Orson Welles’s psychedelic 1973 adaptation of Plato’s timeless allegory of the cave and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” two parables of the human condition.
"It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death."
– Plato’s "Republic", Book 7
"Plato’s allegory of the cave thought-experiment ponders the experience of prisoners shackled in a cave from birth, only able to see the shadows of objects projected onto a wall. The text then traces the journey of a prisoner who is set free from the cave, given the opportunity to experience reality in the glow of the Sun and, upon returning to the cave, is met with laughter by the other prisoners, who think him a fool for struggling to readjust to his old existence. A simple story yielding complex commentaries on the nature of reality and wisdom, Plato’s timeless allegory is built into the foundations of modern philosophy and, more than two millennia later, still stirs debate. Carried by a rich narration from Orson Welles, this rarely seen 1973 animated adaptation of Plato’s words populates the tale with haunting human figures, bringing retro-surreal life to the parable."
"Renowned geopolitical and financial cycle expert Charles Nenner said, back in September, the markets would sink and then go back up. Both calls happened right on time. What does Nenner see now? Nenner says, “Two days ago, we started to take profits again. So, we are not that bullish. The public we have now do not understand bear markets. They don’t understand that we can have rallies of 15% to 20%, and then it can go down again. So, we took profit and we are mostly in cash again. We are long in the bond market for a change because it looks like inflation is going to moderate for a little bit. We are waiting for the gold cycles to bottom, and we are getting very close, but the bull market in gold will come, but it’s still going to take a few more weeks.”
So, are interest rates on the way down? Nenner says, “Yes, but for very short term. You might remember our interest rate cycles bottomed, and the cycle is up for the next 30 years. I expect interest rates to go back to where they were in the early 1980’s. Longer term interest rates are going much higher. Right now, we have a bounce because commodities are weaker, and I think they will be weak until around February. This is probably why the Fed is not going to talk as aggressive as they were talking. This is still temporary and interest rates are still going to go much higher in the future.”
Nenner also says, “Mortgage interest rates will go to the 8% to 9% range in 2023. . . .and the stock market will go down by about 50%.”
Nenner says look for inflation to moderate for the next few months but look out in 2023. Nenner predicts, “Beware because once inflation raises its head, it is very difficult to get it back into the box. We could go down to 6% or 6.5% inflation, but also the inflation cycle just started, and we are going to see much higher inflation.”
On the war cycle, Nenner has been predicting this “war cycle will really heat up in 2023.” He’s convinced all the signs say he’s going to be right. Nenner says, “I don’t think the inflation has anything to do with the war in Ukraine, but I think in the middle of next year, we have war cycles bottoming. I think we are in for a really big mess because it doesn’t seem like anybody is ruling any country anymore, even China. This may be the reason why gold and silver are going to take off. If there are shortages, then the inflation will go through the roof.” There is much more in the 36 min. interview.
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One
with renowned cycle analyst and financial expert Charles Nenner:
"Shopping At Target! Very Strange Prices! What's Coming!?"
"In today's vlog we are at Target and are noticing very strange prices! 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!"
"Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’, or, Don’t Spit in the Well"
By Batiushka
"The Ukrainian people will be liberated from their Neo-Nazi rulers, they deserve to live as friends and good neighbors and prosper alongside their Slav brothers."
"Introduction: There is such a thing as retribution. This is what it says directly in the verse, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’ (Rom. 12: 19) and what lies behind the New Testament, ‘Do as you would be done by’. However, other cultures have other words for retribution, ‘karma’ for example in India. Then there is the proverb, similar in several languages, which in English appears as: ‘Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind’. (See Galatians 6: 7). Then there is another saying which is also pretty universal. The Maltese form says: ‘Don’t spit in the air’ – there is no need to quote the second half – you can imagine the spit falling back onto the spitter.
