Foy Vance, "Make it Rain"
The original, Ed Sheeran's version is the cover.
o
Ed Sheeran, "Make it Rain"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
"A Look to the Heavens"
"From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. The big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 20 million light-years away, behind a veil of foreground dust and stars in the high and far-off constellation of Cepheus. From the core outward, the galaxy's colors change from the yellowish light of old stars in the center to young blue star clusters and reddish star forming regions along the loose, fragmented spiral arms.
NGC 6946 is also bright in infrared light and rich in gas and dust, exhibiting a high star birth and death rate. In fact, since the early 20th century at least nine supernovae, the death explosions of massive stars, were discovered in NGC 6946. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, NGC 6946 is also known as the Fireworks Galaxy. This remarkable portrait of NGC 6946 is a composite that includes image data from the 8.2 meter Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea.”
The Poet: Jane Hirshfield, "The Task "
"The Task "
"It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair -
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.
And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,
from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,
and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked
sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms. "
- Jane Hirshfield
"In Ordinary Times..."
"In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves."
- Dorothy L. Sayers
Adventures With Danno, "Food Shortage Report And Surging Prices! This Is Not Good!"
Adventures With Danno, PM 12/12/23
"Food Shortage Report
And Surging Prices! This Is Not Good!"
"We are going over the food shortage report for winter 2023, and what food items are going to skyrocket in price in early 2024! This is not good as many people are struggling now to even put food on the table!"
Comments here:
"Proof That We’re In The Biggest Collapse Since The Great Depression"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 12/12/23
"Proof That We’re In The Biggest Collapse
Since The Great Depression"
"In the story of our economy, we've seen significant bumps – like the dot-com bubble in the late '90s and the 2008 financial crisis. Fast forward to 2023, and there’s growing proof that we might be on the brink of something even bigger. Ominous signs are emerging, portending something potentially greater and more profound than the upheavals of the past. As we look ahead, the risks seem more substantial, and the traditional safeguards may not be enough. This is a heads-up, a warning to pay attention. The lessons from the dotcom bubble and the 2008 crash remind us that things can go south when we least expect it. What's coming might outdo those past events, and how we navigate these challenges will determine where our economy goes from here."
Comments here:
Gerald Celente, "Fools On The Hill: 'No Gaza Cease Fire, War Is Peace"
Full screen recommended.
Very strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, Trends Journal 12/12/23
"Fools On The Hill:
'No Gaza Cease Fire, War Is Peace"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."
Comments here:
The Very Idea..."
"In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the
alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted."
- Michael Musto
"A Wise Man Once Said..."
“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.
So, how do you beat the odds when it’s one against a billion? You’re just outnumbered. You stand strong, keep pushing yourself against all rational limits, and never give up. But the truth of the matter is despite how hard you try and fight to stay in control, when it’s all said and done, sometimes you’re just outnumbered.”
- "Meredith", "Gray's Anatomy"
Dan, I Allegedly, "Banking Hack Nightmare - Be Ready"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 12/12/23
"Banking Hack Nightmare - Be Ready"
"We discuss several controversial finance and business stories. Topics covered include a Florida couple getting hackec and losing $1.7 million when their title company was hacked, issues with insurance companies not covering homeowners' hurricane damage repairs, China's debt problems, and new US business transparency laws aimed at preventing financial crimes."
Comments here:
"No More Money"
President of Argentina Javier Milei and his sister Karina Milei greet supporters as they leave the National Congress after his Inauguration Ceremony on December 10, 2023 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
"No More Money"
The political caste, a budget chainsaw and
front row seats to the end of the world...
by Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman
Baltimore, Maryland - “There is no more money.” ~ Javier Milei. Argentina’s new president took up his post last week. And with it, he took up an enormous challenge. Among other things, he pledged to cut spending by 5% of GDP. That would be equivalent to a reduction of about $1.2 trillion in the US budget…wiping out the entire US deficit.
Colleagues Tom Dyson and Joel Bowman are down there now. They have the good fortune to be living in Argentina while it conducts one of the greatest political experiments of modern times.
