"15 Stats That Prove Working-Class Families Are Getting Hit From All Sides"

Full screen recommended.

"15 Stats That Prove Working-Class

 Families Are Getting Hit From All Sides"

by Epic Economist

"Millions of working-class families are living on the edge, and they are struggling to keep their dreams alive in the face of overwhelming odds. These people are getting hit from all sides in today's economy. Working-class Americans have been facing some of the hardest economic challenges for decades. Despite being the group that contributed the most to the rise in overall productivity levels, their wages have fallen behind all other income groups, rising at the slowest pace compared to middle-class, and upper-class Americans. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage of working-class Americans adjusted for inflation has only risen by 0.6% per year from 1980 to 2022.

This means, that over the past 42 years, this group has seen a mere 25.2% rise in their incomes, compared to an average increase of 160.3% for upper-income individuals. But the lack of wage growth is not just a problem for workers and their families, it also has broader implications for the economy as a whole. When working-class Americans have less money to spend, they are less able to contribute to the economy through consumption. This can lead to lower economic growth and a decrease in demand for goods and services, which in turn can result in job losses and further economic hardship.

Home and rent prices are soaring above what most blue-collar workers can pay. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, in 2022, the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $1,192, while the hourly wage needed to afford this rent without paying more than 30% of income was $24. However, the average pay of a minimum wage worker is only $7.25. No wonder why more than half of labor-class renters in the US are cost-burdened, with approximately 11.2 million working-class households in the US paying more than 50% of their income on housing. Last year, only 28 affordable and available rental homes existed for every 100 extremely low-income renters, making it increasingly difficult for them to afford adequate and stable housing.

Working-class individuals are typically low-income workers, and the amount they make every month is often insufficient to cover everyday necessities, including food and utilities. And despite government assistance programs, many families still struggle to put food on the table and keep their lights on due to the record rise in consumer prices. Labor Department data shows that the average household food insecurity rate for working-class families is 32%. In 2022, the average monthly cost of utilities for a low-income US household took over 10% of their pay every month. That’s why approximately 22% of such families were unable to pay their energy bills on time, while about one in five had to choose between paying for food or utilities.

Financial insecurity, job loss, debt, and limited upward mobility are just some of the obstacles they must navigate in order to make ends meet. The grim reality facing these families is reflected in the statistics we compiled in today's video, which tell a tale of struggle, hardship, and despair. These numbers don't just demonstrate the difficulties faced by working-class families, they also shine a light on the systemic issues that impact our entire society."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"It’s Too Late For NATO To Win The War Against Russia… Here’s Why" (Excerpt)

"It’s Too Late For NATO To Win 

The War Against Russia… Here’s Why"

by Mike Adams

Excerpt: "While the prostituted propaganda media absurdly claims that Russia is retreating and NATO forces are winning the war in Ukraine, the truth is far more sobering: NATO has already lost the war with Russia. Here’s how we know: A land war with a major military power is a long, drawn out slug fest that requires the sustained expenditure of enormous quantities of munitions: Artillery shells, rockets, missiles, small arms cartridges and so on.

To supply these munitions, a fighting force needs to be backed by a strong munitions manufacturing infrastructure or have huge stockpiles that can sustain the war while supplies are depleted. The United States has neither. No sufficiently large stockpiles and no existing munitions manufacturing infrastructure that can keep pace with Russia, which at times has expended up to 20,000 artillery rounds per day. (Note: The existing munitions infrastructure in the United States can’t even churn out that many rounds in a full month of production…)

Consider this recent article from Breitbart.com: "Endless Arms Flow to Ukraine Raises Worry over U.S. Military Readiness Against China", which warns that U.S. precision-guided munitions would run out in just one week: "A recently-published think-tank analysis warned that as it currently stands, the U.S. would run out of long-range, precision-guided munitions in a war with China over Taiwan in less than a week — a problem that author Seth Jones called one of “empty bins.” “The United States has been slow to replenish its arsenal, and the DoD has only placed on contract a fraction of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine,” Jones, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wrote."

Full article is here:

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

Full video is here:

- https://rumble.com/

"Breaking News: Here's Why They Don't Shoot Down The China Balloon"

Canadian Prepper, 2/3/23:

"Breaking News: Here's Why They 

Don't Shoot Down The China Balloon"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Judge Napolitano ,"Scott Ritter, Is The U.S. Forcing Putin's Hand In The Ukraine War?"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/3/23:

"Scott Ritter, Is The U.S. Forcing 

Putin's Hand In The Ukraine War?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Laguna Indigo"

Full screen recommended.

