"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

by Charles Hugh-Smith

"Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people. This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the Antonine Plague of 165 AD.

The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests which reduced the caloric intake of most people, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague which swept Europe in 1347.

I’ve mentioned the book "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire" a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization. It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.

In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor. The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Kondratieff and others, and Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations. All three are playing out globally in the present.

In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues: the rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.

Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma. Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 40 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.

Now the plan – for lack of any real plan – is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.

Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.

Which brings us to luck. As a general rule, historians seek explanations which leave luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and action and cycles. Yes, cycles and human action influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.

If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors, then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history. It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power in the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse. That was good judgement by Pius but also good luck.

As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs. (A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud but without the water vapor/steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of sea water, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.) That was bad luck for the dinosaurs, and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.

The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)

In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us. We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control–technology, wise investments and policies, etc. The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.

We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.

I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, "Born Under a Bad Sign" (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” The next five years might have us singing this line with feeling."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com

o

Albert King, "Born Under a Bad Sign"

"Winter Is Coming"

"Winter Is Coming"

by John Wilder

"The last year has seen more change than the last twenty years, combined. This is to be expected, especially if you give Strauss and Howe’s "The Fourth Turning" idea any credence. A short version of The Fourth Turning (also known as Kondratieff Wave Theory) is that there is a roughly 80-year cycle of human affairs. Let me use the life of my Dad, Pa Wilder, to describe it:

When Pa Wilder was young he spent most of his childhood in Winter, the first defining experience of his life was the Great Depression. Back then, they had printed versions of the Internet that they would get delivered to their house every day, called newspapers. They also had cell phones that never needed charging, and that you could never lose because they were in the living room and conveniently connected by a cord to the wall.

I’m sure all of the kids on the playground talked with Pa about how obvious it was that the Federal Reserve’s® monetary policy, combined with bankers lending to anyone with a pulse led to near financial collapse. Oh, and how their parents couldn’t afford shoes. Thankfully, Pa lived in a farming community, and every little house in town had a very large garden out back. Food from the grocery store?

Why would you spend money on food when you had to pay for the mortgage? That’s the sort of lesson that bored itself into Pa Wilder’s mind. As a kid, he saw people lose houses, he saw people lose fortunes. He saw a nation nearing collapse.

Economic collapse led to the second thing that defined Pa Wilder’s youth: World War II. Not long after Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor he was in boot camp in Ft. Sill and before long was a 2nd lieutenant in the Army. The next four years he spent on an all-expenses-paid European vacation

The end of the war was the end of Kondratieff Winter. What followed was Spring. In post-war United States, growth and unrivaled prosperity followed from 1945-1965. Pa Wilder, like the rest of the G.I. generation, came back and built families and factories and farms. They looked out at a world that was shattered, and they made fortunes rebuilding it. They even found Dean Martin’s favorite eel. Don’t remember that? It’s a moray.

Spring was characterized by extreme faith in government institutions – sure the government had fumbled the ball in the Great Depression, but it had unified the country for World War II. It stayed back enough to allow growth, and Eisenhower’s America got out of North Korea and planted the seeds for the Super Science® projects that would provide unmatched weapons systems and the seeds of space exploration.

Spring gives over to Summer. Around 1965, the spiritual awakening was followed in 1975 by the “Me” decade. In Summer, the economy is humming along, the weather is great, and the first questioning of the previous ideas that led to the success of the country begins. It’s probably no coincidence that the disastrous Immigration Act of 1965, the arguably unconstitutional Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Lyndon Johnson’s voter-plantation Great Society acts (1964 and 1965) took place at the start of Summer when Americans were questioning their values, questioning the things that made America great.

Pa Wilder was an established businessman, working as the president of a very conservative farm bank. You could get a loan, but only if you had collateral and a good income stream. Pa Wilder told more people “no” than “yes” for loans. That bothered him, with the exception of the fact that he told me, “I’ve never had to foreclose on a house, son.” To him, it was a moral duty. Thankfully Pa never served in the paratroopers, otherwise, they would have called him “debt from above.”

