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So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, April 19, 2024
“Sigmund Wollman’s Reality Test”
“Sigmund Wollman’s Reality Test”
by
Robert Fulghum
“In the summer of 1959, at the Feather River Inn near the town of Blairsden in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. A resort environment. And I, just out of college, have a job that combines being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping out with the horse-wrangling at the stables. The owner/manager is Italian-Swiss, with European notions about conditions of employment. He and I do not get along. I think he’s a fascist who wants pleasant employees who know their place, and he thinks I’m a good example of how democracy can be carried too far. I’m twenty-two and pretty free with my opinions, and he’s fifty-two and has a few opinions of his own. One week the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every single day. Two wieners, a mound of sauerkraut, and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury, the cost of meals was deducted from our check. I was outraged.
On Friday night of that awful week, I was at my desk job around 11:00 P.M., and the night auditor had just come on duty. I went into the kitchen to get a bite to eat and saw notes to the chef to the effect that wieners and sauerkraut are on the employee menu for two more days.
That tears it. I quit! For lack of a better audience, I unloaded on the night auditor, Sigmund Wollman.
I declared that I have had it up to here; that I am going to get a plate of wieners and sauerkraut and go and wake up the owner and throw it on him.
I am sick and tired of this crap and insulted and nobody is going to make me eat wieners and sauerkraut for a whole week and make me pay for it and who does he think he is anyhow and how can life be sustained on wieners and sauerkraut and this is un-American and I don’t like wieners and sauerkraut enough to eat it one day for God’s sake and the whole hotel stinks anyhow and the horses are all nags and the guests are all idiots and I’m packing my bags and heading for Montana where they never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut and wouldn’t feed that stuff to the pigs. Something like that. I’m still mad about it.
I raved on this way for twenty minutes, and needn’t repeat it all here. You get the drift. My monologue was delivered at the top of my lungs, punctuated by blows on the front desk with a fly-swatter, the kicking of chairs, and much profanity. A call to arms, freedom, unions, uprisings, and the breaking of chains for the working masses.
As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman, the night auditor, sat quietly on his stool, smoking a cigarette, watching me with sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He’s got good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin, coughed a lot. He liked being alone at the night job – gave him intellectual space, gave him peace and quiet, and, even more, he could go into the kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to – all the wieners and sauerkraut he wanted. To him, a feast. More than that, there’s nobody around at night to tell him what to do. In Auschwitz he dreamed of such a time. The only person he sees at work is me, the nightly disturber of his dream. Our shifts overlap for an hour. And here I am again. A one-man war party at full cry.
“Fulchum, are you finished?”
“No. Why?”
Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know what’s wrong with you? It’s not wieners and kraut and it’s not the boss and it’s not the chef and it’s not this job.”
“So what’s wrong with me?”
“Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don’t know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night.” In a gesture combining dismissal and blessing, he waved me off to bed.
Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes with a truth so hard. Years later I heard a Japanese Zen Buddhist priest describe what the moment of enlightenment was like and I knew exactly what he meant. There in that late-night darkness of the Feather River Inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked my butt and opened a window in my mind.
For thirty years now, in times of stress and strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I’m ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks: “Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?”
I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference. Good night, Sig.”
"The Most Frightening Thing..."
“Murderers are not monsters, they're men.
And that's the most frightening thing about them.”
- Alice Sebold, "The Lovely Bones"
o
“Do you believe,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?”
“Do you believe,” said Martin, “that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?”
- Voltaire
"The Hell Of It Is..."
“You go up to a man, and you say, “How are things going, Joe?” and he says, “Oh fine, fine… couldn’t be better.” And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
"Israel Attacks Iran, Escalating The World Toward A Nuclear Apocalypse "
"Israel Attacks Iran, Escalating
The World Toward A Nuclear Apocalypse "
by Mike Adams
"The situation in the Middle East is now escalating even more as Israel launches a new attack against Iran, reportedly striking multiple targets on Iranian territory. Despite the efforts of the White House to convince Israel to stop escalating the situation, Netanyahu and his war officials are dead set on provoking a full-scale war with Iran in the hopes of dragging the United States into regional warfare. Today, I present a list of 7 things that will happen once Israel launches its first nuclear weapon. Get ready to hear the term "fallout" a lot more, including discussion about the food supply. There will soon be "pre-fallout" food which will command a premium in price, and then there will be "post-fallout" food that will always be suspected of being slightly radioactive. Difficult times are coming for the entire world if Israel's provocations aren't stopped."