In Russian we have the same proverb, only that is to do with spitting in the well – since you might yourself need to drink the water. Others quote: ‘What goes around, comes around’. Australians and others speak about ‘the boomerang effect’ and Americans speak of ‘blowback’ and ‘payback’. The fact is that there is a universal spiritual law, the law of cause and effect, that when you do something good, there are always good consequences, and when you do something bad, there are always bad consequences. Sooner or later. Anyone who has lived a little can confirm it from experience. Basically, you simply cannot get away with it. And this is what is happening to the Western world today. It’s payback time.
The Perfect Storm: I mention consequences because the history books of the future will be asking the question: ‘Where did the perfect storm in the Western world in 2022 come from’? One thing for sure, it did not come out of the blue. Any number of dates will be put forward as the origin, as far back as 1492 and even further back, for instance, the First Crusade in 1096. From more recent dates we could suggest:
1917, when after nearly three years the US elite entered the first part of the Europeans’ twentieth-century Civil War, having forced Russia out of it through violent regime change. To this day these utterly corrupt Western propagandists justify this cunning strategy by declaring that the Tsar’s government was utterly corrupt (sic!) and going to collapse anyway (sic!) and all were well rid of it (sic!). Some people actually believe that propaganda. They should investigate it objectively, instead of naively swallowing the West’s self-justification for creating the conditions for its genocide.
1944, when US forces invaded and occupied Continental Europe, making it into the first US-occupied Eurasian peninsula, just as they later did with other Eurasian peninsulas, (South) Korea, and (South) Vietnam, in the latter of which they were defeated.
1991, when the USSR collapsed and was (briefly) colonised by the US, leaving chaos and poverty with Chicago-style gangsters everywhere and millions dying of despair and drinking themselves to death.
2014, when the US took over the Ukraine in a violent regime-change coup.
2021, when the US was humiliated in Afghanistan.
2022, when the US clearly began to lose against Russia’s war of liberation of the Ukraine, its equipment and its relations with Western Europe in ruins.
We will leave other dates and the details of the debate to the history books of the future. But the debate will be there, you’ll see. However, beyond the detail that we can leave to the disputes of the academics, the main question that future generations will be asking is: ‘However did the Western world think it could get away with it?’ Where did its delusion come from? These are the questions I will be trying to answer below.
Losing the War in the Ukraine: The US lost the war in the Ukraine the day it began. Russia had been preparing for it for eight years. Ever since, the US and its vassals have just been prolonging the agony by financing a Nazi regime, supplying it with arms, training its troops and sending it paid-for mercenaries. Pessimists see the agony now dragging on for years and years, whereas optimists think it will be much shorter, just a couple of months more. I would like to think the optimists are right, but I actually go along with a more pessimistic ‘another eighteen months’. I hope I am wrong. Every day is a day too long. The fact is the US elite will have to put a lot of effort into face-saving. They hate losing, even though they lost in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc.
Backing down from the confrontations they began and chaos they caused is not something they like doing. But when the last US helicopters take off from the roofs of the US embassies in Kiev and Lvov, we shall see. Last Friday an electrician near Kiev said to my friends there: ‘This war is horrible. And it’s only going to get worse. There’s only one solution. We’ll line up all the politicians from the Rada (Parliament) and shoot them. Then peace will come immediately’. I am told from Kiev that there are more and more Ukrainians saying the same thing: there must be a popular revolt to stop it all. Get ready for it there and, at the rate things are going, get ready for the same thing in Western countries as well.
Losing the EU: In the longer term, however, there is the much more serious problem for the US of losing Europe. The national slogan of the Ukraine since 2014 has been: ‘The Ukraine is Europe’. This is of course nonsense. Geographically, the Ukraine, like the Russia where most Russians live, is obviously Europe. Indeed, most European territory is inside Russia. Of course, what the Kiev regime means is that the Ukraine belongs to Western Europe, the EU, only it does not say that. This is because it obviously does not belong there, apart from the small region of Galicia which is now in the far west of the present borders of the Ukraine, formerly Poland, formerly the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 2014 the EU actually dismissed the Kiev fantasy, telling it that Ukrainian membership of the EU might be considered in 25 years’ from then.
