Monday, July 3, 2023

"16 Harsh Truths That Make Us Stronger "

"16 Harsh Truths That Make Us Stronger "
by Marc Chernoff

"1. Life is not easy. Hard work makes people lucky, it's the stuff that brings dreams to reality. So start every morning ready to run farther than you did yesterday and fight harder than you ever have before.

2. You will fail sometimes. The faster you accept this, the faster you can get on with being brilliant. You'll never be 100% sure it will work, but you can always be 100% sure doing nothing won't work. So get out there and do something! Either you succeed or you learn a vital lesson. Win, Win.

3. Right now, there's a lot you don't know. The day you stop learning is the day you stop living. Embrace new information, think about it and use it to advance yourself.

4. There may not be a tomorrow. Not for everyone. Right now, someone on Earth is planning something for tomorrow without realizing they're going to die today. This is sad but true. So spend your time wisely today and pause long enough to appreciate it.

5. There's a lot you can't control. Wasting your time, talent and emotional energy on things that are beyond your control is a recipe for frustration, misery and stagnation. Invest your energy in the things you can control.

6. Information is not true knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience. You can discuss a task a hundred times, but these discussions will only give you a philosophical understanding. You must experience a task firsthand to truly know it.

7. You can't be successful without providing value. Don't waste your time trying to be successful, spend your time creating value. When you're valuable to the world around you, you will be successful.

8. Someone else will always have more than you. Whether it's money, friends or magic beans that you're collecting, there will always be someone who has more than you. But remember, it's not how many you have, it's how passionate you are about collecting them. It's all about the journey.

9. You can't change the past. As Maria Robinson once said, "Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending."  You can't change what happened, but you can change how you react to it.

10. The only person who can make you happy is you. The root of your happiness comes from your relationship with yourself. Sure external entities can have fleeting effects on your mood, but in the long run nothing matters more than how you feel about who you are on the inside.

11. There will always be people who don't like you. You can't be everything to everyone. No matter what you do, there will always be someone who thinks differently. So concentrate on doing what you know in your heart is right. What others think and say about you isn't all that important. What is important is how you feel about yourself.

12. You won't always get what you want. As Mick Jagger once said, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need."  Look around. Appreciate the things you have right now. Many people aren't so lucky.

13. In life, you get what you put in. If you want love, give love. If you want friends, be friendly. If you want money, provide value. It really is this simple.

14. Good friends will come and go. Most of your high school friends won't be a part of your college life. Most of your college friends won't be a part of your 20-something professional life. Most of your 20-something friends won't be there when your spouse and you bring your second child into the world. But some friends will stick. And it's these friends, the ones who transcend time with you, who matter.

15. Doing the same exact thing every day hinders self growth. If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting. Growth happens when you change things, when you try new things, when you stretch beyond your comfort zone.

16. You will never feel 100% ready for something new. Nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means you won't feel totally comfortable or ready for it. 
And remember, trying to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. Strength comes from being comfortable in your own skin."

"A Time of Unimaginable Sorrow is Upon Us"

"A Time of Unimaginable Sorrow is Upon Us"
By Stucky

"It was a nice cool sunny morning with some blue birds soaking up the sun, all in a row on the high wire. It took some time to figure out what happened. There were a few low rumbles, they seemed to be coming from north of here. We live on a farm out in the wooded hills of southern Missouri, and north would be up towards St Louis. Soon as the booming sounds started the power went off. At first, I didn’t pay much attention, but with all the military stirrings going on in the world these days, you just don’t know what to expect.

I went inside the house, but with the power off there’s no internet, so no way to find out what’s going on. At least until the power comes back on, or until I get the generator started up. More distant thunderous booms that echo now less like thunder and more like tremendous explosions – and I’m starting to get worried. My kids are at work and the grandkids are in school. I swear I‘m seeing sparks and smoke coming from under the hood of my car, but it’s not running. Now the power line where those bluebirds were singing looks like it’s getting really hot and smoke is coming from the bucket transformer on the poles. Wow! The transformer just blew up sending a shower of sparks and molten metal flying all around the pole! I can hear blasts all over the countryside from more pole transformers exploding. All the fences are sparking and smoking. The woods around the power lines and transformers are starting to go up in extremely violent flames. And the cars are now on fire – all of them! Even the old broken-down ones out in people’s pastures. Our emergency generators are smoking – I’ve got to get them away from the houses before they burn up.

