Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/12/24
"Alert! 'Get Out Now' Canada Warns;
Biden Deploys Troops To Israel; French Troops Enter Ukraine"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, April 12, 2024
Jeremiah Babe, Our Dog Mimi Almost Died, Big Medical Bill; WW3 Could Start This Weekend"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/12/24
"Our Dog Mimi Almost Died, Big Medical Bill;
WW3 Could Start This Weekend"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Planetary nebula Abell 78 stands out in this colorful telescopic skyscape. In fact the colors of the spiky Milky Way stars depend on their surface temperatures, both cooler (yellowish) and hotter (bluish) than the Sun. But Abell 78 shines by the characteristic emission of ionized atoms in the tenuous shroud of material shrugged off from an intensely hot central star. The atoms are ionized, their electrons stripped away, by the central star's energetic but otherwise invisible ultraviolet light.
The visible blue-green glow of loops and filaments in the nebula's central region corresponds to emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms, surrounded by strong red emission from electrons recombining with hydrogen atoms. Some 5,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Cygnus, Abell 78 is about three light-years across. A planetary nebula like Abell 78 represents a very brief final phase in stellar evolution that our own Sun will experience... in about 5 billion years.”
"The Day Has Been So Full Of Fret And Care..."
“The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone. Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night’s heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but angels of God.”
- Jerome K. Jerome
"Warning: Israel’s Dangerous Game with Iran - Ukraine Joining NATO Spurs War With Russia"
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano, 4/12/24
John Mearsheimer, "Warning: Israel’s Dangerous Game with Iran -
Ukraine Joining NATO Spurs War With Russia"
Comments here:
"Will Much Of The Middle East Soon Be Turned Into 'A Pile Of Smoking, Radioactive Rubble?'”
"Will Much Of The Middle East Soon Be Turned
Into 'A Pile Of Smoking, Radioactive Rubble ?”
by Michael Snyder
"Iran was ready to launch its attack on Israel but decided to change or postpone it by a few days, likely after warnings from the Biden administration. Overnight, the official Iranian news agency Mehr posted on X that that Iran temporarily grounded all air activity over Tehran’s airspace starting from midnight due to “military maneuvers.” Mehr also shared a video showing missiles with the caption “Maybe tonight… Stay tuned.” The agency quickly deleted both items.
I think that the Iranians realize that if they strike Israeli territory there will be an overwhelming response from the IDF. And Joe Biden is promising “ironclad” support for Israel if the Iranians attack…"US president Joe Biden on Wednesday vowed that American support for Israel is ‘ironclad’, amid fears the Middle Eastern nation will soon be attacked by Iran.
‘As I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad. Let me say it again: ironclad. We’re going to do all we can to protect Israel security,’ Biden said at a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Biden’s top diplomat, Anthony Blinken, affirmed his words and told Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant on a phone call that the US would stand behind Israel if Iran decides to attack.
Does this mean that we will be at war with Iran the moment that Iranian missiles start hitting targets inside Israel? Because that is what it sounds like. I can understand how the possibility of war with the United States would make the Iranians think twice. But even though they may have hesitated, they are clearly not backing down yet.
On Thursday, Iranian leaders did confirm that they fully intend to “punish” Israel in the days ahead…"Tehran must retaliate for the deadly attack on its consular compound in Damascus last week because the U.N. Security Council failed to condemn the strike or take any action against Israel, Iran’s U.N. mission said in a statement posted Thursday on the X platform. “Had the U.N. Security Council condemned the Zionist regime’s reprehensible act of aggression on our diplomatic premises in Damascus and subsequently brought to justice its perpetrators, the imperative for Iran to punish this rogue regime might have been obviated,” the statement said."
So some sort of an attack is definitely coming. If Iran hits targets that are outside the land of Israel, that may not spark an all-out war in the region. But if Iran hits targets inside the land of Israel, that will literally push us to the brink of the unthinkable.
Earlier today, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio posted the following message on social media…"Iran wants to launch a large scale attack from their own territory against #Israel Israel will respond instantly with an even more severe counterattack inside of Iran. What happens next is the most dangerous Middle East moment since 1973."
I agree with his assessment except for one thing. I believe that what we are facing is far more dangerous than anything that we witnessed in 1973. One British news source is reporting that a war simulation that was “crafted by military and security experts” indicates that all-out war is likely if Iran starts hitting targets inside Israeli territory…"Iran and it’s terror proxies including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis all have powerful long-range, high-precision rockets which they use to hit key Israeli targets.
