Monday, September 26, 2022

Bill Bonner, "30 Trillion Reasons"

"30 Trillion Reasons"
Plus real debt, phony notes and pounded sterling...
by Bill Bonner

Youghal, Ireland - “Pound Crashes to All Time Low” is the headline at Bloomberg this morning. The pound plunged almost 5% to an all-time low after Kwasi Kwarteng vowed to press on with more tax cuts, stoking fears that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer’s fiscal policies will send inflation and government debt soaring.

The pound is down against the dollar. But why? Our own Tom Dyson asks: “Why is the dollar so strong when the economy is entering recession, the stock market is in correction, and the government is $31 trillion in debt?” He might have added that the dollar is losing value at an 8.3% annual rate. What is the meaning of it? Is Britain headed towards more inflation? Mr. Kwarteng is the UK’s new treasury secretary. His tax cut policy is similar to Donald Trump’s tax cut in 2017. It is designed to light a fire under the economy.

Investors expect that it will light a fire under inflation instead; they’re selling pounds and buying dollars. The dollar is still the world’s go-to currency. But as the go-to dollar goes up, other currencies are looking like goners. Especially those from emerging markets. They borrowed cheap dollars. Now, they are expected to pay back in much more expensive currency. And what about Americans? Didn’t they borrow dollars too? And doesn’t each rate hike make their dollars dearer and their debts harder to pay? Are they goners too?

The Sneaky Tax: Last week, we took up a provocative subject. Maybe inflation is not so bad for everyone. And maybe the feds – in the UK as well as America – are not as eager to fight it as they appear. But let’s back up.

There are universal rules. And there are policies. The rules – don’t kill, don’t steal, drive on the right side – benefit just about everyone. The policies (regulations, programs) always benefit a few at the expense of the many.

And inflation? Inflation is a policy. It’s a tax. Like all taxes, it lands on some harder than others. And the farther you go down the wealth mountain, the harder it falls. For the first 20 years of this century, inflation was a gift to the elite. The Fed inflated the currency and bought bonds, putting $8 trillion in new money into Wall Street. This new money drove down interest rates and increased asset prices while leaving consumer prices scarcely touched.

But the Fed’s claptrap zero interest policy caused people to borrow far too much money. That excess is now embedded in debt – $30 trillion for the US government, $60 trillion for business and households. Somebody’s gotta pay that debt. And this may be the only thing the Republican and Democratic elite agree on – it ain’t gonna be them.

Right now, the Fed is raising the carrying cost of debt. Stocks and bonds have come down – 15% to 20%, some of them even more. Jerome Powell says he will keep at it, openly discussing a Fed Funds rate north of 4%. With every step, Powell believes he grows taller, following in the giant footsteps of Paul Volcker, and positioning himself for a Nobel prize… or at least the cover of TIME. He will be the man who saves the planet by defeating inflation.

But getting control of inflation will require more exertion. Paul Volcker had to put the Fed Fund rate all the way up to 20% – fully 700 basis points ABOVE consumer price inflation (CPI) – in order to bring inflation under control. The Fed has a long way to go.

Survival Mode: Remember, it’s either inflate…or the Bubble Economy dies. And if it dies, the graveyard gets crowded…with bonds, stocks, businesses, loans, mortgages, real estate – almost all assets. Much of the wealth of the elite gets buried. And while asset prices go to Hell…the federal government goes into purgatory. Not completely dead, but with much less room to maneuver.

Colleague Dan Denning: "The US government cannot afford to pay $1 trillion in interest on its trillions of dollars’ worth of debt that must now be refinanced at much higher interest rates. Expenses would have to be cut back – drastically. No more ‘stimmies’. No more giveaways. No more unemployment incentives. No more checks to the Ukraine. No more ‘green energy’ transition; the feds would be in survival mode.

The rest of the economy would be back-pedaling too… reeling from much higher interest expenses. “Liquidity” (ready cash, when you need it) would disappear. Lenders would see defaults coming from every direction. America would enter a deep depression, probably accompanied by riots, strikes, social chaos and political violence."

Is that going to happen? We don’t think so. An honest man, when he can’t pay his debts, admits it and accepts the consequences. He tightens his belt. He goes meekly into Chapter 7 or Chapter 11. He tries to make amends. But a man with $30 trillion in debt and a printing press in the basement? He has another option: inflation. Every year, inflation reduces his debt burden. He is happy to print money. He pays his debts with his phony notes. And everyone wonders why things are getting so expensive."