View full video here:
Jim Kunstler, "Batshit Crazy America"
"Batshit Crazy America"
by Jim Kunstler
“Look at what all these white patriarchs built.
Without pay. In their spare time. Anonymously.”
- Jordan Peterson on “X”
"Before the saints come marching in, the human archetypes strut down the avenue in their revealing regalia. Do you know why the archetypal batshit crazy women of the Democratic Party adore “Joe Biden?” I’ll tell you: because he represents perfectly and exactly the “patriarchy” they revile in his floridly comic senescence. “Joe Biden” is the patriarchy disabled, feeble, feckless, impotent, and reduced to inanity. He would be pitiful if the patriarchy itself were not so contemptible. This is exactly how the batshit crazy women want it to look.
Do you wonder why “progressive” (i.e. batshit crazy) elite class women seem so unperturbed about the conspicuous number of rapes committed by “newcomers,” as they style illegal border-jumpers these days, who are by an overwhelming percentage “military-age men”? Because, having functionally transformed the ranks of American men into eunuchs, they relish the arrival of so many wild and lustful fellows on the scene, as long as post the imagined bodice-ripping exploits they can be dominated and domesticated — turned into so many swimming pool cleaners and busboys to be ordered around.
Of course, much of that archetypal psychodrama is only played out in the batshit crazy mind of batshit crazy women; for the sake of decorum it is never acted-out. The lurid, shameful fantasies are instead displaced onto Donald Trump, the archetypal “Big Daddy” who so insolently evaded the castration shears of Hillary Clinton — with the help of Russian arch-rapist “Putin” — and keeps on coming at the batshit-crazy women like Jason Voorhees, the psycho-killer in the Friday the 13th horror series (Qu’est-ce que c’est, ladies?)
Proof of Mr. Trump’s rapey-ness has been finally and formally declared in the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial. It’s certified, you see, though the trial itself was a joke of performative pretense. All you really need is a cast of characters, including the judge, Lewis Kaplan, who are sufficiently deranged and degenerate to carry out the performance.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James was up next to attempt the financial castration of Mr. Trump with an artfully concocted civil case that magically transformed a normal real estate transaction into a victimless fraud (say, what?), prompting the Rumpelstiltskin-like Judge Arthur Engoron to declare an unprecedented cash penalty of $354-million, designed to enable the confiscation and forced sale of Mr. Trump’s buildings.
That hasn’t quite worked yet, and may never work, given how appeals courts up to SCOTUS might view the malicious prosecution based on Ms. James’s repeated campaign promise to... pin something on Trump. Batshit crazy “progressives” have managed to not notice how inconsistent with American legal precedent this case was - because they held all the levers of power in New York State: governorship, legislature, and AG’s office, and their power to do whatever they liked was all that mattered.
For the moment Judge Juan Merchan presides over Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s fake case of 34 clerical misdemeanors (past the statute of limitations on them), repurposed as felonies committed for the intention of breaking some federal election law (unspecified). Last time I checked, county courts have no jurisdiction over federal law, most particularly unspecified federal law, which is to say no law at all. The question nobody has asked or answered is: what is the flaw in our system of jurisprudence that allows such an insane and preposterous case to play out so harmfully? I can only suppose that this is what happens when ethics and moral codes are brutally excised from the larger culture that law is but one part of.
It is the way of Homo sapiens that moral codes derive generally from the supervision of fathers in the upbringing of human young and, later on, as children develop into adults, these codes are archetypally re-enacted and enforced by men in the greater social matrix. Why? Because it requires a strong sense of boundaries. Boundaries are the essence of the “patriarchy.” Remove men from the scene, or castrate them politically, and you are sure to end up with a problem knowing right from wrong. We’re apparently subject now to the misrule of women with boundary problems who, for one reason or another, rebelled against Daddy and never got over it. It’s a peculiar irony - so far unexplicated by the hierophants of social theory — that the more affluent and successful Daddy was, the more he was hated for it by his female offspring.