Israel hits back and is fighting off Iranian proxies on a frontline in Syria and Lebanon near its border while striking Iran by air. Tel Aviv appeals to the US several times for intervention but with no luck becomes isolated in its fight against Iran. According to the simulation, nuclear weapons are likely to be used as the conflict progresses…
Eventually it resorts to a non-lethal nuclear detonation in an attempt to make Iran surrender, which it does not. A desperate Israel eventually launches 50 nuclear weapons towards Iran, who unleashes its own nuke ambush against an air base with US troops. The war game simulation ends here with a conflict that would involve Syria, Lebanon, even Yemen and could reduce large parts of the Middle East to a pile of smoking, radioactive rubble."
In the entire recorded history of the world, we have never seen a war like this. Can you imagine the chaos that would erupt all over the globe if major cities in the Middle East were reduced to piles of “smoking, radioactive rubble”? Let us hope that the war simulation described above is not accurate. But without a doubt, we have entered a danger zone.
Once Iran and Israel start lobbing missiles at one another, there will be no turning back. For a long time, I have been warning my readers that an apocalyptic war in the Middle East would be coming. Now we are almost there.
My hope is that the Iranians will back down and that their response to Israel will turn out to be very weak. If that turns out to be the case, that could buy us a little bit more time. But one way or another, I believe that this is the year when the Middle East descends into chaos. So buckle up and hold on tight, because it appears that things are about to get really crazy."
o
Full screen recommended.
"Iran To Attack Israel With 100 Drones, Dozens Of Missiles,
U.S Takes Big Action As War Begins"
Times Of India, 4/12/24
"Recent developments in the Middle East have heightened concerns of a potential conflict, with major players engaging in diplomatic efforts to ease tensions. The US, Germany, and Turkey are among those urging Iran to reduce hostilities with Israel, while the US deploys its aircraft carrier Eisenhower closer to the region. As fears mount and countries issue travel warnings, the situation remains tense. Stay updated on this evolving situation."
Comments here:
"Thought..."
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
- Bertrand Russell
"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
- Thomas A. Edison.
"The Long Dark"
"The Long Dark"
by Chris Floyd
"We are in the Long Dark now. Both hope and despair are the enemies of our survival. We must live in the awareness that we might not see the light come back, without ceasing to work - with empathy, anger and knowledge - for its return.
We must be here, in the moment, experiencing its fullness (whatever its horrors or joys), yet be elsewhere, removed from the madness pouring in from every side, the avalanche of degradation. We must be here, now, but also in a future we can’t see or even imagine.
We must see that we are lost, with no clear way forward, no sureties or verities to cling to, no roots to anchor us, no structures within or without that will always keep their coalescence in the chaotic, surging fl
ow.
We must live in discrete moments of illumination and connection, pearls hung on an almost invisible string winding through the darkness. Striving, always striving, but not expecting; striving without hope, without despair, without any certainty at all as to the outcome, good or bad.
These are the conditions of the Long Dark, this is what we have to work with, this is where we find ourselves in the brief time we have in this vast, indifferent, astounding universe. As I once wrote long ago, quoting the old hymn: “Work, for the night is coming.”
So do we counsel fatalism, a dark, defeated surrender, a retreat into bitter, curdled quietude? Not a whit. We advocate action, positive action, unstinting action, doing the only thing that human beings can do, ever: Try this, try that, try something else again; discard those approaches that don't work, that wreak havoc, that breed death and cruelty; fight against everything that would draw us down again into our own mud; expect no quarter, no lasting comfort, no true security; offer no last word, no eternal truth, but just keep stumbling, falling, careening, backsliding, crawling toward the broken light.
And what is this "broken light"? Nothing more than a metaphor for the patches of understanding – awareness, attention, knowledge, connection – that break through our darkness and stupidity for a moment now and then. A light always fractured, under threat, shifting, found then lost again, always lost. For we are creatures steeped in imperfection, in breakage and mutation, tossed up – very briefly – from the boiling, chaotic crucible of Being, itself a ragged work in progress toward unknown ends, or rather, toward no particular end at all. Why should there be an "answer" in such a reality?
What matters is what works – what pulls us from our own darkness as far as possible, for as long as possible. Yet the truth remains that "what works" is always and forever only provisional – what works now, here, might not work there, then. What saves our soul today might make us sick tomorrow.
Thus all we can do is to keep looking, working, trying to clear a little more space for the light, to let it shine on our passions and our confusions, our anger and our hopes, informing and refining them, so that we can see each other better, for a moment – until death shutters all seeing forever."
ͦ
Full screen recommended.
Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"
“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”
“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”
by MN Gordon
“In 1976, economist Herbert Stein, father of Ben Stein, the economics professor in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, observed that U.S. government debt was on an unsustainable trajectory. He, thus, established Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Stein may have been right in theory. Yet the unsustainable trend of U.S. government debt outlasted his life. Herbert Stein died in 1999, several decades before the crackup. Those reading this may not be so lucky.
Sometimes the end of the world comes and goes, while some of us are still here. We believe our present episode of debt, deficits, and state sponsored economic destruction, is one of these times.. We’ll have more on this in just a moment. But first, let’s peer back several hundred years. There we find context, edification, and instruction.
In 1696, William Whiston, a protégé of Isaac Newton, wrote a book. It had the grandiose title, “A New Theory of the Earth from its Original to the Consummation of All Things.” In it he proclaimed, among other things, that the global flood of Noah had been caused by a comet. Mr. Whiston took his book very seriously. The good people of London took it very seriously too. Perhaps it was Whiston’s conviction. Or his great fear of comets. But, for whatever reason, it never occurred to Londoners that he was a Category 5 quack.
Like Neil Ferguson, and his mathematical biology cohorts at Imperial College, London, Whiston’s research filled a void. Much like today’s epidemiological models, the science was bunk. Nonetheless, the results supplied prophecies of the apocalypse to meet a growing demand. It was just a matter of time before Whiston’s research would cause trouble…
Judgement Day: In 1736, William Whiston crunched some data and made some calculations. He projected these calculations out and saw the future. And what he witnessed scared him mad. He barked. He ranted. He foamed at the mouth to anyone who would listen. Pretty soon he’d stirred up his neighbors with a prophecy that the world would be destroyed on October 13th of that year when a comet would collide with the earth.
Jonathan Swift, in his work, “A True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London on a Rumour of the Day of Judgment,” quoted Whiston: “Friends and fellow-citizens, all speculative science is at an end: the period of all things is at hand; on Friday next this world shall be no more. Put not your confidence in me, brethren; for tomorrow morning, five minutes after five, the truth will be evident; in that instant the comet shall appear, of which I have heretofore warned you. As ye have heard, believe. Go hence, and prepare your wives, your families, and friends, for the universal change.”
Clergymen assembled to offer prayers. Churches filled to capacity. Rich and paupers alike feared their judgement. Lawyers worried about their fate. Judges were relieved they were no longer lawyers. Teetotalers got smashed. Drunks got sober. Bankers forgave their debtors. Criminals, to be executed, expressed joy.
The wealthy gave their money to beggars. Beggars gave it back to the wealthy. Several rich and powerful gave large donations to the church; no doubt, reserving first class tickets to heaven. Many ladies confessed to their husbands that one or more of their children were bastards. Husbands married their mistresses. And on and on…
The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, had to officially deny this prediction to ease the public consternation. But it did little good. Crowds gathered at Islington, Hampstead, and the surrounding fields, to witness the destruction of London, which was deemed the “beginning of the end.” Then, just like Whiston said, a comet appeared. Prayers were made. Deathbed confessions were shared. And at the moment of maximum fear, something remarkable happened: the world didn’t end. The comet did not collide with earth. It was merely a near miss.
The experience of Whiston, and his pseudoscience prophecy, shows that predictions of the end of the world come and go while people still remain. Sometimes the fallout of these predictions, and the foolishness they provoke, is limited. Other times the foolishness they provoke leads to catastrophe. Here’s what we mean…
“In the long run we are all dead,” said 20th Century economist and Fabian socialist, John Maynard Keynes. This was Keynes rationale for why governments should borrow from the future to fund economic growth today. Of course, politicians love an academic theory that gives them cover to intervene in the economy. This is especially so when it justifies spending other people’s money to buy votes. Keynesian economics, and in particular, counter-cyclical stimulus, does just that.
U.S. politicians have attempted to borrow and spend the nation to prosperity for the last 80 years. Over the past decade, the Federal Reserve has aggressively printed money to fund Washington’s epic borrowing binge. Fed Chair Jay Powell confirmed that the Fed will pursue policies of dollar destruction to, somehow, print new jobs.
The world as it was once known – where a dollar was as good as gold – has come and gone. Today, in life after the end of that world, we are witnessing the illusion of wealth, erected by four generations of borrowing and spending, crumble before our eyes. Moreover, contrary to Keynes, in the long run we are not all dead. In fact, in the long run we are all very much alive. And we are all living with the compounding consequences of shortsighted economic policies.”