Elites always control the media…and the government. And the tendency, in any stable political system, is for what Milei calls “the political caste” to rig the laws and the government so as to increase its own wealth and power. Typically, the process is only interrupted by some major event that the elites cannot control. As mentioned here yesterday, the plague of the 13th century broke up the relationship between elite landowners and the peasants who tilled the ground. With a third of the laborers dead, those remaining could demand a bigger slice of the pie.
Heads of State: Wars or revolutions can have the same effect – often by driving away the elites…or murdering them. Before the French revolution, for example, the aristocracy had given itself exorbitant privileges – including excusing itself from taxes – that left it living in luxury while most people were on the edge of starvation. The elites had the system they wanted. They thought it would last forever. And then they got their heads chopped off.
The other thing that can force a big change is a severe financial crisis. Hyperinflation wipes out the value of existing credits, up-ends relationships between haves and have-nots, and destroys the promises and pretensions of the elites. In a democracy, for example, the elite can still promise pay-offs to the voters…but as Milei told them on Sunday: ‘There is no more money.’
Without some big shock, the people in charge stay in charge…and continue to rip everyone else off. The rich get richer; the poor get (relatively) poorer. And the discontent builds. This little insight will become more important as we look more carefully at what is happening in the USA.
Breitbart: "The average monthly mortgage payment in Joe Biden’s America has soared to $3,322, per analysis from the Wall Street Journal. That $3,322 is nearly double the average monthly mortgage payment when His Fraudulency assumed office. When former President Trump left office, the average monthly mortgage payment was $1,787.
“Homeownership has become a pipe dream for more Americans,” writes the WSJ, “even those who could afford to buy just a few years ago. Many would-be buyers were already feeling stretched thin by home prices that shot quickly higher in the pandemic, but at least mortgage rates were low,” the report adds. “Now that they are high, many people are just giving up.”
The Political Caste
The 40 years, 1980-2020, that should have been the most glorious in human history turned into a puzzling period of pathetic underperformance. After such a spectacular show, 1950-1980, you would have expected a spectacular sequel. Momentum alone should have guaranteed success. But it didn’t turn out that way.
“What went wrong?” is the question on the table. Yet it is the question economists never ask. To raise the issue would put their own competence in doubt. They’ve been in the driver’s seat during the last 40 years; the ditch in which the bus now sits is the one they drove us into.
They are, of course, part of the “political caste”…or the managerial elite…who have gained so much over the last 40 years. In Argentina, they are the people whose wealth and power Milei wants to reduce. And therein the new president finds his task; in comparison, Sisyphus’s rock must have been a piece of cake. He needs to take power away from the very people who have the power to prevent him from doing it.
Can it be done? Can a democracy reform itself, without violence? Or does Argentina need to go through another bout of hyperinflation, as it did 30 years ago? And what about America…?That’s the experiment now being conducted on the pampas. We’ll watch carefully, because it might give us a hint of what will happen in the US."
o
Joel’s Note: Our little barrio of Palermo Chico was quiet Sunday morning. A handful of locals stood in line at the little French boulangerie across the street, waiting for their café and croissants.
“Can you believe El Loco has done it?” whispered one gentleman, referring to Señor Javier Milei’s rise and rise to the presidency. “My whole family prayed for him. Three generations. Whether he can actually deliver from here, well…”
Added the woman behind him, a young mother. “He can’t be any worse than those other boludos [no translation provided]. They were ruining us. I don’t think we would have lasted another year. The inflation alone would have killed us…” “It can go on for much longer than you think,” chimed a Venezolano wearing an orange Rappi [food delivery] backpack. “But trust me when I say, it only gets worse. My own country is a mess. But here, I have hope…”
A 20-minute ride downtown, out front of the neoclassical Congreso building, Sr. Milei was delivering some harsh truths to the gathered masses. “The challenge before us is titanic,” he told a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands, “But I’d rather tell you an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie.” Argentina is in a state of “emergency,” said Milei, with four in ten citizens below the poverty line. (Almost one in ten are in a state of “extreme poverty.”) Any wonder… with inflation running at 200%… and climbing.
