"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."
"In today's vlog, we are at Target and are noticing some great deals on some good quality food options. We also check for over the counter medicines and pet food as these items have been in short supply lately. Grab your notepad as you will want to take advantage of some of these deals!"
“How many of these places where polite society turns out to be provably insane
do we have to see before we stop taking their judgment on anything as significant?"
- Bret Weinstein
"The USA is a runaway train with a dead man in the engineer’s seat. The conductor goes through the cars assuring the passengers that everything is fine. . . never mind the screeching wheels on the curves, or the blinding strobe effect of low sunlight passing through the trees out the window at a hundred and forty mph, or the bump that made half the stuff in the overhead luggage rack jump out. More than half the people on-board are at tachycardia levels of fright - some are screeching = but the other less than half just remain fixed on their phones and laptop screens. They can’t be bothered to look out the window...Okay, that’s a metaphor. But if you’re a citizen of our country and care about it, these are the matters you’d better pay attention to, because they are all going off the rails:
The war in Ukraine. We started it in 2014 to mess with Russia and Russia is going to finish it. Who knows what our real motives were. A resource grab? A desperate ploy to erase our national debt by creating a global fiasco? Sheer psychopathic hatred of this Putin fellow? We can’t bring ourselves to acknowledge the failure of this ill-conceived venture. Instead, our feckless allies in Europe are foolishly rattling their sabers, apparently forgetting that you to don’t bring a sword to a nuclear missile fight.
Mr. Macron in France affects to offer up his army for slaughter on the blood-soaked plains of Ukraine, just as the Ukrainians offered up a half a million of their young men so that Victoria Nuland could feel good about herself. Mr. Macron is insane, but the society he presides over is collectively insane, so perhaps he represents them well. Similarly, Olaf Scholz in Germany, whose top generals were caught on a leaked recording last week discussing their plan to blow up the Kerch Bridge that connects Crimea to Russia. Do you understand that this would be a direct attack on Russia, an act of War by NATO? And what the obvious consequence would be?
The phantom government of “Joe Biden” is too weak and mindless to join any negotiation. Ukraine and Russia are up to some kind of cross-talk down in Riyadh with Prince MBS. Even Mr. Zelensky went down for a day, though video appears to show him coked-up, sniffling and snarfling, not a good sign. If ever there was a time to end this stupid conflict, it’s now, before the Russian election. After that, terms will only be more difficult for Ukraine, up to direct custodial supervision instead of remaining a nation. It was never any of our business (though the Biden family, BlackRock, and the CIA saw fabulous opportunity to profit there).
Next is the border. You saw last year how the blob elite greeted the transfer of illegal immigrants to their happy little island of Martha’s Vineyard. (They were not amused by Governor DeSantis’s prank, and off-loaded the mutts post-haste.) But that same smug demographic doesn’t care if hundreds of thousands are distributed to the big cities, which are now fiscally destabilized by them to an extreme, probably to bankruptcy.
Of course, that is not the main thing to worry about with what altogether amounts to millions of border-jumpers flooding our land. The main reason to worry is what the blob that invited them here intends for them to do, which, you may suspect, is to unleash mayhem in the streets, malls, stadiums, and upon our infrastructure just in time to derail the election - perhaps even to make war on us right in our homeland. The US government is paying for this whole operation, you understand, funneling our tax money to international cut-out orgs who set up the transfer camps in Panama, and buy the plane tickets for the mutts to cross the ocean, and coordinate with the Mexican cartels to shuttle this horde of mystery people among us to work their juju for the Democratic Party. The pissed-off-ness of the public has passed the red line on this.
A third FUBAR is the lawfare campaign of the Democratic Party and its regime in power against the citizens of this land. This folder includes overt and obvious political prosecutions by DA’s and AG’s who make election promises to “go after” individuals without such niceties as probable cause. It includes the gigantic new scaffold of inter-agency censorship and propaganda. It includes the psychopathic struggle sessions mandated by “diversity and inclusion” policy. It includes election-rigging directed by the likes of Marc Elias and Norm Eisen, getting states to fiddle laws on voter ID and mail-in ballots. It includes the political protection of rogue groups ranging from looter flash-mobs to Antifa anarchists who bust up things and people and burn buildings down. It includes state officials who peremptorily kick candidates off the ballot. It includes a nakedly biased judiciary, and especially the use of the DC federal district court to punish people extralegally, unjustly, extravagantly, and cruelly. In short, lawfare is the complete perversion of law, and we-the-people are entreated by reprobate officials such as Merrick Garland and Letitia James to accept it.