Liquid Mind, "Laguna Indigo"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“This shock wave plows through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Moving toward to bottom of this beautifully detailed color composite, the thin, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge on. Cataloged as NGC 2736, its narrow appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula.

About 5 light-years long and a mere 800 light-years away, the Pencil Nebula is only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. The Vela remnant itself is around 100 light-years in diameter and is the expanding debris cloud of a star that was seen to explode about 11,000 years ago. Initially, the shock wave was moving at millions of kilometers per hour but has slowed considerably, sweeping up surrounding interstellar gas.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120924.html

Chet Raymo, “We Are Such Stuff...”

“We Are Such Stuff...”

by Chet Raymo

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,

That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again.”

"Caliban is talking to Stephano and Trinculo in Shakespeare's “Tempest”, telling them not to be "afeard" of the mysterious place they find themselves, an island seemingly beset with magic, strangeness, ineffable presences. And you and I, and, yes, all of us, find ourselves inexplicably thrown up on this island that is the world, and we too, if we are attentive, hear the strange music, the sounds and sweet airs, that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere

No, I'm not talking about the usual ubiquitous clamor, the roar of internal combustion, the blare of the television, the beeping of mobile phones. I'm not talking about the Limbaughs and the Becks, the televangelists, the blathering politicians, the twitterers and bloggers (including this one). I'm not even talking about the exquisite music of Mozart, the poetry of Wordsworth, the theories of Einstein.

I'm talking about the sounds we hear in utter silence, in moments of repose, in the heart of darkness, when we are a little bit afraid, disoriented, off kilter. A strange music that comes from beyond our knowing, a felt meaning. You've heard it. I've heard it. You'd have to be deaf not to have heard it.

Where we differ is how we describe it. Mostly, we give its source a name. Angels. Fairies. Gods or demons. Yahweh. Allah. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Nixies, E.T.s, shades and shadows. Naiads, dryads, Ariel and Puck. A host of invisible creatures who are, in one way or another, images of ourselves. And, in naming, we are a little less afraid.

And some of us are just content to listen, to take delight. Having woken to the inexplicable mystery of the world- the sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not- we let the music lull us back into a sweet slumber, a kind of dreamless dream, a reverie. Does reverie share a deep root with reverence? I don't know.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"How the Brain Stops Time"

"How the Brain Stops Time"

by Jeff Wise

"One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from "The Matrix" in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.

Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli. An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat?

Researcher David Eagleman has tackled his very issue in a very clever way. He reasoned that when time seems to slow down in real life, our senses and cognition must somehow speed up-either that, or time dilation is merely an illusion. This is the riddle he set out to solve. "Does the experience of slow motion really happen," Eagleman says, "or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect?" To find out, he first needed a way to generate fear of sufficient intensity in his experimental subjects. Instead of skydiving, he found a thrill ride near the university campus called Suspended Catch Air Device, an open-air tower from which participants are dropped, upside down, into a net 150 feet below. There are no harnesses, no safety lines. Subject plummet in free fall for three seconds, then hit the net at 70 miles per hour.

Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation? To see, Eagleman asked subjects who'd already taken the plunge to estimate how long it took them to fall, using a stopwatch to tick off what they felt to be an equivalent amount of time. Then he asked them to watch someone else fall and then estimate the elapsed time for their plunge in the same way. On average, participants felt that their own experience had taken 36 percent longer. Time dilation was in effect.

Next, Eagleman outfitted his test subjects with a special device that he and his students had constructed. They called it the perceptual chronometer. It's a simple numeric display that straps to a user's wrist, with a knob on the side let the researchers adjust the rate at which the numbers flash. The idea was to dial up the speed of the flashing until it was just a bit too quick for the subject to read while looking at it in a non-stressed mental state. Eagleman reasoned that, if fear really does speed up our rate of perception, then once his subjects were in the terror of freefall, they should be able to make out the numbers on the display. As it turned out, they couldn't. That means that fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.