Already, Sr. Milei has begun eliminating government ministries, with 11 set to get the chop (#Afuera!)… including the “Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity", as seen here:
The big question, however, is what Sr. Milei can do to the engine room of the country’s rampant inflation. On the eve of his inauguration, this past Saturday night, Milei’s supporters held a symbolic wake out front of the nation’s central bank, which Milei has vowed to “burn to the ground.” Meanwhile, Argentines await announcements this week on the next step toward dollarization. And they keep the matches and the gasoline handy…"
Adventures With Danno, 'My Shopping Trip To Meijer and What Deals I Found!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 12/12/23
'My Shopping Trip To Meijer and What Deals I Found!"
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "Expect A Systemic Meltdown Of The Highest Order And An Entirely New System"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/12/23
"Expect A Systemic Meltdown Of The Highest Order
And An Entirely New System"
Comments here:
"A Dangerous Place..."
"If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity."
- Albert Einstein
"Wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it.
Right is right even if only you are doing it."
- Author Unknown
"Wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it.
Right is right even if only you are doing it."
- Author Unknown
“Before the Leaves Fall From the Trees”
“Before the Leaves Fall From the Trees”
by Simon Black
"The morning of June 28, 1914 began like any other normal day. It was a Sunday, so a lot of people went to church. Others prepared large meals for family gatherings, played with their children, or thumbed through the Sunday papers.
At that point, tensions had been high in Europe for several years; the continent was bitterly divided by a series of complex diplomatic and military alliances, and small wars had recently broken out. Italy and the Ottoman Empire went to war in 1912 in a limited, 13-month conflict. And the First Balkan War was waged in early 1913. Overall, though, the continent clung to a delicate peace. And hardly anyone expected that most of the next three decades would be filled with chaos, poverty, and destruction. And then it happened.
That Sunday afternoon, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated during an official visit to Sarajevo. And the world changed forever. Five weeks later the entire continent was at war with itself. But even still, most of the ‘experts’ thought it would be a simple, speedy conflict. Germany’s emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, famously told his troops who were being shipped off to the front line in August 1914, “You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees...” It took four years and an estimated 68 million casualties to bring the war to a close. But that was only the prelude.
Following (and even during) World War I, a series of bloody revolutionary movements took hold in Europe, including in Russia, Greece, Spain, Turkey, and Ireland. Then came the Spanish flu, which claimed the lives of tens of millions of people. Later, Germany sunk into one of the worst episodes of hyperinflation in human history.
Communism began rapidly spreading across the world almost as quickly as the Spanish flu, often through violent fanatics who engaged in murder and arson in order to intimidate their opponents; this became known as the ‘Red Scare’ in the United States.
Of course there were some good years during the 1920s when people generally felt prosperous and happy; but it all came crashing down at the end of the decade when a severe economic depression strangled the entire world. It lasted for more than ten years, during which time the world was once again brought to an even more destructive war that didn’t end until atomic weapons obliterated the civilian populations of two Japanese cities.
Again – go back to June 1914. Who would have thought that the next 30+ years would play out so destructively? Even for the people who did predict that Europe would go to war in 1914, most leaders thought it would be over quickly. And almost no one expected it would spawn decades of chaos.
Today we’re obviously living in different times and under different circumstances. But we may be standing at a similar precipice as in 1914, staring at enormous trends that could shape our lives for years to come. Covid only scratched the surface.
We now know without a doubt, for example, how governments will respond the next time they feel there’s a threat to public health. They’ll say, “We’re listening to the scientists.” Really? The same scientists who told people they couldn’t go to work, school, or church, but it was perfectly fine for peaceful protesters to pack together like sardines without wearing masks because they’re apparently protected from the virus by their own righteousness? The same scientists who wanted to lock everyone down to prevent Covid, but are happy to accept skyrocketing rates of cancer, depression, suicide, heart disease, and domestic abuse as a result of those very lockdowns and so-called "vaccines'?
The public health consequences from this pandemic and "vaccine" will reverberate for years to come. And that doesn’t even begin to take the economic consequences into consideration. Western governments have taken on trillions of dollars in new debt and central banks have printed trillions more. Even with all that stimulus, however, there are still hundreds of millions of people worldwide who lost their jobs, and countless businesses that have closed. Future generations who haven’t even been born yet will spend their entire working lives paying interest on the debts that are being accumulated today. The long-term consequences of all this are incalculable.