In society, however, the big splits had started in 1965. The subversion of colleges started and would be nearly complete by the 1980s. Religious decline started, and Nixon got tired of hiding the fiscal shenanigans of the country that gold was exposing. His solution? Get rid of gold.

But Summer was still a good time. Autumn, however, is harvest. Pa Wilder was pretty close to retirement at this point, and the real economic power had moved to the Boomers. Pa’s natural fiscal conservatism led to a strong and stable business. The people that took over from him, however, would “give a loan to anyone with a pickup and a backhoe.” They even loaned out money on haunted houses, places they were sure were going to be repossessed.

Inertia is important in an economic system. But in 1985 the financial systems of the United States began to be harvested. “Greed is good” became the motto, and systems were run entirely for near-term economic benefit. Everyone from Pa Wilder’s generation was dead or retired – the new people in charge had no living memory of the national crisis brought on by The Great Depression.

The end of Autumn is the first chill of Winter, and the end result was the Great Recession (right on time!) in 2007-2008. In the Winter, things fall apart. I’ve been really quite amazed that things have held together so well since that first cold snap. Obama was, well, a disappointment. Trump seemed (in many ways) overwhelmed by the system and couldn’t figure out how to move the levers of power in any significant and lasting ways – which makes sense on a failing system.

That was the starter’s gun on the crisis, the date Winter began. We should have been a long way through it by now, but this Winter is different: The United States had a uniquely dominant position at the start of Winter, having both complete military dominance as well as a strong economic dominance of the world. The Federal Reserve© decided to just print all the money that it could to spend its way into continued prosperity.

Sure, sometimes government wants to stop a crisis so that the citizens can have a stable country. Sometimes. But other times, governments are waiting for the crisis, looking forward to it. Planning on it. In one article titled Sometimes the world needs a crisis: Turning challenges into opportunities(LINK), the Brookings Institute lists the things they love about crises. I admit that some of them are positive, but here are a few that I think are a bit more ominous – these descriptions are directly from Brookings:

Systemic Change: Global crises that crush existing orders and overturn long-held norms, especially extended, large-scale wars, can pave the way for new systems, structures, and values to emerge and take hold. Without such devastation to existing systems and practices, leaders and populations are generally resistant to major changes and to giving up some of their sovereignty to new organizations or rules.

Dramatic Policy Shifts: Sometimes the fear generated from a crisis and corresponding public outcry enables and even forces leaders to make bold and often difficult policy moves, even in countries not involved in or affected by the crisis.

COVID-19 was the big crisis they were waiting for this Winter. As the economic systems unwind under the unsustainable debt the ‘Rona is the perfect opportunity. Imagine the tapestry of that you see was planned. What end is being sought? Well, they told us already. Systemic Change. Changes to virtually every system in the United States. Want to have a nice, neat, prosperous, and orderly community? Too bad. That’s not a thing that’s going to happen. The police will be neutered. How badly will communities suffer? Here’s how bad it is now:

● Leftist controlled Chicago: arrests/stops are down 53 percent, murders are up 65 percent.

●Leftist controlled New York City: arrests/stops are down 38 percent, murders are up 58 percent.

●Leftist controlled Louisville: arrests/stops are down 35 percent, murders are up 87 (not a typo) percent.

●Leftist controlled Minneapolis: arrests/stops are down 42 percent, murders are up 64 percent.

●Leftist controlled Los Angeles: arrests/stops are down 33 percent, murders are up 51 percent.

●Leftist controlled St. Louis: in 2020, the murder rate hit “a 50-year high, with 87 out of every 100,000 residents being murdered.”

When there is murder and mayhem there is control. This is their plan. This is the crisis. Remove police – replace with ideological commissars that aren’t bound by law. Now, if they see a “crime” that they feel is wrong, they can punish it however they see fit. Most commonly, this will just be by removing the protection of the law and letting the mob do the rest. The biggest crimes? The crimes against the Left.

That’s just the first of the planned Systemic Changes. There are more planned.

●Universal basic income.

●Boards to approve hiring at private companies.

●Equity everywhere.

●More rules than you can imagine. All of them will be based on some fear – guns in rural areas will be restricted because people in the city can’t stop killing each other.

