods moving is stressed now, and strands are missing, putting a greater strain on the whole web. It took hundreds of years to build up this economy. How fast will it fall down Seneca’s Cliff?"
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Related, highly recommended:
by Ugo Bardi
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Freely view "Moral Essays," by Lucius Anneaus Seneca, here:
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Freely download "Seneca's Letters to Lucilius" here:
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
Greg Hunter, "Radical Drought Caused by Military Weather Weapons"
"Radical Drought Caused by Military Weather Weapons"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com.
"Last month, climate engineering researcher Dane Wigington predicted “40 million in West would be without water in 2023.” Looks like the U.S. government is just as worried as Wigington about the extreme drought conditions. The Bureau of Reclamation just announced a first-ever forced water cut plan as the Colorado River dwindles to a trickle in Western America. Wigington contends the severe drought in the West and around the world is not a natural event but caused by man-made weather modification called geoengineering. Wigington explains, “What do we see around the globe? It’s not just Europe and not just the Western U.S., but South America also. We are seeing radical protracted drought that is crushing crops everywhere while Las Vegas is being deluged in an engineered scenario. This is all technology. They control the spigot, period. We have said this at GeoEngineeringWatch.org for a decade and a half. Everything is manifesting itself. What are we seeing? While Vegas is being flooded, we are seeing in the bread basket in the Midwest and California 110 degree temperatures, single digit humidity in some places, and crops are virtually imploding here.”
Who is responsible for the biggest drought in the last 1,200 years? Wigington says documents show it is the U.S. military. Wigington says, “Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Presidents Johnson and Carter, stated on the record that climate modification operations were the exceptional covert weapon of the U.S. military to make countries and their populations more compliant. Climate modification is the Crown Jewel weapon of the Military Industrial Complex. It’s not just for foreign adversaries, but for their own populations. They can bring them to their knees without them ever knowing they are under assault. Think how absurd this is when we have climate modification operations cutting off precipitation to tens of millions in the U.S., and nobody seems to have a clue. Nobody is willing to acknowledge this elephant in the sky.”
The military is also using forest fires as a weapon. Wigington says, “We have found a document that is titled ‘Forest Fires as a Military Weapon.’ (Wigington also has produced a video with the same title.) It actually names the processes or road map to prepare for intense incineration. What is most damning about this document is it specifically cites not only many locations in the U.S., including Mount Shasta where I live, it also cites the ‘prime burn windows’ for other U.S. allies that are on fire now such as Portugal, Spain and Greece. How much more damning can a document be? This is business as usual for the U.S. military. Think about the insanity of this. You incinerate forests as a military weapon and inflict damage on your own citizens.”
Wigington says there is a short window to fully wake people up to stop geoengineering, but the most important group is the U.S. military. Wigington says, “Our military personnel are unknowingly participating in this. They are being told they are doing something for the greater good. It’s something that is saving the planet when it is, in fact, killing the planet.”
Wigington talks about all the contaminated rain water, nuclear war, nano lipid particles, aluminum in your body and how much time we have left before the entire ecosystem implodes because of man-made weather modification called geoengineering. There is much more in the 36 min interview."
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with climate researcher Dane Wigington, founder of GeoEngineeringWatch.org, with an update to the ongoing global drought calamity.
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After the interview:
There is vast and totally free data and scientific information on GeoEngineeringWatch.org.
To see the video called “Wildfires As A Weapon: US Military Exposed,” click here.
To see even more information on “Wildfires As A Weapon: US Military Exposed,” click here for the page with the actual government PDF and other important videos.
CanadianPrepper, "Very Bad Things are About to Happen..."
CanadianPrepper, 8/16/22:
"Very Bad Things are About to Happen..."
"We are weeks if not days away from a major nuclear disaster. "
Comments here:
"Clear Focus Ambient Space Music for Concentration - Isochronic Tones"
Full screen recommended.
Jason Lewis - Mind Amend,
"Clear Focus Ambient Space Music for Concentration -
Isochronic Tones"
Ambient electronic space music with low-intensity
beta and alpha wave tones for clear focus.
Headphones Are Not Required
How does it work? This is a brainwave entrainment music track using isochronic tones combined with music. The music has also been embedded with amplitude entrainment effects, where the music is subtly distorted and vibrates in unison with the same frequency of the isochronic tones. This helps to add further strength to the entrainment effect.