The nonsense about ‘the Ukraine is Europe’ reminds me of a visit to Moldova five years ago. All official buildings flew the EU flag and that was in a country that is not part of the EU and never will be. In other words, ‘The Ukraine is Europe’ is a political daydream, a fantasy. Today, as a result of US incompetence and its lickspittle poodle UK enthusiastically blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, as though that were a present to Germany, we can see that although the Ukraine is not Europe, Europe is fast becoming the Ukraine. In other words, Europe is being corrupted by US political intrigues, being sucked into the same black hole as the Ukraine, without finance, heating, lighting and sewerage. In the words of that old Eastern European joke: ‘Which are the two most corrupt countries in the world? Lithuania is first and the Ukraine is second. But only because the Ukraine bribed Lithuania to take first place, so that it could be second’. Well, today the whole of Europe is being Ukrainianised. Well done, US/UK/EU elite!
Losing the World: Beyond Western Europe, the US elite is also losing the rest of the world. At one time, the US was No 1. Today it is China. At one time Europe was the most populated area in the world. Today over one third of the world’s population is in China and India. At one time the G7 was respected. Today it is a ghetto, representing only a small and increasingly irrelevant part of the world. At one time the G20 represented twenty countries which were pro-Western or at least Western-controlled. Today, definitely not. The G-20 is being taken over by BRICS +.
At one time the dollar was the world’s reserve currency. Today the world is being dedollarized, as countries sell dollars and US treasury bonds and trade in their own countries. After all, who wants to invest in a deindustrialised country which may illegally confiscate (= steal) your assets, gold reserves included, whose currency is not underpinned by gold, but only by printing presses, and whose national debt totals 31 trillion dollars, nearly all of which has been accumulated in the last forty years?
Conclusion: After 500 years of bullying the rest of the world, with the genocides of the native peoples of the Americas and Australia (100 million dead?), the manipulations of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, the Opium Wars, the salt hedge in India, the massacres in the Belgian Congo and in German South-West Africa, the bloodiest Western War in history which it called two World Wars (70 million dead), exporting Marxism outside Western Europe (millions dead), the carpet bombing of Korea, the French massacres in Algeria, the US genocide in Vietnam, uranium-tipped shells in Iraq and Yugoslavia, the pillaging of Eastern Europe and Russia under Western-appointed puppet governments, the war you started in the Ukraine and the mass of arms you are supplying Ukronazis with. However did you think you could get away with it? Where did your delusion come from? Because you came to believe in your own lies. You are delusional.
I do not fear the civil authorities in Western Europe and their death-threats. I fear only the traitors to Russia, who in fact are CIA assets. I fear today’s traitors, who want to make money from this war or have endless zoom meetings with their American masters and let people be massacred by the Gestapo Nazis from Kiev, trained by the CIA and MI6. True, there are fewer of those traitors than there were. Now I will tell you too: You will not get away with it. There are forces at work which are far greater than any of you. ‘The Ukrainian people will be liberated from their Neo-Nazi rulers’. Yes, they will be liberated, just as the German people were liberated from their Nazi rulers, but at such a price. I tremble for you traitors, because your end is coming too. For everything you have done, you will have to repay. Did you really think you could get away with it and that payback time would never come? You spat in the well? Now you will have to drink from it."
"There’s so much of a talk about a recession. The real question is not yes, but when we’re going to see Major banking problems as the banks get more desperate. They are going to turn you in."
"Breaking News: 5 Million Soldiers To Be Mobilized"
"Russia may be actually mobilizing MILLIONS for war according to intelligence agencies. China's cases are about to explode... Things are spiraling out or control."