●Climate change lunacy: to meet Joe Biden’s climate goals, Americans would be restricted to four pounds (344 milliliters) of meat a year. This will be walked back.

●And your ideas: they probably won’t be as bad as the real plans.

To be clear: Winter is here. The Left has an endless list of Leftist goals to accomplish during the crisis to come. The Winter will be dark. Where are our goals? The Right cannot just have the goals of “what the Left wants, but less,” or, “the opposite of what those guys want."After that? Organization. And leadership. And longjohns. Winter is here."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

Bill Bonner, "Pivot Error"

"Pivot Error"

The Fed's fantastic fumble, 

megapolitical currents and serious mental illness...

by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "Last week was a good week for Wall Street. Traders were sure that if the fix weren’t in already, it would be soon. It was just a matter of time, they believed, before the Fed finally ‘pivots’ and the happy days are here again. Here’s the Wall Street Journal, reporting on Wednesday’s Fed press conference: "In September, officials had projected one more hike this year followed by two cuts next year, taking the fed-funds rate to around 5.1%. On Wednesday, officials projected they would lower it to around 4.6% by the end of 2024, the equivalent of three quarter-point reductions from the current level."

That was close enough to a real ‘pivot’ for government work. Traders could take their positions, more or less confident that the Fed has their backs. But what the Fed governors expect to happen usually doesn’t happen. In the 2020-2021 period, for example, everyone with a brain could see that flooding the economy with $6 trillion in new money…while also reducing output by ‘locking down’ much of the economy…would produce higher consumer prices. But the Fed didn’t see it, or didn’t want to say anything.

Still No Idea: Then, when inflation suddenly picked up, the Fed totally mis-understood what was going on, insisting that it was ‘transitory.’ As late as April of 2021, when the Fed should have been aggressively raising the sea-wall before the tsunami hit, the Fed – with its hundreds of Ph.D economists – still had no idea of what was going on. Jerome Powell, April 28, 2021: "We want inflation to run a little bit higher than it's been averaging in the last quarter century. We want it at 2%, not 1.7%," Powell told reporters Wednesday afternoon."

A year later, the CPI was over 9%. Oops. How about now? The CPI is around 4% – it’s come down recently but is still at a high we had not seen for more than 30 years. The federal budget meanwhile, is headed for a $2 trillion deficit, which must be funded somehow. And even now…after 22 months of rate hikes… the Fed’s key lending rate is only 1.3% above inflation.

At this stage, it’s impossible to know whether consumer prices are rising or falling…in the short run. And the major threat investors face is deflation of their asset prices…again, in the near term.

Looking farther into the future, however, it seems unlikely that the authorities will be able to resist inflating the currency. The first wave of consumer price inflation has receded. But the ‘megapolitical’ currents – the deeper, usually invisible trends – are still headed in the same direction. We doubt they will change anytime soon.

Serious Mental Illness: The idea of megapolitics – that the most important trends take place below the surface – was developed by our friends James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Here’s how it works. There are said to be 57 million people in the US with ‘serious mental illness.’ Statistically, one out of every 5 members of Congress is likely to be impaired. Likewise, 2 or 3 of the Feds’ 12-member FOMC are probably brain damaged in some way.

It is tempting to blame many of our public policies on mental defectives. But that would be missing the point. Politicians, and other elites, do not do ‘stupid’ things because they are dumb, but because they are being swept along by a megapolitical trend. In the present case, they’ve been corrupted, bought and paid for, in a decaying empire. They get money from the military/pharma/welfare/racism/gender industry; then, they dance to the tunes that are piped for them.

Ours is not to point the finger of blame – neither at the jackasses in Congress…nor at the phonies at the Fed …nor at cronies and profiteers in the private sector. Had we been elected or appointed to public office, we might do the same thing. Ours is merely to figure out what they might do next.

Why does Congress vote for more military spending and more deadly weapons for the Ukraine and Israel? America’s pocketbook is empty. Besides, the Ukraine war is a lost cause (and not a good one). And Israel, the richest and most powerful country in the region, can take care of itself.

But there is too much hot money at stake for politicians to say ‘no.’ In that sense, the Russians and the Palestinians have no one to blame but themselves. Had they gotten their acts together…hired the president’s son…bribed members of Congress…given huge gifts to universities…and bought much of the US media…well, we’d now be sending weapons to Russia and pulling Israeli kids from the rubble.