What does this track do? A soft house upbeat study music mix with beta wave isochronic tones. Designed to produce a deep focus mental state while studying or working. This session stimulates Beta, SMR and Alpha, alternating in 2 minute increments to help keep the user relaxed and engaged. Note: SMR (sensorimotor rhythm) relates to the frequency range between 12 – 15Hz. It’s associated with sensory processing and motor control. Stimulating this can result in relaxed focus and improved attention. This session is meant to speed up the brain while keeping the left hemisphere dominant (good for attention, concentration and reducing emotional response and hyperactivity). ADD and similar disorders are often characterized by “slow-wave” EEG patterns, particularly in the left frontal region. As such, this session stimulates the left brain hemisphere with Beta frequencies and the right with SMR.
Can it be used to help with studying and if so, when should you listen to it? Yes, it can be helpful to use while studying, and if you read through the many comments about this track, you’ll see that many people have successfully used it for studying. You can either listen to it while you are studying, to get your brain into a good mental state when you need it. Or if you are someone that gets a bit distracted by music while studying, listen to it just before you begin.
How Loud Should The Volume Be? There is varying advice and opinions on the impact of volume with brainwave entrainment, with some saying the louder it is the more impact it has. From my own experience, my advice is to play it at a volume level you feel comfortable with. The main thing to consider is that it should be loud enough to hear the repetitive isochronic tones, so you don’t want it so quiet you can hardly hear them. But you also don’t want it so loud that its uncomfortable for you. Somewhere in the middle is my recommendation.
Use this session in the morning or afternoon, to train your brain for better cognition, such as clearer and faster thinking. You can either sit somewhere quiet and comfortable with your eyes closed and give your brain a nice workout, or you can also listen to this while doing an activity that requires a boost in concentration, like studying.
How long should you listen for to get a good effect? It takes around 6 minutes for your brainwaves to fall in step with the tones and become entrained. It then takes time to be guided along the frequency range used in the track. Listening to about half way through is the minimum in my opinion, but 30 minutes is the optimum and preferred length to listen for.
IMPORTANT RECOMMENDATIONS:
• Drink some water – Make sure you are well hydrated before listening to brainwave entrainment.
WHY? Your brain is made up of around 75% water, so it needs plenty of water to function well. When you stimulate your brain in this way, you’re increasing electrical activity and blood flow in the brain and giving your brain a good workout, so it can be a good idea to drink before listening, so that your brain can fire on all cylinders.
• It is not recommended to listen to this while driving or operating machinery.
WHY? Brainwave entrainment involves a process of stimulating your brainwaves and changing your mental state. While this is safe to do and use in normal situations, it can sometimes zone you out during the track, as you focus in on the sound of the tones. This could result in you being distracted temporarily, which is not a good thing while you’re driving or operating machinery. Some people also experience tingling and other sensations from the stimulation. While that might feel quite nice sitting in a comfortable chair at home, it could cause you to be distracted while driving and result in an accident.
• It is not recommended to listen to this while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or any mind altering substance.
WHY? When your brain is under the influence of drugs or alcohol it’s not operating to it’s full capacity, and you react differently to stimulation and situations, compared to when you are sober. So as a precaution and because I don’t know how you will react in that situation, I recommend you do not use it in that situation.
• Who should NOT listen to this audio? Those who should not listen to this video/audio include: Those who are prone to or have had seizures, epilepsy, pregnant or wear a pacemaker should NOT listen to this video/audio.
WHY? There is insufficient research data in this area, so as a precaution, if you are among the categories listed above, I would recommend you consult a doctor or medical professional before listening to this video/audio.”
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Comments here:
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Whether you want to know it or not we're all in the fight of our lives, for our lives. Some of you reading this will not survive, and I may not either, so I for one will take any edge I can get, and so should you. This works, I suggest you use it.
- CP
"We Are Not The First Civilization To Collapse, But We Will Probably Be The Last"
"We Are Not The First Civilization To Collapse,
But We Will Probably Be The Last"
by Chris Hedges
"I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.
I look out from the structure - known as Monks Mound - at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.
This great city, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.