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 4/12/24"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 4/12/24"
Inflation Everywhere, War Everywhere, CV19 Vax Death Everywhere
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"The latest inflation numbers came in this week, and it says inflation is everywhere. Gasoline is up 6.3%, the Consumer Price Index is up 3.5%, rent, electricity, water and sewer are all up at least 5% and the Fed is realizing it is not cutting interest rates. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says you might even get a rate increase. Bidenomics = inflation.
Where is the inflation coming from? War spending in the hundreds of billions of dollars in Ukraine and more being spent every day so we can have war everywhere. Then, there are the billions of bucks spent on taking care of illegal immigrants and poor Biden Administration policies that we would not have if he was not cheated in in 2020. Yes, I said Biden was cheated in, and the evidence is overwhelming and obvious. Let’s stop pretending Biden is legit. The cheating is why so many things are screwed up in the world, and they are doing it again, according to Tucker Carlson who summed it up perfectly and succinctly last week. Listen to this brilliant description of the nationwide cheating in 2024 for yourself, and you will agree.
Top virologist Geert Vander Bossche is warning of an “imminent tsunami of death among the highly vaccinated.” Vander Bossche says this will replace the huge surge of cancers caused by the CV19 vax and will be replaced by an even bigger surge of death. You can couple that with the warnings about “Bird Flu” taking off and transmitting to humans. This is just in time for the World Health Organization (WHO) to execute its plan to take over the world in the next pandemic and cancel all your rights. There is more in the 56-minute newscast."
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these
stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 4/12/24.
"Reality Avoidance"
"Reality Avoidance"
by Morris Berman
"It’s quite amazing how the news is endlessly about nonsense. Filler, is what I call it. Very little of this has anything to do with reality, which the Mainstream Media and the American people avoid like the plague. What then is real?
1. The empire is in decline; every day, life here gets a little bit worse; all our institutions are corrupt to varying degrees; and there is no turning this situation around.
2. A crucial factor in this decline and irreversibility is the low level of intelligence of the American people. Americans are not only dumb; they are positively antagonistic toward the life of the mind.
3. Relations of power and money determine practically everything. The 3 wealthiest Americans own as much as the bottom 50% of the population, and this tendency will get worse over time.
4. The value system of the country, and its citizens, is fundamentally wrong-headed. It amounts to little more than hustling, selfishness, narcissism, and a blatant disregard for anyone but oneself. There is a kind of cruelty, or violence, deep in the American soul; many foreign observers and writers have commented on this. Americans are bitter, depressed, and angry, and the country offers very little by way of community or empathy.
5. Along with this is the support of meaningless wars and imperial adventures on the part of most of the population. That we drone-murder unarmed civilians on a weekly basis is barely on the radar screen of the American mind. In essence, the nation has evolved into a genocidal war machine run by a plutocracy and cheered on by mindless millions.
Most Americans hide from these depressing, even horrific, realities by what passes for ‘the news’, but also by means of alcohol, opioids, TV, cellphones, suicide, prescription drugs, workaholism, and spectator sports, to name but a few. This stuffing of the Void is probably our primary activity. In a word, we are eating ourselves alive, and only a tiny fraction of the population recognizes this."
o
Read it and weep...
"Morris Berman On A Dumbed-down America"
by RoryLitwin
Excerpt: "I am sharing a passage from Morris Berman’s book from a few years ago, "The Twilight of American Culture." Berman has generously agreed to let me share this passage, which is about the deplorable state of ignorance of the American people. The facts and data in this passage are a bit old, but all signs suggest that things have gotten worse since then, not better. "The Twilight of American Culture," pp. 33-40.
Turning to Item (c),The collapse of American intelligence, we find a picture that is unambiguously bleak. The following data are going to seem invented; please be assured, they are not.
– Forty-two percent of American adults cannot locate Japan on a world map, and according to Garrison Keillor (National Public Radio, 22 March 1997,) another survey revealed that nearly 15 percent couldn’t locate the United States (!). Keillor remarked that this was like not being able to “grab your rear end with both hands,” and he suggested that we stop being so assiduous, on the eve of elections, about trying to get out the vote.
– A survey taken in October 1996 revealed that one in ten voters did not know who the Republican or Democratic nominees for president were. This is particularly sobering when one remembers that one of the questions traditionally asked in psychiatric wards as part of the test for sanity is “Who is the president of the United States?”
– Very few Americans understand the degree to which corporations have taken over their lives. But according to a poll taken by Time magazine, nearly 70 percent of them believe in the existence of angels; and another study turned up the fact that 50 percent believe in the presence of UFOs and space aliens on earth, while a Gallup poll (reported on CNN, 19 August 1997) revealed that 71 percent believe that the U.S. government is engaged in a cover-up about the subject. More than 30 percent believe they have made contact with the dead.