Now I’ve got an idea of what’s happening, because I’ve heard of what an EMP event could do to electrical circuits. Electromagnetic Pulse. That’s what happens when a nuclear weapon explodes. The only other thing I can think of that would do this is a coronal mass ejection from a solar flare. It happened back in 1859 and it was named the Carrington Event. Fortunately, the world did not have much electrical infrastructure back then, just telegraphs, and the induced currents caused the wires to catch fire – sort of like what’s happening to the power lines out here right now. I don’t think it’s a solar event either, because the warmongers in Washington have been beating the nuclear drums for a while, and I’ve been afraid the Russians were going to get spooked and do a first strike. I guess this is it.

A big problem for those of us who might survive a while because we live in areas that aren’t targets is that we lose all sources of information. We don’t have any way of knowing what’s happening. Don’t know if it’s a first strike or a retaliatory strike. Does Washington DC even exist anymore, or is it just a huge radioactive smoking crater? Are those beautiful, magnificient buildings of the Kremlin still standing?

How many of our big cities are destroyed? I remember seeing pictures of the devastation that was Nagasaki and Hiroshima when that monster Truman murdered all those Japanese civilians, and thinking that those bombs were tiny compared to what the psychopaths have in their arsenals today – the Russians have bombs that could literally flatten New York City and/or Houston. I cannot, nor can anyone else, begin to fathom the destruction of a 10 or 20 megaton thermonuclear weapon could wreak on a major city.

Lights go off and then nothing. No TV; no internet. No football – the treasury department that writes all the government checks is gone. Fear-crazed citizens make runs on WalMarts and grocery stores and take everything they can. No one tries to stop them; the store employees are in a panic to get home. Problem is, with no operable vehicles, the only things people can take are what they can carry by hand. Everyone has to walk, even the police are stranded out on the highways. All troopers, city cops, and sheriff deputies are trying desperately to get home to their loved ones. No cops on duty anymore. No traffic moving anymore. Just lots of people running, screaming, hoping they can just get home, and that there still is a home.

Fires are blazing everywhere from the powerlines and transformers exploding. All electrical substations in the country are smoldering and blazing chaos. Forest fires are rampant and out of control all over the nation and there are no operable fire trucks. No firefighting planes or helicopters are available to fight the fires. Houses hundreds of miles away from the many ground zeros are burning both from the unchecked wildfires, and from EMP induced electrical shorts in home wiring. Almost every building in every town is on fire with no way to put them out. And these towns are far away from the targeted places where the bombs actually hit.

This is truly a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, the like of which has never been witnessed in all of human history. There will never be electricity in this country again. Let that sink in. Freezers will thaw out and food will ruin. Untold thousands of people will perish, starting with those vaporized, then those being burned up in their homes, and there are no fire departments available to help anyone. No hospitals; doctors and nurses are gone, understandably abandoning useless smoldering medical facilities. No industry, no UPS deliveries, no more dog food for the pups. If your house didn’t burn to the ground, at least you may (for a while) have a (dark) shelter from the elements.

Huge blasts of radioactive winds blow hundreds of miles from the explosions, of which there have been many. The first wave was intended to take out the military establishment. No way of knowing, but there’s no reason to believe that anything remains of the Pentagon, DC or Langley, Norfolk, San Diego, Chicago, Houston, or any of the coastal cities where there are refineries. All cities with military infrastructure of any kind will be destroyed. The joke that has been for years a missile defense system has been exposed. The sick joke that a nuclear war could be “winnable” has also been exposed. The numbers of people succumbing to radiation sickness is beyond belief. There will be no schools, no stores, no food, and no government services; no disaster relief will be forthcoming. All banks will have ceased to function, so even if there is any money left, it won’t be worth anything. The bankers never were.

If you take medications to stay alive, you’d best have a good supply, because there won’t be any more. All livestock will either be dead from radiation, burned to a crisp in the fires, or promptly slaughtered by starving survivors, and it doesn’t matter to whom they belonged. Same with property. People will no longer obey private property signs, they will go anywhere they think there might be resources, food, water, at the risk of their lives, which aren’t worth much right now anyway. There will be no law!

Every military ship on and under the ocean, with the likely exception of a few submarines, will be sunk. All of the nuclear-powered ships will go to the bottom with reactors likely damaged, spewing radioactive contamination. Like dozens, maybe hundreds, of Fukushimas. Even the reactors that aren’t damaged will undergo meltdowns with no controls. The bible says that something will kill all of the fishes in the oceans, maybe this is how that happens.

