Wilder, Idaho, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, November 28, 2022
Gregory Mannarino, "Alert! Expect An Inflation Super-Wave To Hit!"
Gregory Mannarino, 11/28/22:
"Alert! Expect An Inflation Super-Wave To Hit!"
Comments here:
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“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires [the so-called wealthy "Elite"- CP], become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie [the nearly dead middle class- CP], whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat [the always impoverished poor- CP]. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery [Wall Street- CP].
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
Judge Napolitano ,"Ukraine Russia War Status Update - Col Doug Macgregor"
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano, 11/28/22
"Ukraine Russia War Status Update - Col Doug Macgregor"
Comments here:
"Massive Price Increases At Sam's Club! Not Good! What's Next!?"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 11/28/22:
"Massive Price Increases At Sam's Club!
Not Good! What's Next!?"
"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 the empty shelves situation! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:
"We’ve Been Sold Out!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 11/28/22:
"We’ve Been Sold Out!"
"It is absolute appalling that companies are selling our personal information for gain. They don’t let us know about it and you’re being inundated with advertising based on where you live, your income, and your personal information."
Comments here:
Jim Kunstler, "The Four F**keries"
"The Four F**keries"
by Jim Kunstler
“We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.”
- Raul Ilargi Meier
"I doubt there is another era in the history of Western Civ when the forces in-motion acting on society were so mystifying to those acted upon. And isn’t it especially galling that this is so in an age after rational scientific practice had decoded so many of nature’s secrets? Did that project somehow fail in the end? Has the Enlightenment been defeated? How have we become trapped like frogs being boiled haplessly in our own pond-water?
I have reduced these forces to four obvious streams of the sheerest seemingly evil f**kery, which is to say nefariously managed events meant to harm us. They are surely all related in some way. Let’s try to de-mystify them to understand what we’re up against.
First: Covid-19. How is it that we don’t know for sure how this organism came into the world, or understand what ensued after it did? Answer: the people who caused it to happen in the Wuhan lab have been busy covering their asses for three years, and successfully so. Yet we know exactly what Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric and others did. The paper trail in correspondence and patents alone is clear. We just can’t seem to do anything about it.
We don’t know why they did it yet, too, but there are plausible guesses. Maybe Dr. Fauci wanted to cap his long, checkered career with a final heroic triumph: the introduction of world-saving mRNA vaccines - incidentally, a great financial boon to himself and the pharma industry he secretly served. Like everything else Fauci worked on for forty years, this experiment ended in disaster: a Frankenstein disease that persists in the population and vaccines that maim and kill people. How did Fauci and company get away with it? Here’s how:
Two: Government’s war on its own citizens. I’d date this for the sake of simplicity to DOJ’s and FBI’s campaign to defenestrate Donald Trump starting in 2016 for the crime of winning an election. What began as the Russia collusion prank morphed into RussiaGate, another ass-covering extravaganza in which public officialdom gave itself blanket permission to lie about everything it was doing. The likes of James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Barack Obama’s girl squad in the White House - to name just a few of many participants - also managed to hook in the mainstream news media under the supposition that they were the good guys fighting a disgusting, pussy-grabbing supervillain, which disposed the news media to go along with all the FBI and DOJ lies, and also strand the media in an endless loop of ass-covering they are still locked into.
Bottom line: all involved came to recognize that there was no accountability for their wicked deeds and lying about them, and that became an all-purpose license for everyone in public life to lie about everything and anything ever after - including Dr. Fauci and his colleagues, who watched RussiaGate roll out for four years before the debut of Covid-19. This license to act wrongfully and lie about it extends, by the way, to the epic election mischief carried out programmatically by the Democratic Party’s Lawfare arm in 2020 and 2022, and the installation of a fake president.
Three: Wokery, the Marxist campaign to disorder society in order to overthrow existing institutions and replace them with a utopian dictatorship of the intersectionally oppressed - also known as The Revenge of the Losers. Its primary tactic is to normalize mental illness. Wokery is often described as a new kind of religion, but that’s mainly because all of its proffers and principles are irrational, as is characteristic of all religions. Also, as in many religions, Wokery in practice is preoccupied with coercion and punishment - which is natural for a movement based on vengeance - and often to a sadistic degree. It laughs at the idea of redemption. Its adversaries are never forgiven, only dealt additional punishments for asking.