A fourth item on this list is the US economy which has been overwhelmed by maladministration of an overgrown monster bureaucracy, and the gross (perhaps fatal) mismanagement of the government’s money. The people of this land are not being allowed to do business, to find a livelihood, to transact fairly. “Joe Biden’s” shadow string-pullers are messing as badly with the oil and gas producers as they have messed with Ukraine. And they are doing it in pursuit of a laughable mirage: their “green new deal.”
John Podesta, the “clean energy czar” who replaced the Haircut-in-search-of-a-brain called John Kerry, sits on a $370-billion slush fund that can be used to just dole out to anyone and everyone a political patronage payoff, especially to janky “community” orgs and NGOs with fake agendas. This really just amounts to an asset-stripping operation that will leave the American people busted and with broken supply chains for everything. Instead of annual budgets, Congress raises the US debt ceiling by “continuing resolutions” to keep the government from shutting down. The national debt races to the $35-trillion mark. As interest rates on debt rise, our debt payments now exceed our military spending. You can be sure that our country will break down financially very soon.
The capper on today’s list is the nation’s health, the racketeering system we’ve set up to care for it, and the public health agencies of the government that enabled the Covid-19 operation to happen. The CDC continues to push vaccines that have killed millions of Americans and more millions around the world, and has probably compromised the well-being of millions more going forward. Corporate medicine - that is, your doctor, and your hospitals - is a sinking Titanic of grift and chaos. Try to get an appointment to even see a doctor for an emergency. Try to avoid being bankrupted by your treatment. Try to get out of a hospital alive. Yeah, it’s that bad.
The doctors have surrendered your trust in them with their lying and their bullshit. The current director of the CDC, Mandy Cohen and her predecessor, Rochelle Walensky, have knowingly presided over the mass killing and injuries imposed on the mRNA vaccinated. Hundreds of their deputies should be liable for prosecution, and so should many of the other prominent characters in the Covid Saga: Fauci, Birx, Collins, Baric, Bourla, Daszak, Califf, Woodcock, Hahn, and many more.
What are we going to do about any of this? Return to the metaphor. The runaway train is still picking up speed. You can’t just jump off at 150 mph. If you’re one of the passengers watching this in horror, maybe you can decouple your car, or get the conductor to it by any means necessary. Let’s say that each car behind the engine of this train is a state of the United States. Let the engine up front with the dead man at the controls ride that runaway to its terrible conclusion. Cut loose the cars behind it to take care of themselves, to slow down, get a grip on their situation, and make plans to find a better engine to pull the train. Decouple. Cut loose. It’s the only way."
“The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (top right).
Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself is about 40 light-years across and a mere 300,000 years old. That makes it one of the youngest star forming regions in our sky, with newborn and embryonic stars embedded in its natal dust and gas clouds. Estimates of the distance to open star cluster M21 are similar to M20's, but though they share this gorgeous telescopic skyscape there is no apparent connection between the two. In fact, M21's stars are much older, about 8 million years old.”
The most momentous and significant events in our lives
are the ones we do not see coming. Life is defined by the unforeseen.
by Jonny Thomson
"You’re in the shower one day, and you feel a lump that wasn’t there before. You’re having lunch when your phone rings with an unknown number: there’s been a crash. You come home and your husband is holding a suitcase. “I’m leaving,” he says.
Life is inevitably punctuated by sudden changes. At one moment, we might have everything laid out before us, and then an invisible wall stops us in our tracks. It might be an illness, a bereavement, an accident or some bad news, but life has a habit of mocking those who make plans. We can have our eyes on some distant shore, some faraway horizon, only to find everything come crashing down by the most unseen of events. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men. Gang aft agley” (often go wrong).
In Anton Chekhov’s remarkable play, "The Seagull," we meet a cast of characters who are all, in some way, in love with something. The young, idealistic artist Konstantin is in love with the idea of pure art. Arkadin, his mother, is in love with her fans and her celebrity. Konstantin’s girlfriend, Nina, is in love with becoming rich and famous. Everyone in the play has some kind of ambition and plan, or they live in regret over the life they chose. They rail against how misguided or mistaken their life has been, while longing for something else.
They are each like a seagull, flying over the sea or a great lake, and aiming purposefully for the shore. The view up there is wonderful. But the longer the seagull flies, the more oblivious they are to how they tire or weaken. They’re so fixated on some distant horizon that they’re at the mercy to life’s sudden changes. They’re blinkered and distracted, and the gods love nothing more than the hopeful hubris of mankind.
