Sunday, January 1, 2023

"2023: The Future Has Arrived: The End of 500 Years of Conquistador Civilization"

"2023: The Future Has Arrived: 
The End of 500 Years of Conquistador Civilization"
By Batiushka

"Foreword: It is often said that the systemic Western European superiority complex, a disease which consists of the self-justified domination and exploitation of the surrounding world, began with the First ‘Crusade’ (1096-1099). Technically, this is true, but before it there were other events which we may call ‘Pre-Crusades’. For example, there was the massacre by the barbarian Frankish leader Charlemagne of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in 782. This bloodbath was the foundation of Frankish Europe, which still survives as the core of the lies of the EU today. After the collapse of Charlemagne’s Europe and a period of consolidation, 200 years later there came the events of the earlier eleventh century which did exactly presage the First Crusade at its end. First, there was the Frankish ‘Reconquista’ Crusade which began to accelerate in the eleventh century in Iberia. Then came the ‘Norman’ (in fact they were the collective campaigns of all the Frankish-made scum of North-Western Europe) Crusades or Conquests in Sicily, Southern Italy and in England in 1066.

Like these ‘Pre-Crusades’, the genocidal ‘conquests’ of the First Crusade essentially took place inside Europe, or else close by in the Near East. These Viking-type raiding and trading military expeditions, led on horseback and operating from castles, were expanded into Western Europe (the Celtic lands invaded from the Frankish base in England) and into Eastern Europe (the Baltics and Russia). However, the revolution came with the export of this aggressive Eurocentric mentality to distant lands through the ‘Conquistadors’ (same word) in what we now call Latin America 500 years ago. They were the fruit of Columbus’ imperialist and capitalist venture of 1492 and were followed by da Gama’s money-seeking ventures to southern Africa and India in 1497. They triggered a global revolution because they led to the worldwide genocide and plunder of other peoples and the destruction of their civilizations. Clive of India, Rhodes of Africa, Clinton of Serbia, Bush of Iraq and Biden of the Ukraine were only the conquistadors of later times. However, today we are seeing the end of their Conquistador Civilization.

Our Great Reset: Thus, now we come to the end of the vital crossroads year of 2022 and a revolution that happens only once every 500 years. What we had been waiting for over so many years is now here. The date of 24 February 2022 has already gone down in world history. With the incredibly aggressive refusal of Washington to allow the Kiev puppet regime to grant freedom to the people of the Donbass, Russia has been obliged to turn to Defense Plan B, to partial mobilization and the demilitarization and liberation of all of the Ukraine and even beyond, as the suicidal attitudes of the Western world will oblige it to do. A limited operation has had to be turned by Western aggression into a full-scale war and the US/West/NATO has deprived itself of peace and prosperity through its suicidal sanctions. It means the end of Western Conquistador Civilization. Thus, we try to peer over the horizon into 2023 and beyond. What will come once the Ukrainian war is over?

Some who follow the Western reporting of the conflict may be surprised by these statements. However, that reporting has been a strange mixture of delusional fantasies/wishful thinking and straightforward propaganda, organized by Western secret services and PR agencies, omitting truth, logic and reality. Venal journalists have been ordered to report such nonsense from on high – otherwise, they would have lost their careers and their income. Such reporting has essentially been destined to try and keep Western peoples under control in the hardships they are facing as a result of the suicidal decisions of their US-controlled political elites.

The US elite is making use of the meagre resources of its NATO vassals (so-called ‘allies’), using as its battlefield the Ukraine and as its cannon fodder Ukrainians and mercenaries. But Russian victory is inevitable, even if delayed because the US is deliberately and suicidally making the Ukraine into its Second Vietnam. The Western elite wants to fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’. (“We don’t care how many Ukrainians will die. How many women, children, civilians and military. We don’t care. Ukraine cannot take the peace decision. The peace decision can only be taken in Washington. But for now we want to continue this war, we will fight to the last Ukrainian.” Former US Senator Richard Blake). Therefore, it is immorally supplying all sorts of lethal arms for hundreds of thousands more of these hoodwinked Slavs to die or to be maimed.