"Future Generations (If There Are Future Generations)"

"Future Generations (If There Are Future Generations)"
by Caitlin Johnstone

"Future generations, if there are future generations,
will scarce believe that our species once stockpiled armageddon weapons on purpose,
once built our entire civilization around economic models that could only result in the destruction of our biosphere,
once permitted corporations who profit from war to successfully lobby policymakers to start more wars,
once warehoused living beings in factory farms where they were tortured and brutalized,
once starved children to death with sanctions because their rulers disobeyed our rulers,
once made policies which kept people poor so they’d be financially coerced into facilitating military mass murder,
once let people go hungry and homeless if they didn’t have enough imaginary numbers in their bank accounts,
once stripped this planet of biodiversity and old growth forests to turn the gears of an imaginary economy instead of collaborating with our ecosystem.

Future generations, if there are future generations,
will look back in perplexity at our omnicidal madness,
at our blind subservience to the very worst among us,
at our remarkable ingenuity in always finding groundbreaking new ways to hate each other,
at our fanatical devotion to competition and control when we knew that all we really wanted was to be loved,
at the way we’d marginalize and outcast those who thought differently from the rest of us even though we knew full well that our way of thinking wasn’t working,
at the way we’d spend our lives feeding insatiable hungry ghosts only to wind up on our deathbeds wondering why we feel dissatisfied,
at the amount of energy we’d pour into not experiencing the beauty which surrounds us in every moment and rejecting the gifts we were being showered with from every direction,
at the herculean effort we poured into keeping enlightenment from crashing in,
at our nonstop desperate flailing attempts to be anywhere but here and now,
at the amount of work we put into avoiding being at ease.

Future generations, if there are future generations,
I am so glad that you made it past all the many obstacles we put up between our present age and your birth.
Praise be to you and your parents
for cleaning up our mess,
for setting things right,
for becoming conscious,
for valuing a healthy world,
for getting humanity to where you’re at now
so that the real adventure of our species could begin.

Future generations, if there are future generations,
thank you for your kindness and compassion as you gaze back on us through the records we have left you.
It might not be immediately obvious,
but some of us here saw what you’re seeing from there."
SoundCloud Reading by Tim Foley:

Gregory Mannarino, "The Global Financial System Is Collapsing"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/26/22:
"The Global Financial System Is Collapsing"
Comments here:

"Huge Price Increases At Sam's Club! This Is Ridiculous! Not Good!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 9/26/22:
"Huge Price Increases At Sam's Club! 
This Is Ridiculous! Not Good!"
"In today's vlog we are at Sam's Club, 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:

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Must View! "15 Reasons Why Your Grocery Bill Is Sky-high Right Now"

Full screen recommended.
"15 Reasons Why Your Grocery Bill Is Sky-high Right Now"
by Epic Economist

"Feel like your grocery bill is high? You’re definitely not alone. At this point, it’s hard to remember when grocery prices were “normal”. Every time we wheel the cart down supermarket aisles, we fear which unwelcome surprise we might find next. In recent years, many of us have become accustomed to doing quite a bit of mental math when we go shopping because with each passing month we continue to see the cost of everything continuously climb. The items we used to toss into our carts without a second thought about the cost have become way too expensive to make their way into our pantries.

Over the past year, food prices have jumped by 11.4%, according to official numbers. But U.S. consumers are seeing much higher increases in a wide range of everyday staples. Bread, for example, surged 16.2% in the past 12 months. The cost of meat, poultry, and fish is about 16% higher since the start of 2022. Meanwhile, egg prices soared by a shocking 39.8% - and we’re being told that this is just the beginning.

The compounding challenges of labor shortages, soaring energy prices, and shortages of commodities and raw materials have resulted in a significant production slowdown that’s been affecting virtually every sector of the industry. But the food sector, in particular, has been disproportionally impacted by this deceleration. Many processing plants had to slash headcount to avoid crowded working conditions amid the pandemic, but since then, some have never resumed normal operations. In turn, food producers had to increase the price they charge consumers to make up for their higher operational costs.

After the global health emergency exploded in 2020, food retailers have seen consumers stockpiling essentials at a staggering pace. Many of them tried to boost their inventory levels to meet the unexpected surge in demand, but up until this day, they are still having difficulties finding reliable suppliers, and even when they do, they might not be able to order the volume they want.

Food inflation is a trend that is likely to persist. Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri- Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University said during an interview with Bloomberg that: "People will have to get used to paying more for food. From now on, it’s only going to get worse.” For low-income families, the outlook is particularly troubling. Skyrocketing food prices are regressive and particularly damaging to them, given that they are forced to spend a greater share of their monthly income on food compared with upper-income households. Their trade- offs are not just foregoing a non-essential expense or not paying a utility bill. It might be far worse, such as not going to the doctor, or not getting their full dietary needs, such as an adequate protein intake, because it’s simply too expensive. Some of them will have to find aside income just to cover their extra grocery costs.

