Cluj-napoca, Cluj, Romania. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
"Wars And Rumors Of War"
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 5/6/24
"Russia Escalates to Destruction Of Ukraine;
Supreme Court Denounced Israel's War Crimes"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Danny Haiphong, 5/6/24
"Mark Sleboda: Iran Just Changed Everything As
Operation True Promise Exposes IDF Fragility"
"International Relations and Security analyst Mark Sleboda reveals how Iran's Operation True Promise not only sent a warning to the IDF but showed just how fragile the U.S. military is in the Middle East, effectively changing everything in the region. This video breaks it all down."
Comments here:
"The Digifuture in Its Parts"
"The Digifuture in Its Parts"
by Fred Reed
"How time flies, said Fred with scintillating originality. When I was a young lad in rural Virginia in the mid-Sixties, the only thing digital was the local drive-in movie, known colloquially as the Finger bowl. Now the world runneth over with bits and bytes and screens and all. Regarding which: Much of the unpleasantness of life springs from the need to identify ourselves. To this end we have driver’s licenses, passports, ID , and credit cards.
None of this is really necessary. Let us assume hypothetically that face recognition is infallible. It isn’t, quite, but let us pretend. We would then not need a driver’s license: The cop would scan your face and your license, if any, would pop up on his screen. No passport either: Coming into America the camera would scan your face and all your passport info would pop up. To fly, you would not need a ticket or need to check in: The system would scan your face and know you had a ticket for UAL 3325 to Chengdu
Actually face recognition is not quite perfect, so to get admission to the CIA’s murder records you might need an additional scan of iris or fingerprints, which would leave no doubt. This latter is now used at air ports: “Put your fingers on the glass…”
All of these technologies are well known and work in practice. China uses face recognition, in which it is the world leader, for practically everything.
Making ID-less life run smoothly and efficiently would require considerable programming but no new technology. Government could have a record for every citizen with everything from passport to medical records, each being accessible only to entities needing them. For example, a hospital could see your med recs but not your driver’s license or credit-card transactions. Things of this sort are already done in various countries. They just haven’t been glued together, except largely in China.
The convenience would make this a fairly easy sell to the public. No fumbling with cards, proof of insurance, redundant medical tests. In priciple people fear surveillance, but in practice they will go with convenience every time.
Now, the digital dollar. It is coming. Officials of the government and of the Federal Reserve seem to talk out of both sides of their mouths, but they are considering it, as are the central banks of over a hundred countries. It will probably be introduced gradually, maybe first for transactions between banks, then as an option for the public. But it is coming. Watch. The aim, probably not stated, will be to go cashless, as China has said it wants to do, with transactions made by cellphone, as is already almost universal in China. It will be convenient.
The digidollar software necessarily will also make a record of every transaction: time, place, amount, and to whom made. This sounds shocking, but isn’t much different from records made by credit-card companies and banks. Somehow this sounds less ominous than the feds having them, though it can get them if it wants.
Some interesting effects will flow from cashlessness. Robbery will become difficult. If I put a gun to your head and demand your money, you will probably give me your dough, phone to phone, rather than have your head blown off. But the system will make a record of who I am, the time, place, and amount, which is not optimal for those in the robbery business. When you report the crime, the system will take the money back out of my phone, give it to you, and close my account. I will not be able to open a new account because doing so involves face recognition and I will be blacklisted–and therefore unable, in any way, to get money in a cashless world.
The drug problem would end in about three days. AI routines would have no problem noticing multiple sales in known drug markets of fifty dollars, or whatever a hit of coke or fentanyl costs. It would be easy to check the identity of the recipients with police records of known dealers. There would be no need to arrest them. Just block their accounts and put a note on their screens telling them that if they want access to money again, they need to come into the police station.
All in good fun. But government could–would–use the same techniques to track and control people it didn’t like, such as people named Fred who say not nice things about said government.
There is little doubt that Washington would use the digidollar for purposes of social control, potentially absolute. “Washington” of course means Google, Facebook, the media, Wikipedia, and all the other de facto parts of government. Already people and websites that say bad things have their credit cards cancelled, find themselves delisted by Google, banned by Facebook, erased from the Wikipedia, and ejected from YouTube. There is much of this, though I suspect that most of the public is unaware of it.