And then there are the social trends – the rise of neo-Marxism that’s sweeping the world so fast. It’s the Red Scare of the 21st century. They despise talented, successful people. They believe it’s greedy for you to keep a healthy portion of what you earn, but it’s not greedy for them to take it from you and spend it on themselves.
Many of the people in this movement, of course, are violent fanatics who routinely engage in arson, assault, and vandalism. Same for the social justice warriors who are just as quick to violence and intimidation; plus they’ve already commandeered the decision-making of some of the largest, most powerful companies in the world. You can’t even watch a football game or a TV commercial anymore without some commentary on oppression and victimization. And any intellectual dissent is met with intimidation or censorship.
In fact the largest consumer technology companies in the world have become our censors. We’re not allowed to share scientific information that doesn’t conform to the Chinese-controlled World Health Organization’s guidance. And news articles that don’t match their ideology are blocked.
Let’s not kid ourselves – these trends are not going away any time soon. It’s great to be optimistic, hope for the best, and enjoy the good years as they come. But it makes sense to at least be prepared for the possibility that we could be at the very beginning of a period of enormous instability that may last a very long time."
○
"The Guns of August"
"In this landmark, Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players."
Freely read online here:
o
o
“It is history that teaches us to hope. It is well that war is
so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”
- Robert E. Lee
But we've learned nothing from history, nothing at all, and our fondness,
no, our absolute love of war, has only improved the weapons...
David Stockman, "Washington's Entrenched War Machine"
"Washington's Entrenched War Machine"
by David Stockman
"After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later as Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the Red Army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an abrupt end.
The world had descended into a “77-Years War”. It had incepted with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations that germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into World War II and the Cold War that followed inexorably thereupon.
Upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and the follies of Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.
At the end of the Cold War, therefore, the last embers of the fiery madness that had incepted with the guns of August 1914 had finally burned out. Peace was at hand. Yet 32 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it.
The proof is plain as day. The unnecessary invasions and occupations of Iraq, the Washington-instigated shambles of Syria, the wanton destruction of Yemen, the regime change-cum barbarism that NATO inflicted upon Libya, the brutal sanctions and covert military war on Iran, the current unspeakable catastrophe financed by Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and countless more lessor depredations, tell you all you need to know.
All of these misadventures bespeak the fact that the War Party is entrenched in the nation’s capital, where it is dedicated to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee perpetual war. These forces ensure endless waste on armaments; they cause the inestimable death and human suffering that stems from 21st-century high-tech warfare; and they inherently generate terrorist blow-back from those upon whom the War Party inflicts its violent hegemony.
Worse still, Washington’s great war machine and teeming national security industry is its own agent of self-perpetuation. When it is not invading, occupying and regime changing, its vast apparatus of internal policy bureaus and outside contractors, lobbies, think tanks and NGOs is busy generating reasons for new imperial ventures.
So there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77-Years War ended. The great general and President, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial-congressional complex” in the draft of his farewell address. But that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word “congressional” in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.
So restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday-afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of Beltway busybodies who constituted the civilian branches of the Cold War Armada (CIA, State, AID, NED and the rest) and the circle would have been complete. It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.
In a word, the real threat to peace circa 1991 was that the American Imperium would not go away quietly into the good night. In fact, during the past 31 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the Cold War. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.
A few months after that horrendous slaughter had been unleashed 109 years ago, however, soldiers along the western front broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, song and even exchange of gifts. For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell. As Will Griggs once described it, "A sudden cold snap had left the battlefield frozen, which was actually a relief for troops wallowing in sodden mire. Along the Front, troops extracted themselves from their trenches and dugouts, approaching each other warily, and then eagerly, across No Man’s Land. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, as were gifts scavenged from care packages sent from home. German souvenirs that ordinarily would have been obtained only through bloodshed – such as spiked pickelhaube helmets, or Gott mit u9s belt buckles – were bartered for similar British trinkets. Carols were sung in German, English, and French. A few photographs were taken of British and German officers standing alongside each other, unarmed, in No Man’s Land.
“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other –
instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.”
- Edward Abbey.
The truth is, there was no good reason for the Great War. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet. The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time, however. And for the same reasons."
o
War. Ukraine, now... 500,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers, 75,000 dead Russians - for what? Our own country's going to hell in a handbasket, literally falling apart everywhere and in every way, and we spend hundreds of billions of dollars funding this horror? Yes, we do...