Bread and Butter: Right and wrong have (almost) nothing to do with it. Politicians argue about what we “should” do…but they are merely mouthpieces for megapolitical forces they neither understand nor control. Technologies come and go. Empires rise and fall. Money, power, status ebb and flow…

It may be theoretically and experientially true that the Fed cannot improve on the decisions made by investors, consumers and business people – that is, the folks with ‘skin in the game.’ But being a celebrity economist at the Fed – pretending to make the world a better place – is not a bad gig. Okay, you have to shake a lot of hands and say a lot of things that you know are just mumbo-jumbo. Still, you earn a decent living, you get your name in the paper, and you can even make a few bucks by front-running Fed decisions. And then, after you leave the Fed, like Janet Yellen, you can collect millions in speaking fees from the banks whose bread you helped to butter.

Yes, that’s the point, dear reader. Things don’t work the way you think they should work. In practice, if it weren’t for chicanery, stupidity and hypocrisy, at least half of all newspaper headlines would disappear and most of what we know as ‘public policy’ would vanish.

The Fed, for example, doesn’t operate in some rarified world of pure logic and innocent decision making. It operates in the real world. The world of megapolitics. Its public announcements may be nothing more than blah-blah and bunkum. But its real mission is to make sure its brethren in the banking business do not have many bad hair days."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

"How It Really Is"

John Wilder, "On Winning The Big Fight"

"On Winning The Big Fight"

by John Wilder

"We’ve talked about the bigger picture recently. The bigger picture includes Elite Overproduction and The Wealth Pump. What we haven’t discussed so much is how the Left subverted so many of our institutions. I think we have the why down pretty well, but let’s go to the “how” of the situation.

It starts with Vladimir Lenin: “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.” Yup, Lenin said that. Or at least someone typed that he said that. I mean, someone besides me. And when Lenin said it, it was probably in Russian and I imagine he needed a breath mint, because I always imagined he’d smell like cabbage and B.O.

Regardless, Lenin’s idea was to propagandize kids from the start. And, in the Soviet Union, he could get away with that because the Soviets had the secret police and the bravado and the people thought they were at their mercy. I think Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn said it best:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation....We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

In the United States we were entirely different – there has yet to be a secret police that could act with impunity against Enemies of the State. Oh, sorry, forgot about Ruby Ridge and Waco and January 6 protestors and the ATF and FBI. I guess we do have one, but ours is on a shorter (for now) leash since they still have to pretend that the Constitution exists.

But to get to where we are now, things had to start to rot. The rot in America really started in academia, specifically colleges. And, the colleges that were targeted were the education departments of the colleges. Why?

Here’s Lenin’s statement again: “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.” Now, in my experience, teachers generally start teaching when they’re in their early 20s and stop sometime after they become petrified wood. I think my kindergarten teacher was born in the late Triassic, but my first-grade teacher was maybe 22.

If you’re a Lefty in a rural farm school district, you’re not going to get away with much, especially if the other teachers are all married and religious conservatives. But over time, bureaucracies always swim Left. I recall the first really Leftist teacher that showed up at my school. She was fresh out of college, and was a substitute. She went on a long rant about income redistribution and lots of other commie talking points.

Since it was middle school and she was a substitute, she got about as much respect from the students as Joe Biden would if he guest-hosted Jeopardy!, which is zero. “You know, you have to answer the question in the form of a question like my dead son, who was in the military did.”

These teachers had to bide their time, move into the administration, and slowly build a majority. Of course, this didn’t happen all at once, it evolved. And once it evolved, it did what Leftists always do: they radicalized themselves more and more until only the most Leftist idea survives. I was blessed to have “conservative” and left-leaning teachers, but no real Leftists. But in the big cities and in Blue State? Lenin would be proud.

But that’s only a part of it. Pop culture is important, too. I recall reading once that because Fonzie in Happy Days said, “The Fonz don’t go to sleep without sweet smelling teeth,” that toothbrushing doubled among the 8- to 14-year-old set.