The digidollar would provide a censoric meat axe that would–will–strike fear into dissidents. What remedy would there be? The victim would have to depend on friends even to eat while any drawn-out appeal went on. This sounds, I know. like right-wing paranoia. How it would be used and to what extent I don’t know, but recent history is not encouraging, and the mere possibility would argue for obedience.
Note that we live in a wired world. We all have cell phones. Mine is an iPhone, which has Siri as digital assistant. She is a good listener. She can be half a room away, or in my pocket, or in a noisy restaurant but when I say, “Hey Siri, what time is it?” she almost always understands. Those who have iPhones but do not use Siri have no way of knowing whether the microphone is on. Presumably, likewise with Android.
The Alexa boxes in our house understand both English and Spanish well and sometimes rooms away. I don’t know what policies Apple and Amazon have towrd eavesdropping, whether they do this when the feds want it, but they assuredly can. The bottom line is that millions of homes host high-grade listening devices inserted with the best of motives–making music available–just as password managers, also with the best of motives, extract our passwords. In grade school I was taught that sharing is a good thing. I wonder.
OK, that’s it for today. A tentacle is coming out of my Alexa box and seems to be reaching for my throat. Maybe it was something I said."
Dan, I Allegedly, "We are Headed for a Crash Landing"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 5/6/24
"We are Headed for a Crash Landing"
"The expressive told us that we will not enter a recession. Now we’re hearing that not only are we going to go way past a recession we’re going to have a crash landing with this economy."
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "America's Block Party"
The Battle of Lexington
"America's Block Party"
A subtle corruption infected the whole financial system.
The new money was a credit from the banks, not an asset.
It was borrowed into existence – at absurdly low rates -- rather than earned.
by Bill Bonner
"I can resist anything but temptation."
- Oscar Wilde
Dublin, Ireland - “I think it is unlikely that the next policy rate move will be a hike,” said Jerome Powell. But why? US inflation is running about 100% above the Fed’s supposed target. Why cut rates rather than raise them? Herewith, we propose a hypothesis.
Last week, colleague Tom Dyson gave us a simple way to connect the dots. We are near the end of the biggest financial experiment in history, he says. Condensing the following 700 words to just five: central bankers cannot resist temptation. In 1971, guided by Milton Friedman, the US did something extraordinary. It changed the whole world’s money system. And few people even noticed.
At issue was whether the US dollar system could be managed better by professionals — Ph.Ds with more discretion over interest rates and other banking policies - so as to improve capitalism. The gold-backed dollar wasn’t easily managed at all. You can’t just ‘print’ gold. You had to mine it. And ship it. And store it. And in the end, you were lucky if the supply of new gold-backed money kept even with supplies of other goods and services in the real economy.
Not a bad thing. The dollar was fairly stable... and hard to diddle. In 1913 - when the Fed was created - a dollar was worth almost exactly as much as it had been 100 years before. But the system limited the amount that US policymakers could spend.
Temptation too much: The new system changed that. Gold was out. The Fed could create money on demand. In 2002, Ben Bernanke explained: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” But could ordinary humans be trusted to resist the temptation to print too much? The answer, now in, is ‘no.’
This experiment was not new. ‘Paper’ or ‘monopoly’ money systems have come, and gone, many times. The coming was always fun - people had more to spend. It was the ‘going’ that was painful - often ending in depression, war or revolution.
After WWI, Germany was faced with huge war debts. It switched to paper money with no gold backing. By 1923, it took 4,210,500,000,000 marks to buy one dollar.
France in 1960, after years of excess money printing, had to replace the old franc with a new one, at 100 to 1. China... Yugoslavia... Argentina... Zimbabwe... Lebanon - all were social, political and financial catastrophes.
Inflation in Germany led to such widespread discontent that gangs battled it out in the streets; Adolf Hitler’s national socialists won those street brawls and took over the country. Russia’s financial instability led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Chinese inflation in the 1940s brought Mao Tse-tung to power.
On August 15, 1971, in the US, came the Nixon Shock. The new dollar looked just like the old one. But it no longer represented an asset - a dollar backed by gold; now it was essentially an IOU, a ‘federal reserve note,’ issued by a federal reserve bank. Most economists nodded in approval. The public nodded off.