At one point in the play, Chekov has the character Trigorin recount a short story about a gull flying over a lake who’s, “happy and free.” But in the next moment, “a man sees her who happens to come that way, and he destroys her out of idleness.” The seagull is killed, its flight and plans annihilated, in one instant of random thoughtlessness.
Boundary Situations: While so much of our lives are spent in planning and preparation, the most transformative and significant moments are those which come at us out of the blue. These are what the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers called “boundary situations” - the ones we cannot initiate, plan, or avoid. We can only “encounter” them. These are not the mundane, everyday parts of our life - what Jaspers calls “situation being” - but rather they are things which thunder down to shake the foundations of our being. They change who we are. Although these “boundary situations” (sometimes called “limit situations”) change a bit in Jaspers’ works, he broadly sorted them into four categories:
Death: Death is the source of all our fear. We fear our loved ones dying, and we fear the moment and fact of our own death. When we know grief and despair, or when we reflect on mortality, we are transformed. We always know about death, but when it’s a boundary situation, it comes crashing into our lives like some grim scythe; an unforeseen curtain call. The awareness and subjective encounter with death transforms us.
Struggle: Life is a struggle. We work for food, compete for resources, and vie with each other for power, prestige, and status in almost every context there is. As such, there are moments when we are inevitably overcome and defeated, but also when we are victorious and champion. The final outcomes of struggle are often sudden and great, and they make us who we are.
Guilt: Hopefully, there comes a moment for each of us when we finally accept responsibility for things. For many, it comes with adulthood, but for others it comes much later still. It’s the awareness that our actions impact all around us, and our decisions echo into the world. It’s seeing the damage or tears we’ve caused. It’s to recognize that, however small or big, we’ve hurt and upset someone. It’s a profound pull of the heart that changes how we live, and it often comes on unexpectedly.
Chance: No matter how neat and ordered we might want our world to be, there will always be a messy, chaotic, and unpredictable exception. We can hope for the best, and make the plans we want, but we can never take a steering handle on the facts that will affect our existence. According to Jaspers, we each prefer, “assembling functional and explanatory structures… whose central axis lies in sufficient reason” and yet, “despite this, it is not possible for man to control and explain everything. In fact, day by day he faces events that he cannot call anything else other than coincidences or hazards.” We want order, and regularity. What we get is the mercurial and capricious throes of chance.
The best laid plans: What Chekhov’s Seagull and Jaspers’ “boundary situations” get right is that we are each much more vulnerable than we might want to allow. A wedding, three years and a fortune to plan, is ruined by a stomach bug. An hour-long journey home for Christmas winds up getting you stuck in the traffic of a freak snowstorm. A lifetime achievement is overshadowed by a national disaster. Our lives are defined by the unforeseen. We have our dreams, hopes and are flying to some faraway shore. Yet life doesn’t care. Around every corner, at every flap of our wings, everything can change."
Col. Douglas MacGregor discusses what's next in #Ukraine
and #Gaza with Gerald Celente and explains the dangers ahead.
"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."
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
We believe it enjoys high relevance in this, the 21st century. More from which: "It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement." Thus the frog goes into its pot of gradually heating water - and never jumps out.
Perfectly Imperfect: We've wondered why so many continue to accept the verdicts of Dr. Fauci... his understrappers within the field of public health… and the elected officials who boss us. In nearly every particular they have proven mistaken - intentionally or unintentionally... Mistaken on masks. Mistaken on lockups. Mistaken on medicines. Mistaken on vaccines. What they claim one day is proven false the following day. What they deny one day is proven true the following day. If not the following day, then the following week. If not the following week, then the following month.
It is not the erring that flusters us. Sincere men - men of good faith - can botch badly. We are merely confounded and discombobulated that so many continue heeding them… and submitting to their blemished authority. And why do so many have such blistering heat against those who point to holes in official theories, who announce that the emperor is well and truly nude? Would they prefer to be foxed, conned and tricked - to believe the emperor is garmented? These are the questions we tackle today...
No Judgment: We do not hector, we do not preach, we do not badger, we do not hold forth today. Nor do we judge. A man shoots an accusing finger outward and three shoot back at him… as is said. We are merely out to solve a puzzle, the way a detective is out to solve a crime, the way an autopsist is out to solve a death.
For light, we turn to Professor Mattias Desmet. This fellow professes psychology at Belgium’s Ghent University. A people acquire an acute anxiety, he explains. In the case before us, acute anxiety of the virus. Coney-catchers, sharpers and opportunists - that is, political leaders - emerge in response, holding out salvation. The people accept the outstretched hand. It soothes and comforts them. Anyone who slaps away this hand is a hellcat, a hobgoblin, a menace to the public happiness.