“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in "The Collapse of Complex Societies." “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”
Several centuries ago, the rulers of this vast city complex, which covered some 4,000 acres, including a 40-acre central plaza, stood where I stood. They no doubt saw below in the teeming settlements an unassailable power, with at least 120 temple mounds used as residences, sacred ceremonial sites, tombs, meeting centers and ball courts. Cahokia warriors dominated a vast territory from which they exacted tribute to enrich the ruling class of this highly stratified society. Reading the heavens, these mound builders constructed several circular astronomical observatories - wooden versions of Stonehenge.
The city’s hereditary rulers were venerated in life and death. A half mile from Monks Mound is the seven-foot-high Mound 72, in which archeologists found the remains of a man on a platform covered with 20,000 conch-shell disc beads from the Gulf of Mexico. The beads were arranged in the shape of a falcon, with the falcon’s head beneath and beside the man's head. Its wings and tail were placed underneath the man’s arms and legs. Below this layer of shells was the body of another man, buried face downward. Around these two men were six more human remains, possibly retainers, who may have been put to death to accompany the entombed man in the afterlife. Nearby were buried the remains of 53 girls and women ranging in age from 15 to 30, laid out in rows in two layers separated by matting. They appeared to have been strangled to death.
The poet Paul Valéry noted, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.”
Across the Mississippi River from Monks Mound, the city skyline of St. Louis is visible. It is hard not to see our own collapse in that of Cahokia. In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers - Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina - have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita, of the 100 largest police departments in the nation, according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization in terminal decline.
“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing,” Jared Diamond argues in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." “When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”
Pre-industrial civilizations were dependent on the limits of solar energy and constrained by roads and waterways, impediments that were obliterated when fossil fuel became an energy source. As industrial empires became global, their increase in size meant an increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes us more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse, not less. Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, (the worst drought in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a decline in crop yields of 8 or 9 percent), power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society. The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.
“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright warns, calling industrial society “a suicide machine.” In "A Short History of Progress", he writes: "Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee - or to watch out for - long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer."
Wright also reflects upon what will be left behind: "The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth."
Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in ‘ecological deficit,’ taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 percent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century. We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct. Others will follow.
As Cahokia declined, violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing” writes anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat, in "Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians." He notes that, in one fifteenth-century cemetery in central Illinois, one-third of all adults had been killed by blows to the head, arrow wounds or scalping. Many showed evidence of fractures on their arms from vain attempts to fight off their attackers.
Such descent into internecine violence is compounded by a weakened and discredited central authority. In the later stages of Cahokia, the ruling class surrounded themselves with fortified wooden stockades, including a two-mile long wall that enclosed Monks Mound. Similar fortifications dotted the vast territory the Cahokia controlled, segregating gated communities where the wealthy and powerful, protected by armed guards, sought safety from the increasing lawlessness and hoarded dwindling food supplies and resources.
Overcrowding inside these stockades saw the spread of tuberculosis and blastomycosis, caused by a soil-borne fungus, along with iron deficiency anemia. Infant mortality rates rose, and life spans declined, a result of social disintegration, poor diet and disease.
By the 1400s Cahokia had been abandoned. In 1541, when Hernando de Soto’s invading army descended on what is today Missouri, looking for gold, nothing but the great mounds remained, relics of a forgotten past.
This time the collapse will be global. It will not be possible, as in ancient societies, to migrate to new ecosystems rich in natural resources. The steady rise in heat will devastate crop yields and make much of the planet uninhabitable. Climate scientists warn that once temperatures rise by 4℃, the earth, at best, will be able to sustain a billion people. The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.
The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit."
"Crop Failures Now At Crisis Levels Worldwide", Excerpt
"Crop Failures Now At Crisis Levels Worldwide"
by Mike Adams
Excerpt: "Globalists are currently carrying out a planetary-scale genocide agenda against humanity and all life on Earth as we know it. They are waging this war through multiple vectors that attack not only humans, but also plant life across the planet. Their weapons include terraforming, geoengineering, induced famine, energy collapse, economic collapse and vaccine bioweapons for depopulation. Crop losses are huge across the USA and Europe, and there's simply not enough food in the pipeline at this point to keep all of humanity alive for the next year. The crisis is about to impact hard. Get full details in today's complete feature story and podcast here."