It’s now 2024 - 53 years later. In 1971, US debt reached $400 billion. Even nine years later, it was still only $800 billion. At that level, the Fed’s last honest chief, Paul Volcker, could still fight inflation with extraordinarily high interest rates. His top Fed rate — 20% in June of 1981 — caused the worst downturn since the Great Depression. That is what it took to wring inflation out of the system. It was a heroic move. Politicians and economists squealed. Volcker was widely despised. He was burned in effigy on the Capitol steps and denounced by thousands of economists.
And today? A 20% Fed Funds rate would be impossible. Here’s why. After Volcker’s save, cheaper and cheaper credit made it profitable to borrow and speculate like never before. Consumers, businesses, investors, and the government all went deeper and deeper into debt. They bought bigger houses, better cars, more fighter jets and aircraft carriers... mergers and acquisitions... dotcoms... cryptos — whee!
A subtle corruption infected the whole financial system. The new money was a credit from the banks, not an asset. It was borrowed into existence – at absurdly low rates - rather than earned. Who could borrow it most cheaply? Big, credit-worthy institutions — big banks, big business, and big government. That’s how firms like BlackRock were able to outbid families and buy up thousands of homes; they could borrow at lower interest rates.
At 10%... debt payments would quickly absorb all income tax receipts. At 20%, all Hell would break loose immediately.
What this means is that the Fed can no longer ‘save the system.’ It can’t afford to. There’s too much debt. Floating on a tide of ultra-low interest rates, debt seemed almost weightless. But the farther out to sea it floated, the harder it was to get back onto dry land. Today, even a 10% fed funds rate - half the level of 1981 - would be so devastating the Fed wouldn’t dare to try it.
Today, there is $34.6 trillion in federal debt, rising by more than $120 billion per month. And the Treasury, trying to keep its debt payments down, is choosing shorter- and shorter-term debt - 2-year notes, rather than 10- year bonds, for example. The result is that more of the total debt gets ‘marked to market’ each year. And the whole lot of it becomes more sensitive to interest rates.
Instead, its real goal is not to eliminate inflation, but to manage it... to ‘monetize the debt’ - reducing its real value with sustained price increases. But to do so, inflation must be higher than the rate of new debt creation. US debt is galloping along at nearly 7% of GDP per year. The inflation reading needs to get up to that level... and stay there. That’s the real reason the Fed is talking about cutting interest rates rather than increasing them. But watch out. Trying to manage inflation is like trying to control a block party in a bad neighborhood. The bullets could fly at any moment. Stay tuned..."
"How It Really Is"
“We'll know our disinformation program is complete
when everything the American public believes is false.”
- William Casey, former director of the CIA
Adventures With Danno, "Stocking Up At Meijer!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 5/6/24
"Stocking Up At Meijer!"
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "Get Out Of The Slave System, Take Your Life Back!"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/6/24
"Get Out Of The Slave System, Take Your Life Back!"
Comments here:
"I Can't Convince Myself..."
“I can’t convince myself that it does much good to try to challenge the everyday political delusions and dementias of Americans at large. Their contained and confined mentalities by far prefer the petty and parochial prisons of the kind of sense they have been trained and rewarded for making out of their lives (and are punished for deviating from them). What it costs them ultimately to be such slaves and infants and ideological zombies is a thought too monstrous and rending and spiky for them even to want to glance at.”
- Kenneth Smith
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
- Oscar Wilde
“Wretched of the Earth”
For the 15,000 slaughtered children of Gaza...
“Wretched of the Earth”
“Poor kids,
wretched of the earth,
why should we feed you?
Why shouldn't we empty our sea of
bullets into your swollen bellies or
poison you with toxic chemicals
or depleted uranium?
Why should we care,
we who are living well?
Where is it written in stone
that you deserve better?
Or that we are not animals
subject to the law of nature:
kill or be killed?
You suspect us of being cruel,
but we are kind.
Our god tells us so.
It is yours that lies.
So you cry at night,
shivering in the cold
or sell yourselves
for a slice of bread.
What is that to those of
us who are living well?”
- gk thomas
o
God damn to Hell the psychopathic monsters doing this genocide!
Hell is not hot enough, and eternity is not long enough...
And eternal shame and disgrace on America for allowing and supporting this horror!
You and I and all of us paid for every goddamned bullet!
All that blood is on YOUR hands too!
"Israeli Ground Forces Enter Rafah"
Full screen recommended.
"Israeli Ground Forces Enter Rafah"
by Dave DeCamp
"Israeli tanks have entered Rafah and appear to be pushing to capture the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing that connects to Egypt, several media outlets have reported. Heavy airstrikes have been reported in the city as well, with some media reports describing it as a “carpet bombing,” although the scale of destruction and death toll is unclear at this time.