Even if some in NATO dare to send more tens of thousands of the ‘willing’ to be slaughtered in the Ukraine directly, and not pretending to be Ukrainians, as with the many, many thousands of mainly Polish mercenaries at present, many of them already killed, that victory is still inevitable. Given Western aggression and intransigance, Russia has been preparing for a full-scale Continental war ever since 2014. Even if next year the Polish Army with its new 200,000 reservists armed to the teeth by the USA, attacks, Russia is ready. Although the prophecies of elders indicate May 2024 as the end of this ten-year long war (the US elite started it through its paid Ukrainian puppets in 2014), prophecies are always conditional on repentance and we should not try to predict exact details from them. Whatever happens, the next few years are going to see revolutionary transformations worldwide as a result of this war.

The New World Order: The most dramatic event after its defeat in the Ukraine will surely be the retreat of the USA, as it is expelled from Eurasia, a process which began in Vietnam and then continued in Iraq and Afghanistan. The nationalist Trump wanted to withdraw voluntarily, but he was not allowed to, therefore the humiliating US withdrawal will happen by force, as it did in Kabul. ‘Yanks, go home’, chants the whole world, including many in Western Europe, tired of US tyranny. In Eurasia the US now occupies only a few islands (Taiwan, Japan, Singapore), the tips of two peninsulas (Korea and Western Europe) and the seaboard edge Israel. It will have to leave all of these, except for the Non-Palestinian parts of Israel. Taiwan will naturally return to China, Japan will have to find its own way, reconciling itself to a reunited Korea and submitting itself to China economically. For Western Europe, see below.

Once home, the USA will have to lick its wounds and be deoligarchized by popular revolt. The dedollarization of the world economy is already under way, with very serious consequences for the deindustrialized US economy. The American Empire will undergo deimperialization, like the European Empires after 1945, and, if at all possible, have to find some sort of unity, identity and sovereignty in its highly polarized, highly indebted and highly fragilized situation. Outside the US, the world chants ‘Yanks, go home’, but inside the US, ordinary Americans chant: ‘Feds, go home’. It is the same thing. The swamp must be drained. The departure of the USA from Western Europe after its eighty-year long occupation will mean the end of the already much disarmed and futile NATO. The suicidal bankruptcy of the European countries will also lead to the end of NATO’s political and economic arm, the EU.

This will mean the reconfiguration of the tip of the European peninsula and its resovereignization, a process which has already begun in Hungary. In the Western Balkans, Camp Bondsteel, the second largest US base in the world, will be abandoned, and Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia will rearrange themselves in the post-American world, the world of long-awaited justice. The future of Europe is not thousands of miles across the Atlantic, but eastwards, next door, in its natural sources of energy, food, fertilizer and manufactures. Europe as a separate Continent is after all a pure fiction, an artificial construct which was created from and cut off from the Eurasian landmass for purely political reasons. Europe is about to learn this, as it returns to its roots, which Russia alone has kept. A Russian-led Europe provides the prospect of a unity of sovereign but confederal Northern Eurasia ‘from sea to shining sea’, in fact, from Reykjavik to Tokyo. It is the future, in which the USA is utterly irrelevant. Its ‘lies-based order’ of genocidal chaos is over.

Inside Russia itself the transformation has already begun, with treacherous members of the ‘creative class’ gone to their spiritual home in Israel, with Pugachova and Zelensky, as well as across the borders to Georgia and Finland. This cleansing process and the ensuing Re-Russification of Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus will go far. After the deviations of 200 years of Imperial Russia – and there were very serious deviations then – otherwise Tsar Nicholas II would not have wanted to return to pre-Imperial Russia, to ‘Rus’ and there would never have been 1917 – 75 years of Marxist Sovietization and 30 corrupt years of the Americanization and so oligarchisation, the transformation has far to go. There will be a great and radical refreshing and cleansing of national identity after this unheard-of period of decadence and corruption, which ultimately stretches back over 300 years. All Russian institutions, including the still Sovietized Church, together with its small branches founded by post-1917 emigres, will be transformed. The uncompromised Russian Church, freed from the moneychangers, will arise from the embarrassing ruins of the past. The past is over. The arrival of the future in 2022 has made it all so irrelevant.