"Biden’s Latest Whopper Is Outrageous"
"Biden’s Latest Whopper Is Outrageous"
by Jim Rickards
"Why do they keep trying to redefine the meaning of words? In June 2022, U.S. inflation was 9.1%, the highest in over 40 years. In July 2022, the inflation rate was 8.5%, a decline from the June rate but still one of the highest inflation readings since the early 1980s. Joe Biden might have claimed a little credit for bringing inflation down a little in July. Instead, he jumped the shark and claimed that inflation in July was “zero.” You read that right. His exact words were: “We received news that our economy had 0% inflation in the month of July.” Of course, that’s preposterous. Here’s the real story…
Sorry, Joe, You’re Wrong: Inflation is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) inside the Department of Labor. They report results monthly. Each monthly report looks at the prices of a basket of over 30 separate categories such as gasoline, food, clothing, travel, electronics and so on. Inside each of these broad categories are hundreds of individual items that comprise what a typical consumer might buy in a particular month. That data consists of prices. The next step is to compare those prices for a certain month with the same month in the prior year. The basket of prices for July 2022 was compared with the same basket of prices for July 2021. The year-over-year increase in prices is the inflation rate for the month of July 2022. That’s the 8.5% increase the BLS reported. Where did Biden get his “zero” data?
Changing Inconvenient Definitions: In a desperate move to hide bad news by changing definitions, the White House looked at the price level in July 2022 compared with the price level in June 2022. In other words, they did a month-to-month comparison instead of the customary year over year. That’s a change in the rate of change of the price data.
You can rest assured Biden doesn’t understand any of this, but he was able to mouth the words on the teleprompter. This episode - changing the definition in order to change the news - is exactly what the White House and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen did when they changed the definition of “recession” after the Commerce Department reported two consecutive quarters of declining GDP at the end of July.
(Incidentally, many in the mainstream media tried to deny that the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago with dozens of armed agents was actually a “raid.” They claimed the FBI was simply delivering a “legal search warrant” or some other benign language to disguise what actually happened.)
Joe Biden Isn’t Big Brother: Anyway, the White House policy is clear. If you don’t like the economic news, just change the definitions to get whatever result you want. That’s exactly how George Orwell portrayed Big Brother in his novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four." Joe Biden isn’t competent enough to be Big Brother. He’s so mentally impaired that when he says absurd things, it’s hard to tell if it’s the result of cognitive decline, outright lies or a simple inability to know what he’s talking about when someone puts a script on his teleprompter.
That’s not a personal attack on Biden - no one takes delight in seeing an elderly man in decline. I certainly don’t. But Biden’s most recent absurdity is so bad that it might possibly be the result of all three.
Fortunately, Americans are not as dumb as the White House seems to think we are. Most Americans see right through the sham. In any case, we don’t need the White House to tell us about inflation. We see it in the grocery store and at the gas pump every day. Inflation may be down a bit from its peak, but it’s still outrageously high, no matter what kind of spin the White House may put on it. But for the moment, let’s pretend that inflation really is down as Biden says. Is that necessarily a good sign? The answer is no.
Destroying the Economy in Order to Save It: The difficulty is that U.S. inflation is coming from the supply side (energy, food, transportation, supply chain dysfunction) rather than the demand side (consumers pulling demand forward based on inflationary fears). Since the Fed doesn’t drill for oil, drive trucks or operate cranes, they can’t really affect the supply side directly. What they can do is destroy demand by raising rates so high that consumers will be drained with higher mortgage rates and excessive credit card charges.
This kind of inflation control can work, but it comes at a high cost - a severe recession. Right now, consumers are plagued with high gasoline prices, though they have declined some. Those prices will come down when consumers stop buying gas at all because they’re unemployed or their businesses have failed. To paraphrase an old saying from the Vietnam War, the Fed will have to destroy the economy in order to save it.
The Bullwhip Effect: Other negative data abounds. The supply chain is still broken but in a new way. Six months ago, distributors and retailers were short of inventory and the shelves were bare. There’s still some of that, but the delivery channels are working better now.
The problem today is that distributors put in double and even triple orders to make up for shortages. Now those orders are being delivered at exactly the same time that demand has fallen off a cliff. This is known in supply chain science as the bullwhip effect, where small moves at one end of the whip produce huge effects at the other end. Not only are warehouses full, but new orders are drying up. Distributors and retailers don’t need more goods. GDP is calculated based on inventories, not final sales, so this is another huge negative for GDP in the third quarter.