By now, it has become a common thing to start making calculations in our heads at the checkout line to determine what other things we might have to sacrifice financially because we just got hit with a high food bill. Many Americans who have never struggled with money before are having to make difficult decisions, such as turning to food banks for the first time in their lives.

Unfortunately, there's not only one problem or one solution that could fix this situation -- analysts say it will take time for consumers to see relief, which means that, until then, our grocery bills will keep shooting higher and higher. There are many factors pushing food costs to stratospheric levels, and they're combining to create a nightmare scenario for our food supply chains in 2023. That’s what we’re going to expose today."
Comments here:

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

Mike Oldfield, "Tubular Bells, Finale"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“This colorful skyscape features the dusty, reddish glow of Sharpless catalog emission region Sh2-155, the Cave Nebula. About 2,400 light-years away, the scene lies along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus.
Astronomical explorations of the region reveal that it has formed at the boundary of the massive Cepheus B molecular cloud and the hot, young, blue stars of the Cepheus OB 3 association. The bright rim of ionized hydrogen gas is energized by the radiation from the hot stars, dominated by the bright blue O-type star above picture center. Radiation driven ionization fronts are likely triggering collapsing cores and new star formation within. Appropriately sized for a stellar nursery, the cosmic cave is over 10 light-years across.”

Must View! "It's Too Late To Party - The Worst Is Yet To Come; Stop Spending Money And Prepare"

Jeremiah Babe, 9/25/22:
"It's Too Late To Party - The Worst Is Yet To Come;
 Stop Spending Money And Prepare"
Comments here:

"Beware of Restaurant Closures"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 9/25/22:
"Beware of Restaurant Closures"
"Over the last two years we have seen it time and again where a restaurant will be closed because of staffing issues. We have seen it with the big chains and we have seen it with the smaller locations. You need to be aware of this because sometimes it’s not a staffing issue."
Comments here:

"Empty Shelves Everywhere At Kroger! Not Good! This Is Crazy!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 9/25/22:
"Empty Shelves Everywhere At Kroger! Not Good! This Is Crazy!"
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, and are noticing lots of empty grocery shelves! This is not good as we are seeing massive price increases, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead"

Gregory Mannarino, 9/25/22:
"Markets, A Look Ahead"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"

 

Full screen recommended.
Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"
“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 Daily "Near You?"

Rhododendron, Oregon, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"How to Remember You're Alive"

"How to Remember You're Alive"
by David Cain

"One way to appreciate virtually any moment of your life is to pretend that the whole thing is already over. Your life came and went a long time ago, but for some reason you’ve just been sent back to this random moment, here in this office chair, or in line at Home Depot.

It isn’t clear why you’ve been sent back. Maybe it was a cosmic accounting error, or a boon from a playful God. All you know is that you’re here again, walking the earth, having been inexplicably returned to the temporary and mysterious state of Being Alive.

Any moment will do for this experiment. In fact, the more mundane the moment, the more profound the effect. You might find yourself, in this instance, pushing a cart through the frozen foods aisle. Or maybe you’re seated in front of a bowl of cereal at the speckled Formica breakfast table you bought on Craigslist. Or you’re carrying a bag of recycling down the back stairwell on a muggy night. It’s definitely your life though, and at least for now, you get to be alive again.

When you view life as something you’re returning to - rather than something that has never not been happening - it feels like the gift it perhaps always should. It’s just so damn interesting to be alive and experiencing things, and choosing what to do during those experiences.

Seeing life as the curious and rare condition it is gives even ordinary events the character of a brilliant film. An oblong rectangle of sunlight on the table flutters with the shadows of leaves. While you fold laundry, your phone lights up: a friend texting you a cheesy pun she knows you will appreciate. A short-lived party of bubbles appears and disappears when you fill a glass of water from the tap. A thin mist pours from the open freezer display onto your sandaled feet. It’s all spectacular, just because it’s happening, and once it’s over you would greatly miss it if you could. So why not miss it now? Or at least understand why you would.

The state of Being Alive also comes with a rich and distinct sense of possibility. You can make any number of interesting things happen by sheer will. You can scrawl sentences on a scrap of paper that will trigger certain thoughts later, for you or someone else. You can touch a few buttons on your phone and be speaking to any of a hundred people you know, and whatever is said would change each other’s day, or life, in some way. You could clean the house this afternoon, or leave it messy, and each option would give a different shape to the evening.

Can you believe that this condition - of being in the world, of feeling stuff and doing stuff - was once happening all the time? Remember being able to open windows and pet dogs and wash your hands in warm water? What an amazing time that was. No matter what happened, whether life was decidedly going “well” or not, it was always so eventful, and you got to decide what to do in each moment of it.