The New Christian Order: As regards the current versions of Western Christianity, Protestantism (1517-2017) is largely a spent force within the Western world, its 500-year best before date is up. Just as it was launched by printing technology, it has been ended by internet technology. Puritanism preached ‘Hate the sin and especially hate the sinner’, now its just as aggressive descendant, Wokeism, preaches, ‘Love the sinner and especially love the sin’. In other words, all is permitted. The once full churches of Protestantism close down in their hundreds every year in the Western world. It was what it was, a moralizing and White Supremacist blip in history, both for good, as in keeping promises, honesty, integrity and moral uprightness, and for bad, as in the ruthless and unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources, including slavery, the obsession with money and saving money, as well as boring and iconoclastic philistinism caused by narrow-minded bigotry, and the tragic, rigid, literalist, moralizing, unnatural and pharisaical repression of human nature, causing crass hypocrisy and misogyny, to the point of the slaughter of women as ‘witches’.

As for Roman Catholicism, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it was taken over by the CIA in the early sixties to be used as a political battering ram against the USSR. And it too is also largely a spent force (1054-2054?) in the Western world. Covered-up pedophilia and the misogyny of compulsorily unmarried and frustrated clerics, some of them perverts, now exposed, are killing it off. Little wonder that some say that the present Pope is the last one. However, if Catholicism can be freed of American and European political stooges and cleansed of its inherent millennial secularism, it at least can return to roots (Protestantism as a schismatic, splintering protest opinion movement has in itself no roots to return to). Liberated from Rome, the people now called ‘Catholics’ can reflourish in new forms, especially in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, providing that Catholicism goes native, yet remains traditional, and the Global South’s clergy’s almost universal, but hypocritically concealed marriages can be recognized officially. This will mean Catholicism divesting itself of the secularist and corrupt Western Middle Ages and returning to the spirit of the pre-Roman Catholic Faith of first millennium Western Europe.

As regards the Non-Western, Orthodox Church, the 200 million in the at present fifteen local branches of the Orthodox Church, the Dewesternization revolution will be just as radical. At present there is the 7%, the 14 million of the Greek Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Once the US Establishment, which stands behind them all and meddles intensively in their affairs, has retreated, freedom will come to them at last. As for the Russian Church, the 70% or 140 million, just as for the 23% or 46 million of the other Non-Greek Churches, in Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Macedonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Albania, the revolution will also necessarily be radical. They are all going to have to be freed from the Western disease of worldliness:

‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all those who sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said to them: It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves’.

Afterword: The whole Russian policy over the last twenty-two years to move towards a multipolar/polycentric world is now coming to fruition. The Big Four, Russian, China, India and Iran, are being joined by many countries from all Continents in the Global South in huge and powerful Non-Western organizations like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), the SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organization) and the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), to form a new G20 to replace the failed American vassal one.

Now this multipolar/polycentric world, inherently anti-centralist, will be reflected in ramifications everywhere. The old and failed centralization, which has always brought corruption in its wake, will gradually disappear and people may be seen for what they are. This is a warning to all tyrants and bullies, who have promoted artificial unions and institutions all over the world. Your secrets are being found out. Your time is up. We shall not die on our knees, but live on our feet. It is time for the Deimperialization and the Resovereignization of both whole countries and of individual souls."

"How It Really Is"

 

"Welcome to 2023! Empty Shelves At Walmart! High Food Prices! Costs Rising!"

Full screen recommended.
The Real Economy, 12/31/22:
"Empty Shelves At Walmart! High Food Prices! Costs Rising!"
Comments here:

At Walmart?!

Saturday, December 31, 2022

"Falling Into The Abyss - Things Are About To Get Worse"

Jeremiah Babe, 12/31/22:
"Falling Into The Abyss - Things Are About To Get Worse"
Comments here:

"Predict This!"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 12/31/22:
"Predict This!"
"Everybody has submitted their predictions on where are, and where we think the economy is headed in the new year. Here are your predictions for 2023."
Comments here:

Happy New Year 2023!

 

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Full screen recommended.
Moby, "Love Of Strings"
Life, magnificent, precious Life...