– A 1995 article in the New York Times reported the results of a survey that revealed that 40 percent of American adults (this could be upward of 70 million people) did not know that Germany was our enemy in World War II. A Roper survey conducted in 1996 revealed that 84 percent of American college seniors cannot understand a newspaper editorial in any newspaper, and a U.S. Department of Education survey of 22,000 students in 1995 revealed that 50 percent were unaware of the Cold War, and that 60 percent had no idea of how the United States came into existence.
– At one point in 1996, Jay Leno invited a number of high school students to be on his television program and asked them to complete famous quotations from major American documents, such as the Gettysburg address and the Declaration of Independence. Their response in each case was to stare at him blankly. As a kind of follow-up, on his show of 3 June 1999, Leno screened a video of interviews he had conducted a few days before at a university graduation ceremony. He did not identify the institution in question; he told his TV audience only that the students he had interviewed included graduate students as well as undergraduates. The group included men, women, and people of color. Leno posed eight questions, as follows:
1. Who designed the first American flag? Answers included Susan B. Anthony (born in 1820,) and “Betsy Ford.”
2. What were the Thirteen Colonies free from, after the American Revolution? One student said, “The East Coast.”
3. What was the Gettysburg Address? One student replied, “An address to Getty;” another said, “I don’t know the exact address.”
4. Who invented the lightbulb? Answers included Thomas Jefferson
5. What is three squared? One student said, “Twenty-seven;” another said, “Six.”
6. What is the boiling point of water? Answers included 115 degrees?
7. How long does it take the earth to rotate once on its axis? The two answers Leno received here were “Light years” (which is a measure of distance, not time,) and “Twenty-four axises [sic].”
8. How many moons does the earth have? The student questioned said she had taken astronomy a few years back and had gotten an A in the course but that she couldn’t remember the correct answer.
It is important to note that not a single student interviewed had the correct answer to any of these questions. Leno’s comment on this pathetic debacle says it all: “And the Chinese are stealing secrets from us?”
– A 1998 survey by the National Constitution Center revealed that only 41 percent of American teenagers can name the three branches of government, but 59 percent can name the Three Stooges. Only 2 percent can name the chief justice of the Supreme Court; 26 percent were unable to identify the vice president. In the early 1990s, the National Assessment of Education Progress reported that 50 percent of seventeen year olds could not express 9/100 as a percentage, and nearly 50 percent couldn’t place the Civil War in the correct half century–data that the San Antonio Express News characterized as evidence of the “steady lobotomizing” of American culture. In another study of seventeen year olds, only 4 percent could read a bus schedule, and only 12% could arrange six common fractions in order of size.
– Ignorance of the most elementary scientific facts on the part of American adults is nothing less than breathtaking. In a survey conducted for the National Science Foundation in October 1995, 56 percent of those polled said that electrons were larger than atoms; 63 percent stated that the earliest human beings lived at the same time as the dinosaurs (a chronological error of more than 60 million years;) 53 percent said that the earth revolved around the sun in either a day or a month (that is to say, only 47 percent understood that the correct answer is one year;) and 91 percent were unable to state what a molecule was. A random telephone survey of more than two thousand adults, conducted by Northern Illinois University, revealed that 21 percent believed that the sun revolved around the earth, with an additional 7 percent saying that they did not know which revolved around which.
– Of the 158 countries in the United Nations, the United States ranks forty-ninth in literacy. Roughly 60 percent of the adult population reads as much as one book a year, where book is defined to include Harlequin romances and self-help manuals. Something like 120 million adults are illiterate or read at no better than a fifth-grade level. Among readers age twenty-one to thirty-five, 67 percent regularly read a daily newspaper in 1965, as compared with 31 percent in 1998.
– In a telephone survey conducted in 1998, 12 percent of Americans, asked who the wife of the biblical Noah was, said “Joan of Arc” (reported on National Public Radio, 13 June 1998.)
– In 1997, as a hoax, the attorney general of the state of Missouri submitted a proposal to an international academic accrediting agency (not identified) to establish an institution he named Eastern Missouri Business College, which would grant Ph.D’s in marine biology and genetic engineering, as well as in business. The faculty would include, inter alia, Moe Howard, Jerome Howard, and Larry Fine – that is, The Three Stooges; and the proposed motto on the college seal, roughly translated from the Latin, was Education Is for the Birds. The response? Academic accreditation was granted."