The mystery here is how Wokery was incorporated into the operating system of the Democratic Party. The answer is the party needed something to replace its erstwhile corpus of organized industrial workers, gone with the winds of Globalism, and so it valorized the various categories of the mentally ill, the permanently downtrodden, and sundry persons who had become economic hostages to its corrupt system of payments and grants. High above that ragtag-and-bobtail of crazies reigned an aristocracy of the so-called cognitive elite, people of unquestioned virtue, college professors, the creative class, the credentialed echelon - super-busy signaling their good intentions to their vassals to keep them in line.
Wokery, you may have noticed, is also a “religion” dominated by women, and a particular strain of women: those left grossly disappointed by the promises of feminism in its several iterations, that is, the ideal of having brilliant careers minus family and children - producing an implacable, inchoate, and transmissible rage at the world and a fierce wish-to-punish others not so disposed to Woke dogma. So, it’s no surprise that so much of that dogma emanated from the humanities departments of the universities where such careerist feminist intellectuals flocked and marinated in their disappointments. Thus, too, their avatar: the ever cold-blooded and fiendish Hillary Clinton, forever seeking requital for her life’s losses. Hillary leads us to the world stage, and to…
Four, the most mysterious of the four f**keries: Globalism as represented by the World Economic Forum (WEF) led by the quasi-comical Klaus Schwab. Supposedly - and I can’t endorse this proposition - it is a front for some cabal of exalted international bankers and oligarchs, the proverbial Rothschilds and Rockefellers, Soros and Bill Gates and their various subalterns. There is certainly a lot of money involved and, as the old saying goes, Money talks and bullshit walks. There is also a ton of chatter about this selfsame cabal centering around a Satanic child molestation cult.
I dunno about this, either. Seems plumb cuckoo to me. And yet, how do you explain Jeffrey Epstein’s activities, and how he got it away with all of it, until he was offed right under Attorney General Bill Barr’s nose? How to explain the deification of transsexuals by the folks in-charge of culture and politics? You are dared to condemn such outrageous insults to human hard-wired morality as the Drag Queen Story Hour.
It’s hypothesized that the Satanic sex module is just of a piece with the WEF’s Transhumanism project: to engineer a super-race that will manage and enjoy the perqs of life-on-earth as a previously unseen hermaphroditic genus, and all the performative kink sexuality on display is just a preview of that, to soften us up. More to the point though, is the idea that this WEF elite will rule a planet of lower-order slaves (us), to mine their lithium and mix their drinks. And along with that is the much-heard narrative of the WEF seeking to severely reduce the earth’s current human population. I’m not wholly on-board with believing any of this; just sayin’ it’s all ‘out there’ and, crazy as it sounds, it is hard to explain.
Except in this way. Readers know that I have retailed my personal view of a collapsing techno-industrial society as The Long Emergency. My own conviction is this: that the general apprehension of such an event, now on-going, has generated among the citizenry such terror as to drive society crazy. (Mass Formation is a related interpretation, not necessary to go into here.)
I suppose this has happened to most other civilizations that wobbled and fell. The one best-known to me - because I wrote about it in "The City in Mind" (2002) - is the psychosis that overcame the Aztecs 1519 to 1521. It is the weirdest story in history that I know of. Aztec civilization was barely two hundred years old. The great city-state of Tenochtitlan had quickly grown to about a million when Hernan Cortés and Company, representing Spain of the Inquisition, marched in. Cortés, in his gleaming steel helmet, was the personification of the Aztecs’ deity-in-chief, Huitzilopochtli, their sun god, and the theological narrative that went with him - that Huitzilopochtli would return to the world from wherever elsewhere the gods reposed and destroy everything. In fact, that’s exactly what Señor Cortés and his few-hundred soldiers proceeded to do to a million Aztecs and their culture.
But during the two years Cortés sojourned among them, the Aztecs went batshit crazy ramping up their previously modest program of human sacrifice - a few hapless captives now and again - to a fantastic ritual mass bloodbath, cutting the hearts out of hundreds at a time atop their great pyramid to propitiate Huitzilopochtli and persuade him, by such a bloody performance of their devotion, to not end their world. It ended anyway, though another world (arguably not a better one) took its place: Mexico.
