"On The Wrong Track: This Is What An Imploding Economy Looks Like"

"On The Wrong Track: 

This Is What An Imploding Economy Looks Like"

by Michael Snyder

"One of the main reasons why Americans are in such a foul mood right now is because the economy is in really bad shape and it just keeps getting worse. This is very good news for the Trump campaign, because most Americans don’t want things to remain the same. A desire for change is in the air, but our economy is unraveling so rapidly that it won’t be easy for anyone to turn things around. We have built up a tremendous amount of momentum in the wrong direction, and it appears that the months ahead are not going to be pleasant.

Just look at what is happening to home sales. Last month, sales of previously existing homes fell to the lowest level that we have seen since October 2010. Of course in October 2010 we were dealing with the aftermath of a global financial crisis. Overall, we are on pace “for the worst year since 1995” for sales of previously existing homes…"Sales of existing homes in the U.S. are on track for the worst year since 1995 - for the second year in a row.

Persistently high home prices and elevated mortgage rates are keeping potential home buyers on the sidelines. Sales of previously owned homes in the first nine months of the year were lower than the same period last year, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. Existing-home sales in September fell 1% from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.84 million, NAR said, the lowest monthly rate since October 2010."

Let those numbers sink in for a moment. We haven’t seen anything like this for a long time, and nobody can deny that the market for residential real estate is in a depressed state right now. And it appears that this month could be even worse than last month, because the number of mortgage applications being submitted is absolutely plummeting…"Mortgage applications decreased 17% from one week earlier as mortgage rates surged, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) weekly application survey for the week ending October 11, 2024. The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 17% on both a seasonally adjusted and an unadjusted basis from one week earlier."

Meanwhile, our nationwide commercial real estate crisis just continues to intensify. If you can believe it, an office building in Manhattan that sold for 332 million dollars in 2006 just sold for 8.5 million dollars…"The sale of a nearly 1 million-square-foot Manhattan office building listed on the online auction site Ten-X was completed Tuesday for only $8.5 million. That’s 97 percent less than the $332.5 million that the seller, Swiss bank UBS, paid for the Midtown property in 2006. The loss on the building at 135 West 50th Street was minimally offset by a $6 million gain UBS realized by buying and selling the ground beneath it in the interim.

UBS and its brokers at JLL listed the 920,000-square-foot building for sale on the online platform. The two-day auction kicked off July 30 with a starting bid of $7.5 million. The sale ended the next day after Ten-X lowered the reserve price. The winning bidder, whose identity has yet to hit property records, closed about 70 days later." That is insane! Commercial real estate prices have been crashing all over America, and this crisis is not getting the attention that it deserves from the media.

The banking industry is headed for big trouble as well. In fact, the government shut down another bank on Friday…"Friday, The First National Bank of Lindsay was closed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) appointed as receiver. The OCC acted after identifying false and deceptive bank records and other information suggesting fraud that revealed depletion of the bank’s capital. The OCC also found that the bank was in an unsafe or unsound condition to transact business and that the bank’s assets were less than its obligations to its creditors and others."

The OCC is referring the matter to the United States Department of Justice, which has a wide variety of tools to hold individuals accountable for criminal acts and focuses on victims in all of its matters. Some experts are projecting that hundreds of more banks will soon fail. If that actually happens, it will be a complete and utter nightmare.

The “restaurant apocalypse” that I have written about so much also continues to roll on. Sadly, we just learned that Denny’s has decided to shut down 150 locations…"Denny’s is closing 150 restaurants over the next year, and the 71-year-old diner chain is mulling a major change to its 24/7 operating hours. Fifty locations are set to close by the end of 2024, while the remaining 100 will shutter in 2025, Denny’s announced in an earnings call Tuesday. That amounts to a tenth of its restaurants, leaving 1,375 locations once completed. A specific list of closing restaurants weren’t immediately announced."

Needless to say, lots of other chains are slimming down as well. Right now, thousands upon thousands of restaurants are being permanently closed from coast to coast. If the economy was heading in the right direction, this would not be happening. Speaking of closures, another major retailer has announced that it will be closing all stores…

"Buybuy Baby is shuttering all of its stores roughly a year after new owners tried to revive the brand. The company announced on its website that it is transitioning to an online-only model after recognizing the need for a “a strategic reset.” “With this shift, we’ve come to the difficult decision of closing our physical stores by the end of this year,” the company wrote. “We understand this may be disappointing news, and we want all our customers to know this wasn’t a choice we took lightly.” Most retailers that are experiencing difficulties will try to hang on until at least the end of December. But once we get into 2025, expect a huge wave of new store closures.

As I discussed the other day, U.S. consumers are really hurting at the moment. You can’t get blood out of a stone, and a staggering percentage of U.S. cardholders have already maxed out at least one credit card…"Nearly 2 in 5 cardholders (37%) have maxed out a credit card or come close since the Fed started raising interest rates, Bankrate’s Credit Utilization Survey found. That includes 20% who have maxed out a credit card and 17% who have come close to maxing one out."

This is what an imploding economy looks like. Bubbles are bursting all around us, and the outlook for 2025 and beyond is absolutely horrible. Our leaders kept the game going for a long time by injecting trillions of dollars into the system and by going into unprecedented amounts of debt. But despite all of their efforts, the economy is coming apart at the seams anyway, and so I hope that you are prepared for a very hard landing."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Kroger Items Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 10/24/24

"Kroger Items Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "A Bad Week Getting Worse"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 10/24/24

"A Bad Week Getting Worse"

"Boeing's $6B disaster has set off alarm bells in the aerospace industry, and in today's video, I dive into the chaotic financial unraveling. From a massive $6 billion loss in just one quarter to a catastrophic satellite explosion, Boeing's week has gone from bad to worse. And it's not just them - Apple and Goldman Sachs face their own financial fiascos with the Apple Card debacle. Join me as I explore these corporate disasters and what they mean for the economy."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian"

"18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian"

by Maria Popova

"Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life - not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness - that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.