"Target’s supply chain problems should be a major red flag for all U.S. retailers. The company’s latest warning about profits for the final quarter of 2022 is triggering major repercussions across the entire sector and prompting shares of several popular retailers to crash as investors fear that a flood of disappointing results is coming even as we enter the busiest shopping season of the year. At this point, most consumers are overwhelmed by higher prices in all spending categories, and they’ve been changing the way they shop to adjust to a reality of lower buying power as inflation continues to squeeze the budgets of many. But that shift has sparked a ripple effect that is severely hurting retailers’ bottom lines, and a weaker-than-expected Black Friday is adding to their financial setbacks. The shock has been so extreme that now the retail titan is in big trouble, and that’s after it had already faced a 90% profit loss in the second quarter. The outlook for Target is disturbingly gloomy, and given that many of its industry peers are facing a similar situation, soon we might see an avalanche of collapsing retailers as the U.S. economy breaks down all around us.
Target’s lopsided supply chains and its continuous logistics imbalances have resulted in what retail experts have called “the worst train-wreck profit outlook of the year”. Since the pandemic broke out, the retailer has been facing a series of problems with its inventory levels. Shoppers were not interested in the items they had on their shelves, and inventory wasn’t moving at all. It didn’t help that their total inventory volume had increased by over 40%. By mid-spring, it was imperative for the company to get rid of these products to be able to empty its warehouses and bring in products consumers actually wanted to buy. Their only alternative was to slash prices on all of these goods and take on a profit hit of 90%.
When you’re one of America’s biggest retailers, seeing your inventory lose 90% of its value is undoubtedly dangerous for your business. At that time, many retailers, including Amazon, Home Depot, Costco, Walgreens, Best Buy, and Dollar General were in a disturbingly similar situation. However, right now, the outlook has gone from ugly to downright horrifying as Target reports another blow on its earnings for the third quarter and issues a dire warning for profits in the fourth and final quarter of 2022. Reporting a 52% profit loss in Q3, the retailer is still holding an excessive amount of inventory even after offering deep discounts and at a time the whole sector is facing a slowdown in consumer spending. Altogether, Target has faced a 193% profit loss so far this year.
In face of these mind-blowing numbers, there’s no wonder why Wall Street analysts and many other retail companies are sitting on the edge of their seats this holiday season. Target’s bleak prediction for the weeks ahead also took down other major retailers' stock values. Macy's lost 8.1%, Best Buy dropped 8.6%, and Advance Auto Parts fell 15.1%. Investors are afraid that a flood of collapsing earnings will mark this year’s holiday shopping season.
If their forecasts come to fruition, that will be the worst holiday shopping season since the global financial crisis. With thousands of retailers around the U.S. struggling financially, a bleak holiday season is likely to accelerate their demise. We may be headed to a new year of mass retail layoffs, store closures, and bankruptcies. The numbers do not look good. The feeling of dread seems to be spreading across every sector. A major shift has begun. And it looks like it’s all downhill from here."
“This pretty, open cluster of stars, M34, is about the size of the Full Moon on the sky. Easy to appreciate in small telescopes, it lies some 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. At that distance, M34 physically spans about 15 light-years. Formed at the same time from the same cloud of dust and gas, all the stars of M34 are about 200 million years young.
But like any open star cluster orbiting in the plane of our galaxy, M34 will eventually disperse as it experiences gravitational tides and encounters with the Milky Way's interstellar clouds and other stars. Over four billion years ago, our own Sun was likely formed in a similar open star cluster.”
“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of Infinity. Life is Eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in Eternity.”
"I have spent my entire career attempting to prove my own computer system wrong. It brought me no pleasure to reveal that the world was heading into a world war. The War Cycle has never been wrong. Poland’s attack appears similar to the Lusitania sinking that began World War II. They have lied to start every war using excuses from weapons of mass destruction to the fact that Germans sank the Lusitania because the US was secretly using passenger ships to move weapons to Britain. The collaboration of NATO means that all countries must now act.