Eagleman's findings are important not just for understanding the experience of fear, but for the very nature of consciousness. After all, the test subjects who fell from the SCAD tower certainly believed, as they accelerated through freefall, that they knew what the experience was like at that very moment. They thought that it seemed to be moving slowly. Yet Eaglemen's findings suggest that that sensation could only have been superimposed after the fact. The implication is that we don't really have a direct experience of what we're feeling ‘right now,' but only a memory - an unreliable memory - of what we thought it felt like some seconds or milliseconds ago. The vivid present tense we all think we inhabit might itself be a retroactive illusion."

- http://www.psychologytoday.com/

The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, "A Walk"

"A Walk"

"My eyes already touch the sunny hill.

going far ahead of the road I have begun.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has inner light, even from a distance -

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

we already are; a gesture waves us on

answering our own wave...

but what we feel is the wind in our faces."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Universe

“Believe me, I know all about it. I know the stress. I know the frustration. I know the temptations of time and space. We worked this out ahead of time. They're part of the plan. We knew this stuff might happen. Actually, you insisted they be triggered whenever you were ready to begin thinking thoughts you've never thought before. New thinking is always the answer.”

“Good on you,”

The Universe

“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”

- www.tut.com

The Daily "Near You?"

Saco, Maine, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Douglas Macgregor, "Russia Is Ready For A Much Larger Conflict Than Ukraine"

"Russia Is Ready For A Much Larger Conflict Than Ukraine"

Straight Calls with Douglas Macgregor, 2/3/23

"Your home for analysis of breaking news and in-depth discussion of current geopolitical events in the United states and the world. Geopolitics. No ego descriptions. No small talk. Straight to the point. Calls with the relevant analysis only."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Related:

"We Are About To See The Biggest 

Escalation Of The War In Ukraine So Far"

"Cash Is Not Trash"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 2/3/23

"Cash Is Not Trash"

"Ray Dalio steps forward to say that cash is NOT trash. What an about face from just last May. People are borrowing more money than ever."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 2/3/23"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up 2/3/23"

by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"The constant media psyop is falling apart on all fronts. We were told Trump was colluding with the Russians. That was a huge lie. We were told Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. That’s another huge lie. We were told the CV19 vax was safe and effective, which is a double deadly monster lie. These are just a few of the lies the Lying Legacy Media (LLM) continues to push. As the old saying goes, “Don’t give up the con.” We have been conned, and we are all paying for it. The LLM will never recover.

A new study shows masks do not work to stop covid. NYU Professor of Media Studies Mark Crispin Miller called the mask fiasco a gigantic form of propaganda. He also says the entire Covid19 event from infection to injection was a masterpiece in propaganda. Another new study says the CV19 vax offered “zero benefit” and “made the problem worse in every metric, hospitalizations, infections and death.” The CV19 injections are now routinely being called a “bioweapon.” There have been 600 million CV19 injections in the USA alone. There have been nearly 13 billion CV19 injections globally. There is no stopping the vaccine genocide, but you may help yourself with Ivermectin. The LLM is covering up deaths, injuries and still trashing Ivermectin. Nuremberg 2.0 will not be kind to them.

They keep saying the Fed is just about to stop raising rates, and rate cuts are right around the corner. The Fed just raised a key interest rate this week and is promising there are more to come. Granted, the Fed has signaled the increase will be smaller, but the FED IS STILL RAISING RATES. Maybe it’s the Saudi government announcing the end of the petrodollar by now accepting other currencies besides the U.S. Dollar in trade for oil. You think that has the Fed uptight? Can you cut interest rates when the world is shedding your currency and your Treasury bonds?" There is more in the 52 minute newscast.

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble for these stories and 

more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 2/3/23:

- https://rumble.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Food Shortages Are Starting To Become Quite Serious All Over The Planet"

"Food Shortages Are Starting To Become 

Quite Serious All Over The Planet"

by Michael Snyder

"The worst case scenario that many of the experts feared is starting to play out right in front of our eyes. Throughout 2022, I repeatedly warned my regular readers that there were all sorts of indications that the emerging global food crisis would go to entirely new level in 2023, and that is precisely what is happening. In response to tightening supplies of food, prices are surging all over the planet and the number of desperately hungry people is exploding. Unfortunately, this crisis is not going to be just temporary. As I will explain at the end of this article, the global nightmare that we are facing is inevitably going to intensify in the years ahead.