It’s all over, of course, which is too bad. You didn’t realize at the time how small a window it was, and you can’t believe you spent a lot of it complaining. However, for right now at least, for some reason, you’re back. You have at least this moment to enjoy being alive. There may be more coming afterward, but you can’t count on that. Not this time anyway.

Except in moments of extreme emotional tilt, this exercise always seems to work. I can almost always, when I think of it, choose to see the current moment as a certain kind of an unexpected gift - a long-awaited return to the most interesting thing ever, which is being alive.

It works because if it were true - you really had just been sent back to the realm of the living - chances are you really would think it’s unutterably great to be here, even if you didn’t the first time. By mentally jumping out of life and then back in, it becomes clear that the experience of being alive really is a profoundly interesting thing, and we can live with an ongoing awareness of that. That few seconds of contemplation reframes virtually any moment as the best thing that can happen: you, enjoying a rich pocket of Being Alive Right Now, amidst a vast universe that is almost entirely not that.

At least, it becomes interesting when you’re aware that there’s no reason any of this should necessarily be the case. There will not always be things happening. You will not always have the ability to experience the world and respond how you please. But - by the grace of whoever - you do right now. Whatever the metaphysics of it really is, the point is that the window is small, and if you’re in it right now, that should probably be regarded as a profoundly lucky thing, whether it’s your first time here or you’ve been sent back for another tour.

However, because the window is open continuously until it’s closed for good, it’s hard to feel the luckiness of being alive while life is still happening. This is one way to contact that sense of good fortune reliably - see the moment as an inexplicable return to the wild and spectacular condition of Being Alive, which was once so abundant you forgot to appreciate it. This experience you’re having right now, of being here in a body, experiencing the world and choosing how to respond - is gone, and by the Law of Joni Mitchell, you only now know what you had. But by some unbelievable stroke of luck, here it is again."

The Poet: Mary Oliver, “October”

“October”

"There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re
not there? and there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the
green pine tree:
little dazzler
little song,
little mouthful.

The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes -
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.

Near the fallen tree
something - a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down - tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.
It pulls me
into its trap of attention,
And when I turn again, the bear is gone.

Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?
Look, I want to love this world
as thought it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, 
not the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me - and I thought:
so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful."

- Mary Oliver

"You Think..."

"That's why crazy people are so dangerous.
You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage."
- Michael Buckley

"The Story Of Man"

“The sands of time blew into a storm of images... images in sequence to tell the truth! Glorious legends of revolutionaries, bound only by a desire to be true to themselves, and to hope! Parables of colliding worlds, of forbidden love, of enemies healing the wounds of circumstance! Projected myth of persecution through greed and selfishness... and the will to survive! The Will to survive! And to survive in the face of those who claim credit for your very existence! We survive not as pawns, but as agents of hope. Sometimes misunderstood, but always true to our story. The story of Man."
- Scott Morse
Vangelis, "Alpha"
This song always suggested the image of our relentless, idealized, noble, glorious March of Mankind through the ages. Despite it all, despite ourselves, we survive and march onward towards our unknown destiny.

Still, some wonder about our true nature as a species, as the Apex Predator of this planet, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did when he asked,“What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts.” Indeed, Angelic aspirations regardless, the historical record suggests a less benevolent but far more accurate and truthful view of the instincts of beasts within Humanity... - CP
Steve Cutts, "MAN"
“What a chimera then is Man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?”
- Blaise Pascal

"Pride and refuse," indeed...

"This Thanksgiving, Supplies Of Turkey, Eggs And Butter Will Be Extremely Tight In The United States"

"This Thanksgiving, Supplies Of Turkey, Eggs 
And Butter Will Be Extremely Tight In The United States"
by Michael Snyder

"If you love to cook, this upcoming Thanksgiving may be a real challenge for you. Thanks to a resurgence of the bird flu, supplies of turkey are getting tighter and tighter. Sadly, the same thing is true for eggs. And as you will see below, reduced milk production is sending the price of butter into the stratosphere. Thanks to soaring prices, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner will be out of reach for millions of American families this year, and that is extremely unfortunate. Of course all of this is happening in the context of a horrific global food crisis that is getting worse with each passing day. Yes, things are bad now, but they will be significantly worse this time next year.

The bird flu pandemic that has killed tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys was supposed to go away during the hot summer months, but that didn’t happen. And now that the weather is starting to get colder again, there has been a resurgence of the bird flu and this is “devastating egg and turkey operations in the heartland of the country”

"Turkeys are selling for record high prices ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday as a resurgence of bird flu wipes out supplies across the US. Avian influenza is devastating egg and turkey operations in the heartland of the country. If just one bird gets it, the entire flock is culled in order to stop the spread. Millions of hens and turkeys have been killed in recent weeks. As a result, prices for turkey hens are nearly 30% higher than a year ago and 80% above pre-pandemic costs. Just as concerning are inventories of whole turkeys, which are the lowest going into the US winter holiday season since 2006. That means there will be little relief from inflation for Thanksgiving dinner." In the months ahead, we could see tens of millions more chickens and turkeys get wiped out.