“Mass-Formation: Here the professor speaks of “Mass-Formation.” As summarized: "In Mass-Formations people become radically intolerant of dissident voices. This person threatens to wake the people up and they get angry when confronted by the initial anxiety and discontent they experience by challenges to the official doctrine. The crowd directs all their aggression at dissident voices.
At the same time they are radically tolerant of their leaders who pronounce the mainstream narrative. These people can lie and cheat and do everything they want and will always be forgiven by the crowd. All the lying, dishonesty and misbehavior is seen by the crowd as doing it for their own safety."
We suffer the acquaintance of certain individuals who fit this description to a fare-thee-well… as perfectly and precisely as the size 10 foot fits the size 10 shoe. They, like your editor, are reasonably sane. They are reasonably reasonable, they are reasonably tolerant. They are generally pleasant and agreeable.
Jekyll and Hyde: But tell them that Dr. Fauci has been less than fully truthful. Tell them that masks are minimally effective. Tell them that lockups fail to jail the virus. Above all… Tell them that these vaccines are not as safe or as formidable as the drummers claim. Now you have a demon on your hands. They will scourge you as a conspiracy theorist… a delusional… an imbecile… a witless dupe of the bedlamite fringe.
Here we speak with the invincible authority of personal experience. We know such gentlemen and ladies. We had best keep the names dark, lest our attorneys receive a sharp note claiming character defamation.
No matter what you hurl against them, it bounces off unbreachable armor… spitballs off a tank. They simply will not listen. They are sunk in a sort of intoxicating hypnosis. And woe to anyone out to shatter the spell…
Why Facts Don’t Work: More: Similar to hypnosis, people in this hyper-focused state are narrowly focused. In hypnosis, only the hypnotized are focused in this way… In Mass-Formation, leaders emerge which are even more narrowly focused than the followers. When people experience this mental intoxication it no longer matters if the narrative is wrong or even blatantly false. What matters is that it leads up to this mental intoxication. This is why they will continue to go along with the narrative.
The resistance to understanding the narrative is false or wrong is driven by the fear of returning to the state of Free-Floating Anxiety and wanting to continue to experience the mental intoxication. This explains why arguing based on facts will not work. Facts no longer matter to them. Given the facts, they are unable to come to sensible conclusions, even in their own best interests.
Here we believe the author lowers his hammer square upon the nailhead. We believe his thesis holds vast explanatory powers. It is immensely plausible. Again: We do not judge or condemn whom we consider the entranced. They consider us entranced. They are of course correct.
For example: This editor of yours believes he is the reincarnated soul of the Emperor Nero. He believes that he is a masterful lover. He believes that he is nice. He accepts them as fact… though in honest moments he concedes he lacks all confirming evidence. But let it go...
The Real Blame: Our grievance is not with the entranced, but rather with the spellbinders who entrance them. That is, with those who would wreck a society over a virus rate with a survival rate in excess of 99%...
With those who would decry the use of safe and effective drug treatments because they would harpoon the legal justification for experimental, emergency-use vaccines… With those who promised us we could discard our facial masks once we took aboard the vaccines… With those who would torture statistics to declare a false “pandemic of the unvaccinated”...
With those who deny that these vaccines have murdered many thousands of people and mangled hundreds of thousands more… With those who would inform mothers-to-be that these vaccines will not injure their child… With those who would vaccinate young children, young children who face infinitesimal risk of sickness or death and who are far more likely to perish from the vaccine itself… With those who believe they can and should dictate the medical choices of free men and women.
It is they who frost our nose. It is they who wring our gizzard. It is they who rile our customary serenity and our detached indifference to the world’s events.
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is, as the title suggests, a simple story of one day in the life of Ivan Shukov Denisovich, a prisoner in a Soviet concentration camp. Shukov, a simple Russian peasant fighting for Stalin in WWII, is imprisoned for treason – a crime he did not commit – and has spent the last 8 years in concentration camps. Shukov’s day begins at 5.00 a.m. with the clang of the reveille – he is, along with the other prisoners, marched out into the bitter cold, stripped and searched for forbidden objects, and then sent to work until sundown, without rest, without a full stomach. In this slim 143 page-novella, we follow Shukov’s grueling routine and see how he struggles to maintain his dignity in small, subtle ways. On this day, he has scored some small triumphs for himself – he has swiped an extra bowl of mush at supper, found a piece of metal that can be used as a knife to mend things, replenished his precious tobacco supplies and also has had a share of a small piece of sausage before lights out. Thus, at the end of the day (and the novel), he thinks to himself that it has been “A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.” He must survive only another 3653 days more.”