The result of all that is the Democratic Party of our time as run by the batshit crazy women, fearful of sex and its consequence (babies), paradoxically subject to biological promptings and unable to find suitable mates among the men they’ve turned into eunuchs of one sort or another; resentful of the dull managerial jobs that have replaced the anathematized “jobs” of motherhood; filled with rage and revenge fantasies which, because of their boundary problems, have now extended to willing the destruction of our country. It’s an uninviting view of what’s happened to us, but there it is, like so much meat on the table."
Dan, I Allegedly, "Times Are Tough - You Won’t Believe This"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 4/19/24
"Times Are Tough - You Won’t Believe This"
Comments here:
"Wars And Rumors Of War: The Middle East Crisis"
Full screen recommended.
Vantage with Palki Sharma, 4/19/24
"Israel Attacks Iran, Targets Military Base"
"US officials confirmed that Israel launched missile strikes against Iran today (April 19, 2024). Iranian media outlets reported that multiple explosions were heard near an Iranian military base in the central city of Isfahan. Major airports in Iran were initially closed and flights were diverted. Israel also struck Syria and Iraq. In response to Israel's latest strikes, an Iranian official said that there are "no plans for immediate retaliation against Israel." As tensions continue to escalate in West Asia, the international community is calling for de-escalation and "calmer heads to prevail". UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that "it is high time to stop the dangerous cycle of retaliation in the Middle East." Palki Sharma tells you more."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Times Of India, AM 4/19/24
"'Destructive': Iranians React To Israeli Airstrike;
Tehran Vows Revenge But 'Not Immediately'"
"Tensions soar as Iran reels from reported Israeli strikes on its nuclear site, leaving Iranians in panic and calling for peace amid fears of escalating conflict. With conflicting reports emerging and the specter of an all-out war looming, the region braces for what could be a critical turning point."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, AM 4/19/24
"'Hezbollah Will Go To War If...':
Iran-backed Lebanese Group Threatens Israel"
"Hezbollah has threatened to wage a war on Israel if the IDF attacks the Iran-backed group first. Hezbollah's second-in-command, Naim Qassem, said, "If Israel attacks us and aggresses us, then we will definitely respond. If they escalate, we will escalate." The fresh threat comes amid heightened tensions between Israel and Iran in the Middle East. Early morning, explosions were heard in Iran's Isfahan province. U.S. officials claim that they were heard due to Israel's retaliatory missile strikes on Iran to avenge the weekend missile and drone barrage from Tehran. However, there has been no official confirmation."
Comments here:
Hezbollah has over 100,000 extremely well trained and equipped professional soldiers, battle hardened after 10 years of participating in the Syrian civil war, with enormous artillery resources. According to Col. Douglas Macgregor they have 200,000 missiles. They will crush the Israeli Occupation Force in a war...Israel will cease to exist.
Gregory Mannarino, "Take Action And Prepare For Anything, Because It's Coming"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/19/24
"Take Action And Prepare For Anything,
Because It's Coming"
Comments here:
"If The US Doesn't Pull On The Leash Of The Mad Dogs In Tel Aviv It's Going To Escalate"
George Galloway MP, 4/19/24
"If The US Doesn't Pull On The Leash Of
The Mad Dogs In Tel Aviv It's Going To Escalate"
If the Israeli regime strikes Iran, Iran will strike back much harder.
And this time not with the dirt cheap drones used in the initial response.
Comments here:
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Canadian Prepper, "Emergency Update: WTF Just Happened? Israel Nearly Starts Nuclear WW3, But Something Isn't Right..."
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/18/24
"Emergency Update: WTF Just Happened?
Israel Nearly Starts Nuclear WW3, But Something Isn't Right..."