Egg prices have already tripled in 2022 and the price of turkey meat is up 60 percent. Unfortunately, this is likely just the beginning…"Turkey hens are $1.82 a pound this week, according to Urner Barry, compared to $1.42 last year and $1.01 before the pandemic. Meanwhile, wholesale egg prices are at $3.62 a dozen as of Wednesday, the highest ever, up from a previous record of $3.45 a dozen set earlier this year, said John Brunnquell, chief executive officer of Egg Innovations, one of the biggest US producers of free-range eggs. Consumers have seen prices for eggs at grocery stores triple this year, while turkey meat rose a record-setting 60%, according to a Cobank report."

Meanwhile, supplies of butter are steadily getting tighter as well…"Lower milk production on U.S. dairy farms and labor shortages for processing plants have weighed on butter output for months, leaving the amount of butter in U.S. cold storage facilities at the end of July the lowest since 2017, according to the Agriculture Department. Tight supplies have sent butter prices soaring at U.S. supermarkets, surpassing most other foods in the past year. U.S. grocery prices in August rose 13.5% during the past 12 months, the largest annual increase since 1979, according to the Labor Department. Butter outstripped those gains, rising 24.6% over the same period."

The trends that are driving up the price of butter aren’t going away any time soon, and so we are being warned to brace ourselves for “elevated” prices for the foreseeable future…"The forces at work in butter highlight the challenge of curtailing inflation. Economic pressures fueling high prices for livestock feed, labor shortages and other factors could persist, keeping prices for the kitchen staple elevated longer term."

To me, slathering a piece of warm bread with a huge chunk of butter is one of the best things about Thanksgiving. And most of us will continue to buy butter no matter how high it goes. But the truth is that rapidly rising food prices are forcing vast numbers of Americans to adjust their shopping habits. Here is one example…"For Carol Ehrman, cooking is a joyful experience.

“I love to cook, it’s my favorite thing to do,” she said. She especially likes to cook Indian and Thai food, but stocking the spices and ingredients she needs for those dishes is no longer feasible. “When every ingredient has gone up, that adds up on the total bill,” she said. “What used to cost us $250 to $300 … is now $400.” Ehrman, 60, and her husband, 65, rely on his social security income, and the increase was stretching their budget. “We just couldn’t do that.”

The global food crisis is starting to hit home for many ordinary Americans, and we need to understand that this crisis is still only in the very early chapters. David Beasley is the head of the UN World Food Program, and he is actually using the word “hell” to describe what is potentially coming in 2023…“It’s a perfect storm on top of a perfect storm,” Beasley said. “And with the fertilizer crisis we’re facing right now, with droughts, we’re facing a food pricing problem in 2022. This created havoc around the world. If we don’t get on top of this quickly - and I don’t mean next year, I mean this year - you will have a food availability problem in 2023,” he said. “And that’s gonna be hell.”

The World Food Program keeps sounding the alarm, but very few of us in the western world seem to be taking those warnings very seriously. People are literally dropping dead from starvation in some areas of the globe right now, and a new report that the WFP just released says that there are 19 “hotspots” where we could see a “huge loss of life” between October and January…"World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are out with a new report outlining countries that “are either already starving or on the brink of disaster.”

WFP and FAO found 19 hunger hotspots worldwide, with most countries in Africa, the Middle East, and even some in Central America. They call for urgent humanitarian action between October 2022 and January 2023 to avoid “huge loss of life.” Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Yemen, and Haiti are labeled “hotspots of highest concern,” facing catastrophic hunger levels.

The sort of famines that we were warned about are already starting to happen right in front of our eyes, but most people simply will not care as long as they are not going hungry themselves. What those people do not realize is that this global food crisis is going to continue to spread. As supplies of food get tighter and tighter, prices will continue to soar and shortages will become more common. We truly are in unprecedented territory, and the pain that is ahead will greatly shock all of the lemmings that just kept assuming that everything would work out just fine somehow."
"Most people simply will not care as long as they are not going hungry themselves." Ahh yes, so very true, the willfully, massively ignorant "Oh, that could never happen here!" crowd. They never cared about anyone but themselves. But they will...Let's see how they feel as the new reality viciously slaps that stupid, condescending smirk off their faces...Oh, they'll care then...

Greg Hunter, "Banking Crisis Will Start in Europe – Martin Armstrong"

"Banking Crisis Will Start in Europe – Martin Armstrong"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong says nothing is going to get better by the end of 2022, and he is still forecasting “chaos” coming in 2023. Armstrong says the plunge in the stock market last week is all because of “extreme uncertainty.” Armstrong predicted a stock market crash two months ago and contends, “It’s not over.”