An Egyptian official told The Associated Press that the Israeli operation could be limited and that Israeli forces could soon withdraw. But Egypt is also preparing for the possibility of a major influx of Palestinian refugees entering its territory. According to Middle East Eye, Cairo estimates between 50,000 and 250,000 Palestinians could flee toward Sinai.
A source told Axios that Israel plans to take control of the Rafah border crossing and monitor all aid that enters Gaza, a sign that it’s seeking long-term control of the area. The military activity near the Rafah crossing will further disrupt aid shipments into the Strip as Palestinians in northern Gaza are facing a “full-blown famine,” according to the UN’s World Food Programme.
Israel’s move on Rafah comes after Hamas said it accepted an Egyptian and Qatari proposal for a ceasefire. Israeli officials quickly rejected the idea that there was a deal and said the proposal included terms Israel did not agree to.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the proposal didn’t meet its “core demands” and said Israel would go ahead with military operations in Rafah. “The War Cabinet unanimously decided this evening Israel will continue its operation in Rafah, in order to apply military pressure on Hamas so as to advance the release of our hostages and achieve the other objectives of the war,” the office said.
Early on Monday, Israel said it ordered the evacuation of about 100,000 Palestinians from eastern Rafah and warned that “extreme force” would be used in the area. Rafah is estimated to be packed with about 1.4 million Palestinian civilians, the majority of whom are displaced, as the city only had a pre-war population of about 275,000.
Aid groups have slammed the Israeli order since there’s nowhere for the Palestinian civilians to go. Israel suggested the Palestinians go to the al-Mawasi refugee camp on the coast, but the Norwegian Refugee Council said the camp didn’t have the resources to accept the evacuees. Oxfam America pointed to the fact that Israel has bombed so-called “safe zones” in Gaza throughout the past seven months.
US officials have claimed they’re opposed to Israel invading Rafah without a clear plan to protect civilians. But there’s no sign the Biden administration is putting any real pressure on Netanyahu as US weapons shipments to Israel continue to flow."
Full screen recommended
"Holocaust Survivor Denounces Israel's Genocide of Gaza"
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"An Enormous Chunk Of The U.S. Population Is Either Homeless, Living In Poverty Or Considered To Be Among The Working Poor"
"An Enormous Chunk Of The U.S. Population Is Either Homeless,
Living In Poverty Or Considered To Be Among The Working Poor"
by Michael Snyder
"As the U.S. economy slows down, those at the bottom of the economic food chain are being hit the hardest. Homelessness is surging, the number of Americans living in poverty is rising, and more Americans are considered to be among “the working poor” than ever before. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a historic economic shift right now, and economic conditions are only going to get even more harsh during the months ahead. Needless to say, that is really bad news for all of us. According to a report from Harvard University, approximately 650,000 Americans were homeless at some point last year. That represented an increase of nearly 50 percent from 2015…
A January 25 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies estimated that over 650,000 Americans experienced homelessness in 2023 - up almost 50% from 2015. Costs of renting and home ownership have skyrocketed while wages largely stagnate. The Harvard report found that half of U.S. households are “cost-burdened” (meaning that 30-50% of monthly income goes to housing), and 12 million people are “severely cost-burdened.” These Americans stand one accident, health setback, or employment disruption away from eviction.
During the past several years, scores of tent cities have sprouted like mushrooms in and around U.S. cities from coast to coast. One 32-year-old woman named Brandy that is living in a tent city near Winterhaven, Florida says that she has been living there for five years and literally has nowhere else to go…
Deep in the woods outside of Winterhaven, Florida, are a cluster of tents and tarps. There are 46 people that live in this homeless encampment, including Brandy C., who has been there for five years. “I just made a mistake and I’ve been stuck here since. I’m trying to fix it and I can’t,” Brandy told Scripps News Tampa. The 32-year-old said the homeless camp is not the safest environment, but it is somewhere she can lay her head at night. However, it could soon be taken away. “They tell us, ‘y’all know y’all fixing to have to leave,'” Brandy said. “We’re like, ‘so where do we go?’” These are the forgotten people that our politicians don’t like to talk about. And their ranks are growing with each passing day.