This is the kind of periodic human mass insanity that I see in the Four F**keries now loose in the world as Western Civ wobbles. The trouble is, having replaced our gods with science, we have no deity to propitiate. Just endless hypotheses of what’s to come."
"How It Really Is"
"Sometimes I feel like I'm actually on the wrong planet, and it's great
when I'm in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think:
'What the hell am I doing here?'"
- George Harrison
"Economic Market Snapshot 11/28/22"
"Economic Market Snapshot 11/28/22"
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Job cuts and much more.
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
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And now... The End Game...
"Human Life..."
"Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart."
- Blaise Pascal
"People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy."
- James Baldwin, "Another Country"
"They Will Lock You Down Again"
"They Will Lock You Down Again"
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
"The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all.
To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few.
Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever. The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue. Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should have.
Meanwhile, a few points to consider: The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration, has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news.
The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news.
Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway.
Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common. Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the courts.
The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people, is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant.
More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents, including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money.
The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals, and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural, health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy theory.
The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing “support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates who won election.
Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed.
In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform.
In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call “they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square.
We cannot allow that to happen."
"The Future..."
"The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it,
but no one wants to go there now."
- James Baldwin
but no one wants to go there now."
- James Baldwin
"100 Million Dead Birds Are Just The Beginning, Because This Pestilence Is Far From Over"
"100 Million Dead Birds Are Just The Beginning,
Because This Pestilence Is Far From Over"
by Michael Snyder
"Did you know that an extremely vicious virus that is currently sweeping across the globe has already killed more than 100 million birds? If you haven’t heard about this yet, don’t feel bad, because most people in the general population don’t know about this either. Like so many of the other nightmares that we are facing right now, the mainstream media continues to downplay the bird flu crisis and continues to insist that authorities have everything under control. But of course the truth is that they don’t have this outbreak under control. Flocks are being steadily wiped out all over the planet, and prices for turkey, chicken and eggs just keep going higher and higher. If the bird flu spreads even faster in 2023 than it did in 2022, it won’t be too long before we have some pretty serious shortages on our hands.
Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, it was being reported that the official death toll in the U.S. has now reached 50.54 million. That makes this “the worst animal-health disaster in U.S. history”…"More than 50.54 million U.S. birds have died in what is the worst Avian flu outbreak in U.S. history, according to data from the Department of Agriculture, Reuters reports. It also marks the worst animal-health disaster in U.S. history." But it is perfectly “normal” for tens of millions of our turkeys and chickens to be wiped out, right?
Unfortunately, this pestilence is not just limited to the United States. In fact, the UK and the European Union “are also suffering their worst avian-flu crises”…"Losses of poultry flocks sent prices for eggs and turkey meat to record highs, worsening economic pain for consumers facing red-hot inflation and making Thursday’s Thanksgiving celebrations more expensive in the United States. Europe and Britain are also suffering their worst avian-flu crises, and some British supermarkets rationed customers’ egg purchases after the outbreak disrupted supplies."
We have never seen anything like this before. According to CNBC, the number of dead birds in the EU alone has reached “nearly 50 million”…"Governments across Europe have culled bird populations to limit the spread of avian flu. Almost six million birds have been killed in the Netherlands since October 2021, while Spain, Bulgaria, Denmark and France have also been badly affected. Nearly 50 million birds have been killed in Europe this year as countries try to contain the disease, according to the EU’s Food Safety Agency."
Actually, that figure is a bit old, but I was not able to find an updated one. But if you take that number and add 50 million from the United States, that gives us a grand total of approximately 100 million dead birds, and that doesn’t even account for the remainder of the globe. For example, nearly 3 million birds have already been wiped out in Japan, and at this point the bird flu is beginning to spread like wildfire in that country…"Cases of the highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, are spreading at an unusual pace in Japan, with 18 outbreaks confirmed this season through Saturday at poultry farms in 12 of the country’s 47 prefectures."
But that number is expected to rise further, in line with global trends. This has truly become a worldwide crisis. Past outbreaks have either greatly subsided or completely gone away during the hot summer months, but that did not happen this year. In 2022, the virus “continued to fester” during the warmer months, and now authorities are concerned that things could get much worse during the cold months that are in front of us…
“The virus has mostly impacted turkey and egg operations, sending prices to all-time highs and contributing to soaring food inflation. While the spread slowed during the warmer months, it continued to fester and now risks further spread as cooling temperatures prompt more birds to migrate,” Bloomberg said."