Scott Ritter, "Brutally Realistic Geopolitics"
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 12/12/23
"Brutally Realistic Geopolitics"
Comments here:
"2 Million Turkish Soldiers, Iranian Navy Ready To Flatten Israel To Protect Gaza"
Full screen recommended.
Col. Douglas McGregor, 12/12/23
"2 Million Turkish Soldiers,
Iranian Navy Ready To Flatten Israel To Protect Gaza"
Comments here:
Monday, December 11, 2023
"Israel - Palestine War Update 12/11/23"
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 12/11/23
"'Israel Defeated...' Jordan's Big Claim As
IDF-Hamas War Gets Bloodier In Gaza"
"Jordan has made a big prediction about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war outcome. Jordan’s foreign minister has claimed Israel cannot achieve a military victory in Gaza. Ayman Safadi said the goal of Israel’s operation against Hamas is to oust the Palestinian population rather than defeat the militant group. Ayman Safadi also claimed that Israel has already suffered a strategic defeat."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 12/11/23
"Good News for Hamas - Hezbollah Takes North Israel,
IDF Must Withdraw Troops From GAZA"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Col. Douglas Macgregor, 12/11/23
"Israel Has Crossed The Muslim Red Line,
They Must Be Eliminated By Middle East"
Comments here:
"The American Empire Is Falling, Our Enemies Are Very Strong; We Have Huge Strategic Vulnerabilities"
Jeremiah Babe, 12/11/23
"The American Empire Is Falling, Our Enemies Are Very Strong;
We Have Huge Strategic Vulnerabilities"
Comments here:
"Beautiful Relaxing Music for Stress Relief"
Full screen recommended.
Soothing Relaxation,
"Beautiful Relaxing Music for Stress Relief"
"Beautiful relaxing music for stress relief, composed by Peder B. Helland. This instrumental music ("The Hidden Valley") works well as sleep music, ambient study music, meditation music or relaxation music."
Magnificent...
"A Look to the Heavens"
"It’s always nice to get a new view of an old friend. This stunning Hubble Space Telescope image of nearby spiral galaxy M66 is just that. A spiral galaxy with a small central bar, M66 is a member of the Leo Galaxy Triplet, a group of three galaxies about 30 million light years from us. The Leo Triplet is a popular target for relatively small telescopes, in part because M66 and its galactic companions M65 and NGC 3628 all appear separated by about the angular width of a full moon.
The featured image of M66 was taken by Hubble to help investigate the connection between star formation and molecular gas clouds. Clearly visible are bright blue stars, pink ionized hydrogen clouds - sprinkled all along the outer spiral arms, and dark dust lanes in which more star formation could be hiding."
The Poet: David Wagoner, "Getting There"
"Getting There"
"You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You're there. You've arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.
What did you want to be?
You'll remember soon.
You feel like tinder under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change.
The sky is pulsing against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression
On the self you were,
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power,
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.
What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,
Telling it haltingly like a dream,
That lost traveler's dream under the last hill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.
You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings."
~ David Wagoner
"The Consequences Of Our Choices..."
"Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.”
- Richard Bach, “Running From Safety”
"Never..."
- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
“The Myth of Human Progress”
Full screen recommended.
“The Myth of Human Progress”
By Chris Hedges
“Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth – intellectually and emotionally – and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury – as well as unrivaled military and economic power – for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.
Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.
“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada.
“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today – about 2 billion – is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.
If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”
Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.
Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.
Wright explained this further on our call. “The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again.
We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”
As Wright told me: “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable – the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun – would disappear.
We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we let oil and gas exploration rip when we knew that expanding the carbon economy was suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.
If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”
Dan, I Allegedly, "Sticker Shock? You're Not Alone"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 12/11/23
"Sticker Shock? You're Not Alone"
"Feeling inflation's bite? You're not alone. Food, housing, even a Big Mac meal deal - costs are skyrocketing. How much has your budget gap grown? Learn how high prices are crushing families and small biz in Dan's straight talk on the inflation nightmare. Click for inconvenient financial truths politicians ignore."