"A Look to the Heavens"

“While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the below gorgeously detailed image was recently taken in infrared light by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in honor of the 23rd anniversary of Hubble's launch.
The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is seen above primarily because it is backlit by the nearby massive star Sigma Orionis. The Horsehead Nebula will slowly shift its apparent shape over the next few million years and will eventually be destroyed by the high energy starlight.”

"Get Your Stuff Together..."

"We all got problems. But there's a great book out called "Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart." Did you see that? That book says the statute of limitations has expired on all childhood traumas. Get your stuff together and get on with your life, man. Stop whinin' about what's wrong, because everybody's had a rough time, in one way or another." 
- Quincy Jones

The Poet: John O'Donohue, "In These Times "

"In These Times"

 "In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety,
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down,
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction 
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts 
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage 
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home."

~ John O'Donohue,
from "To Bless the Space Between Us"

The Daily "Near You?"

Hinesville, Georgia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "Coming Home"

"Coming Home"

"When we are driving in the dark,
on the long road to Provincetown,
when we are weary,
when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look,
I imagine us rising from the speeding car.
I imagine us seeing everything from another place -
the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea.
And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,
but which we cherish.
And what we see is our life moving like that
along the dark edges of everything,
headlights sweeping the blackness,
believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.
Looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me."

- Mary Oliver

2023: "It Has Been A Privilege..."

Full screen recommended.
2023: We're the band...
and "It has been a privilege playing with you."
o
God help us...

"Truth And Consequences"

"Truth And Consequences"
by Jim Kunstler

“I would advise the more-sciencey-than-thou to not pivot from Covid directly into climate change bullying just yet. 2023 is going to be replete with excess death, and you are gonna have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. Lots of apologetic to push, in support of the Narrative.” - The Ethical Skeptic on Substack

"Even if NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, The WashPo, and the rest of the Big News Media mafia ignore the Twitter Files story, the revolution at Twitter is going to shake their windows and rattle their walls. There will be free debate in 2023 on this social media platform. News and ideas will be set loose across the landscape, and, for the first time in years, reality will have a chance to compete with the bad faith narratives of a regime at war against its own people.

We’ll have to see how long this window remains open before the Intel Community tries to shut Twitter down, ramp up a campaign to defame it, or blow it up as a viable business. Or make a move to, shall we say, neutralize the person behind the revolution there. The more that free speech is actually permitted on Twitter, the more every other platform will look like a lame organ of propaganda, especially when it comes to issues that really matter such as the deadly consequences of the mRNA “vaccines,” the shady doings around recent US elections, the actual condition of the US economy, the perilous folly of “Joe Biden’s” war in Ukraine (and the family grifting operation that prompted it), and the evil machinations of the Intel Community itself.

In about one week the Party of Chaos will be swept out of power in the US House of Representatives. Their opponents will take control of all the House committee chairs, with subpoena power to compel the testimony of public figures who have managed to avoid answering questions for years. The Big News Media may not be able to avoid reporting on it, especially with Twitter loosened up, and their lying attempts to spin events are going to look pathetic when instantly contrasted with free analysis and informed debate in the public arena.

You can’t overstate what an advantage the insidious takeover of social media gave to forces seeking to wreck the country, though the effects have barely been explored yet. The people remain bamboozled over the Covid-19 operation especially. The pandemic certainly wasn’t some random act by Mother Nature, not with US public health agencies supporting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses from Ukraine to North Carolina to Wuhan, China. And the subsequent damage caused by the government’s response to the outbreak was either an epic fiasco of inept officialdom, or something that smells like mass murder.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s little trick so far to avoid answering questions about these matters was simply to not use the term “gain-of-function” in his correspondence arranging grants for it — especially after President Barack Obama banned that type of research by its name in 2014. So when asked about gain-of-function, he could just lie with abandon. After that simple ruse is exposed, the patent and royalty benefits enjoyed by Dr. Fauci — who doubled his net worth after 2019 — will be dragged into the light of day.

It’s doubtful that Merrick Garland’s uber-corrupt DOJ would follow-up on any referral for criminal prosecution issued by a House committee. But guess what? There are fifty states attorneys general who have standing to prosecute Dr. Fauci over injuries to their state’s citizens. It appears that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, for one, has identified that legal avenue and this week asked Florida’s top court to convene a special grand jury to consider exactly that.