Comments here:
Scott Ritter, "Iran Can Beat Israel Destroying the IDF"
Scott Ritter, 4/18/24
"Iran Can Beat Israel Destroying the IDF"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "RV Apocalypse Proof A Credit Crisis Has Begun, Turmoil And Bankruptcies Hit The Industry"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 4/18/24
"RV Apocalypse Proof A Credit Crisis Has Begun,
Turmoil And Bankruptcies Hit The Industry"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: George Harrison, "What Is Life"
Full screen recommended.
George Harrison, "What Is Life"
"Sometimes you will never know the value of
a moment until it becomes a memory."
- Dr. Seuss
"A Look to the Heavens"
"How do clusters of galaxies form and evolve? To help find out, astronomers continue to study the second closest cluster of galaxies to Earth: the Fornax cluster, named for the southern constellation toward which most of its galaxies can be found. Although almost 20 times more distant than our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, Fornax is only about 10 percent further that the better known and more populated Virgo cluster of galaxies.
Fornax has a well-defined central region that contains many galaxies, but is still evolving. It has other galaxy groupings that appear distinct and have yet to merge. Seen here, almost every yellowish splotch on the image is an elliptical galaxy in the Fornax cluster. The picturesque barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 visible on the lower right is also a prominent Fornax cluster member. "
"What An Amazing Miracle..."
"In a universe devoid of life, any life at all would be immensely meaningful. We ARE that meaning. "And what we see, "says the poet Mary Oliver, "is the world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish." As though life itself is the great, universal, unrequited love of all time. But there is even more to this. Deep mystery. We are the universe aware of itself. We let the miracle get lost in distractions. On a planet so rich with living companions, much of humanity sentences itself to solitary confinement. Late at night, I used to lie in my boat listening to radio calls from ships to families ashore. There was only one conversation, and it boils down to, "I love you and I miss you: come home safe." Connections make us individuals. Ironic, isn't it? The more connected, the more unique our life becomes."
- Carl Safinao
"Retirement Crisis Will Trigger Social Insanity In America As People Can’t Take Care Of Themselves"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 4/18/24
"Retirement Crisis Will Trigger Social Insanity In America
As People Can’t Take Care Of Themselves"
"The U.S., which once stood as a beacon of prosperity, is now trailing behind in the retirement race. What was once seen as an epitome of the golden age has now slipped out of reach for many Americans. Just imagine you've worked hard your entire life, and now you are looking forward to those golden years of relaxation and well-deserved peace after your retirement. But you know what? That dream has been cut short for many Americans. According to a recent report by Sen. Bernie Sanders, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, the future looks bleak for a significant portion of older Americans. The report highlights a startling statistic from the National Retirement Risk Index – it found that nearly half of households won't be able to maintain their standard of living after retirement. And it gets worse with this one - A staggering 56% of low-income households and 45% of middle-income households are at risk of falling short of their preretirement standards by the time they hit 65."
Comments here:
The Poet: Charles Bukowski, "The Laughing Heart"
Charles Bukowski, "The Laughing Heart"
"In this poem, Bukowski captures the essence of life and the human experience in a way that is simple, yet profound, a life-changing poem that will make you laugh and cry. This poem is a poetic exploration of the human experience, from the everyday to the profound. After watching this video, you'll understand Bukowski's unique perspective on life and why his poems are so powerful."
"Every Human Decision..."
"Except for totally impulsive or psychotic behavior, every human
decision comes down to the choice between two alternatives."
- Jeff Duntemann
"The Great Enemy Of Freedom..."
In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...
Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed?
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means."
- Wendell Berry,
"The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays"
o
“If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.” - Murray N. Rothbard, "The Ethics of Liberty"
Free Download: George Orwell, “1984”
“What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold,
is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be
granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.”
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.”
– George Orwell, “1984” (1949)
Freely download “1984″, by George Orwell here:
"The Worst Betrayal..."
“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus - the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
- Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist.
Robert Gore, "Shorting Evil" (Excerpt)
"Shorting Evil"
by Robert Gore
Excerpt: "Evil is in a topping formation. Evil is completely dependent on the good it attempts to destroy. When good discovered fire, invented the wheel, and started planting seeds, evil invented government. Evil produces nothing, it only commands, coerces, enslaves, destroys, and murders. Gigantic tombs loom over Egypt’s desert, built by slaves millennia ago, monuments to rulers’ vanity. A single farmer working the Nile’s alluvial soil produced more than any pharaoh, yet the former had to send a portion of his crop to the latter. Nothing has changed since then. How do the production and lives of the good become the property of evil?