Of course this comes at a really bad time, because if you follow my work on a regular basis you already know that global food production is being hit hard from countless directions right now. The UN has already been warning us that 2023 will be a year of famine in many areas of the planet, and so it would be very helpful if the bird flu were to disappear. Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen any time soon. And actually we have been extremely fortunate so far.
If the bird flu were to mutate into a form that humans can catch and spread easily, we would rapidly be facing a global health scare of epic proportions. Up to this point, it has been rare for humans to catch the bird flu, but when it does happen the death rate can be as high as 60 percent…"But when the bird flu does infect people, it can be quite severe, with a mortality rate estimated to be at approximately 60 percent, according to the CDC."
Can you imagine how frightened people would be if such a virus started spreading among humans in our major population centers? The panic would be far beyond anything that we have experienced over the past few years. So this is a story that we will want to keep a close eye on.
For years, I warned my readers that we were moving into an era of great pestilences. Sadly, the times that I warned about have now arrived. Of course what we have been through so far is just the beginning. The pestilences that we are currently dealing with will continue to spread, and more are coming. Millions upon millions of people have died up to this point, and tens of millions more will eventually die.
A lot of you have been waiting for life to “return to normal”, but that isn’t going to happen. Global events have begun to spiral out of control, and things are only going to get more intense as we roll into 2023."
Sunday, November 27, 2022
"Humanity..."
"Humanity, I love you, because when you're hard
up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink. "
- e. e. cumming
"Breaking: WW3, Russia Prepares; Super-Virus; China's Insane Lockdown; Blackouts & Financial Collapse"
Canadian Prepper, 11/27/22:
"Breaking: WW3, Russia Prepares; Super-Virus;
China's Insane Lockdown; Blackouts & Financial Collapse"
"Half a million troops prepare to storm a blackout stricken Ukraine; 400 million under lockdown in China as unrest rages; 99% likelihood for a recession (depression) in 2023; massive quarantine camps being erected; Bird flu is everywhere; Food prices exploding; North Korea commits to massive Nuclear proliferation; strange events occurring around the world as NATO prepares for WW3."
Comments here:
"The Consumer Economy Has Completely Collapsed – “It’s a Ghost Town” for Holiday Shopping Everywhere"
"The Consumer Economy Has Completely Collapsed –
“It’s a Ghost Town” for Holiday Shopping Everywhere"
by Sundance
“Crowds? I see nothing. I’m surprised,” retail worker Jeremy Pritchett told FOX 2. “Normally, it’s wrapped all the way around the building. Today: no one.” That’s the typical ground report from areas all over the country. No one, literally almost no one, is doing any holiday shopping and the traditional Black Friday rush to get deals and discounts just didn’t happen. Financial media are scratching their puzzlers, perplexed with furrowed brows.
Interestingly, almost every financial media outlet is using the same Retail Federation talking point about anticipating an 8% increase in holiday sales this year. Apparently, pretenses must be maintained. Meanwhile, news crews and camera crews are having a desperate time finding any holiday shopping to use as background footage for the claims that sales are strong.
“Look, over there. There’s a person buying something. Oh, wait, no, that’s just an employee dusting the empty cash register.” At a certain point, one would have to believe reality would run head-first into the mass delusional pretending. Maybe this holiday season will be it, maybe not.
Reuters – […]" About 166 million people were planning to shop from Thursday’s Thanksgiving holiday through this coming “Cyber Monday,” according to the National Retail Federation, almost 8 million more than last year. But with sporadic rain in some parts of the country, stores were less busy than usual on Black Friday. “Usually at this time of the year you struggle to find parking. This year, I haven’t had an issue getting a parking spot,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry adviser of the NPD Group Inc. “It’s a lot of social shopping, everybody is only looking to get what they need. There is no sense of urgency,” Cohen added, based on his store checks in New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia."
At the American Dream mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, there were no lines outside stores. A Toys ‘R’ Us employee was handing out flyers with a list of the Black Friday “door buster” promotions. (read more) It’s almost Kafkaesque to see how the media are continuing to maintain economic pretenses, yet the reality of a completely collapsed consumer economy is physically staring them in the face.