Propaganda works, and the younger you get the kid, and the more hours that you have with the kid, the deeper the hook sets. That’s where television came in. Before the big cable invasion, before the Great Fragmentation of the streaming services and multitudes of video sharing services, there was the Big Three. CBS®, NBC™, and ABC©. These three dominated the airwaves, and produced content that was beamed directly into the brains of Americans from when they got up to when Pa Wilder turned off the TV after watching the 10:30 weather.

In between, it was filling brains with Leftist propaganda. Norman Lear (who just died) was one of the biggest proponents of Leftist propaganda on television, and made tens of millions. It really was Lear who made me question if the ideas of freedom and nationalism that I’d had since I can remember could ever be funny, or if the only humor could come from the Leftist perspective.

Of course, I know now that the brainwashing didn’t hold, and that we’re actually a lot funnier than the Left because our humor is based on Truth, and the only way that they’re funny is when they set up a construct. In order to poke fun at the Right, they had to construct an Archie Bunker and use him as their strawman. And Norman Lear created him. And had shows that showed that "strong womens don’t need no man" ("On Day At A Time").

Those shows weren’t aimed at parents – they were aimed at kids, so Norman could pump his Leftism into their brains when the teachers were off duty. Norman made millions attempting to destroy everything that made American culture strong, and when Reagan was elected, Norman took in tens (if not hundreds) of millions and tried to continue on building a cultural subversion mechanism, People for the American Way©, which, even now, funnels money to Leftists. This subversion took decades, of course, and it brought us to where we are.

Thankfully, the tide is turning. Home schooling is great for counteracting Leftism impact on kids and more people are opting for it. Places like Modern Mayberry don’t care much for Leftism in schools. The media chokehold the Left had forever is weakening – they can’t channel our minds on just three channels for 12 hours a day.

Let’s look at the other side: “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a state of free men that won’t yield to tyranny.” Do we want to win? We have to show up. With our children."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

"We've All Heard..."

“The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can’t pretend we haven’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still, sometimes, we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug, until we can’t anymore, until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin meant: That knowing is better than wondering. That waking is better than sleeping. And that even the biggest failure, even the worst, most intractable mistake, beats the hell out of never trying.”

- “Meredith”, “Grey’s Anatomy”

Jim Kunstler, "In the Game of Strip Poker, Someone Ends Up Naked"

"In the Game of Strip Poker, 

Someone Ends Up Naked"

by Jim Kunstler

“Joe Biden,” is only the most obviously weak device in the feckless and misbegotten regime installed via the blob’s US color revolution of 2020. This sort of coup d’état, you understand, was well-rehearsed by our combined intel, 4-gen war, and propaganda units over the decades prior in fractious foreign places like Kyrgyzstan (2005), Egypt (2011), and Ukraine (2014). So, it was only a matter of time before these geniuses turned their political black magic on the home front, against their own citizens. But wasn’t it ol’ Karl Marx himself who observed that tragic history repeats as farce?

Thus, the farcical pageant, in a land of fake everything, of America’s fake government attempting to rescue itself from the web of lies and subterfuge it so cleverly spun for itself to keep all its sundry rackets going. For instance: the preposterous idea that “Joe Biden” is running for reelection. Does anybody over age seven, even in Beverly Hills, believe this whopper? I doubt it. But the absurd meme is repeated endlessly in the relic newspapers and floundering cable news channels, and for one reason: elite members in the party behind all this mischief - that is, the Democratic Party of Chaos - are desperate to avoid prosecution for things like seditious conspiracy to defraud the electorate, bribery, and treason.

They have two reasons to be really afraid. One, of course, is Donald Trump, the once and increasingly probable future president, and Bobby Kennedy, the outsider warrior personifying America’s erstwhile interest in the eternal verities. Both of them promise to bring a heavy hand down on the coupsters, going back to the coup preliminaries in the Obama White House, and including the Clintons, more than one US attorney general and their adjutants, a groaning raft of former and current high officials in and around the blob’s vicious intel “community,” and the public health rogues who engineered the Covid-19 fraud and vaccine crime.