Most of us in the western world simply do not understand how badly conditions have already deteriorated in much of the world. For example, Reuters is admitting that the hunger crisis in Africa has now become “bigger and more complex than the continent has ever seen”…"Across Africa, from east to west, people are experiencing a food crisis that is bigger and more complex than the continent has ever seen, say diplomats and humanitarian workers." Please let that sink in for a moment. There have been many famines in Africa in the past, but things have never been as bad as they are right now.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East a severe shortage of wheat is forcing many Pakistanis to wait in line for hours “to receive a single bag”… "Pakistan is currently suffering from skyrocketing prices and a shortage of wheat flour, with people waiting in line for hours to receive a single bag." Would you wait in line for hours for one bag of flour? If you were desperately hungry you would.

In South America, seemingly endless civil unrest has intensified the very serious shortages that are happening in Peru…"As the anti-government protests in Peru show no sign of ending, the country is currently facing a shortage of basic products including food items and fuel."

And on the other side of the globe, Australians are growing increasingly frustrated about the very painful potato shortage that has gripped that nation…"Potatoes are among Australia’s favourite vegetables. However, we are facing a shortage of processed potatoes, especially of frozen chips. Coles introduced a two-item limit for shoppers seeking frozen potato products. Fish and chip businesses are under pressure and some are outraged McDonald’s is launching a new potato product in the middle of a crisis."

In previous decades, there have been times when there have been localized famines in various parts of the world. But what we are facing now is global. According to the New York Times, food shortages are “causing intense pain across Africa, Asia and the Americas”…“We’re dealing now with a massive food insecurity crisis,” Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said last month at a summit with African leaders in Washington. “It’s the product of a lot of things, as we all know,” he said, “including Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.”

The food shortages and high prices are causing intense pain across Africa, Asia and the Americas. U.S. officials are especially worried about Afghanistan and Yemen, which have been ravaged by war. Egypt, Lebanon and other big food-importing nations are finding it difficult to pay their debts and other expenses because costs have surged. Even in wealthy countries like the United States and Britain, soaring inflation driven in part by the war’s disruptions has left poorer people without enough to eat.

Have I convinced you yet? This is serious. Here in the United States, food prices continue to escalate to frightening levels. For example, the price of orange juice just skyrocketed to a brand new record high because it is being projected that Florida citrus production will hit the lowest level since 1945…"OJ futures have hit a new high, surging 10 cents or 4.56% to $2.292/lb, surpassing the 2016 record of $2.2585, due to limited supply. The USDA predicts Florida’s citrus production will reach 44.5 million boxes this year, which could result in the state’s smallest orange harvest since 1945. This is due to “greening disease” and hurricane damage in Florida’s citrus groves." In 1945, there were 139 million people living in the United States. Today, the population of the country has risen to 329 million. So there are far less oranges per person now.

The size of the national cattle herd is also shrinking…"The latest figures from the US Department of Agriculture cattle-inventory report on Tuesday showed 89.3 million cattle as of Jan. 1, down 3% from a year ago. The decline wasn’t unexpected and was in line with a Bloomberg survey." This means that beef prices are going to continue to go higher and higher.

You could try to switch to chicken or turkey, but thanks to the bird flu pandemic they certainly aren’t inexpensive either. At this point, the bird flu has already killed more than 58 million chickens and turkeys in the United States. If that wasn’t bad enough, now a lot of chicken farmers around the country are reporting that their hens have suddenly stopped laying eggs. This is something that Tucker Carlson recently discussed…"Now healthy hens lay eggs on a regular basis, every 24 to 26 hours. But suddenly, chicken owners all over the country – not all of them, but a lot of them – are reporting they’re not getting any eggs or as many. So what’s causing that? Clearly, something is causing that. Some have concluded their chicken feed may be responsible."

Egg prices have already shot up to a level that most people never dreamed would be possible, and this is creating quite a bit of panic. More Americans than ever before are suddenly interested in raising their own chickens, and this has sparked quite a buying frenzy at local hatcheries…"Google search interest in “raising chickens” has jumped markedly from a year ago. The shift is part of a broader phenomenon: A small but rapidly growing slice of the American population has become interested in growing and raising food at home, a trend that was nascent before the pandemic and that has been invigorated by the shortages it spurred.

“As there are more and more shortages, it’s driving more people to want to raise their own food,” Ms. Stevenson observed on a January afternoon, as 242 callers to the hatchery sat on hold, presumably waiting to stock up on their own chicks and chick-adjacent accessories."