In Denver, officials have spent 274 million dollars to fight their homelessness crisis, but the area has still “added more homeless individuals than any other metro region in the country since 2018″…Metro Denver’s homeless crisis has worsened and become among the most acute in the nation despite the city of Denver contracting for at least $274 million from 2021 through 2024 to keep people off the streets. The Denver metro region has added more homeless individuals than any other metro region in the country since 2018, according to key metrics collected by the federal government. Like we are seeing in so many other cities, mass migration has been playing a major role in Denver’s homelessness crisis.
We can’t even come close to taking care of the hundreds of thousands of Americans that are already homeless, and more deeply impoverished people are constantly being allowed to pour over our borders. Meanwhile, the number of Americans that are living in poverty and the number of Americans that are considered to be among “the working poor” both continue to increase.
As I discussed last week, more than 11 percent of Americans are officially impoverished, and another 29 percent are “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed”…"Over time, higher costs and sluggish wage growth have left more Americans financially vulnerable, with many known as “ALICEs.” Nearly 40 million families, or 29% of the population, fall in the category of ALICE - Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed - according to United Way’s United for ALICE program, which first coined the term to refer to households earning above the poverty line but less than what’s needed to get by. That figure doesn’t include the 37.9 million Americans who live in poverty, comprising 11.5% of the total population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Do you understand what this means? More than 40 percent of the U.S. population is either homeless, living in poverty or among the ranks of the “working poor”. That is staggering. The middle class is being absolutely eviscerated, and a lot more pain is on the way.
Former Merrill Lynch chief economist David Rosenberg accurately predicted the recession that hit us in 2008, and he is now warning that things are about to get really bad in this country. In fact, even though the Biden administration is telling us that the economy added “175,000 jobs” last month, he is convinced that the economy is actually bleeding jobs…"The US economy added 175,000 jobs last month, shy of economists’ forecasts for 238,000. In notes to clients Friday, the former Merrill Lynch chief economist explained why he views the numbers as a cause for concern.
He said the data is inconsistent with numbers coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and Business Employment Dynamics datasets, both of which stated the economy actually lost jobs in the third quarter. Given the disparity, Rosenberg said the data is likely ‘overstated – by historical proportions.’"
I agree with Rosenberg. Large companies all over America have been conducting mass layoffs, and the numbers that we are getting from sources that are not controlled by the Biden administration clearly indicate that the economy is losing jobs.
But I am also convinced that our economic problems will accelerate significantly as we head toward the end of this year. A “perfect storm” of factors is hurting economic performance all over the world, and I anticipate that global turmoil is only going to become more intense as the months roll along.
So what is the bottom line? The bottom line is that more Americans will soon be homeless, more Americans will soon be living in poverty, and more Americans will soon be among the ranks of the “working poor”. Our standard of living is steadily declining, and if you want someone to blame you can blame those that are currently running the show in Washington."
But there's $95 billion for Israel and Ukraine, and $878 billion for "defense"...
Great is our sin indeed.
"Attitude..."
“Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you
as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens
to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.”
- Kahlil Gibran
Monday, May 6, 2024
"A Look to the Heavens"
“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.
The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
"Any Other View..."
"Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."
- Michael Crichton, "The Lost World"
The Poet: Maya Angelou, "A Brave And Startling Truth"
"A Brave And Startling Truth"
by Maya Angelou
"We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space,
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns,
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we discover
A brave and startling truth.
And when we come to it,
To the day of peacemaking,
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms.
When we come to it,
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate,
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean.
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass,
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil.
When the rapacious storming of the churches,
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased.
When the pennants are waving gaily,
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze.
When we come to it,
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders,
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce.
When land mines of death have been removed,
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace.
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh,
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse.
When we come to it,
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory,
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets.
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun.
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world.
When we come to it,
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe,
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace.
We, this people on this mote of matter,
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence,
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor,
And the body is quieted into awe.
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet,
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living.
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow,
And the proud back is glad to bend.
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines.
When we come to it,
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body,
Created on this earth, of this earth,
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety,
Without crippling fear.
When we come to it,
We must confess that we are the possible,
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.
That is when, and only when,
We come to it."
○
"The True Dream..."
“Maybe we accept the dream has become a nightmare. We tell ourselves that reality is better. We convince ourselves it’s better that we never dream at all. But, the strongest of us, the most determined of us, holds on to the dream or we find ourselves faced with a fresh dream we never considered. We wake to find ourselves, against all odds, feeling hopeful. And, if we’re lucky, we realize in the face of everything, in the face of life the true dream is being able to dream at all.”