The blob’s weakness and idiocy are clearly on display in the four court cases against Mr. Trump, which look like a cartoon of thieves throwing stuff out of a hijacked furniture truck at the cars in pursuit behind them. There’s DA Alvin Bragg’s joke case in Manhattan around the dead-on-arrival Stormy Daniels business. End-of-story, as T0ny Soprano always liked to say. New York’s AG, Letitia James, vowed to get Mr. Trump on something, anything, while electioneering, and delivered a bullshit case to Judge Arthur Engoron that is sure to get tossed on appeal — and will eventually get both Ms. James and the Judge disbarred (and possibly prosecuted) for their trouble. There’s Fulton County (GA) DA Fani Willis’s laughable RICO rap against Trump, Guiliani, et al,. for complaining about the obviously janky ballot-counting activity there in 2020.

And then, there are US AG Merrick Garland’s two cases against the former president. The DC case brought under Special Counsel Jack Smith, claiming that Mr. Trump somehow led an “insurrection” at the US Capitol on 1/6/21. This turkey was rehearsed in earlier House J-6 Committee hearings, so shabbily staged that Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) arranged to have all the evidence destroyed (including witness deposition transcripts) as soon as the hearings wrapped. Mr. Trump’s defense is probably immaterial in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC courtroom. But one of the case’s main predicates, the law against “obstructing official proceedings,” is about to be adjudicated in the US Supreme Court involving convicted J-6 defendants. If the court tosses it, Jack Smith’s case goes out the window too. If not, and Mr. Trump is successfully railroaded by Judge Chutkin, you can be sure the appeal will be expedited to SCOTUS and die there. If there even is a trial before the election of 2024. In any case, Mr. Trump will still be on the ballot next November.

The second Garland/Jack Smith case is the most interesting. That would be the Mar-a-Lago documents case. According to the reporter who styles himself as “Sundance” at The Last Refuge news site, the purpose of the August 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid was not to seek classified documents at issue in a dispute between the former president and the National Archives - as the public has been given to understand by the blob’s news media. The actual purpose was to find a 10-inch-thick dossier of documents collected over many months by Mr. Trump’s deputies to be used in future prosecutions of DOJ, FBI, and other officials and private persons (including Hillary Clinton, the DNC, the DNC’s law firm Perkins Coie,) who were implicated in the Russia collusion hoax, especially after the failure of Special Counsel John Durham to even depose many of these parties and persons.

There were apparently many copies made of Mr. Trump’s dossier, and distributed among anti-blobsters, but these were all heavily redacted - names were all blacked out. The binder at Mar-a-Lago was unredacted and this was what the FBI was after in the August 2022 raid. Is there any chance by now that the FBI hasn’t disposed of 10,000 emails and documents that were in its possession pertaining to the Russia hoax and other crimes? Do you suppose that the unredacted Trump doissier was the only copy? I wouldn’t. So far, Mr. Trump and his lawyers have not mentioned this. Why wouldn’t they play this hand close to the chest? Will it be consequential in the long and tortured course of things? What do you think?"

- https://kunstler.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Beware Of 2024! Expect Much More Devastating And Expanding War"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/18/23

"Beware Of 2024! Expect Much

 More Devastating And Expanding War"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Items Disappearing At Walmart! This Is Not Good! What's Next?"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, AM 12/18/23

"Items Disappearing At Walmart! 

This Is Not Good! What's Next?"

"In today's vlog, we are at Walmart and are noticing a lot of different items that are disappearing off the shelves. With already high prices on everything, this brings concern that grocery items may be going up again!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Economic Market Snapshot 12/18/23"

"Economic Market Snapshot 12/18/23"

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Market Data Center, Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data 

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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

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- https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/

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A comprehensive, essential daily read.

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

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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: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

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- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

Job cuts and much more.

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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"The more I see of the monied classes,

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...

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And now... The End Game...

o

"Alert! USA Declares War On Yemen; Russia Loads Nukes; N. Korea Launches EMP Ready ICBM; ISW Warning!"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 12/18/23

"Alert! USA Declares War On Yemen; Russia Loads Nukes; 

N. Korea Launches EMP Ready ICBM; ISW Warning!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "My Reaction To 'Civil War' Trailer, It's Ominous And Real"

Jeremiah Babe, 12/17/23

"My Reaction To 'Civil War' Trailer,

 It's Ominous And Real"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

"Civil War" trailer.