● Collective defense means that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies.
● The principle of collective defense is enshrined in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
● NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history after the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States.
● NATO has taken collective defense measures on several occasions, including in response to the situation in Syria and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
● NATO has standing forces on active duty that contribute to the Alliance’s collective defense efforts on a permanent basis.
Bombing Poland is akin to bombing all NATO countries, and each country must collectively respond. NATO was never a means to curb warfare. They have been lining up troops around Eastern Europe in preparation for this moment. Governments would not have sent troops overseas to train Ukrainian soldiers if they did not expect to participate in a war themselves. Hold tight, as this is tragically the beginning."
Russia Has Not Given Up on Kherson Yet; Kherson Retreat"
"Take a look at the map of Ukraine. Kherson is situated in the south of Ukraine. It was one of the first provinces to be taken by the Russians after the invasion of Ukraine began. Then, Moscow retreated from the west bank of the Dnipro River earlier this month. Ukraine celebrated it. The retreat was termed as arguably the biggest blow to Vladimir Putin since the war began. But there's a catch. Russia still holds control of a majority of Kherson, that is to the east of the Dnipro river. And since then, it has made the life of Ukraine's forces and citizens a living hell."
"For many great deeds are accomplished in times of squalid struggle. There is a kind of stubborn, unrecognized courage which in the lowest depths tenaciously resists the pressures of necessity and ill-doing; there are noble and obscure triumphs observed by no one, unacclaimed by any fanfare. Hardship, loneliness, and penury are a battlefield which has its own heroes, sometimes greater than those lauded in history. Strong and rare characters are thus created; poverty nearly always a foster-mother, may become a true mother, distress may be the nursemaid of pride, and misfortune the milk that nourishes great spirits."
"As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.
What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.
These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.
It is with those souls in mind that I included a discussion of the mass formation theory of Dr. Mattias Desmet during a recent talk I gave in Tampa, Florida to an audience of about 2,000. As I looked out into the audience and spoke, I could see relief on many faces, and even tears running from the eyes of stoic men.
Unknown to me, someone recorded the speech and appended the vocal track to a series of calming images of natural landscapes, producing a video that has gone viral throughout the world. The video, as well as some notes to clarify and supplement the talk are appended below. Many have told me that they find it very healing. I hope it may help you also.
Full screen recommended.
A brief overview of Mass Formation, which was developed by Dr. Mattias Desmet. He is a psychologist and a statistician. He is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. I think Dr. Mattias is onto something about what is happening and he calls this phenomena:
Mass Formation Psychosis: So, when he says “mass” formation, you can think of this as equivalent to “crowd” formation. One can think of this as: crowd psychosis. The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible "object of anxiety" and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.
As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view. Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong.
Left unabated, a society under the spell of mass formation will support a totalitarian governance structure capable of otherwise unthinkable atrocities in order to maintain compliance. A note: mass formation is different from group think. There are easy ways to fix group think by just bringing in dissenting voices and making sure you give them platforms. It isn’t so easy with mass formation. Even when the narrative falls apart, cracks in the strategy clearly aren’t solving the issue, the hypnotized crowd can’t break free of the narrative. This is what appears to be happening now with COVID-19. The solution for those in control of the narrative is to produce bigger and bigger lies to prop up the solution. Those being controlled by mass formation no longer are able to use reason to break free of the group narrative.
Of course, the obvious example of mass formation is Germany in the 1930s and 40s. How could the German people who were highly educated, very liberal in the classic sense; western thinking people… how could they go so crazy and do what they did to the Jews? How could this happen? To a civilized people? A leader of a mass formation movement will use the platform to continue to pump the group with new information to focus on. In the case of COVID-19, I like to use the term “fear porn.” Leaders, through main stream media and government channels continuously feed the “beast” with more messaging that focus and further hypnotize their adherents.
Studies suggest that mass formation follows a general distribution:
● 30% are brainwashed, hypnotized, indoctrinated by the group narrative.