Europe is in big financial trouble with Russian natural gas turned off as a retaliation from the sanctions. Armstrong explains, “In Europe, I believe they are actually deliberately doing this, and this is Klaus Schwab’s ‘Great Reset.’ They know they have a serious problem. They lowered rates to below 0% in 2014. They just started raising interest rates. Meanwhile, you ordered all the pension funds throughout Europe to have more than 70% in government bonds. Then they took it negative. All the pension funds are insolvent. Europe is fiscal mismanagement on a grand scale. There is no way it can sustain itself, and we are looking at Europe breaking apart.”

So, could Europe suck the rest of the world down the tubes? Armstrong says, “Oh, absolutely. Europe is the problem. The crisis in banking will start in Europe. The debt is collapsing. They have no way to sustain themselves. The debt market over there is undermining the stability of all the banks. You have to understand that reserves are tied to government debt, and this is the perfect storm. Yes, the (U.S.) stock market will go down short term. We are not facing a 1929 event or a 90% fall here. Europeans, probably by January of 2023, as this crisis in Ukraine escalates, anybody with half a brain is going to take whatever money they have and get it over here.”

So, where is smart money going to go? Armstrong says, “Stocks are like gold, it is on the same side of the table and is opposite government debt. People are not going to be buying government debt. They are going to be looking at anything in the private sector. People are buying whatever they can to get off the grid.”

Armstrong says governments are borrowing and spend huge amounts of money. The Fed will keep raising interest rates to fight inflation, but Armstrong says, “Raising interest rates will only make things worse. We have supply shortages, and raising rates will not fill the gaps.”

Armstrong has never been more positive on buying gold. Why? Armstrong explains, “We are looking at a sovereign debt default. This is what’s going on. This is why Biden will spend whatever he wants because he knows he doesn’t have to pay it back. Eventually, this is what’s going to happen. This is Schwab’s agenda.”

Armstrong has predicted “2023 will be the year from Hell.” Armstrong says, “Civil unrest will only get worse” this year, and he is predicting we will have full blown war next year. Armstrong contends Democrats are desperate and will do things like granting illegal aliens citizenship so they can vote in the mid-term elections. In closing, Armstrong says, “Something is going to spark a collapse in government again. It’s going to be something, I think, in Europe where they do something drastic because they have no other choice. They need war as the excuse for the defaults of all the government debt.” There is much more in the nearly 59-minute interview."

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with Martin Armstrong, cycle expert and author of the upcoming new book “The Plot to Seize Russia, Manufacturing World War III.”

"How It Really Is"

Saturday, September 24, 2022

"Alea Iacta Est"

"Alea Iacta Est"
by Alexander Macris

"In the closing days of 50 BC, the Roman Senate declared that Julius Caesar’s term as a provincial governor was finished. Roman law afforded its magistrates immunity to prosecution, but this immunity would end with Caesar’s term. As the leader of the populares faction, Caesar had many enemies among the elite optimates, and as soon as he left office, these enemies planned to bury him in litigation. Caesar knew he would lose everything: property, liberty, even his life.

Caesar decided it was better to fight for victory than accept certain defeat. In January 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon River with his army, in violation of sacred Roman law, and began a civil war. “Alea iacta est,” said Caesar: The die is cast."
Full screen recommended.
Charles Bukowoski, "Roll the Dice" 

Musical Interlude: "Beautiful Relaxing Music - Calming Piano & Guitar Music"

Full screen recommended.
"Beautiful Relaxing Music - Calming Piano & Guitar Music"
"Beautiful relaxing music by Soothing Relaxation. Enjoy calming piano and
 guitar music composed by Peder B. Helland, set to stunning nature videos."

"A Look to the Heavens"

“About 70 million light-years distant, gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 289 is larger than our own Milky Way. Seen nearly face-on, its bright core and colorful central disk give way to remarkably faint, bluish spiral arms. The extensive arms sweep well over 100 thousand light-years from the galaxy's center.
At the lower right in this sharp, telescopic galaxy portrait the main spiral arm seems to encounter a small, fuzzy elliptical companion galaxy interacting with enormous NGC 289. Of course spiky stars are in the foreground of the scene. They lie within the Milky Way toward the southern constellation Sculptor.”

Chet Raymo, “Take My Arm”

“Take My Arm”
by Chet Raymo

“I’m sure I have referenced here before the poems of Grace Schulman, she who inhabits that sweet melancholy place between “the necessity and impossibility of belief.” Between, too, the necessity and impossibility of love.