(Bloomberg) – "Activity Light at One San Francisco Mall (4:40 p.m.) – At the Stonestown mall in San Francisco, shoppers were few and far between. The Target and Zara stores were mostly empty, and there was no line for the mall’s Santa Claus. Uniqlo and Apple were the busiest locations, but they still weren’t crowded.
[…] Crowds were thin in the late morning at the Stamford Town Center mall. Kay Jeweler, empty. Safavieh, empty. Only a couple of people waited at the checkout line at Forever 21 and just a few were in line for a purchase at Barnes & Noble.
[…] At a Target store on Chicago’s North Side, the parking lot was barely half full at about 9 a.m. local time. Shoppers were greeted with $3 ornaments and discounted Christmas trees when entering, and the store seemed calm and relatively quiet.
[…] The Macy’s in Stamford, Connecticut, was neat and orderly — maybe a little too neat and orderly on a day associated with shopping chaos. The furniture section was nearly deserted, though there were more shoppers looking at shoes." (read more)
Black Friday Has Gotten Out Of Control pic.twitter.com/AzhL3rFnas
- Steve Inman (@SteveInmanUIC) November 26, 2022
Full screen recommended.
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Full screen recommended.
"Lack of Black Friday Shoppers Waiting in Line"
"The War on Cash"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 11/27/22:
"The War on Cash"
"Banks around the world are getting very leery of giving out cash. Now we are starting to see more large and small companies limit cash transactions. They just don’t want it."
Comments here:
"The Housing Market Is Falling Apart Before Our Eyes As Prices Drop Faster Than In 2008"
Full screen recommended.
"The Housing Market Is Falling Apart Before Our
Eyes As Prices Drop Faster Than In 2008"
by Epic Economist
"The alarm bell is ringing for American homeowners, as surging mortgage rates scare away buyers and declining prices terrorize sellers amid one of the most turbulent reversals seen since 2008. Real estate experts say the slump in the housing market is only going to get worse, and after seeing their equity shrink by over $1.5 trillion this year, homeowners should prepare for an ugly 2023, they say, warning that property values are set to drop by the double digits early next year, and after that happens, prices will overshoot downwards.
Erik Lundh, a principal economist at The Conference Board, notes that this impressive surge was even higher than the rise seen in home prices during the last bubble. “It’s true that US homeowners should prepare for an ugly 2023,” he warned. “After years of underinvestment and suppressed supply, US home prices rose an eye-popping 47% between January 2020 and June 2022, as low interest rates and the surge in remote work spurred demand. For comparison, in the lead-up to the housing downturn that started 16 years ago, prices were up by 30% over a comparable period,” the expert explained.
However, now it is clear that the demand boom that fueled the growth of the current bubble hasn't just fizzled out, but it's doing a 180: Compared to a year ago, mortgage purchase applications are down 41%. There are actually fewer purchase applications now than at the bottom of the 2008 crash. All of that is thanks to the highest mortgage rates in two decades.
“We’re at very, very frothy levels right now. In such situations, prices do tend to overshoot to the downside,” highlights James Knightley, the chief international economist at ING Bank. The truth is that the housing market was squeezed so high before and during the pandemic that it needs to face a significant correction to come back to sustainable levels. In some markets, such as Austin, Texas, where home prices climbed 93.5% over the last two years, or North Port, Florida, where prices soared 83.4% since 2020, according to data compiled by Business Insider, a 40% crash still wouldn’t be enough. A lot more pain is coming for 57% of U.S. housing markets that are overvalued by 50% or more.
“Overall, this is the most worrying housing market outlook since 2007-2008, with markets poised between the prospect of modest declines and much steeper ones” pointed out Adam Slater, a lead economist at consultancy firm Oxford Economics. Redfin reported that home sales plunged 32.1% last month, the worst year-over-year collapse in the history of the United States. In a statement, Redfin Economics Research Lead Chen Zhao said that “the Fed’s actions to curb inflation are causing the housing market to slow at a pace not seen since the financial crisis.”
Mortgage defaults and foreclosures creeping up again, unemployment rates are ticking up and consumer spending is drying up. All the elements of a perfect storm are already in place. Now, all that we can do is to watch this slow-motion trainwreck playing before our eyes."
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "Lady Labyrinth & Nightbook"
Full screen recommended.