Complete article is here. Read it and weep...
o
o
As the great Mogombo Guru said, "We're so freakin' doomed!"
And that's why...
Dan, I Allegedly, "A Bad Idea Travels Fast"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 4/12/24
"A Bad Idea Travels Fast"
"We are seeing all of these ideas that originated in California travel across the country. These are expensive bad trends. The next one of these is a ridiculous restaurant added to your bill This includes insurance fees, venue, fees, maintenance fees, and a myriad of other junk fees."
Comments here:
"So Simple Even A Congressman Could Understand"
"So Simple Even A Congressman Could Understand"
The feds will owe so much interest that they won’t be able to pay it.
Investors see a reckoning coming; they demand higher interest
rates to cover the risk, raising the feds’ interest cost even more.
by Bill Bonner
Dublin, Ireland - "Yesterday we had just gone to press when we got a news flash from colleague Dan Denning in our Laramie research hub: "The Treasury Department says the US Government ran a $1 trillion deficit in the first half of the fiscal year. According to the figure from the Monthly Statement of the Treasury, total Defense spending for the first half of the year was $433 billion. Net interest expense was the fourth largest expense at $429 billion (Social Security was first at $715 billion and Medicare/Medicaid second at $449 billion)."
Dan comments: "You can have your guns. And you can have your prescription drugs. But in America 2024, I'm not sure how much longer you can have both. It all comes with rising prices, rising rates, and seemingly no way out. The problem is so simple even a Congressman could understand it. The feds spend too much money. The difference between what they get in tax revenues and what they spend in boondoggles, bombs, and patent medicines must be covered either by borrowing or ‘printing’ money. Both come with suicide tablets.
“The Fed is caught between a rock and a hard place,” says Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens. If the feds borrow the money, they need to pay interest. The more they borrow, the more interest they pay. Unless they stop spending, they need to borrow more and more. Sooner or later, the feds will owe so much interest that they won’t be able to pay it. Investors see a reckoning coming; they demand higher interest rates to cover the risk, raising the feds’ interest expense even further.
Prohibitively Expensive: Historically, the point-of-no-return comes when government debt reaches 130% of GDP. This is not an arbitrary number. It’s when the feds lose control. And it could come as early as the end of next year. That was the conclusion reached by an AI when it was given IMF numbers from 2001 to 2024 and asked to project them into the future.
Here’s what happens. At 5% interest, on debt equal to 130% of GDP, last year the feds would have paid $1.6 trillion in interest - or a third of tax revenues. Already, tax revenues only cover 75% of federal spending. That’s an operating loss equal to a third of income; the feds lose 33 cents on every dollar of revenue. And every year, the loss increases as interest costs increase. Soon, it becomes prohibitively expensive. When that happens, the politicians typically resort to printing more money. That’s when the misery arrives. Prices rise. People get poorer.
Typically, too, inflation undermines key institutions, notably the government itself - leading to political and social chaos as well as widespread poverty. Even the earnest, mainstream media has begun to notice the problem. Here’s Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times: "All this threatens to create a vicious circle in which high perceptions of risk raise interest rates above likely growth rates, thereby making fiscal positions less sustainable and keeping risk premiums high. At some point, surely, Stein’s law would bite: investor resistance to further rises in debt would jump and then monetisation, inflation, financial repression and a global monetary mess would ensue.
The IMF blog argues that, “first and foremost, countries should start to gradually and credibly rebuild fiscal buffers and ensure the long-term sustainability of their sovereign debt”. Right. Rebuild those ‘buffers.’ ‘Ensure the long-term sustainability of their sovereign debt.’ Blah. Blah. Get right on it.
What they really need to do... the only thing they can do... is the very thing they don’t want to do - cut spending. Drastically. If it is true that the US spends $1.33 for every dollar of revenue, it has to cut 33 cents to get to break even. That’s the equivalent of about $1.5 trillion from the federal budget. Since most of what the feds spend is unnecessary, that should be easy to do. But politically, it is almost impossible. Every dollar of spending goes into someone’s pocket. And that someone is politically powerful, otherwise the dollar wouldn’t have gotten there in the first place. Getting it out of his pocket will be a real struggle. On the other hand, if the money keeps flowing at the same rate a disaster is almost guaranteed.
Prepare for Battle: In this situation, a tough businessman would gird his loins, put the knife between his teeth and prepare for battle. His back to the wall, he would do what he had to do to reduce expenses... or go out of business. But how does a modern democracy - with all its pressure groups, constituents, lobbyists, deadhead voters and jackass opinion mongers - make that kind of radical change?