Force, fear, and fraud are the usual answers, but they can’t be the entire answer. Rulers and their military and police forces are always vastly outnumbered by the ruled. Revolts have brought down countless governments. Yet, why have most people down through the ages not revolted but endured the force, fear, and fraud?
The trick is to get the ruled to assign their right in their own lives to the rulers, acting as the purported agent of a collective. If the mass of people accept the proposition that there is a cause or causes greater than themselves, the rest is easy. So, find a greater cause - God, country, fighting evil enemies domestic or foreign, fighting a deadly germ, safety, the common good, the public interest, global warming, global cooling, climate change - the list is endless.
The people will fight wars, pay taxes, comply with every absurd law and regulation, mask up, lockdown, take deadly vaccines, embrace misery, and line up for the concentration camps. Who am I, they might ask, to question, to object, to fight, to revolt? They’ve already answered that question. They’ve surrendered their lives and souls; they are nobodies. Figuratively and perhaps literally, these corpses will join the stack in the ditch or the ashes in the crematorium.
The rulers expertly play their emotions, but what stirs their greatest passion is the occasional odd man or woman out - the ones who refuse to assign their lives to the collective. The nothings burn the somethings at the stake; self-loathing finds its expression in destruction and death.
By a wide margin no person or institution has caused more destruction and death than governments. Evil and governments are joined at the hip, and history’s bloodiest epoch, from World War I right up to today, has also been the epoch of its largest and most totalitarian governments. That’s no coincidence.
That epoch is drawing to its bloody close. Evil finds itself undone by its perpetual nemesis, its inability to produce. Honest income statements for the world would show that production and income are in decline. Honest balance sheets would show that the world is bankrupt, debt far in excess of assets and almost every asset already pledged as collateral, often several times over.
The rapacity of evil knows no limits. Plans are supposedly being made for a Great Taking, which will hoover up much of the world’s book entry claims - or in the lingo of the thieves, subordinated security entitlements - on income and assets. Those entitlements are subordinated to “secured creditors,” the largest participants in the derivatives complex. Imagine losing your stocks to Goldman Sachs. The grim joke is on evil. A Great Taking may well happen - once. Evil will feed itself for a few weeks or months, but just like its victims, it will ultimately own nothing."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
"Chastity In A Whorehouse..."
"People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?"
- H. L. Mencken
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Bill Bonner, "The Coming Retirement Income Squeeze"
"The Coming Retirement Income Squeeze"
The average interest rate on US Treasury bonds is near 5%. Priced in gold, the Dow is down 21%. In order to catch up to the December 2021 high, in real terms, the Dow would have to go over 48,000.
by Bill Bonner
“Something will have to give.”
- IMF warning the US this week about its growing debt.
Dublin, Ireland - "‘Stocks down. Interest rates up.’ That was our message in the autumn of 2020. Amid the falling leaves... and the general gloom of the Covid epidemic... we thought the Primary Trend had shifted.
Music, leaves, lives - there are patterns to everything. A single swallow does not a summer make. But keep your eyes on the flock and you’ll time the seasons. Here in Europe, they migrate to Africa in the winter... and then come back in the Spring. So too, for days, weeks, months... stock market trading seems chaotic. Without rhyme or reason. Maybe an AI program can make sense of it; we can’t. But beneath the surface chop are long patterns that persist over decades.
Click image for larger size.
In July 2020, after 40 years, the interest rate cycle finally hit bottom. The US 10-year Treasury bond yielded all of 52 basis points (0.52 of one percent) - the lowest rate in 500 years. We predicted the obvious; now they would go up!
And if rates were rising, stocks would fall. A year and a half later, they did.
Nothing since then gives us a reason to believe the Primary Trend will not continue - stocks down (inflation adjusted)... interest rates up. Today, the average interest rate on US Treasury bonds is near 5%. Priced in gold, the Dow is down 21%. In order to catch up to the December 2021 high, in real terms, the Dow would have to go over 48,000.