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Bill Bonner, "A Bad Place"
"A Bad Place"
Falling wages, forever wars and the
heavy hand of government...
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - "Michael Snyder: "Say Goodbye To The Middle Class: Half Of All American Workers Made Less Than $40,847.18 Last Year." If you are wondering why so many Americans are stressed about their finances these days, just look at the numbers. The Social Security Administration just released national wage statistics for 2022, and the figures that they have given us do not paint a pretty picture at all. In particular, we should all be deeply alarmed that the median wage earner brought home just $40,847.18 last year. That breaks down to about $3,400 a month, and that is before taxes. Needless to say, you cannot live a middle class lifestyle in America today on just $3,400 a month before taxes. So in most households more than one person must work, and in many cases more than one person is working multiple jobs.
More formerly middle class Americans are falling into poverty with each passing day, and this is causing an alarming surge in demand at food banks from coast to coast…Economic conditions have deteriorated substantially in 2023, and I am entirely convinced that 2024 will be even worse…"
And here’s Business Insider: "Americans are drowning in credit-card debt - and the economy will pay the price. Record credit-card debt threatens to spark a consumer-spending slowdown soon, Carl Weinberg said. "Consumers are just waking up to the fact that they're financing their spending by running up their credit cards, and that the interest on those credit cards is over the top, out of control, off the hook right now," Carl Weinberg told CNBC on Wednesday.
Musk painted a similar picture in October. "A large number of people are living paycheck to paycheck and with a lot of debt," he said, noting credit-card payments have hit "extremely punishing" levels. "If you cannot pay them off and you're still accruing interest at 20%, you're at best headed to a bad place."
Slip Slidin’ Away: A bad place is where we think we’re headed. So let’s continue trying to understand how we’ll get there. As you recall from last week, the period – 1950-1980 was fine. Then came a bewildering 40-year stretch, 1980-2020 should have been the most astonishingly rich period in our history. It turned out to be a big flop. Despite some of the most remarkable technological innovations ever, growth rates declined. Real wages stagnated. By almost all comparisons and indicators, the US slipped down.
‘What went wrong?’ is the most important question in modern economics. Didn’t the Fed stimulate enough? Nope, it couldn’t be that…the Fed never before stimulated as much as it did then, especially in the last half of that period.
Bad luck? Where? How? In the 13th century, the plague struck Europe and wiped out an estimated one-third of the population. That was bad luck. In comparison, Covid was a gentle nuisance. There were no major plagues in the last 40 years. No real climate disasters. No giant meteors crashed into the earth.
So, what went wrong? One hypothesis: most of the progress of the last 150 years came from fossil-fueled machines. And that breakthrough may have reached a natural point of declining marginal utility by 1980. You could add more and better machines; but you got only marginal, incremental gains.
But that wouldn’t seem to explain the entire slowdown…and it certainly doesn’t explain how the gains, such as they were, went overwhelmingly to the elites. And it is perhaps more than a coincidence that this period also saw a breathtaking surge in the number of elites themselves – PhDs, engineers and scientists, but also social engineers, policy makers and political hacks. All of them went to work to try to improve the material conditions of our lives. Did they all fail? Or did the weight of so many improvers drag down the whole economy?
A Heavy Hand: One of the most insidious features of government policies is that the improvers never seem to go away…even when they are disastrously wrongheaded. Wars go on for years – at staggering cost – even though there’s no plausible gain on the horizon. Whole careers are spent fighting the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty, for example, with no sign of victory. Agencies, projects, commissions, departments…the list grows; it never shrinks. The feds announce an outfit intended to deal with an emergency. The group gets titles, office space and a budget. It goes to work…and is never heard from again. It becomes as eternal as sin, comfortably camped in luxury on the bayous of Washington DC…while the limelight moves on to the next crusade.
This is not unique to the US government. It is a feature of government itself. Over time, the swamp of lame programs, freeloading clients, and jackass crusades gets deeper and deeper. And then, the going gets tough. Entrepreneurs, reformers, and the sweating multitudes, struggle through the muck of regulations…and drown in the slime of politics.
But wait. What does this mean? Is the middle class doomed? How about the US itself? The stock market? There’s more on the subject of ‘what went wrong,’ tomorrow…"
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