The other players in Team Covid have plenty to answer for, too. Rochelle Walensky’s CDC has deliberately concealed, misled, obfuscated, or opted to not even collect information about injuries and deaths from the Covid “vaccines.” Her agency did nothing to update the inadequate, difficult-to-use VAERS reporting system, or even communicate the very bad news that managed to land on it. The CDC is still aggressively pushing vaccines on children, knowing full well that it damages young hearts, brains, immune systems, and probably the kids’ very DNA.

Probably few would recognize the name Dr. Robert Califf in his second go-round as Commissioner of the FDA (served one year 2016-17 under Obama; confirmed again in Feb. 2022). Dr. Califf has been a tool of the pharma companies for decades. Earlier in his career as a professor at Duke University, he specialized in organizing drug trials. His operation there was supported by over $150-million in grants from pharma. Even despite Deep State control of social media prior to Elon Musk’s cleanup of Twitter, a lot was already known about the botched and faked drug trials that led to the FDA’s conditional emergency approval of Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 products — along with the official suppression of existing anti-viral drugs that could have saved a million lives, which was done strictly to preserve the liability shields of the “vaccines.” A finding of fraud in all this would vitiate the Pharma companies’ protection against lawsuits, and there was fraud galore in the whole wicked business.

Others have to be called to face the new music in Congress: self-styled “humanitarian” Bill Gates, whose fingerprints are all over the Covid-19 story, from the “pandemic war game” (Event 201) he sponsored, held in the fall of 2019, to his vested interests in pharma, to his connections with the shadowy operations of the World Economic Forum and its stated population-reduction initiative. 

Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, indisputably the preeminent expert on Coronavirus gain-of-function research, and knee-deep in the Covid-19 episode - who has magically been able to hide under a rock the past three years - could shed a lot of light in public testimony on what happened. And Peter Daszak, head of the CIA cut-out org, EcoHealth Alliance, which helped enable the move of gain-of-function research to the Wuhan lab, explicitly explained years ago - in a notorious recording from a symposium - how to create profit opportunities from a pandemic response.

There are countless high officials of the deputy director and commissioner rank, unknown to the public, who could be called to testify about their agency’s contribution to the catastrophe that the Covid-19 response turned out to be. Almost all of them have been laying low since the whole thing started.

Meantime, Mr. Musk has announced that Twitter is preparing the release of all its archives containing communication with federal agencies that sought to control and suppress truthful discussion of the pandemic 2020 to 2022. He added snarkily that his personal pronouns are “prosecute/Fauci” - in case there’s any misunderstanding about what he’s learned from the files.

What’s liable to come out of this uncorking of evil spirits in 2023 is a grotesque spewage of info about official corruption and misconduct that will make the projectile vomiting from The Exorcist look like a mere Satanic loogie in comparison. You have to wonder how the nation will handle it, especially along with the extremely uncomfortable fact that “Joe Biden” still occupies the White House."

"Life Changing Poems for Hard Times"

Full screen recommended.
RedFrost Motivation,
"Life Changing Poems for Hard Times"
Read by Shane Morris

0:00 - "Defeat" by Khalil Gibran
3:20 - "A Psalm of Life" by H. W. Longfellow
6:15 - "If" by Rudyard Kipling
9:33 - "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley
11:15 - "Desiderata" by Max Ermann

"How It Really Is"

 

Douglas Macgregor, "Ukraine: The Russian Winter Offensive"

Douglas Macgregor,
 "Ukraine: The Russian Winter Offensive"
Comments here:

"Price Increases At Kroger! This Is Ridiculous! Sale Prices!?"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 12/31/22:
"Price Increases At Kroger! 
This Is Ridiculous! Sale Prices!?"
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, and are noticing price increases on groceries, and a lot of empty shelves! 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:
o
Full screen recommended.
"25 Biggest Grocery Stores In America
 That Filed For Bankruptcy"
by Epic Economist

"At a time when supercenters continue to seize a larger share of the market, and online platforms offer shoppers everything they want without leaving their homes, running a grocery store is definately not an easy thing to do. The business of food retailing is build upon extremely thin profit margins, and issues like shoplifting, supply chain disruptions, mergers and aquisitions, or anti-trust complaints can drive an entire chain that operated for decades or even hundreds of years out of business in a snap of fingers. It's very likely that at least one supermarket chain you used to shop at has disappeared from the U.S. retail landscape since the turn of the century. 