- Dr. Meredith Grey, "Grey's Anatomy"
"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death. The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"
"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death.
The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"
By Dr. Gary G. Kohls
“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” - Roger Waters
“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.” – Dresden James
“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill
"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.
The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.
But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.
SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.
Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”
Postman ended his book by writing: “What afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
“Amused To Death”
by Roger Waters
"Doctor, Doctor what’s wrong with me?
This supermarket life is getting long.
What is the heart life of a color TV?
What is the shelf life of a teenage
queen?
Ooh western woman,
Ooh western girl,
News hound sniffs the air
When Jessica Hahn goes down
He latches on to that symbol of
detachment
Attracted by the peeling away of
feeling
The celebrity of the abused shell
of the belle
Ooh western woman
Ooh western girl
And the children of Melrose strut
their stuff
Is absolute zero cold enough?
And out in the valley warm and clean
The little ones sit by their TV screens
No thoughts to think
No tears to cry
All sucked dry down to the very
last breath.
Bartender what is wrong with me,
Why I am so out of breath?
The captain said excuse me ma’am,
This species has amused itself to death
We watched the tragedy unfold,
We did as we were told.
We bought and sold,
It was the greatest show on earth.
But then it was over,
We oohed and aahed,
We drove our racing cars,
We ate our last few jars of caviar,
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah.
And when they found our shadows,
Grouped ‘round the TV sets,
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test,
They checked out all the data in
their lists.
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed.
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise,
They logged the only explanation left.
This species has amused itself to death.
No tears to cry,
No feelings left,
This species has amused itself to
death…"
○
Freely download “Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, by Neil Postman, here:
Jeremiah Babe, "Small Businesses Can't Pay Their Rent; Renters Will Never Be Able To But A Home"
Jeremiah Babe, 5/6/24
"Small Businesses Can't Pay Their Rent;
Renters Will Never Be Able To But A Home"
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'A Wise Man Once Said..."
“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”
- “Dr. Meredith Grey”, “Grey’s Anatomy"
"Code Red Emergency Alert! Russian Nukes Near Ukraine; Israel Invasion Begins"
Canadian Prepper, 5/6/24
"Code Red Emergency Alert!
Russian Nukes Near Ukraine; Israel Invasion Begins"
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o
GTA5 Gameplay, 5/6/24
"Larry Johnson Warning: Nuclear Crisis -
Russia's Fury Unleashed by NATO & France's Provocation"
"In this critical analysis, Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and recognized expert in global security, examines the perilous escalation of military activities between NATO and Russia over the Ukraine crisis. This video delves into recent developments, highlighting France's deployment of troops to Ukraine and Russia's alarming response with nuclear exercise announcements.
Johnson discusses the strategic implications of these moves and how they reflect on the broader NATO-Russia relations. He provides a thorough breakdown of the potential risks involved, especially considering Russia's declaration not to step back in the face of U.S. missile deployments targeting their territory. This situation marks a dangerous pivot towards heightened military readiness on both sides, with the potential to spiral into a direct and uncontrollable conflict.
With precision and clarity, Johnson analyzes how each action by NATO and the U.S. could be perceived as provocations by Russia, leading to a series of retaliatory measures that could very well push the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict. His insights offer a sobering look at the delicate balance of international power and the catastrophic consequences of miscalculations.
This video is a must-watch for those seeking to understand the intricate dynamics of global military strategy and the dire consequences of escalating aggression in Eastern Europe. Tune in as Larry Johnson guides us through this high-stakes geopolitical chess game, where the stakes could not be higher."
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"Wars And Rumors Of Wars"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 5/6/24
"Ray McGovern: Israel’s Extremist War Agenda"
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o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 5/6/24
"Russia's Patience Has Limits,
Ukraine Faces Total Collapse & Never Become NATO"
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Full screen recommended.
Redacted, 5/6/24
"Warning! 'Ukraine Will Colllapse in 2 Weeks!'
Putin Readies Massive Offensive"
"Vladimir Putin has issued his toughest statement yet against NATO aggression. At the same time, European leaders are pushing to send troops into direct confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. Military experts agree that Russia is days away from launching a massive Spring offensive to end the war."
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