Democracy is supposed to be the best form of government, because it adapts to changing circumstances and is able to switch leaders as necessary. Is it true? Has a democracy ever faced this kind of crisis? Has it ever done the right thing? Let’s take a look... tune in on Monday."
o
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you
were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
"All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots,
and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity."
"...the smallest minds and the selfishest souls
and the cowardliest hearts that God makes."
"The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a
thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether -
Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there."
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly
native American criminal class except Congress."
"Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can."
- Mark Twain
o
The best little whorehouse, well, anywhere...
Too bad the jokes on US...
Jim Kunstler, "The Beauty Parlor’s Full of Sailors and the Circus is in Town"
"The Beauty Parlor’s Full of Sailors
and the Circus is in Town"
by Jim Kunstler
“They have tried to solve a wide range of insoluble problems,
from the weather to poverty to viruses, and now they will attempt to solve us.”
- Eugyppius
"This is that part of the movie where the hero - you - tumbles off the cliff on Kong Island in a lightning storm with a canyon full of tarantulas down below where you’ll soon be landing. I know, not a pretty picture. The cliff is our country’s financial quandary; the lightning is us getting sucked directly into war; and the tarantula pit below is the emerging peril of Covid vaccine injury and death coming on hard, like your landing.
Gold and silver are vaulting up suddenly like nobody’s business (literally). This may be fun to see if you are sitting on a pile, even a small pile of the stuff. But to everybody else it’s a signal that something is messed up in the complex engine of the economy. You know, of course, that our money is debt. So, debt is the fuel that drives that engine. Debt is a promise to pay back money with interest to take advantage of the time-value of money. The time-value of money means it’s better to have the money now (to keep the engine running) than to wait until your work produces money (if it even can).
The trouble is, debt loses its credibility if there is no plausible way of paying it back, or even just to keep paying the interest. That’s exactly what is happening now. Everybody can see that the US government can’t pay the interest on its debt, which is Treasury bonds, notes, and bills (from long duration to short). That debt is running at well over $1-trillion a year. That’s a thousand billion, which is a thousand million, altogether a million million. See, it’s impossible to grok how more than a trillion dollars gets produced in an economy based on selling fried chicken nuggets and streamed movies to people with no jobs.
When the Treasury holds an auction on a new issue of bonds (needed to pay off the interest on old bonds) and nobody shows up to buy because they doubt its ability to pay interest on the new paper, our country’s debt becomes worthless. As a last resort, the Federal Reserve swoops in and buys that worthless paper by creating “money” on its computer. That “money” goes out into the economy. The Fed pretends to get paid interest. It’s all fakery, a swindle. It’s like putting water in the gas tank of your engine. You know that the engine is going to throw a rod. When it does, it’ll be such a shock that the vehicle it’s running in is liable to hit a bridge abutment or something else hard. That’s what tumbling off the cliff is like.
The dopes running US foreign policy are so foolishly obsessed with taunting Russia (“poking the bear”), that they can’t give up their sponsorship of the war in Ukraine, which Ukraine is losing because they never had the mojo for the fight. That should have been obvious, but for some reason our “best-and-brightest” overlooked that. No amount of free weaponry and ammo can make up for the fact that Ukraine has run out of young men to pointlessly get shredded by Russian artillery. (600,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers now . -CP)Russia is unwilling to get rolled by NATO and the US in a part of the world Russia has controlled for centuries. Yet, “Joe Biden” keeps hinting about sending America’s tranny army there, and even gearing up the military draft for the nose-ring and blue hair generation. Good luck with that.
Nor does “JB” exercise any control over what Israel does over in the Bible Lands. Bibi gonna do what Bibi gonna do. Israel can’t be persuaded that the current war is not a struggle for its existence. As Scott Adams points out, Israel has decided to pawn off its Holocaust cred in order to treat its enemies as harshly as possible, so as not to get wiped off the map. Israel has treated the Palestinians very harshly. (The October 7 Hamas raid was pretty darn harsh, too.) In any case, world opinion went all rancid on Israel. That hasn’t stopped them. Now Israel faces its ultimate foe, Persia, a.k.a. Iran, these days. Persia has a big army and a lot of weapons, and all sorts of wing-men in the neighborhood... as a practical matter, most of Islam right now. This week, Persia made noises about an imminent attack on Israel. Didn’t happen so far.