Unfortunately, everything that I have shared in this article so far is just the tip of the iceberg. That is because global food supplies are going to continue to get tighter in the years ahead no matter what we do now. If we suddenly stopped using all fertilizer immediately, we would only be able to feed about half the world. So the production of fertilizer is absolutely critical.

Unfortunately, almost all of the phosphorus that we use in our fertilizers comes from “non-renewable phosphate rock”, and 85 percent of the remaining supply is located in just five countries…"Without phosphorus food cannot be produced, since all plants and animals need it to grow. Put simply: if there is no phosphorus, there is no life. As such, phosphorus-based fertilisers – it is the “P” in “NPK” fertiliser – have become critical to the global food system.

Most phosphorus comes from non-renewable phosphate rock and it cannot be synthesised artificially. All farmers therefore need access to it, but 85% of the world’s remaining high-grade phosphate rock is concentrated in just five countries (some of which are “geopolitically complex”): Morocco, China, Egypt, Algeria and South Africa."

As supplies of non-renewable phosphate rock continue to get tighter and tighter, global food supplies will continue to get tighter and tighter. Eventually there will simply not be enough non-renewable phosphate rock to go around, and at point we will be in all sorts of trouble. The kind of horrifying global famine that I have been relentlessly warning about has become inevitable. It is just a matter of time. I would encourage you to learn how to grow your own food now, because we are moving into times that will be extremely “interesting” indeed."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Lose-Lose"

"Lose-Lose"

by Jim Kunstler

“The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame.” -Hugo Dionisio

"The New York Times - indicted this week as a chronic conveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review - is lying to you again this morning. This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms form a symbiont: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.

The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage - that is, America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.

All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated." For those of you not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.

That business model could be reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting gardens - even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town - and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.

Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.

There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity and giving the plunder to a mob of “intersectional” complainers - e.g. the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down - most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.

This might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family are a right-wing conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice."

- https://kunstler.com/

"Shopping At Ollie's! Bargain Hunting, Checking Prices!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 2/3/23:

"Shopping At Ollie's! Bargain Hunting, Checking Prices!"

"In today's vlog we are at Ollie's, and are seeking out some bargains on grocery items. With massive price increases continuing at grocery stores, we are searching for some good deals during these times of high inflation. We will go over quality, and prices of items that we shop for in the store."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Big Surprise is Coming..."

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 2/2/23:

"Big Surprise is Coming..."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Great Retail Collapse: The Devastating Impact Of Mass Store Closings In America's Biggest Chains"

Full screen recommended.

"Great Retail Collapse: The Devastating Impact 

Of Mass Store Closings In America's Biggest Chains"

By Epic Economist

"The U.S. retail industry has been undergoing some drastic changes in recent years. We have lost thousands of iconic stores and seen many popular brands disappearing from our economic landscape, in a phenomenon known as the “retail apocalypse.” Now, the latest reports show that the ongoing recession is forcing some of the biggest retailers in America, including names like Nike, to conduct mass store closings once again as they rush to cut costs and boost their profit margins before consumer demand declines even further in the months ahead. Industry insiders expect retail bankruptcies to soar this year, with many companies being overwhelmed by an oversupply crisis and the slowest sales growth recorded since 2008.

In recent weeks, some retail favorites have been closing stores in droves as the retail apocalypse comes back with a vengeance. The combination of declining sales, rising operational costs, slower foot traffic, and changing consumer patterns are pushing many popular brands to shutter brick-and-mortar locations before a full-blown recession wreck havoc on their bottom lines as they attempt to weather the storm that is ahead.

Grocery chains like Piggly Wiggly and IGA Supermarkets announced in January that they will start closing multiple locations for good very soon. Meanwhile, in the apparel sector, things are looking ugly. With Americans cutting back on discretionary purchases, many brands are watching sales collapse and they are being left with no alternative other than closing up shop. The scenario is looking so bleak that even consolidated brands like Nike are closing dozens of stores, starting with locations in Ohio, Seattle, and New York City, the company confirmed to The Enquirer. Nike’s inventory glut sent the company’s stock to the lowest level in 20 years. Before the health crisis, the sports retailer was already experiencing a cash flow crisis, and tightening credit conditions are certainly not helping the situation.