Megapolitics
Meanwhile, there are patterns in political affairs too. Sometimes it is hard to connect the two - finance and politics (a field we call Megapolitics). But the record highs in stocks in 2021 and bonds in 2020 were clearly the product of government policies. Two key policies - debt and war - brought the Dow to over 36,000 and bond yields under 1% (starkly negative when adjusted for inflation).
The stimmies, wars and debts increased, so did consumer prices. And then inflation forced the Fed to abandon its support for the stock and bond markets. Stocks fell. Bond fell too (yields rose). In the stock market, the damage was sharp... but later disguised by inflation. In 2023, prices on Wall Street rose... even though, adjusted for inflation, they were still well below their Dec. 2021 level. Bonds suffered the worst sell-off ever recorded.
But the full impact of the bond market decline has not yet been felt. Pension funds, insurance companies, and banks hold billions in US government bonds. Many were required to buy bonds as “safe” forms of capital reserves. Then, when the bonds lost value, their owners held on... counting them at face value, pledging to hold them to maturity, and pretending that they would not lose money.
This is why there is so much talk of lowering interest rates as soon as possible. There is nothing inherently good about lower interest rates. People pay interest. But they also receive interest on their savings. Interest rates are just information.
But the key players in our financial system - banks, Wall Street and the federal government - all are massive owners and sellers of US bonds. And $7.6 trillion worth of existing US bonds are maturing this year. They need to be refinanced. So do current deficits, bringing the total financing load to nearly $10 trillion.
Bond sellers and refinancers (the borrowers) want lower interest rates. And yet the volume of their borrowing itself naturally drives up interest rates.
When interest rates go up, not only is it harder for them to borrow more money, the value of their bond holdings also goes down. The banks are said to be holding more than $600 billion in unrealized losses on their bond portfolios.
The feds themselves - including the Fed - are the largest holders of US Treasury debt. Total US debt is now over $34 trillion. About $25 trillion of it is in the hands of the public. The rest - $9 trillion - is held by US government agencies.
Squeezing Social Security: The Social Security trust account, for example, has about $2.8 trillion in US bonds. As those bonds lose value to inflation, Social Security gets squeezed on both sides at once. Its outflow - payments to retirees - are adjusted to inflation, but its Treasury bonds are not. The feds then need to raise more money to cover the shortfall in their reserves. This requires more borrowing... which pushes interest rates higher.
Meanwhile, more and more people are retiring... putting further pressure on US government finances. Retired people spend. They depend on Social Security and Obamacare.
This pattern of fiscal and monetary policies tracks the Primary Trend patterns of the markets. Fed policies - notably, extremely low interest rates - tricked up the stock and bond markets to extreme highs. Now... over the decades ahead... their policies - war and debt - will likely push them to extreme lows. Stay tuned."
Market Note, by Dan Denning: "Social Security began running a deficit (paying out more in benefits than it's taking in through taxes and other sources) a few years ago. It was a dangerous ‘cross over’ point. Regular deficits would eventually mean reducing the size of the Trust fund to pay benefits.
The most recent report from the Trustees who manage Social Security was published in November of last year. It says that without any changes, and under current projections, the Trust fund would be depleted by 2034. Or, that benefits will have to be cut to 80% of the expected level to correspond with insufficient FICA tax receipts and interest income.
Before you panic, the same situation happened in 1983. The deckchairs were arranged by Congress to allow the various Trust funds to fund each other in the event one was running a deficit. And immediate crisis averted. And 83 million Baby Boomers were years from retiring anyway. But long-term?
Click image for larger size.
Social Security benefits could always be paid out of a direct transfer of cash from the Treasury to beneficiaries. This would be wildly inflationary, of course, printing money to pay old age pensions. And even before that, taxes on benefits could be increased to generate more income.
More likely is that long before drastic measures are required, the Social Security Trust Fund will be be forced to start selling its $2.8 trillion Treasury stockpile that Bill mentions above (see chart). It won't be a buyer anymore. Without annual surpluses, the Trust fund won’t be able to buy any of that debt Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has to sell to fund annual US deficits and refinance our $34 trillion in debt.