The USSR detonated a bomb of around 50-megaton yield back in 1961. It was called the Tsar Bomba. The weapon had a 100-megaton capacity, but for safety they modified the yield. Awe inspiring is just too mild of a description of what that looked like. Since the bomb was so powerful, they calculated that the plane that dropped it had only a 50 percent chance of surviving – that is even after the plane released the weapon several thousand feet up in the air with a parachute to slow it down while the plane flew away from the scene at full speed. It did almost destroy the plane – they said the blast wave overtook the plane some 45 miles from the explosion and it lost over a kilometer of altitude before the pilot, Andrey Durnovtsev, could regain control and keep it from crashing. That thing made a mushroom cloud 37, yes 37 miles, (60 km) high! An uninhabited village, Severny, 34 miles (55 km) from ground zero was obliterated, and buildings 100 miles away were damaged! The blast would have caused third degree burns 62 miles (100 km) from the explosion. I would expect if they still have these in their arsenal, they would use one on Cheyenne Mountain. It would probably take out Denver and Amarillo, TX and certainly everything in between. Instantly vaporized. What are our “leaders” thinking?

It sounds crazy, but if this happens, I want to be at one of the ground zeros. As bad as being vaporized sounds, it would be infinitely better than surviving into the nightmarish existence that would ensue. There will be marauding gangs of survivors, undoubtedly armed, in various stages of hunger, disease, emaciation, and injury. It will probably be a situation where anyone you encounter will be apt to kill you. For one thing, they won’t know whether you are out to kill them too, or maybe you have something they want/need to survive. A can of tuna or a bowl of beans might cost your life.

The landscape will be nightmarish. Imagine a few days or weeks after the event. There will be burned out stumps on land that was beautiful forest, now riddled with stagnant pools of black muddy radioactive slime, full of human and animal bones, charred flesh, and entrails. Few buildings will exist intact, and many will perish fighting over them. There will be no light at night. Light would attract unwanted guests. No music. No one will have any idea what’s going on. There may be a few survivors in places like subway tunnels, abandoned train cars, or in remote wilderness areas, but such people will have resorted to the basest of behavior, including cannibalism, in short order. Imagine! Human beings who once inhabited a civilized nation and lived decent lives will have to worry about being killed and eaten by other human beings! Zombie apocalypse, just with regular people, not zombies, although with burns and wounds, hair falling out and all out of sorts with radiation poisoning, they probably will look the part.

I have heard people talking like they plan to survive and stay healthy by hunting and foraging. Well, if a nuclear winter follows a nuclear apocalypse, foraging is going to be slim pickings. And the deer won’t last long if they manage to survive the bombs, radiation, and fires, there’ll probably only be a few very unhealthy specimens left, but if a gunshot rings out, I’m pretty sure it will attract whatever starving people hear it, so there might be more to deal with than just dressing a deer.

Bedraggled survivors will wander in shock around former cities in hopes of disaster relief which will never come. Desperate people will offer anything – gold, jewelry, ammunition, their own bodies, for sustenance. Helpless parents will watch in horror as their children starve, hoping against hope that they will awaken from this nightmare, but when this all comes down, it’ll be too late for them.

And we still won’t know what happened. Who decided that a nuclear war would be a good idea? Who “won” the war? Did any of our leaders survive to sign a surrender, and to whom? Or did Russia or China surrender? Will there be hordes of soldiers from some faraway land invading our country after the radiation dies down?

And what of the wealthy folk who built the magnificent bunkers filled with the necessities of life in which to wait out the nuclear winter? Do they actually believe they will emerge into a second garden of Eden complete with succulent fruit trees and minstrels singing their praises? First of all, the bible speaks of a great earthquake, such as has not occurred since people have been on earth, so I think a big part of those individuals will be entombed in those lavish bunkers. So maybe a few do survive, and after some months, maybe a few years tucked away, they stumble blindly onto the surface, a hardly recognizable landscape littered with human skulls, burned out cars and buildings, and destroyed terrain. When they went into the holes, they were wealthy, but after what has transpired, of the few commoners left, no one will be interested in their gold – and those old bank accounts? Well the digital age has completely and utterly vanished, and all those millions or billions they had on their ledgers is now squat.

Even by this time, there will undoubtedly still be a few scroungy survivors, but instead of the fawning proles these rich folks were used to in the old world, those survivors will undoubtedly have a taste for some well-fed and plump upper crust brisket, so thanks for preserving some. It won’t help their situation any when they discover that some of the survivors actually know they caused, or at least played a part in causing the disaster. The scenario described does not take into account the likelihood that hapless survivors will undoubtedly spend their time searching for air vents to the bunkers in which to pour gasoline or whatever else they can find to upset living conditions in said refuges down below. Any who survive this carnage will be on a mission and will not easily be placated!