For example, A&P, also known as The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., this company started as a tea seller in 1859. As time went by, it branched out its business to sell other products, and its wide product range and good pricing allowed it to become a very popular store all over America. At its peak, A&P had over 15,000 stores, according to Reuters. But as other competitors emerged, and its new store format fell flat, A&P faced a series of waves of sell-offs and store closures, which resulted in two rounds of bankruptcies. In 2015, the cumulative losses become too great for the chain to bear, and A&P went out of business completely.

Similarly, Fresh & Easy was the U.S. version of the U.K. grocery giant Tesco. In 2006, the supermarket chain opened branches in California, Arizona, and Nevada. In addition to selling groceries, the company also established a cold-chain delivery for prepackaged meals, which Tesco had successfully implemented in the U.K. But American customers didn’t really buy the idea, and they didn’t think the quality was that good. CPS magazine notes that the size of the U.S. made the delivery system untenable and that the brand failed to distinguish itself from other brands, filing for bankruptcy for the first time in 2013. A year after, Fresh & Easy was bought by Yucaipa Companies, but that wasn't enough to save the grocery chain; Fresh & Easy filed for bankruptcy again in 2015, closing all of its stores in the same year.

The same happened to Grand Union stores, which were once plentiful in the U.S. Northeast. But tough competition led the grocer to file for bankruptcy in 2001, being bought by C&S Wholesale Grocers a year later. The new parent company quickly realized that it wouldn’t be able to save the brand, so it decided to sell off stores to Tops Friendly Markets in 2012. But a couple of months later, proven to be unprofitable, the new owner discontinued the Grand Union chain altogether.

Competition is getting harder and harder as big conglomerates dominate the scene and crush small, local, and mom-and-pop brands with their large-scale operations and reduced labor costs. Only companies that stand out will be able to survive in this environment, which means we are likely to see many more grocery store shutdowns in the years ahead. With so many big names closing stores lately, it makes us wonder which chain will disappear next. Today, we listed 25 once loved grocery store chains that don't exist anymore. 
o
Related:

"Butterflies..."

“I think humans might be like butterflies; people die every day without many other people knowing about them, seeing their colors, hearing their stories… and when humans are broken, they’re like broken butterfly wings; suddenly there are so many beauties that are seen in different ways, so many thoughts and visions and possibilities that form, which couldn’t form when the person wasn’t broken! So it is not a very sad thing to be broken, after all! It’s during the times of being broken, that you have all the opportunities to become things unforgettable! Just like the broken butterfly wing that I found, which has given me so many thoughts, in so many ways, has shown me so many words, and imaginations! But butterflies need to know that it doesn’t matter at all if the whole world saw their colors or not! What matters is that they flew, they glided, they hovered, they saw, they felt, and they knew! And they loved the ones whom they flew with! And that is an existence worthwhile!”
- C. JoyBell C.

"Alea Iacta Est"

"Alea Iacta Est"
by Alexander Macris

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

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

"People Pay For What They Do..

"Today Is The Day..."

"We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn't. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don't look to the left, don't look to the right; we simply don't have the time. Never be afraid of fear."
- C. JoyBell C.

Friday, December 30, 2022

Musical Interlude: 2002, "The Calling"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "The Calling"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula left of center, and colorful M20 on the right. The third, NGC 6559, is above M8, separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant.
The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20's popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. The colorful skyscape recorded with telescope and digital camera also includes one of Messier's open star clusters, M21, just above the Trifid.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where
he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."

- Walt Whitman

"Sometimes..."

"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether
it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

That ultimately is the question...
Adrian Lester as Hamlet: "To be or not to be..."
William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", Act III, Scene I

The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"

"The Winter of Listening"

"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.

What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."

- David Whyte,
"The House of Belonging"

"This Assumption..."

"It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge."
- H. L. Mencken

"Get Ready To Pay More"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 12/30/22:
"Get Ready To Pay More"
"There are so many tax increases that are coming in 2023 that people just don’t know about. In addition to that we are seeing that inflation is continuing to rise. Get Ready to Pay More."
Comments here:

The Daily "Near You?"