It's not exactly the family silver. Or even the National Silver (or National Treasure). But when the Trust fund has to sell assets to pay benefits, the clock is ticking on US government finances. All of this raises the issue of having enough retirement income to beat inflation in retirement. It’s a problem we have front and center in 2024 and beyond."
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"The 'Everything Bubble' Expressed in Terms of Gold"
by Tom Dyson
"The Dow/Gold ratio made a new three-and-a-half-year low Monday... it’s now at 15.82. Meaning, it will take you roughly 15 ounces of gold to buy the DJIA. For new readers, a falling Dow/Gold ratio shows gold is beating stocks. The Institute of International Finance tracks the size of the global debt pile. It recently published the figure for 2023. Its finding? In 2023, the global debt pile increased by more than $15 trillion, reaching a new record high of $313 trillion. For every dollar of this debt, there’s also an over-inflated asset somewhere backing it.
What if Earth itself were a single financial entity? Would all these highly valued assets and debts mean Earth Corp. was getting more valuable? The human race works hard every day, building stuff and improving stuff. And the efficiency of our labor goes up slowly over time. So we’re definitely accumulating some real wealth.
But for years, the Fed and other central banks kindled a gargantuan credit inflation by motivating speculators with all kinds of crazy incentives and reassuring them with all kinds of safety nets. And then they printed reserves to make sure it was easy for speculators to write new debts. The rising market value of assets and debts has far outpaced any real value creation or output. This chart shows this phenomenon in the US. Here’s wealth charted against GDP, indexed to 1950 and using a log scale.
Click image for larger size.
A hundred trillion here... a hundred trillion there... these debt and asset values all just look like mountains of overpriced paper to me. If this is true – that it’s all just been massive credit inflation – the forces of debt deflation must now be immense.
Our core position is that asset prices have to collapse, and much of the attached debt will need to be written off and erased. History is pretty clear about this. All credit bubbles deflate and asset valuations return to “fair” and then “cheap.” It’s how nature restores equilibrium. We call the adjustment that’s coming “The Big Loss.”
The critical insight is this: the Big Loss in stocks will occur in terms of gold. A debt deflation... priced in gold. So when you see the price of gold rising on your screen this week, don’t think “gold is going up.” Instead think “the Everything Bubble is deflating” because that’s exactly what’s happening. The world’s pile of debt and equity is deflating... in gold terms. This is why we watch the Dow and other asset prices exclusively in terms of gold. And why we’re recommending such a large allocation to precious metals in our asset allocation model.
This bubble has already started to collapse five times – in 2000, in 2008, in 2018, in 2020 and in 2022 – and each time they doubled down with huge new incentives to speculate and other stimulus to re-inflate the bubble.
Now it’s the most patched-up, bolted-on credit bubble in history... a true mutant. We must be close to another debt bubble zenith. So it goes..."
Adventures With Danno, "Items At Kroger Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 4/18/24
"Items At Kroger Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now!"
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Dan, I Allegedly, "Proof People Are Not Paying"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 4/18/24
"Proof People Are Not Paying"
"We just heard from Bank of America that defaults on credit cards are rising. It was pretty warm. This is proof that people are not paying their bills. Plus, there’s a ton of their business news in this video. Elon Musk wants a $56 billion payday and we hit $3000 an ounce. Plus much more."
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "Is A Stock Market Crash Imminent?"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/18/24
"Is A Stock Market Crash Imminent?"
Comments here:
Greg Hunter, "Driving America Into a Brick Wall "
"Driving America Into a Brick Wall "
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Back in February, when everyone was predicting a Fed rate cut, precious metals expert and financial writer Bill Holter said rates would be going up and not down. Since that call, the 10-Year Treasury is up more than 30 basis points. It closed today at 4.67%. Now, Holter is still calling for higher interest rates that will coincide with higher gold and silver prices. Why? It’s called inflation, and it’s not temporary. Holter explains, “Foreigners are backing away from buying Treasuries. That is the only thing that has kept the doors open, so to speak, is the fact we are able to borrow an unlimited amount of money because we are the world reserve currency. Foreigners backing away from our debt is going to lead the Federal Reserve to be the buyer of last, and then, only resort. So, you will have direct monetization between the Fed and the Treasury. What that will cause is a currency that declines in purchasing power. It will decline in a big way, and it will decline rapidly. So, what I am describing is inflation that turns into hyperinflation.”