Who knows what the final outcome will be. How many millions, or hundreds of millions of people will be counted among the slain? When this calamity happens, it will obviously involve the deaths of millions. This destruction, I believe is prophesied as the destruction of the modern Babylon in Revelation 18, and most people I’ve heard seem to think (as I do) that the place named as Babylon is the United States, and it is utterly destroyed in the space of one hour, by fire! Completely devastated to the point that (verse 22) “the music of harpists and musicians, pipers and trumpeters, will never be heard in you again,” and “no worker of any trade will ever be found in you again,” this decadent place will cease to be! According to scripture, it’s not a bad thing that this evil place is destroyed. “Rejoice over her, you heavens! Rejoice, you people of God! Rejoice apostles and prophets! For God has judged her with the judgement she imposed on you.” Time will tell, but I’m afraid we don’t have much."
Hat tip to Stucky and The Burning Platform for this material.
o
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, 
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
- Albert Einstein

"I Can Choose..."

“Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.” 
- Walter Anderson 

"How It Really Is"

 

"Like So Much Mulberry Bark"

"Like So Much Mulberry Bark"
by Jeff Thomas

"In 1260, Kublai Khan created the first unified fiat currency. The jiaochao was made from the inner layer of bark of the mulberry tree. It’s of interest that the mulberry tree was quite common in Mongolia. What allowed Kublai Khan to get away with treating tree bark as currency was that each bill was cut to size and signed by a variety of officials. They affixed their seals to each bill. To further ensure authenticity, forgery of the chao was made punishable by death.

But even then, why would people accept bark as being of the same value as gold and silver, which had successfully served as "money" for thousands of years? Well, to begin with, the chao was redeemable in silver or gold. But just to make sure it was accepted, Kublai decreed that refusing to accept it as payment was also punishable by death. Today, we’re more sophisticated. Governments no longer threaten to kill people for refusing to use a fiat currency; they just make it extremely difficult to deal in anything but fiat currency.

At the time, Kublai was involved in an ongoing war with the Song. The war had drained the treasury and Kublai was finding it difficult to continue to finance the war. And so, in 1273, he issued a new series of the currency without having increased the gold and silver in the treasury. In 1287, Kublai’s minister, Sangha, created a second fiat currency, the Zhiyuan chao, to bail out the previous one, to deal with the budget shortfall. It was non-convertible and was denominated in copper cash.

There’s an old saying that, if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. Yet, throughout history, leaders, having created a Ponzi scheme of fiat currency and finding out that it has its pitfalls, invariably keep digging ever faster. In Kublai’s case, as in so many other cases in subsequent history, inflation of the chao led to economic disaster. The chao became an utter failure.

Today, most dictionaries define inflation as being "an increase in the price of goods"; however, the traditional definition is "an increase in the amount of currency in circulation." An increase in the cost of goods due to an increase in the amount of currency in circulation is a near-certain eventuality, but it should not be the definition. This distinction is an important one, as it allows us to focus on the root problem rather than the outcome.

Marco Polo visited Asia just in time to see the initial success of the chao. Upon his return to Venice, he informed Europe of the concept of fiat currency. Although he had been in Asia long enough to see the collapse of the currency, Europe took to the idea of fiat currency like ducks to water, and fiat currency has been used in the Western world ever since.

Not surprisingly, European fiat currencies experienced the same outcome as the chao. Over time, every fiat currency ever created has failed and always for the same reason: Governments become overextended (generally due to warfare), excessive printing is implemented to bail the government out, and the resultant inflation collapses the currency.

Fast-forward to the US in 1971. President Richard Nixon had a problem. The treasury was being drained of gold by trading partners such as France. The US was waging war in Vietnam, which was also draining the treasury. Mr. Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connolly, with support from other presidential advisors, recommended that the president dig the hole deeper, by going off the gold standard and printing dollars. Sound familiar?

It’s unlikely that Mister Nixon was aware that he was making exactly the same mistake Kublai had made, seven hundred years previously, and that he was doing so for the exact same reasons, and based upon the same recommendations from his advisors. However, the US, at that time the greatest creditor nation in history, stepped off the economic cliff. And yet, that occurred almost fifty years ago. In the past, fiat currency collapse has generally been far swifter. Why has the dollar been in suspended animation for so long?

Well, for that, we look once again at real money: gold and silver. The US had joined both world wars late. In the early years, the US became the suppliers of munitions, equipment and vehicles for the two wars. And more to the point, they insisted on being paid in gold. (It should be noted here that, as often as the US government and the Federal Reserve have tried to argue to Americans that gold is not really money, during wartime, the US would accept nothing else in payment for goods shipped to other countries.)

By the end of the two world wars, the US held the lion’s share of the world’s gold in its vaults and therefore could dictate to the post-war world what the economic standards would be. They came up, first, with the concept that the world would use the dollar as the default currency and, later, that it would be the petro-dollar – the currency to be used for the settlement of all oil-related transactions.