Initial claims for unemployment have been rising for several weeks. Real wages are declining sharply. (Nominal wages are up about 5%, but inflation is 8.5% so the real wage - nominal minus inflation - is negative 3.5% on an annualized basis.) That’s a disaster.
Don’t Expect Much Improvement: Other signs of a more severe recession than the one we are already in keep accumulating. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecast for third quarter GDP growth (annualized) is now +1.8%. But that should be compared with a prior estimate of +2.5%. The declining projected rate is significant. They don’t forecast in the usual highly inaccurate Wall Street manner. Instead, they “nowcast” based on data available at the time, without extrapolating or estimating data that is not yet available.
We won’t have an official government estimate of Q3 GDP until late October. But based on the most recent projection, it’s reasonable to conclude that Q3 may end up in the negative column when all is said and done.
Why Have Oil Prices Crashed? Meanwhile, oil prices have been declining precipitously since June. The crude oil futures contract fell from $122 per barrel on June 8 to $86 per barrel as of today, nearly a 30% mini crash in less than two months. It would be nice to think this was due to a flood of supply suddenly emerging, but that’s not the case. Supply is still highly constrained.
What happened is that demand collapsed. You may have noticed this starting to show up in the price of gas at the pump. The price is still high, but it has come down recently and will come down more. That may be a good thing for you, but it’s a bad sign for the economy because it means many Americans simply can’t afford gas, are driving less or in some cases have lost their jobs. Count this development on the side of negative economic indicators. There’s more data but you get the idea. Inflation may be coming down, but not because its underlying conditions are being addressed - but because recession is causing a drop in demand.
We’re in a recession now and the best estimate is that the recession will continue and get worse. But hey, at least inflation will fall."
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Related:
"Alternate Inflation Charts"
"The CPI chart reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living."
"I Wish..."
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf "and so do all who live to see such times.
But that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"
"Don't Lend Money To Family And Friends; Homebuyers Cancel Deals"
Jeremiah Babe, 8/16/22:
"Don't Lend Money To Family And Friends;
Homebuyers Cancel Deals"
Comments here:
Gerald Celente, "Swallow Our B*llsh*t, Follow Our Orders"
Full screen recommended.
Strong language alert!!
Gerald Celente, 8/16/22:
"Swallow Our B*llsh*t, Follow Our Orders"
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Related:
Gregory Mannarino, "Seeing Is Believing... The Economy Is Dead, It's Totally Over"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 8/16/22:
"Seeing Is Believing... The Economy Is Dead, It's Totally Over"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Laguna Indigo"
Full screen recommended.
Liquid Mind, "Laguna Indigo"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth's sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula's central regions.
In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light."
"Life..."
"Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living."
- Alysha Speer
"The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool."
- Scott Turow
"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."
- Andrew Klavan
"A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life."
- Richard Ford
"Life, Reality..."
"Life is not what you see, but what you've projected.
It's not what you've felt, but what you've decided.
It's not what you've experienced, but how you've remembered it.
It's not what you've forged, but what you've allowed.
And it's not who's appeared, but who you've summoned.
And this should serve you well until you find what you already have."
- The Universe
“Reality is what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is what we believe.
What we believe is based upon our perceptions.
What we perceive depends upon what we look for.
What we look for depends upon what we think.
What we think depends upon what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe.
What we believe determines what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is our reality.”
- Gary Zukav
"The True Measure..."
"Place yourself among those who carry on their lives with passion, and true learning will take place, no matter how humble or exalted the setting. But no matter what path you follow, do not be ashamed of your learning. In some corner of your life, you know more about something than anyone else on earth. The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others."
- Kent Nerburn
"Sometimes..."
"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether
it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
That ultimately is the question...
Adrian Lester as Hamlet: "To be or not to be..."
William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", Act III, Scene I
"A 'Housing Recession' Is Here, And It Isn’t Going To Be Fun…"
"A 'Housing Recession' Is Here, And It Isn’t Going To Be Fun…"
by Michael Snyder
"Our concerns about the housing market have been confirmed. This week, the corporate news is full of headlines about the new “housing recession” that has officially arrived, but this shouldn’t surprise any of us. We were warned over and over again that if the Federal Reserve aggressively hiked interest rates that it would absolutely crush the housing market. In so many ways, what we are currently witnessing seems so similar to 2008. After a period of very rapid growth, home prices all over the nation are starting to fall. Meanwhile, much higher mortgage rates are pushing millions of potential homebuyers out of the market and home builders are starting to panic. If nothing is done, it won’t be too long before large numbers of Americans are once again underwater on their mortgages and this crisis starts to reverberate on Wall Street.