Many other struggling chains are at heightened risk of bankruptcy as consumer spending softens. The new wave of turbulence in the sector comes as the end of 2022 has seen an uptick in loan defaults from multiple retailers. But this time around, industry experts say that America’s classic department stores are at the highest risk of going under.

Reports show that in the past seven years around 40 percent of the nation's department stores have closed. A new forecast shared by UBS analysts warns that national chains will be forced to shutter some brick-and-mortar locations to better position themselves for the recession that is at our door, – “even those that survived the combined challenges of the retail apocalypse, which devastated the industry from 2017 to 2020, and the pandemic shutdowns. That's because months of inflation and a looming recession are eating into sales at mid-tier retailers,” the analysts highlighted.

With inflation cooling slowly, the outlook for mid-tier retailers is dim. "I suspect there's going to be a whole round of restructures, bankruptcies, all sorts of upheaval, as we approach the end of the year into next year," the director of retail studies at Columbia University, Mark Cohen, said to Insider. What lies ahead for American retail remains shrouded in darkness, and the impact of the retail apocalypse will haunt us for generations to come. This crisis has cast a long shadow over America, and its consequences will be felt far into the future, leaving us to ponder the grim reality of a world without physical retail stores."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Prepare For Emergency; Parents Paying Your Bills"

Jeremiah Babe, 2/2/23:

"Prepare For Emergency; Parents Paying Your Bills"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Vangelis, “Fields of Coral”

Full screen recommended.

Vangelis, “Fields of Coral”

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.

Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120930.html

"In Three Words..."

 

“Mirror Neurons: Mirrors In Your Brain”

“Mirror Neurons: Mirrors In Your Brain”

by Casey Kazan

“A recent paradigm-shattering discovery in neuroscience shows how our minds share actions, emotions, and experience - what we commonly call "the monkey see, monkey do" experience. When we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing.

Only recently, however, with the discover of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerful sharing of experience is realized within the human brain. In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action. These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the the world's leading experts to predict that 'mirror  neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'.

Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" writes that "Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma has elegantly explored the properties of neurons- the so-called "mirror" neurons, or "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. His research indicates that any given cell in this region will fire when a test monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, picking up, grasping, etc. In addition, it appears that different neurons fire in response to different actions."

The astonishing fact is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action. "With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: imitation learning, intentionality, "mind reading," empathy- even the evolution of language." Ramachandran writes.

"Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."

Mirror neurons may also help explain the emergence of language, a problem that has puzzled scholars since the time of Charles Darwin, he adds. "Is language ability based on a specially purposed language organ that emerged suddenly 'out of the blue,' as suggested by Noam Chomsky and his disciples? Or did language evolve from an earlier, gesture-based protolanguage? No one knows for sure, but a key piece of the puzzle is Rizzolatti's observation that the ventral premotor area may be a homologue of "Broca's area"- a brain center associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language. Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California suggest that mirror neurons may also be involved in miming lip and tongue movements, an ability that may present the crucial missing link between vision and language."

To test his idea, Ramachandran tested four Broca's aphasia patients - individuals with lesions in their Broca's areas. He presented them with the sound of the syllable "da," spliced to a videotape of a person whose lips were actually producing the sound "ba." Normally, people hear the "da" as "ba" - the so-called "McGurk effect" - because vision dominates over hearing. To his surprise, he writes, "we found that the Broca's patients did not experience this illusion; they heard the syllable correctly as 'da.' Even though their lesions were located in the left frontal region of their brains, they had a visual problem- they ignored the lip movements. Our patients also had great difficulty with simple lip reading. This experiment provides a link between Rizzolatti's mirror neurons and the evolution of human language, and thus it calls into question the strictly modular view of language, which is currently popular."

Based on his research, Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: "they will provide a unifying framework and possibly even explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."

- http://www.dailygalaxy.com/

o
Related:
"The Mind's Mirror", Excerpts

"For years, such experiences have puzzled psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers, who've wondered why we react at such a gut level to other people's actions. How do we understand, so immediately and instinctively, their thoughts, feelings and intentions?"

"The mirror neurons could help explain how and why we "read" other people's minds and feel empathy for them. If watching an action and performing that action can activate the same parts of the brain in monkeys- down to a single neuron- then it makes sense that watching an action and performing an action could also elicit the same feelings in people."