● 40% in the middle are persuadable and may follow if no worthy alternative is perceived.
● 30% fight against the narrative.
Those that rebel and fight against the narrative, become the enemy of the brainwashed and a primary target of aggression. One of the the best ways to counter mass formation is for those against the narrative to continue to speak out against it, which serves to help break the hypnosis of some in the brainwashed group as well as persuade the persuadable middle to choose reason over mindlessness.
Dr. Desmet suggests that for something as big as COVID-19, the only way to break the mass formation psychosis is to give the crowd something bigger to focus on. He believes that totalitarianism may be that bigger issue. Of course, after COVID-19, global totalitarianism may be the biggest issue of our time."
“What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time. Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one’s ribs get re-broken again.”
"Robert Kiyosaki steps forward and tells us that it’s not just bad, but that we are living through the mother of all bubbles. The biggest bubble in world history. Get out of Stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. It’s time to look at physical metals according to Robert."
"Empty Shelves At Meijer! This Is Crazy! What Now!?"
"In today's vlog we are at Meijer, and are seeing a lot of empty shelves in the grocery department! We continue to get hundreds of comments on empty grocery shelves across the country, and we are starting to notice more, and more here as well. It's been a real struggle as stores are having trouble getting in products."
For years there has been much talk about how "Derivatives" are a gigantic problem, and if Derivatives Markets collapse, it is the end of the financial world as we know it. We looked at Bank exposure to "Derivatives" and below is a list that will likely frighten you. US Banks are on the hook for two Quadrillion dollars, in "Derivatives." Is **YOUR** bank on this list? If it is, ask yourself "If they LOST all this money, would MY money still be safe in this bank?" Act accordingly.
Below is the list of United States banks and how much exposure they have to "Derivatives." Two quadrillion dollars is the total notional value of derivative contracts off-balance sheet. Need collateral. It’s notional. Not sustainable. Triffins dilemma. Dollar shortage. More collateral. But from where?
Of course, net notional value is completely different than directional risk. Just seeing these numbers does NOT indicate how much the bank itself is on-the-hook for. Moreover, there is still value in the underlying commodities for many of these derivatives. People that think these are all bilaterally netted (Hedged) and those people are partially correct. But that bilateral netting will lead to the complete collapse of equities markets.
The numbers are utterly staggering and logic dictates the banks with the highest exposure, have the most to lose. Being that derivatives are interest rate sensitive, for most of these banks, it’s a doomsday scenario.
The majority of people don’t understand monetary inflation let alone derivatives. So think of it like this: Derivatives are IOU’s backed by other IOU’s. Hustling fast money by selling chickens before they hatch, 5 generations in advance, hoping all the eggs hatch because the money was already spent on fees for a loan to pay interest on credit card debt.
Below is a graphic known as Exeter's Pyramid. It shows financial risk from the safest, GOLD; to the least safe: Derivatives.
Banks Ranked by Derivatives: The following is a ranking of all banks in the United States in terms of "Derivatives". This comparison is based on data reported on 2022-06-30.
"The list of product shortages is still growing and haunting us as we head into the winter. Many of us are getting increasingly apprehensive as we see grocery stores shelves getting barer and barer with each passing month. With the cold season right at the corner, a larger number of families have begun stockpiling food staples and other essential items --and industry executives are alerting that shortages are about to become even more widespread. That means our chance to get the food staples we want and need before they vanish from supermarkets may be almost up. That's why today, we compiled some indispensable products that will suffer from availability issues over the coming weeks so you can get ahead of the stockouts and replenish your pantry while you still can.