On Monday, we received some news that was extremely troubling…"The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, which measures the pulse of the single-family housing market, fell for the eighth consecutive month to 49, marking the worst stretch for the housing market since the 2008 financial crisis."
8 months in a row. Needless to say, that is clearly a trend. And if you want to thank someone for this, you can thank officials at the Federal Reserve, because they have pushed us into yet another “housing recession”…“Tighter monetary policy from the Federal Reserve and persistently elevated construction costs have brought on a housing recession,” NAHB chief economist Robert Dietz said.
The only way out of this mess is lower interest rates. But Fed officials aren’t going to reduce rates. Instead, they are going to keep hiking them, and that means much more doom and gloom for the housing market in the months ahead.
Looking more deeply at the numbers that were just released, I am particularly alarmed by what has happened to buyer traffic…"Of the index’s three components, current sales conditions dropped 7 points to 57, sales expectations in the next six months fell 2 points to 47 and buyer traffic fell 5 points to 32. Despite higher costs for land, labor and materials, about 1 in 5 builders in August reported lowering prices in the past month in an effort to increase sales or limit cancellations. The average drop reported was 5%."
A very low level of buyer traffic indicates that sales will be depressingly low during the weeks and months to come. So if you are trying to sell a house right now, that is really bad news.
And for homebuilders the outlook is downright apocalyptic. Those that build homes have to make plans far in advance. If they guess right, they can be rewarded handsomely. But if they guess wrong, the pain can be immense. Unfortunately, homebuilders are being hit by a double whammy right now. Input costs have been going higher and higher, and meanwhile home prices overall are about to steadily fall all over the nation thanks to much higher mortgage rates.
If you can believe it, 30 year rates have almost doubled over the past 12 months…"The average rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage climbed to 5.22% for the week ending Aug. 11, according to recent data from mortgage lender Freddie Mac. That is significantly higher than just one year ago when rates stood at 2.86%."
We really need mortgage rates to start coming back down. But thanks to the Fed they are just going to keep going up. Buying a home in the United States has never been more unaffordable than it is right now, and it is only going to get worse as we head toward 2023.
Many Americans that would like to buy a home are currently choosing to rent instead, but rent prices are also becoming less affordable. As I discussed yesterday, the median monthly rent in the United States has now risen above $2,000 a month for the very first time. I was stunned when I first read that. I can still remember renting a nice apartment for $300 a month many years ago.
There is no way that rents should be as high as they are now. The greed that we are seeing in the industry has gotten completely out of hand. According to one recent survey, almost 60 percent of all renters have had their rent payments increased over the past year…"If you are feeling the pinch of higher rents, you’re not alone. Nearly 60% of renters saw a rent increase during the past year, while just 38% said they saw their income increase, according to a study from Freddie Mac. And renters were less likely than all employed respondents to have gotten a raise. As a result, nearly 1 in 5 who experienced a rent increase said they are now “extremely likely” to miss a payment."
This is going to end quite badly. As the U.S. economy slows down, millions of people will ultimately lose their jobs. And a lot of those people that are no longer working will eventually lose their homes. Do you remember the tremendous suffering that we witnessed during 2008 and 2009? Well, as I have been persistently warning, we are going to see it happen again.
Whenever the housing market crashes, there are countless people that have their lives turned upside down as a result. So much of the pain that is coming could have been avoided if our leaders had made much different decisions. But that didn’t happen, and so now a “housing recession” is here. And it isn’t going to be fun at all."
"Experts Have Sold It All. Should You? Restaurants are Cheaper than the Grocery Store"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 8/16/22:
"Experts Have Sold It All. Should You?
Restaurants are Cheaper than the Grocery Store"
"Inflation is going up so bad that individual grocery store pricing has gone through the roof. We just saw food pricing hit well over 13%. Some experts say that people are eating out at restaurants more often to save money. Do you believe this?"