"This neural mechanism is involuntary and automatic," he says. "With it we don't have to think about what other people are doing or feeling, we simply know. It seems we're wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different," Gallese says. "At the root, as humans we identify the person we're facing as someone like ourselves."

Full article is here:
- http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.aspx

The Poet: William Stafford, ”Today”

”Today”

“The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere

a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays

come down. A tomorrow has come. Open

your hands, lift them: morning rings

all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.

Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,

you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

And it is already begun, the chord

that will shiver glass, the song full of time

bending above us. Outside, a sign:

a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,

“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant

has passed through town, widening streets, touching

the ground, shouldering away the stars.”

- William Stafford

"Never, Ever Forget..."

"Never, ever forget that nothing in this life is free. Life demands payment in some form for your "right" to express yourself, to condemn and abuse the evil surrounding us. Expect to pay... it will come for you, they will come for you, regardless. Knowing that, give them Hell itself every chance you can. Expect no mercy, and give none. That's how life works. Be ready to pay for what you do, or be a coward, pretend you don't see, don't know, and cry bitter tears over how terrible things are, over how you let them become."

- Ernest Hemingway, "For Whom the Bell Tolls "

"The Pain is Not Going to Stop"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 2/2/23:

"The Pain is Not Going to Stop"

"Things are going to get worse for the average person. The pain is going to continue. The Fed just raised interest rate a quarter of a percent. That may seem good to you but Jerome Powell just said that this is going to get much worse and we are going to continue to have a raise interest rates."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Related:

"Consumer Spending PLUMMETS

 As Americans Lose Access To Cheap Credit"

The Daily "Near You?"

Sapulpa, Oklahoma, USA. Thanks for stopping by.

"Know What's Weird?"

"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,

but pretty soon... everything's different."

- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"

"A Panicked Empire Tries To Make Russia 'An Offer It Can't Refuse'" (Excerpt)

"A Panicked Empire Tries To Make 

Russia 'An Offer It Can't Refuse'"

By Pepe Escobar

Excerpt: "Realizing NATO’s war with Russia will likely end unfavorably, the US is test-driving an exit offer. But why should Moscow take indirect proposals seriously, especially on the eve of its new military advance and while it is in the winning seat?

Those behind the Throne are never more dangerous than when they have their backs against the wall. Their power is slipping away, fast: Militarily, via NATO’s progressive humiliation in Ukraine; Financially, sooner rather than later, most of the Global South will want nothing to do with the currency of a bankrupt rogue giant; Politically, the global majority is taking decisive steps to stop obeying a rapacious, discredited, de facto minority.

So now those behind the Throne are plotting to at least try to stall the incoming disaster on the military front. As confirmed by a high-level US establishment source, a new directive on NATO vs. Russia in Ukraine was relayed to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Blinken, in terms of actual power, is nothing but a messenger boy for the Straussian neocons and neoliberals who actually run US foreign policy. The secretary of state was instructed to relay the new directive – a sort of message to the Kremlin – via mainstream print media, which was promptly published by the Washington Post.

In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department. and the Washington Post to the CIA. In this case though the directive was too important, and needed to be relayed by the paper of record in the imperial capital. It was published as an Op-Ed (behind paywall).

The novelty here is that for the first time since the start of Russia’s February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the Americans are actually proposing a variation of the “offer you can’t refuse” classic, including some concessions which may satisfy Russia’s security imperatives.

Crucially, the US offer totally bypasses Kiev, once again certifying that this is a war against Russia conducted by Empire and its NATO minions – with the Ukrainians as mere expandable proxies."

Full, highly recommended article is here:

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

o

A Must-Read Related:

"Everything They’ve Told You About Russia Is A Lie"

Scott Ritter, "Iran & Russia Alliance; West Seeks To Destabilize Iran"

Scott Ritter, 2/2/23:

"Iran & Russia Alliance; West Seeks To Destabilize Iran"

"We are joined by Seyed Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian American academic and political analyst. He was born in Richmond, Virginia and spent the first 13 years of his life in the United States. Marandi is a graduate of the University of Tehran and Birmingham University (UK). Marandi is also the former head of the North American Studies program at the University of Tehran. He is currently a professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the university and an adviser to the Iranian nuclear negotiations team in Vienna."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gonzalo Lira, "The West Is Now Impotent In The Ukraine Conflict"

Gonzalo Lira, 2/1/23:

"The West Is Now Impotent In The Ukraine Conflict"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"