In times when demand for grocery items far outpaces the available supply, there is little that can be done to prevent these shortages from getting worse. When it comes to product stockouts and rising prices at grocery stores, many factors are at stake, such as scarcity of packaging, freight disruptions, and labor shortages at production plants. The Ukraine crisis is also adding a lot of stress on the grocery supply line in the U.S., and tight supplies of essential grains are resulting in declining supplies of a wide range of products. Prices of commodities like wheat and corn are still nearing or at record highs. For that reason, many food distributors are trying to hold on to their inventories for as long as they can, and also imposing new purchasing limits for food retailers.
Meanwhile, farmers have experienced one of the toughest plant and harvest seasons in history. This year, the U.S. faced extensive crop losses of different kinds of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains. Meat, poultry, fish, and even plant-based proteins are getting harder to come by as well, and shoppers are literally seeing their pool of options getting steadily smaller. In the face of all that, it's no wonder why so many consumers anticipate that the rise in grocery food items will continue this winter, so panic buying has already begun in many cities. This phenomenon will, of course, add to the food shortage list for the coming months. And just like it happened before, prices are likely to jump even higher. According to Morning Consult, grocery items are up by 51% this holiday season compared to 43% in the last quarter of 2021. On top of that, gasoline prices have started to surge again, leaving low and middle-income families with even tighter food budgets. Experts believe that the rise in the price of essential grocery items will push people to stock up on shelf-stable supplies, which will lengthen the list of product stockouts for 2023.
Even big grocery store chains are struggling to restock their inventories right now. At the start of the year, executives from Walmart, Food Lion, and Kroger expressed concerns that the stores were experiencing food supply issues. Empty grocery shelves continue to be their most significant concern as the new year approaches. That's why it is so important to keep informed to stay ahead of these grocery inventory holes before they hit critical levels. This is going to be a challenging winter for all of us, so make preparations before it begins."
"This colorful cosmic skyscape features a peculiar system of galaxies cataloged as Arp 227 some 100 million light-years distant. Swimming within the boundaries of the constellation Pisces, Arp 227 consists of the two galaxies prominent on the left; the curious shell galaxy NGC 474 and its blue, spiral-armed neighbor NGC 470. The faint, wide arcs or shells of NGC 474 could have been formed by a gravitational encounter with neighbor NGC 470. Alternately the shells could be caused by a merger with a smaller galaxy producing an effect analogous to ripples across the surface of a pond.
Remarkably, the large galaxy on the right hand side of the deep image, NGC 467, appears to be surrounded by faint shells too, evidence of another interacting galaxy system. Intriguing background galaxies are scattered around the field that also includes spiky foreground stars. Of course, those stars lie well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. The field of view spans 25 arc minutes or about 1/2 degree on the sky."
"One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, generosity, empathy, truth, compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about this for a minute and then asked the grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
"In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be - every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is." Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development."
"Britain's Royal Society, established in 1660, was the first formal scientific association. It's early membership included such luminaries as Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. They took as their motto Nullius in verba, which can be translated roughly as "Take no one's word for it." And thus ended, in that gathering at least, a millennium-and-a-half of a European intellectual tradition based on quoting authorities as proofs of arguments. It always helped, of course, to have Aristotle on your side. Or Augustine. Or Aquinas. Or best yet, the divinely inspired scriptures. No matter which side of an argument you were on, you lined up your authorities like soldiers on a battlefield.
Citation of authority. A way of knowing that advanced human knowledge not one whit. Always looking backwards. Never ahead. And along comes "Nullius in verba." A new way of knowing. The only arbiter of truth is the interrogation of nature. The experiment. Data that does not come tagged with some illuminary's name. Data that can be reproduced by believers and skeptics alike.
And what happened when the new way of knowing was applied to miracles? They vanished. It turns out that there is not a shred of non-anecdotal, reproducible evidence for the miraculous, no supposed manifestations of divine intervention that cannot be explained within the natural order. I believe it might have been Francis Bacon who said that it is a common human attribute to mistake coincidence for causality. And there, I quoted an authority, and a smart one at that. But the fact that Bacon (or whoever) said it carries no weight unless what he said matches our experimentally controlled observations of human behavior."