This put the US on a unique pedestal. After 1971, the US could print all the dollars it wanted and the world would just have to accept it. This, in turn, created a bubble of debt such as the world has never seen. The US became the world’s greatest debtor nation. But along the way, weaknesses began to appear in the bubble. Oil producers such as Iraq and Libya announced that they would begin dealing in currencies other than the dollar. The US reacted swiftly, killing their leaders and destroying their governments.

Soon, Iran made the same decision and, this time, it was supported by India, China, Russia and even the EU. Additionally, both China and the EU created their own international payments systems, bypassing the dollar. Further, nations began dumping US treasuries back into the US system.

At present, the dollar is stable but has a critical illness. And it has occurred at a time when the US has been at war in the Middle East for nearly two decades and is pouring billions each year into that effort. It is also spoiling for war in Iran, which undoubtedly will result in Iran being supported by China, Russia and possibly the EU. The Federal Reserve has stated publicly since 2004 that if deflation occurs, it will print as much money as it takes to "solve" the problem – a commitment to massive inflation.

And so, history repeats. On this occasion, it’s taken longer to play out, as the dollar has had such a great advantage over other fiat currencies. But we’re fast approaching the point at which the dollar, like so much mulberry bark, becomes worthless, as have so many fiat currencies before it. When this occurs, we shall discover what Kublai Khan discovered in the thirteenth century – that when fiat currencies fail, the world once again returns to real money: silver and gold."

"Where Are We At?"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 7/3/23
"Where Are We At?"
"Make your own mind up. Do you believe this economy is doing well right now? Do you think things are heading in a negative direction? We have to look at everything."
Comments here:

Jim Kunstler, "Blobocracy"

"Blobocracy"
By Jim Kunstler

"Neocon war is unpopular, ugly, venal. Worst of all, it is unsuccessful – meaning instead of ending in triumph and celebration, it persists as a confusing, contradictory and costly problem multiplier. Neocons are the Dylan Mulvaneys of American politics, albeit with less sincerity and self-awareness." - Karen Kwiatkowski

"The American Revolution was a long emergency, too. Try to see past the elegant uniforms, the dashing horsemen, and the beautiful, unspoiled country to imagine the darkness of uncertainty those people lived in, trying to go their own way against an implacable, distant authority. This holiday we admire the birth of that new nation, though it has aged into a monster repudiating its finest achievements: liberty and the rule of law. The DC Blob is the new distant, implacable authority, and many of us are not happy with it.

By happenstance lately, out and about, I met up with several old friends and attempted to check-in with where they stood on these matters — how are things going in our country? The phrase our country seemed to make their heads snap back a little and their eyes goggle. Their answer, uniformly, was “Trump, Trump, Trump,” issued as a sort of barking. Trump’s criminal insults to democracy must be stopped, was the drift.

My next question was: How’s “Joe Biden” doing? (They didn’t see the quote marks, and I didn’t use my fingers to signify.) “He’s doing pretty well… accomplished a lot,” they said. What’d they make of the developing bribery scandal? “Huh… the what?” Raking in all that money from foreign governments when Joe was Veep, and then after. “Oh… right-wing talking points… baseless…”

This is what my old friends think. Quite a few of them are aware that I write this blog. They don’t actually read it; they seem to just hear about it. The old community of Boomer friends thinks I’ve “gone off the deep end.” One thing these encounters taught me is how successful the censorship and propaganda campaign of the Blob has been. These were people, you understand, who came of age believing in free speech, freedom of the press, respecting civil rights, decrying political persecutions, and, most of all, being against hegemonic wars - which, back in the sixties, was called imperialism.

These days they’re all for a righteous defense against misinformation that threatens our democracy, meaning: censorship. They wouldn’t call it that, exactly. They consider it a battle against right-wing extremism, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, the usual bugbears. It never occurs to them that the Blob lies to them continually, remorselessly, promiscuously about everything.

They apparently believe what comes out of CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, et cetera. They were told to go get vaxxed. They went and got vaxxed. Some are not looking too good. They don’t seem to know that the vast machinery of public health in our country has been marshalled to do them harm, that the people running that machinery were well-aware that their vaccines did not get properly tested, and the little testing that was done did not turn out very well. Those agencies lied about it and worked strenuously to prevent the duped and vaxxed-up public from learning what had been done to them.

What we’ve got, then, this Fourth of July holiday, 2023, is basically the pro-Blob Americans against the anti-Blob Americans. It’s a vicious conflict with no sign of resolution. No amount of factual disclosure - no Durham report, no fruitless Mueller report, not any number of whistleblowers, no alt news - can persuade the pro-Blobbers that their beloved Blob lies and deceives. And no degree of coercion or punishment will convince the anti-Blobbers to fall into line and just do what they’re told. I think my old friends are insane, and they think the same about me.