Belief and love. They have so much in common, yet are as distinct as self and other. How strange that two people can hitch their lives together, on a whim, say, or wild intuition, knowing little if nothing about the other’s hiddenness, about things that even the other does not fully understand and couldn’t articulate even if he did. Blind, deaf, dumb, they leap into the future, hoping to fly, and, for a moment, soaring, like Icarus, sunward. The necessity of wax. The impossibility of wax. We “fall” in love, they say. Schulman: “We slog. We tramp the road of possibility. Give me your arm.”

"Grief..."

“The dictionary defines grief as: “Keen mental suffering or distress over affliction of loss; sharp sorrow, painful regret.” We’re taught to learn from and rely on books, on definitions, on definitives but in life, strict definitions rarely apply. In life, grief can look like a lot of things that bear little resemblance to sharp sorrow.

Grief may be a thing we all have in common but it looks different on everyone. It isn’t just death we have to grieve. It’s life, it’s loss, it’s change. And when we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes, it has to hurt so bad. The thing we gotta try to remember is that it can turn on a dime. That’s how you stay alive when it hurts so much you can’t breathe. That’s how you survive. By remembering that one day, somehow, impossibly, it won’t feel this way. It wont hurt this much. Grief comes in it’s own time for everyone in it’s own way. So the best we can do, the best anyone can do, is try for honesty. The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief is that you can’t control it. The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it when it comes and let it go when we can. The very worst part is that the minute you think you’re past it, it starts all over again and always, every time, it takes your breath away.

According to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, when we are dying or have suffered a catastrophic loss, we all move through five distinctive stages of grief. We go into denial because the loss is so unthinkable, we can’t imagine it’s true. We become angry with everyone. We become angry with survivors, angry with ourselves. Then we bargain, we beg, we plead. We offer everything we have. We offer up our souls in exchange for just one more day. When the bargaining has failed and the anger is too hard to maintain, we fall into depression, despair. Until finally we have to accept that we have done everything we can. We let go. We let go and move into acceptance.”
- “Grey’s Anatomy”

"What In the Hell Was Washington Thinking?"

"What In the Hell Was Washington Thinking?"
by David Stockman

"What in the hell were those bloody-minded Washington/NATO neocons thinking? At any time in the last nine months they could have had a diplomatic settlement with Russia that would have:

Avoided/ended the war in Ukraine, thereby saving tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and hundreds of billion of economic cost and destruction;

Allowed the Russian speaking population of the Donbas a substantial degree of self-governance and autonomy from the hostile government in Kiev;

Permitted the historic Russian territory of Crimea to remain under Russian control per the wishes of the overwhelming share of its Russian-speaking population;

Kept NATO out of Ukraine and its missiles away from Russia’s doorstep;

Removed NATO missile bases from the the old Warsaw Pact countries, where NATO had expanded in breach of Washington’s solemn promise made at the time of the German reunification to not extend NATO "one inch to the east" .

Would this have furthered the national security of the US and Europe, permitted Europe’s then flourishing peaceful commerce with Russia to continue and avoided the current global plague of soaring energy and food prices caused by the Sanctions War? Yes, it would have. In spades!

So the question recurs. What alternative path did Washington/NATO envision and how could the likely consequences have improved upon either the above summarized settlement, which has been possible all along or, far worse still, the disastrous end game which is now unfolding?

The fact is, after Putin’s speech the phrase "disastrous end game" is barely adequate to describe the scenario ahead. That’s because it signaled that the relative restraint of Russia’s "Special Military Operation" (SMO) is now over, and what lies ahead is full scale political and military warfare that can only end in calamity for Ukraine, NATO and indeed the world: The heart of the matter is that Putin is now :

Mobilizing Russia’s entire GDP, which is at least 15X greater than what’s left of Ukraine’s;

Mustering 300,000 fresh reserves or double the number of Russian forces now deployed in the SMO;

Abandoning the policy of not attacking Ukraine’s civilian electric power grid and railroad system, which has been crucial to Ukraine’s survival to date and the West’s massive supply of weapons across the western border and through the interior rail network;

Preparing to annex the two breakaway Donbas republics in the east and the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the south after hurriedly called referendums, which will transform the war into an explicit NATO-enabled attack on Russia proper.

To be sure, Kiev and Washington are screaming loudly that these referendums are "shams", and it’s probably the case that the ballot counting will be no better than what occurred in the state of Georgia in 2020. But the fact is, these regions are populated by Russian-speakers who have no love for or loyalty to the anti-Russian government in Kiev; who have already lined-up for Russian citizenship in large numbers; and who, in any case, fear the retribution of the Ukrainian military and secret service far more than they fear the Russians.