Patrick Springs, Virginia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Europe's Largest Ice Rink, Moscow, Russia"

Full screen recommended.
Travelling With Russell, 12/30/22:
"Europe's Largest Ice Rink, Moscow, Russia"
"Take a tour of VDNKh in Moscow, Russia during the 2022 New Year Celebrations. Walking through the park we will look at Europe's largest ice rink is in Moscow, Russia. Christmas decorations, Ice slides and food markets."
Comments here:

I'm speechless...
Your thoughts, Good Citizen? Comment below...

"Price Increases At Sam's Club! Be Prepared! Stock Up! What's Coming!?"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 12/30/22:
"Price Increases At Sam's Club! 
Be Prepared! Stock Up! What's Coming!?"
"In today's vlog we are at Sam's Club, and are noticing price increases on groceries, and a lot of empty shelves! 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:

Jim Kunstler, "Forecast 2023 - Get Out of the Way if You Can’t Lend a Hand" (Excerpt)

"Forecast 2023 - 
Get Out of the Way if You Can’t Lend a Hand"
by Jim Kunstler

Excerpt: “The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.” - Miranda Devine

“It’s all just snake oil. 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

“2023 could be a pivotal year for USA if the pervasive lies can be exposed, digested, and believed. All that exposure has to happen amidst continuing boondoggles toward the Great Reset agenda.” - Truman Verdun

“More borrowing only ever makes sense if you are expecting a larger economy in the future. All economic expansion is based on energy. Countries with energy can expand, those without cannot.” - Chris Martenson

“To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” - Henry Kissinger

“The incorrect narrative provided by mainstream media (MSM) is that climate change is our worst problem. To lessen this problem, citizens need to move quickly away from fossil fuels and transition to renewables. The real narrative is that we are running short of fossil fuels that can be profitably extracted, and renewables are not adequate substitutes. However, this narrative is too worrisome for most people to handle.” - Ugh Bardi

"It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without spiraling into nausea, tachycardia, and cold sweat. But it is an inescapable duty here to lay out the probabilities ahead. I’ve been doing this forecast thing for some years now, and, of course, I am often wrong, so take some solace in that and relax. Maybe the new year will be all unicorns, rainbows, talking gerbils, and candied violets.

2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political, and cultural collapse - a hat-trick of calamity - and he did it more swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with policies and actions 180-degrees contra to America’s public interest - cheered on by a thinking class that had obviously lost it consensual mind.

Was it simply to do the opposite of what the loathed and detested Mr. Trump would do? Could it be that simple or that automatic? The thinking class’s eyes have a zombified glaze these days. It’s obvious, you might agree, that “Joe Biden” is not in charge of anything, really. He’s an animatronic figure programmed to read a teleprompter and not much else. Half the time, he can’t even find his way off-stage after doing that one trick. The claque pulling his strings just may be the crew you see around him (you know, WYSIWYG): Susan Rice, Ron Klain, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and company. Ms. Rice has kept herself completely hidden backstage at the White House for two years. Nobody ever hears about her or sees her. Weird, a little bit, for the Director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Or else, are there puppeteers deeper in the shadows, say, “JB’s” former boss Barack Obama, Der Schwabenklaus and his WEF retinue, Bill Gates and other tech billionaires, the “systemically important” bankers, George Soros…? Or some coven of super-elite warlocks we’d never heard of? The US leadership dynamic is truly mystifying and has been for two whole years. Will mysteries be revealed in 2023? Personally, I think so. Things are lining up in that direction, though who knows whether the damage can even be reversed at this point. And now onto the shape of things to come…"
Full article is here:

A Must-Read: "It's Not A Lie If You Believe It" (Excerpt)

"It's Not A Lie If You Believe It" (Excerpt)
By Jim Quinn

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, 
the lie became the truth.” – George Orwell, "1984"

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical 
point of view, is silence about truth.”
- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"

Excerpt: "I wish I could go through a day without having to reference Orwell and Huxley when observing how the ruling class is able to manipulate, subjugate, and propagandize the willfully ignorant masses through lies, deceptions, disinformation, and fear. But here we are, living through a dystopian nightmare blending the worst aspects of Orwell’s "1984" and Huxley’s "Brave New World."