Let’s get real on Islam. Its core principle is to exterminate the humans on this planet who are not of Islam. Islam has been pissed-off at Western Civ since the Crusades, its animus renewed in 1683, when Islam’s advance into Europe was halted at the gates of Vienna, and then again in modern times when Islam got pushed around because Western Civ wanted its oil. Islam is overrunning Europe again and penetrating the USA through our southern border. Islam means business. It wants to wreck us, kill us, and take our stuff. And it dearly, sorely, wants to deep-six Israel, which Islam contemptuously refer to as “the Zionist entity,” as if it were some crypto-insectile space alien.
America (and Europe, too) wants to play this both ways: to grudgingly help Israel survive while at the same time pretending not to notice Islam’s true aims. Looks like Israel has decided to go for broke on this one whether we ride to rescue or not. Israel may have to go “Mad Dog” in its neighborhood. They may lose this thing anyway. The rest of the world will affect to hate them for it no matter how it ends. Meanwhile, all over Europe the Islamic birth-rate way outpaces the Euro peoples’ birth rate. And how many angry, determined “sleepers” has Islam snuck into the USA the past several years across “Joe Biden’s” open border. It’s a bit disturbing to contemplate. Also, never under-estimate the damage that can be wreaked with small arms against “a pitiful, helpless, giant,” as Dick Nixon once described our country in an earlier time of distress. There’s your lightning storm.
At the bottom of the cliff is the vaxxed-up population of the world waiting for their spike protein infested bodies and dysregulated immune systems to enter fatal break down. Many already have injured organs, hearts, brains, blood, ovaries, etc. Many others will get in trouble when a more efficient Covid-19 mutation goes lethal on them. The public health authorities are desperately trying to conceal the damage. Some organized groups of people are clamoring for the data on vaccine injury and death from places like the CDC, only to discover that the public health agencies not only won’t disclose it but probably avoided even collecting it over fear of what it would show. Horror creeps on little tarantula feet.
This is how the movie is going as of April. Spring is hardly fledged. Portent looms at every compass point. You’re in a tight spot. (We all are.) In modern times - and I mean going back to the first twinges of the Enlightenment - faith in the people running things has never been lower. It’s still an election year, har har! It makes you wonder if this movie is actually a comedy."
The full name of Kunstler's website is so absolutely true...
Gregory Mannarino, "Alert! A Major False Flag Event Is Now Imminent!"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/12/24
"Alert! A Major False Flag Event Is Now Imminent!"
Comments here:
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Canadian Prepper, "Gerald Celente: Alert! World War 3 Has Begun! Iran Locked And Loaded; Banks Will Crash!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/11/24
"Gerald Celente: Alert! World War 3 Has Begun!
Iran Locked And Loaded; Banks Will Crash!"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "Everything Is A Big Fat Lie; Economy Is Collapsing Faster Every Day"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/11/24
"Everything Is A Big Fat Lie;
Economy Is Collapsing Faster Every Day"
Comments here:
Judge Napolitano, "Intel Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 4/11/24
"Intel Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern"
Comments here:
"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 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”
"Making Your Best Guess"
"Making Your Best Guess"
by Arthur Silber
"We are not gods, and we are not omniscient. We cannot foretell the future with certainty. Most often, cultural and political changes are terribly complex. It can be notoriously difficult to predict exactly where a trend will take us, and we can be mistaken. We do the best we can: if we wish to address certain issues seriously, we study history, and we read everything that might shed light on our concerns. We consult what the best thinkers of our time and of earlier times have said and written. We challenge everyone's assumptions, including most especially our own. That last is often very difficult. If we care enough, we do our best to disprove our own case. In that way, we find out how strong our case is, and where its weaknesses may lie.
Barring extraordinary circumstances, we cannot be certain that a particular development represents a critical turning point at the time it occurs. If we dare to say, "This is the moment the battle was lost," only future events will prove whether we were correct. We do the best we can, based on our understanding of how similar events have unfolded in the past, and in light of our understanding of the underlying principles in play. We can be wrong. "
"Emergency Alert! War Begins In Hours Not Days, Iran Prepares Massive Attack"
Full screen recommended.
Redacted News, 4/11/24
"Emergency Alert! War Begins In Hours Not Days,
Iran Prepares Massive Attack"
Comments here:
The Poet: W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"
"September 1, 1939"
"Defenseless
under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out
wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."
- W.H. Auden
○
"On September 1, 1939, the German army under Adolf Hitler launched an invasion of Poland that triggered the start of World War II (though by 1939 Japan and China were already at war). The battle for Poland only lasted about a month before a Nazi victory. But the invasion plunged the world into a war that would continue for almost six years and claim the lives of tens of millions of people."
○
And here we are, on the brink of a nuclear World War III,
having learned... nothing...
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