Everybody knows that the tension building is unendurable, that eventually things will break, and we all worry what kind of country we will have when the breaking ends. I’ll tell you what it will be: it will be a country without a Blob. The Blob thrives on money, and one of the first things to break will be our money and all the operations that generate, multiply, and move it. For years, we anti-Blobbers have been on the receiving end of punishments doled out so liberally by the Blob and its followers. Soon, all the lying, including the lying about our money, will bring on events that’ll deprive the Blob of its nourishment. It will shrink and desiccate into a fragile little nugget of residual malevolence that can be put down like a small, rabid animal.

There will be fewer of us around then, and I think you know who that will mostly be - if the Blob doesn’t do something desperately stupid and suicidal in its agonizing demise, like provoke a lobbing of nukes around the world (as it is currently threatening to do). Otherwise, those fewer of us will then inhabit a land in recovery from a long list of injuries, bad choices, and insults. We’ll know what lying sounds like and there will be a lot less of it because you will no longer be able to pretend that it’s for our own good.

Hard times will produce strong men and women with a bias toward reality, which naturally tends to comprise things that are truthful. Untruth will be consigned back to its traditional category: Evil. It will be shunned, as it should be. Nations come and go and perhaps America, as a federation of states united as one, will go. Many of the self-evident truths that were born with her will remain to be honored one way or another, in some region of this large land-mass, or another. Events await. Facing our time of dark uncertainty, we have a lot to think about this Fourth of July, a very solemn holiday."

Bill Bonner, "Race Riots and Culture Wars"

“Mostly peaceful” riots in France.
"Race Riots and Culture Wars"
La revolución comes to France as the 
country braces for yet more violence...
by Bill Bonner

"The police in New York City chased a boy right through the park,
In case of mistaken identity, they put a bullet through his heart..."
~ "Heartbreaker," the Rolling Stones

Poitou, France - “What was it like?” “What?” “Paris…during the riots.” “Were there riots?” Every country has its railroad tracks. And some people are inevitably on the other side of them. In Paris, poor people tend to live in the suburbs. One of them got killed by police last week. Those of us in the center of town barely noticed.

Nationwide, the French seem to be having their own George Floyd moment. Here’s CNN: "Chaos, destruction and confrontations have led to curfews in some towns around the capital. Bus and tram services faced disruptions with a nationwide shutdown ordered for 9 p.m. on Friday to try to stem another night of violence.

Areas within some of France’s major cities have erupted in violence for several successive nights after a teenager named Nahel Merzouk, reportedly of Algerian descent, was fatally shot by police - an incident caught on video. More than 800 people were arrested the night of June 29, as outrage continued to intensify. Merzouk’s death appears to have become a flashpoint for anger about racial inequality in France and claims of police discrimination."

Culture Warriors: Meanwhile, ‘racism’ is a big deal in the US too. There is a whole brigade of culture warriors ready to call it out…stamp it out…and duke it out. They see racism everywhere. The Daily Beast: "White Professor Disgusts Women Historians’ Conference." "A conference for female historians this weekend was plunged into turmoil when a prominent white academic speaking at the main event said her professional life would have been easier if she were Black. “She was immediately called out for her blatantly racist remarks, and refused to apologize, let alone listen, to the reason why her remarks were horrifyingly wrong….”

And here’s another click-baiting headline from something called ‘Buzzloving’: “White men are a danger to society,” says a member of San Francisco’s reparations committee."

This past weekend, the US press reeled and railed over the Supreme Court’s latest decision on universities’ race-based admissions programs. In brief, the court recognized that you can’t discriminate in favor of one group (Blacks, for example) without discriminating against another (Asians, for instance). This anti-racist decision was immediately attacked as…yes…racism! Fox News: "Jemele Hill accuses Asians of 'carrying the water for white supremacy' for backing affirmative action decision. Harvard pledged to go forth and sin no more…at least not openly. It said, however, that it would continue to take other circumstances, beyond test scores and academic achievements, into account."

Inherent Bias: This is, of course, what we all do. We take into account our own prejudices, predilections and preferences. When we want a good Chinese restaurant, for example, we don’t go to “Lil’ Italy.” We go to Chinatown. We guess that we’ll get better wontons there. Are we discriminating against the Italians? Of course, we are. And if we want to demonstrate our commitment to social justice, we can put on a rainbow T-shirt…and adopt a kid from Ouagadougou. But private acts of preference, kindness and vanity are not enough for some people. They want the smell of burning tires in their nostrils…and someone else’s money in their pockets.