Ludovico Einaudi,
"Lady Labyrinth & Nightbook"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, but also one of the dustiest. Dubbed the Silver Coin for its appearance in smalltelescopes, it is more formally known as the Sculptor Galaxy for its location within the boundaries of the southern constellation Sculptor. Discovered in 1783 by mathematician and astronomer Caroline Herschel, the dusty island universe lies a mere 10 million light-years away.
About 70 thousand light-years across, NGC 253, pictured, is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest to our own Local Group of galaxies. In addition to its spiral dust lanes, tendrils of dust seem to be rising from a galactic disk laced with young star clusters and star forming regions in this sharp color image. The high dust content accompanies frantic star formation, earning NGC 253 the designation of a starburst galaxy. NGC 253 is also known to be a strong source of high-energy x-rays and gamma rays, likely due to massive black holes near the galaxy's center. Take a trip through extragalactic space in this short video flyby of NGC 253."
"I Pity You, Too..."
“Said a philosopher to a street sweeper, “I pity you. Yours is a hard and dirty task.” And the street sweeper said, “Thank you, sir. But tell me, what is your task?” And the philosopher answered saying, “I study man’s mind, his deeds and his desires.” Then the street sweeper went on with his sweeping and said with a smile, “I pity you, too.”
- Kahlil Gibran
"I Must Not Fear..."
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."
- Frank Herbert,
"Dune", "Litany Against Fear"
The Universe
“There are no accidents. If it's appeared on your life radar, this is why: to teach you that dreams come true; to reveal that you have the power to fix what's broken and heal what hurts; to catapult you beyond seeing with just your physical senses; and to lift the veils that have kept you from seeing that you're already the person you dreamed you'd become. There are no accidents. And believe me, that was one heck of a dream.”
“Tallyho,”
The Universe
“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”
"Feeling Overwhelmed: Breathing Into Order"
"Feeling Overwhelmed: Breathing Into Order"
by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM
"Always know, the Universe works in perfect order and you are never given more thank you can handle. Sometimes we may feel like there is just too much we need to do. Feeling overwhelmed may make it seem like the universe is picking on us, but the opposite is true: we are only given what we can handle. Difficult situations are opportunities to be our best selves, hone our skills and rise to the occasion.
The best place to start is to take a deep breath. As you do, remind yourself that the universe works in perfect order and therefore you can get everything done that needs to get done. As you exhale, release all the details that you have no control over. The universe with it‘s infinite organizing power will orchestrate the right outcome. Anytime stress begins to creep up, remember to breathe through it with these thoughts. Then, make a list of everything you need to do. Note what needs to be done first, and mark the things others may be able to do for you or with you. Though we often think no one else can do it correctly or well, there are times when it is worth it to exhale, let go of our control, and ask for help from professionals or friends. With the remaining things that feel you must do yourself, take another breath and determine their true importance.
Sometimes they are things we’d like to do, but aren’t really necessary. After taking these quick steps, you will find you have a plan laid out, freeing you from frenzied thoughts circling in your head. With calming deep breaths, you are now free to focus more fully on our priorities. Herbal teas or flower remedies along with wise choices about caffeine and food can help keep us from becoming frantic too. But with nothing further from us than our breath, we can breathe in our best intentions and let the rest go with an exhale. Keeping ourselves centered and breathing into and through life’s challenges helps us learn what we are truly capable of doing, and we will find we have the ability to rise to any occasion. Remember you aren’t being picked on, and you are never alone."
- http://www.dailyom.com/
"You Can Avoid Reality..."
"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"
"I... don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."
- Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”
"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."
Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."
"Francisco’s Money Speech” from “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand.