"This just in. Jerome Powell has stepped forward and said that we have a booming economy and that there is no need right now to have rate cuts in 2024. Unemployment is low and inflation is subsiding. I don’t know where he lives."
Excerpt: "From 2000 through 2007, while waging two wars in the Middle East, the U.S. ANNUAL Federal deficit averaged $220 billion PER YEAR. And many fiscal conservatives thought that was outrageously out of control. Well, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, the despicable scum in Congress, and the rest of the Deep State calling the shots in this military empire of delusion and debt said, HOLD MY BEER.
Just as the wheels were starting to come off in late 2019, the convenient arrival of the Covid plandemic provided the cover for these purveyors of propaganda and panic to run $3 trillion deficits and establish a new baseline of $1 trillion per year. The house of cards, built upon a crumbling foundation of debt comes crashing down when deficits are allowed to drop below $1 trillion. Running in place gets more expensive by the day.
Now it requires $1 trillion of new debt every 100 days to achieve nothing but remaining static economically. The regime media pundits and the cabal on Wall Street tell us the economy is doing great. No recession in sight. All is well. The dumbed down and distracted ignorant masses don’t realize all the reported “economic growth” is “created” by the government, enabled by The Fed, spending billions on their wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, funneling the money into the Military Industrial Complex corporations; paying for the transportation, feeding, and housing of the illegal invading hordes; hiring more government drones to harass the citizenry, and desperately trying to prop up a corrupt tottering empire in its final death throes."
"In today's vlog, we are at Big Lots and are finding some great deals on many items. Grab your notepad as these are items everyone should be buying here in 2024!"
"What does a typical supermarket in Tashkent, Uzbekistan look like? Take a walk with me inside a Uzbekistan typical supermarket. What are the differences, what unique items do they sell?"
"American Patriots, things are moving faster than ever, and every day it seems like worse things are happening. Society is becoming crazy at a truly unprecedented rate, with a recent study showing that ninety percent of Americans believe we’re facing a mental health crisis right now. There were over 100,000 drug overdose deaths in 2022, a five-fold increase from 2002 and over double the amount of drug overdose-related deaths in 2015.
If this isn’t a good indication that American society is on the verge of collapse, what else is there? The fact that banks are closing, and there is a centralization effort by our central bank and government? Especially in the private mom-and-pop shop sector, businesses are finding that survival is nearly impossible."
“Here’s a Hubble Space Telescope composite photograph of two colliding galaxies in the constellation Corvus.
Each of the three books of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” ends with the same words: “the stars.” The Inferno concludes with distant stars glimpsed through the narrow exit of hell. “We emerged,” says the poet, “and saw the stars.” The poet’s journey through Purgatory ends on Earth’s highest mountain, with the heavens seemingly not so far away. He is “ready to ascend to the stars.” Finally, Dante looks down upon the stars from above, from the luminous realm of Paradise. He has experienced “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” The beauty of that final destination, the Empyrean Sphere that encloses the created universe in divine brilliance, taxes the poet’s powers of description:
“I saw light in the shape of a river
Flashing golden between two banks
Tinted in colors of marvelous spring.
Out of the stream came living sparks
Which settled on the flowers on every side
Like rubies ringed with gold…”
Nothing in Dante’s experience could have prepared him for the splendors of the heavens as revealed by the Hubble. The photograph of colliding galaxies in Corvus is a work of genius in the tradition of the “Divine Comedy” – imagination in service to humankind’s loftiest aspirations and longings.
In Dante’s time, astronomy was one of the seven liberal arts – with grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, and music – required of every student who aspired to a university degree. Of all the secular sciences, astronomy was deemed most likely to lead one to the contemplation of things divine. Yesterday’s Hubble pic made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, which is about as close to the divine as I ever get. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is based on the medieval astronomical conception of the world – a system of concentric spheres centered on the Earth and bounded just up there by the Empyrean.
In the Hubble photograph of colliding galaxies we see something akin to Dante’s paradisal vision, but it is not a cosmos centered on the Earth. Here are other Suns and other Earths being born, in prodigious numbers, massive stars destined to die soon as supernovas, and other less massive stars that will live long lives, perhaps evolving life or consciousness on their planets. We see in the Hubble photograph a universe of a fullness and dimension that makes Dante’s human-centered cosmos of concentric spheres seem like a dust mote in an immense cathedral.
Astronomy is no longer a required course of study in our universities, and it’s something of a shame. Who can look at the photograph of colliding galaxies and not be moved to rapture? An understanding of the size, age, and prodigality of the universe should be part of every liberal arts graduate’s intellectual furniture.”
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