We bring up ‘money,’ not because it is the most important part of the story, but only because it is measurable. In France, as in America, Blacks complain that they are mistreated by the police. Of course, the police take their own bugaboos into account, too. Whether they handle Blacks fairly, or not, is hard to know. But at least ‘money’ can be counted…and Black people tend to earn less of it than Whites. On the surface, this appears ‘unfair.’ And it seems to offer an easy arithmetic solution: take money from the latter group and give it to the former one.

Alas, often, if not always, imposed solutions make the problem worse, not better. So, let’s at least take a glance at what the real problem may be. There are three major hypotheses. First, it is the Africans’ fault that they get the short end of the stick – they are lazy, stupid, criminal, etc. The second hypothesis is that it is Whites’ fault – they enslave, discriminate and suppress people of African origin. The third explanation is that it’s nobody's fault – different groups have different habits and customs…which result in different outcomes and genuine diversity.

Quiet Desperation: This last hypothesis is probably the most likely and least attractive. It is least attractive precisely because it is most likely…it sees no problem and suggests no solution. It is ‘racist,’ in the sense that it recognizes that not everyone has to live the same way; Blackness is not a disease. And it can’t be cured by Whiteness. Nor vice versa.

Our granddaughter recently competed in a musical talent show in Carnegie Hall. She was one of hundreds of contestants…but almost all the other violinists were Asian. And if the people of Nanterre (the suburb where most of the residents are of African descent) acted like Asians, they wouldn’t be setting cars on fire. Young men would not be out on the streets at night. They’d be practicing the violin…or studying for their exams…with their mothers and fathers on their backs, urging them to work harder and do better. Then, as they grew older they’d take their places in bourgeois society. They’d earn about the same amount as others similarly situated…and they could live the lives of quiet desperation that Western Civilization depends on. Better? We don’t know. But it would give police fewer opportunities to shoot them."
o
France related, but all of Europe...

"Grocery Stores Are Lying To Everyone & You Don't Even Know It!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/3/23
"Grocery Stores Are Lying To 
Everyone & You Don't Even Know It!"
"In today's vlog we are exposing the truth that everyone is being lied to about grocery prices, inflation, and shrinkflation. We discuss how these stores are not only charging extreme prices due to greed but also secretly shrinking products at the same time."
Comments here:

"Economic Market Snapshot 7/3/23"

    

"Economic Market Snapshot 7/3/23"
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: creditequity valuationfunding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United Statesother advanced economies, and emerging markets."
Job cuts and much more.
Commentary, highly recommended:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
And now... The End Game...
o

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Douglas Macgregor, "Russia Launches Large-scale Attack"

Douglas Macgregor, 7/2/23
"Russia Launches Large-scale Attack"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 7/2/23
"Russian Army "Wipes Out" Nearly 700 Ukrainian Troops;
 Repels 11 Attacks in Donetsk"
"The Russian defense ministry has repelled 11 attempts to regain territory in the Donetsk region by Ukraine amid the ongoing counteroffensive. In the last 24 hours, the Russian forces have reportedly eliminated nearly 700 Ukrainian troops. 14 Ukrainian drones were downed and four HIMARS projectiles were also reportedly intercepted by Russian air defense systems. The Russian MoD also released a video of Giatsint Howitzer crews decimating Ukrainian strongholds."
Comments here:

"Poor People Living Like Millionaires; Evictions Skyrocket"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/2/23
"Poor People Living Like Millionaires; Evictions Skyrocket"
Comments here:

"It's Not Enough Money"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 7/2/23
"It's Not Enough Money"
"Financial experts have gotten together and decided that the amount of money that people need for an emergency is much higher than we originally thought. Everybody talks about $400 as the emergency fund. It’s not enough. You need to have $1700 set aside."
Comments here:

"McDondald's Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes As Retail Apocalypse Crushes World's Biggest Fast Food Chain"

Full screen recommended.
"McDondald's Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes As Retail
 Apocalypse Crushes World's Biggest Fast Food Chain"
by Epic Economist

"For decades, McDonald’s was the most popular fast food chain in America, a place where families and children could enjoy a meal at affordable prices. But those days are long gone. Now, the soaring cost of several menu items is making the company lose millions of customers and billions in sales every year, resulting in worrying cash flow problems that are accelerating its collapse in the very industry it helped to create. In this video, we explore some of the reasons why the world’s largest burger flipper is losing momentum and falling apart in the US market as the brand continues to lose its essence.

May was yet another month where a wave of customer defections hit several McDonald’s restaurants across the US. In nine of the past 10 months, the burger flipper reported losing customers in the United States, and a new analysis reveals that has everything to do with its new pricing strategy.