Freely download "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, here:
"Endgame Ukraine; Putin's Battleplan" (Excerpt)
"Endgame Ukraine; Putin's Battleplan"
by Mike Whitney
Excerpt: “Ukraine’s unquestioned strategic center of gravity is its western corridors to the Polish border where the vast majority of its war support enters the country. Their operational center of gravity is their resupply lines emanating eastwards from Kyiv to Ukraine’s various frontline positions. Without those two corridors, it would be nearly impossible for Kyiv to sustain wartime operations for more than a few weeks. Putin, therefore, may calculate the best use of those 218,000 additional troops will be to launch a three-pronged axis to cut both of those supply routes.” - Lt. Colonel Daniel L. Davis, Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and Contributing Editor at 1945
“I want to emphasize again that all tasks of the special military operation will be unconditionally fulfilled.” - Russian President Vladimir Putin
"Another day of large-scale missile attacks on Ukraine’s hobbled energy infrastructure has plunged much of the country into darkness. The relentless attacks - which continued through the night and into the early morning hours - have intensified dramatically as Russian combat troops continue to join their units along the perimeter in preparation for a major winter offensive. Russian President Vladimir Putin has waited patiently for the Zelensky regime to grasp the gravity of their situation and press for bilateral negotiations. But the Ukrainian president has stubbornly rejected diplomacy at every turn opting instead to fight til the bitter end. He is fully supported in that decision by his backers in Washington who see the conflict as an opportunity to weaken Russia so it cannot obstruct US plans to “pivot” to Asia. The transformation of Ukraine into a frigid, uninhabitable wastelands is largely the result of Washington’s voracious geopolitical ambitions. This is from a post at the website Moon of Alabama:
"Previous attacks had limited the distribution capacity to some 50% of demand. Controlled blackouts over several hours per day allowed to give some electricity for a few hours to most parts of the country. The attack today created a much larger problem. Not only were distribution networks attacked but also so the elements that connect Ukraine’s electricity production facilities to the distribution network. All four nuclear power stations of Ukraine with their 15 reactors are now in shutdown mode. Kiev along with most other cities of Ukraine no longer has electricity.” "Ukraine – Lights Out, No Water And Soon No Heat”, Moon of Alabama
Ukraine Plunged Into Darkness - As of the morning of November 24, more than 70% of Kiev remains without electricity. There is no water in half of the capital. Power outages continue in all regions throughout the country….”Kiev goes Dark as NATO Sacrifices Ukraine”,Southfront
The widespread power outages are accompanied by freezing temperatures that will inevitably lead to an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Millions of Ukrainians will be forced to flee across the border seeking refuge in Europe. Others will be left to hunker-down in makeshift emergency shelters that are sporadically heated by diesel-powered generators. There is no prospect that Ukraine’s dilapidated power-system will be fixed quickly if ever. And even if it could be cobbled-back together in some improvised capacity, it would only be a short-term fix. The fact is, the Russians have identified the main substations, terminals and auto-transformers across Ukraine and are picking them off one-by-one. Unable to defend itself against the daily barrage of precision-guided missiles, Ukraine is gradually being bombed into the Stone Age.
The objective of the Russian operation is to undermine Ukraine’s ability to wage war. The attacks on Ukraine’s power-grid, railway hubs, fuel deports, bridges and command-and-control centers are merely Phase 1 of a 2-phase operation that is designed to defeat the enemy and bring the war to swift end. Russia has gathered roughly 500,000 troops in a combat Strike-Force that will traverse the country along three main axes annihilating Ukrainian Forces wherever they are encountered and seizing key cities along the way. Critical supply-lines from Poland will be blocked, leaving troops at the front cut-off and vulnerable to attack. Eventually, the regime and their Right-bloc security forces will be killed or captured. Moscow will not allow a government that is openly hostile towards Russia to rule the country. This is from an interview with Colonel Douglas MacGregor:
"There are now 540,000 Russian troops stationed around the outskirts of Ukraine preparing to launch a major offensive that I think will probably end the war in Ukraine. 540,000 Russian troops, 1,000 rocket artillery systems, 5000 armored fighting vehicles including at least 1,500 tanks, hundreds and hundreds of tactical ballistic missiles. Ukraine is now going to experience war on a scale we haven’t seen since 1945.” Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Rumble
Full, highly recommended article is here:
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Full screen recommended.
"Ukraine Is About To Be Annihilated"
Straight Calls with Douglas Macgregor - Your home for analysis of breaking news and in-depth discussion of current geopolitical events in the United states and the world. Geopolitics. No ego descriptions. No small talk. Straight to the point. Calls with the relevant analysis only.
"How It Really Is"
"How many times do you have to get hit over the
head until you figure out who's hitting you?"
- Harry S. Truman
"Shopping At Trader Joe's! Trying Some Of Their Products!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 11/27/22:
"Shopping At Trader Joe's! Trying Some Of Their Products!"
"In today's vlog we are shopping at Trader Joe's, and are trying some of their products! We are here to try some of their produce as most produce has been terrible in some stores lately! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
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