The Poet: William Stafford, "The Gift"

"The Gift"

"Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one

that your life conceals, the one waiting outside

when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at

in her crochet design, the one almost found

over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.

You get killed now and then, violated

in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)

You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait

and pray, and maybe good things come - maybe

the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.

You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It's a balance, the taking and passing along,

the composting of where you've been and how people

and weather treated you. It's a country where

you already are, bringing where you have been.

Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,

turning the world, moving the air, calling,

every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."

- William Stafford

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Full screen recommended.

Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Life, magnificent life...

"Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit." 

- A.W. and J.C. Hare 

"A Look to the Heavens"

“What created this unusual planetary nebula? NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in the featured image. In modern times, though, for reasons unknown, it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in red) in specific directions that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners. These shells and patterns have been mapped in impressive detail by recent images from the Wide Field Camera 3 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope.

What lies at the nebula's center is unknown, with one hypothesis holding it to be a close binary star system where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star. NGC 7027, about 3,000 light years away, was first discovered in 1878 and can be seen with a standard backyard telescope toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).”

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200630.html

"The True Measure..."

"Place yourself among those who carry on their lives with passion, and true learning will take place, no matter how humble or exalted the setting. But no matter what path you follow, do not be ashamed of your learning. In some corner of your life, you know more about something than anyone else on earth. The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others."

- Kent Nerburn

"A Person Who Has Remained A Person..."

"A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet for sale, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing, cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity." - Erich Fromm

And so, sometimes, we all get like this...

Full screen recommended.

Pet Shop Boys, "Numb"

So...

"I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go." - May Sarton

Then...

"Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others' faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear." - Rumi

Dan, I Allegedly, "Home Builder in Trouble - I Told You This Would Happen"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly 12/17/23

"Home Builder in Trouble - 

I Told You This Would Happen"

"Lennar homes just announced they are liquidating 11,000 multi family units. I told you that this would happen that these home builders have been stretched so thin that all they can do is get out of this as quick as possible. Will it work?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com

The Daily "Near You?"

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

"This I Believe..."

“This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most

valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind 

to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: 

any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.”

- John Steinbeck

Free Download: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, “On Death and Dying” ("The 5 Stages of Grief")

“Grief may be a thing we all have in common but it looks different on everyone. It isn’t just death we have to grieve. It’s life, it’s loss, it’s change. And then we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes, it has to hurt so bad. The thing we gotta try to remember is that it can turn on a dime. That’s how you stay alive when it hurts so much you can’t breathe. That’s how you survive. By remembering that one day somehow, impossibly, it won’t feel this way. It wont hurt this much. Grief comes in it’s own time for everyone in it’s own way. So the best we can do, the best anyone can do, is try for honesty. The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief is that you can’t control it. The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it when it comes and let it go when we can.”

- Meredith Grey, “Grey's Anatomy”

o

Related:

• "Coping with Grief and Loss: The Five Stages"

• "Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and the 5 Stages of Grief"

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Freely download “On Death and Dying”, by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, here:

- http://www.psicoterapia-palermo.it/PDFS/

"The Legend of the Starfish"

"The Legend of the Starfish"

Author Unknown

"A vacationing businessman was walking along a beach when he saw a young boy. Along the shore were many starfish that had been washed up by the tide and were sure to die before the tide returned. The boy was walking slowly along the shore and occasionally reached down and tossed the beached starfish back into the ocean.

The businessman, hoping to teach the boy a little lesson in common sense, walked up to the boy and said, “I have been watching what you are doing, son. You have a good heart, and I know you mean well, but do you realize how many beaches there are around here and how many starfish are dying on every beach every day. Surely such an industrious and kind hearted boy such as yourself could find something better to do with your time. Do you really think that what you are doing is going to make a difference?” The boy looked up at the man, and then he looked down at a starfish by his feet. He picked up the starfish, and as he gently tossed it back into the ocean, he said, “It makes a difference to that one.”

"Heaven Knows..."

"You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that."

- E.B. White, in "Charlotte’s Web"