Stated differently, the populations of the Donetsk (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republics (LPR) and those of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions are not begging to be "liberated" by Ukrainian armies, which are every bit as brutal and vindictive as the Russian military has been alleged to be, and surely don’t give a whit about Washington/NATO’s hypocritical malarkey about the rule of law and the sanctity of borders. In fact, the overwhelming share of the populations (75-90%) of these regions have voted for the pro-Russian candidate in every presidential election held in the Ukraine since the Soviet Union’s mailed fist was lifted from their governance in 1991.

That is to say, they have implicitly voted for partition of a country that never existed until it was nailed together by the tyrannical rule of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev after 1922. So doing, they effected an arbitrary rearrangement of borders that plopped what had been "New Russia" for upwards of 200 years into the commie designed Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine for no better reason than it suited their whims and convenience of rule.

But now, within a matter of weeks, Ukraine’s borders will be restored to the pre-WWI status quo ante. Whether fair and square or not, the vote will be overwhelmingly in favor of separation and upon the request of the peoples of "Novorussiya", Putin has indicated that these regions will once again become formal Russian territories.

What that means, in turn, of course, is that NATO’s war in support of the Kiev regime will become an explicit war on the territory of Russia. And that surely portends a bloody and disastrous end game because the only way it does not end up in an armistice after untold more deaths and destruction, followed by secession of the new "Russian" territories , anyway, is if Ukraine wins the war. That’s not going to happen. Not in a blue moon.

Once Moscow takes the gloves off and savages Ukraine’s electric power grid and railway system it will be all over except the shouting. The massive flow of western armaments, which has kept Kiev in the game to date, will be drastically curtailed; and the civilian population in the Kiev-controlled areas will be left high and dry, preparing to shiver in the dark as the severe Ukrainian winter approaches.

Nor does the alleged surprise victory of Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv area in recent weeks change the scenario. What that actually accomplished was the sacrifice of thousands of Ukrainian troops in the apparent faint attack on Kherson in the south in order to regain a few thousand square miles of lightly populated open steppe around Kharkiv. Even then, the alleged hastily retreating Russian army was not that at all. The area had been mostly occupied and defended by the lightly trained volunteers of the Republic of Luhansk, not the trained professionals of the Russian armed forces.

Now that the Ukrainian army has driven out the Luhansk volunteers and occupied the open steppe lands, it remains for Russian dominance of the air and artillery war to encircle the alleged victors and pulverize them from the air and via long-range artillery that is even now being brought into position.

That is to say, in a few weeks the Ukrainian "victory "will disappear from the MSM, just as have so many other alleged setbacks to the Russian cause. Instead, the news will be about the brutality of the Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure; the roadblocks it will put in front of what has been the demolition derby of US/NATO supplied weaponry to the battle front; and the fact that without massive new aid from Washington beyond the $50 billion already authorized, civilian life in the Kiev-controlled portions of the country will be on the verge of collapse and the regime in Kiev will be on virtual life-support from Washington.

In short, the end game in lieu of the diplomatic settlement which could have been had long ago will be either a more unfavorable partition of Ukraine, leaving Kiev and the western regions as a bankrupt landlocked rump state and ward of the west, or an escalation that involves direct military engagement by NATO and leaves the world teetering on the edge of nuclear war.

So much for using Ukraine as cannon fodder to drastically "weaken Russia" and to force the demonized Vlad Putin from power. To the contrary, by the time Europe’s cold and dark winter is underway, it will be European governments, which slavishly did Washington’s bidding, that will be falling like dominoes.

More importantly, it will also be the new Republican majority on Capitol Hill asking our opening question of Biden’s infinitely foolish national security team: Indeed, what in the hell were you thinking?!"

The Daily "Near You?"

Spencer, West Virginia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Nothing New Under the Sun"

"Nothing New Under the Sun"

"Yes, the times change with the tides; yet the tales, like the surf, sound on in familiar perpetuity and with steady repetition. In the modern era, during the great clash of civilizations currently underway, there will be no new, great and ghastly crusades. Only resistance or surrender. In America, just as her tide recedes from the world, in the end it may become Man overboard, and every man for himself. The sun rises. The sun sets.

As sand through an hour-glass, or waves rolling over every shore, so too, do our journeys mark passageways through time; and, in the end, our navigation may, indeed, depend upon guidance, like stars, shining down from heaven upon what we know, over the decisions we make; on the destinies we choose. And, of course, there will be losses incurred during the storms.

So, we raise our sails and pray for the prosperous winds of Providence to guide our ways and guard our lives through uncharted seas. Perhaps it's true that fortune finds and favors the faithful above all. Even still, those who believe, and those who doubt, and those who sleep, all do drift and blow by the same breeze. The winds of change are on us. They've always been here, steadfast and old as time itself. Like the earth. Nothing new under the sun."
- Doug "Uncola" Lynn