But that is not the end of our problems. Holter points out, “I do think it is going to get worse, and that means interest rates will go higher, and that will put on much more pressure. We are at 4.65% on the 10-Year Treasury now. We went from 3.75% to 4.65% (in a short amount of time). We run through 5% on the 10-year Treasury, and everything blows up. The bottom line here is we are at the end game of a fiat currency. Young people have never experienced high inflation. Where we are this time around, Paul Volker (Fed Head in 1979) was able to raise rates to 16% or 17% and crush inflation. He was able to do that because there was not a ton of debt. The U.S. debt back in 1980 was 35% of GDP. Now, it is 125% plus debt to GDP. If you raise rates to 6% to 8%, you will blow up the entire system because much of this debt was put on during the 1% to 3% interest rate time. The inflation is going to push rates higher no matter what the Fed says.”
Gold is hitting one new record high after another. It’s not greed, but fear, and Holter says, “Big money is buying gold because they are looking for protection.” The other wild card is war, and Holter says, “War is a way to keep the system propped up.”
In closing, Holter contends, what you are seeing is not a series of mistakes by incompetent people. Holter says, “This is too stupid for it not to be the plan. This is not a Republican or Democrat thing. We are being steered directly into a brick wall because the globalists can’t take over the world with the US standing. They have to take the US down, and if they take the US down, so will the western financial system fall. If that happens, the globalists can have their way.”
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One
with financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter.
"Gerald Celente: World War Three Has Already Begun"
George Galloway MP, 4/18/24
"Gerald Celente: World War Three Has Already Begun"
"The world went to war in February ’22, they just didn’t admit it. Israel will inevitably retaliate, like a dog with a prostate problem, and WW3 will then escalate."
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Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Canadian Prepper, "It's Quiet, Too Quiet; Emergency Action Messages"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/17/24
"It's Quiet, Too Quiet; Emergency Action Messages"
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Jeremiah Babe, "Most People Will Be Dead Broke By 2025"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/17/24
"Most People Will Be Dead Broke By 2025;
Student Loan Debt Is Now Your Debt"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.
Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”
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"Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in
heaven where the love of our lost ones pours
through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy."
~ Eskimo saying.
Chet Raymo, “To Sleep, Perchance To Dream”
“To Sleep, Perchance To Dream”
by Chet Raymo
“What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
What is more soothing than a pretty hummer
That stays one moment in an open flower,
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?
What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing
In a green island, far from all men's knowing?
More healthful than the leafiness of dales?
More secret than a nest of nightingales?”
"What indeed? The poet Keats answers his own questions: Sleep. Soft closer of our eyes. I've reached an age when I find myself occasionally nodding off in the middle of the day, an open book flopped on my chest. Also, more lying awake in the dark hours of the night, re-running the tapes of the day. And, in the fragile moments of nighttime unconsciousness, dreaming dreams that reach all the way back to my childhood.
I've read the books about sleep and dreaming. There has been lots of research, but not much consensus about why we sleep or dream. Sleep seems to be pretty universal among animals. Who knows whether animals dream. Do we sleep to restore the soma? To knit the raveled sleeve of care? Process memories? Find safety from predators? After 50 years of work, the sleep researcher William Dement opined: "As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy."
The Latin poet Martial supposed that sleep "makes darkness brief," a worry-free way to get through the scary hours of the night when wolves howl at the mouth of the cave (and goblins stir under the bed). That hardly explains my dropping off after lunch into a dreamless stupor that I neither desire nor welcome.
“Low murmurer of tender lullabies!
Light hoverer around our happy pillows!
Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows!”
Not quite! There are the nightmares too. The tossing and turning. The hoo-has. But enough of this idle speculation. I'm getting sleepy...”
"A Perpetual Illusion..."
"Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart."
- Blaise Pascal
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