It’s as if O’Brien and Mustapha Mond are running the show, using behavioral conditioning, restricting freedom of speech, adhering to a strict caste system, surveilling everything we say or do, using our fears to control us, utilizing propaganda to produce false narratives, and ultimately threatening to stomp a boot on our faces forever if we do not obey and conform. Virtually everything we are told by politicians, government bureaucrats, military brass, “esteemed” journalists, medical “experts”, bankers, and corporate executives is lies. They do not believe their lies, but they know it benefits themselves financially to lie, and as long as they work together, they know the ignorant masses will believe them.

George tells Jerry “It’s not a lie if you believe it” as he is going to take a lie detector test. I wonder how Fauci, Biden, Hillary, Obama, Comey, Wray, Pelosi, and the slew of other Deep State coup conspirators would fare on a lie detector test about Russiagate, Covidgate, J6 Insurrectiongate, and Vaccinegate. Based on the titanic volume of lies they have spewed over the last several years, I’m sure the machine would overheat and explode if hooked up to any of this traitorous vile scum.

The humorous phrase uttered by George Costanza on a sitcom twenty-seven years ago captures a significant kernel of truth about the mindset of the vast majority of non-critical thinking drones roaming the aisles of WalMarts and waiting in the drive-thru at McDonalds across our dystopian states of America. The lies run so deep you need hip-boots to wade through them on a daily basis. The reason our leaders lie is because we let them lie. The majority prefer comforting lies to unpleasant truths, because accepting unpleasant truths would require them to act and they prefer being distracted by trivialities like sports, reality TV, social media likes and otherwise being addicted to their technological gadgets."
Full, recommended must-read article is here:

"Ukraine SitRep 12/28/22: Counter Artillery War, Financial Disaster" (Excerpt)

"Ukraine SitRep 12/28/22: 
Counter Artillery War, Financial Disaster"
By Moon of Alabama

Excerpt: "Since the mid of the year it has become clear that the war in Ukraine is one that is mainly fought by artillery. Ukraine was clearly the underdog in that fight as the Russian forces fired eight times the amount of artillery munitions the Ukraine could make available. The U.S. and some European dependents stepped in. Some 120 M-777 guns and a myriad of modern track mounted artillery systems were given to the Ukrainian army. Hundred of tons of ammunition were moved in. The U.S. and some allies delivered HIMARS systems that could reach beyond the limits of gun artillery.

The Russian military reacted to it. It dispersed its depots and command centers thereby limiting the number of targets for HIMARS systems. It also intensified its use of electronic warfare which took down the drones the Ukrainian artillery used to find its targets: The electronic suppression of Ukraine’s unmanned aerial vehicles blunted one of Kyiv’s biggest advantages in the early months of the war. The Ukrainians counted on superior intelligence - largely provided by UAVs - to make their smaller artillery arsenal more precise than Russia’s own, larger arsenal of big guns and rocket-launchers.

But the Russians’ electronic warfare prevented those drones from navigating and communicating - and deprived the Ukrainians of the precision they were counting on. “The defeat of precision was critical to unit survival” for the Russians, analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“The average life-expectancy of a quadcopter remained around three flights,” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds wrote. “The average life-expectancy of a fixed-wing UAV was around six flights” and, “in aggregate, only around a third of UAV missions can be said to have been successful.”

Lacking real fighting capabilities the Ukrainian artillery switched towards easier fixed targets. In late November it again started to intensely bombard Donetsk city with artillery and missiles. As there are few military installations or even barracks within the city this clearly was a war against its civilian population. Russian language papers wrote about the civilian casualties caused by the carnage. The political leadership of the Donetsk Republic requested an urgent operation against the threat.

As the heavily fortified frontline makes it impossible to quickly break through and hunt the artillery behind that line, the Russian military moved to other measures. A special cell was created to wage the fight against Ukrainian artillery around Donetsk. More counter artillery radars were moved in. More satellite picture interpreters began to look for firing positions. Longer range counter battery guns also appeared."
Full, highly recommended article is here:
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