Comments here:
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Related:
Bill Bonner, "Dr. Doom Looms"
"Dr. Doom Looms"
Uncontrolled inflation? Or a hard landing? Why not both?!
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - "In this morning’s Bloomberg news is this: "‘Dr. Doom’ Roubini Sees Either US Hard Landing or Uncontrolled Inflation." “The fed funds rate should be going well above 4% – 4.5%-5% in my view – to really push inflation towards 2%,” the chairman and chief executive officer of Roubini Macro Associates said in an interview on Bloomberg Television."
That’s it. Those are the choices. Inflate the bubble. Or let it die. Roubini says he thinks hopes for a Fed “pivot” – from tightening to loosening – is “delusional.”
In the near term, he is certainly right. Fed governors are not stupid… at least, not in a conventional way. It took many years of study to become the simpletons they are. And they are still human! Let’s not forget; they don’t like people laughing at them behind their backs any more than anyone else. And now, everyone can see that they made a huge mistake by not raising interest rates sooner. Then, they made another huge mistake by not recognizing the threat of inflation sooner… and still another big mistake by believing it would go away like a summer shower. Instead, inflation has settled in… and has been drenching consumers for more than a year.
Up to Their Necks: And now, Fed governors must atone… they must make good… they must prove that they are not hopeless morons. How? By getting control of the situation. That is how they will “regain credibility.” And that means – as Mr. Roubini tells us – getting the fed funds rate up above the inflation rate. (Point of reference: The Fed, in 1982, put the key rate about 600 basis points… 6%... ABOVE the CPI to get control of inflation. Currently, the rate is 600 bps BELOW inflation.)
The trouble is, the higher the funds rate goes, the more people have trouble paying their debts. The Fed’s ultra-low rates encouraged people to borrow. Now, they’re up to their necks in debt. And most, but not all, debt needs to be refinanced from time to time… which means, people have to pay a lot more in interest. Already, from June ’21 to June ’22, the typical mortgage payment rose by $700.
All central bankers learn the theory of Keynesian central banking, by heart. It is very simple, based on the Bible story; Joseph interpreted Pharaoh's dream… in which the latter saw seven skinny cows and seven thin ones… which he took to mean that there were 7 years of famine coming. Pharaoh then began a ‘counter-cyclical policy’ of stocking grain during the fat years in order to have something to eat in the lean ones.
In the Fed’s version, interest rates are raised during the fat years and lowered when the famine threatens. At least, that is the idea. In practice, the Fed really has no idea what is going on… and, being human, Fed governors prefer fat to lean and don’t mind a little legerdemain to keep the pastries coming. That is, they lower rates – even when the economy is strong. You’ll recall that the economy in 2019 couldn’t have been stronger. It was Donald Trump’s turn to play Pharaoh. He said it was the “greatest economy ever.”
Enter Mother Nature: The Fed had been trying to ‘normalize’ interest rates, after leaving the fed funds rate ‘near zero’ for far too long. By the time it got up to 2.4%... in 2019… the stock market turned down… and the Fed panicked, dropping the rate down to zero again. But it was not Mother Nature who determined the lean years or the fat ones in the US economy; it was Fed policy blunders themselves. Everybody likes the fat years, especially the elite, whose stocks and bonds go up. And the Fed, an arm of the Wall Street elite, did what it could to make it happen.
In other words, the people implementing the counter-cyclical policies were the same people who were tricking up the cycles. It was as if the umpire had run around the bases, slid into home plate, and pronounced himself “SAFE!” The Fed could not counterbalance the boom, 2009-2021, because it was the cause of it.
By 2021, it had been force feeding the economy with cash, credit, and fat-inducing calories for more than a decade. And then, in 2021-2022, inflation shot up, the stock market fell and the economy entered a recession. But the Fed couldn’t provide any counter-cyclical policy to offset the bust; its storerooms were empty! It had already dropped the key rate to zero. And now, contradicting the rules set forth in the Central Bankers’ Handbook, it has to raise rates in order to stop inflation and recover a little of its dignity.
And what now? Uncontrolled inflation? Or a hard landing? Which will it be? Our guess: both. A hard landing… and then, uncontrolled inflation. But we’ll wait to see what happens, along with everyone else."
"Your Job..."
“Life is half delicious yogurt, half crap,
and your job is to keep the plastic spoon in the yogurt.”
- Scott Adams
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