In April, McDonald’s announced price increases on a number of menu items for the second time in a single quarter. The company noted the decision came amid rising commodity prices and labor costs. The last price hike was seen on February 15, when it raised the cost of five combos by a dollar. But indicators show that consumers are getting fed up with higher costs at McDonald’s restaurants. In the first quarter of 2023, the company reported an average price increase of about 10% in its US locations when compared to the same period of the prior year. Although executives said that higher menu prices are helping the company to boost earnings and revenue, analysts argue this is also shrinking the chain’s customer base, which will ultimately hurt its bottom line.

Even though same-store sales have risen over the past decade, higher average checks drove these numbers, not customer visits. “How many millions of lost customers will it take before McDonald’s really focuses on reversing this risky trend?” asks Forbes contributor, Larry Light.

He predicts that for the company to increase revenues relying on average checks on a shrinking customer base will require the average customer to spend $20 per transaction. This troubling pricing strategy is accelerating the brand’s downfall. During a call with investors, the CFO highlighted that McDonald’s cannot survive with declining customer counts. Corporate knows that it’s impossible to maintain a chain that operated 38,000 stores across the globe on a shrinking customer base. Still, nothing has been done to prevent this from happening.

Considering its enormous operations worldwide and the conditions that led the company to become a huge success, it is very odd to see that instead of investing in keeping and growing its base of customers who can afford to regularly frequent its restaurants, the brand is focusing on gaining a public that already has hundreds of options of higher priced burger chains out there.

In an industry that is getting more and more competitive with each passing year, being one of the largest and oldest chains in the market is not a synonym for success and growth anymore. Businesses have to adapt constantly and, more importantly, value the customers that they already have. The fall of McDonald’s is a self-inflicted crisis that will spark major repercussions for the company in the near future. And that means America’s most iconic fast-food chain is at serious risk of collapsing all around us, and its downfall will be very painful to watch."
Comments here:

"Emergency Update! NATO Alerted; 100 Just Evacuated Nuclear Plant; Nuke Detection Planes Are Airborne"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 7/2/23
"Emergency Update! NATO Alerted; 100 Just Evacuated
 Nuclear Plant; Nuke Detection Planes Are Airborne"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 7/2/23
"Russia-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant To Be Bombed?
 Zelensky's Big Warning Amid War"
"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a warning on Saturday that there is a risk of Russia blowing up the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) after returning it to Kyiv. The Zaporizhzhia plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, has been a focal point in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. The struggle for control of the plant between Ukrainian and Russian forces has raised concerns about the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear explosion, posing immense dangers to the surrounding area. Zelensky's warning comes in the backdrop of Ukraine launching its counteroffensive, last month, aimed at retaking occupied territories in the Zaporizhia region." 
Comments here:
o
And it all seems so horrifyingly, unstoppably inevitable...
Full screen recommended.
Vera Lynn, "Dr. Strangelove • We'll Meet Again"

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

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

"A Look to the Heavens"

“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.”
"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

"Some Oddities..."

"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
- Douglas Adams

The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Geranium”

“The Geranium”

“When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine -
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she’d lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me -
And that was scary -
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.
But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.”

- Theodore Roethke

The Daily "Near You?"

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"We May Know..."

“We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbor who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.”
- Fernando Pessoa

"I Wish You Enough"

"I Wish You Enough"
by Bob Perks

"Recently at the airport I overheard a father and daughter in their last moments together. They had announced her departure and standing near the security gate, they hugged and he said, "I love you. I wish you enough." She in turn said, "Daddy, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I wish you enough, too, Daddy."

They kissed and she left. He walked over toward the window where I was seated. Standing there I could see he wanted and needed to cry. I tried not to intrude on his privacy, but he welcomed me in by asking, "Did you ever say goodbye to someone knowing it would be forever?" "Yes, I have," I replied. Saying that brought back memories I had of expressing my love and appreciation for all my Dad had done for me. Recognizing that his days were limited, I took the time to tell him face to face how much he meant to me. So I knew what this man was experiencing.

"Forgive me for asking, but why is this a forever goodbye?" I asked. "I am old and she lives much too far away. I have challenges ahead and the reality is, the next trip back would be for my funeral," he said.

"When you were saying goodbye I heard you say, "I wish you enough." May I ask what that means?" He began to smile. "That's a wish that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone." He paused for a moment and looking up as if trying to remember it in detail, he smiled even more."When we said 'I wish you enough,' we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them," he continued and then turning toward me he shared the following as if he were reciting it from memory.
"I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish enough "Hello's" to get you through the final "Goodbye."

He then began to sob and walked away." My friends, I wish you enough!"