This is all to say: Ever since I first began reflecting on what I have learned about living with each passing year of writing The Marginalian (because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life), these learnings have always been profoundly personal - not overt advice to anyone else, but notes to myself about what I have needed to learn and keep relearning. I write them and share them for the same reason I read - so that we may feel less alone in our individual experience, which is just a commonplace fractal of the total human experience. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin reflected in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)

On this 18th anniversary of the birth of The Marginalian, here are all of these learnings so far as they were originally written in years past, beginning with the present year’s - the most challenging and most transformative of my life.

18. How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability - and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability - but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.

17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:

"Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,

But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,

(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,

Yet out of that I have written these songs.)"

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern -  the antipode of wonder.

15. Outgrow yourself.

14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” - and what an everything he lived through - then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus - an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

"So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance."

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing "Figuring" (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable - incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism - fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis - in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture - which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands - give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” - a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial - in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit - it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that - a myth - as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living - for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night - and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right - even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself."

- https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/

"The Most Important War: The War Between The Sexes"

"The Most Important War: 

The War Between The Sexes"

by John Wilder

"While we spend a lot of time reading about the war in Ukraine or the war that Israel is involved in and realize that right now the only winners are Raytheon®, Boeing™, and Lockheed Martin©. I mean, it must be a relief for Boeing™ to try to design something that’s supposed to experience kinetic failure at high impact killing dozens. Sadly, their new Nerf™ ClusterBomb© isn’t having the combat impact they had hoped for. I think, however, that those wars distract us from a much more important war: the war between the sexes.

This is Wednesday, so obviously we’ll be talking about the economic costs as well as the social costs, so we might as well start talking about that right now: The root of the problem is that women are working. This was seen back in the day as a mechanism to get more cheap labor for business. Oh, that wasn’t the main point of Women’s Lib, just a nice byproduct. No, Women’s “Liberation” was first and foremost a tool of the GloboLeftElite to try to break apart the true atom of society, the family.

And it worked, swimmingly. They knew it would, of course. When Edward Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to get more women to smoke, he paid a lot of women to smoke during one Easter Day Parade in NYC. He tipped off the press that women suffragettes would be smoking “torches of freedom” and they took it from there. 99% of women over 45 at that day and time didn’t smoke. Thankfully, for Marlboro®, the women were very susceptible to propaganda.

Just like at work. The progression went from, “get out and work” to “you don’t need no man” to “go to college and get an education and make big bucks”. Now, as the meme goes, women are taught that devoting themselves to a husband and their children is slavery, but going to work at a faceless corporation for a man, which is, I guess, empowerment.

Women can be very capable and driven, so those that apply themselves early in their career (like men used to be taught to do) and push the long hours can reach success, in many cases, more easily than a man. And there are multiple problems embedded in this.

When women are working fifty-hour weeks, regardless of if they’re in a relationship, they defer having children. When they defer, that often means that their window of fertility closes without even a FedEx® envelope showing up marked, “Urgent, your chance to have a baby expires in 28 days.” I recall one article I read about a fortysomething who had frozen a plethora of her eggs in anticipation that one day she’d have enough, that she’d be where she wanted to be to have those children that she had neglected to have when she was 23.

Oops. I can’t quote it exactly, but she talked about “raging, screaming like an animal” when she found out that her frozen eggs were about as viable as a Bernie Sanders presidential run. Although I’m not completely evil, I did enjoy a bit of epicaricacy at the thought. I know, it’s a bad habit, but in this case I was hoping that some 23-year-old read the news and decided to not become a regretful wine aunt.

But just the mechanism of women wanting to have great jobs is killing them. Women are (as far as I can see) programmed to find men that are better than them. They want a man who makes more money, but they also want to be high powered corporate lawyers, which takes, at minimum, enough effort to push to and through 35.

And those men that make more money than the women? They’re not looking for 35-year-old lawyer women, they’re looking for a 23-year-old Stacy who isn’t cynical after spending over a decade climbing the ladder. Women in that position have rendered themselves simultaneously undesirable and incapable of finding a man.

The Mrs. and I were having a conversation. Her thesis was that women were monogamous – they just had to find the right man. That would make sense. Again, from the newspaper, another 40 something woman (there are a lot of these stories), blows up her marriage of fifteen or twenty years. Leaves it to find and reconnect with the man that had been The One that she had dated for a month or six before she met her husband. In my favorite version, the man has no, absolutely zero, recollection of the woman. She is an Alpha Widow, forever pining for that Alpha she had back in the day.

The probability that a woman becomes an Alpha Widow increases with every sex partner that she has. Whether or not The Mrs. is right, the facts show that if a woman spends her 20s in dissolute sex, the chances that she’ll be psychologically able to remain faithful to man number thirty or sixty plummets to zero. For women who view that their sexual worth is not determined by massive numbers of partners, I’d ask who wants to buy a pair of shoes that have been worn by 126 dudes?

Almost any woman can have an Alpha for a night, but the problem is that once they’ve had one, they feel that’s what they deserve. All of this, together, is what I call The Big Lie that women have been told.

This has consequences. The first is that the average Alpha loves it. He can get as much sex as he wants, when he wants it. The Beta, though, is getting wise, and having an Alpha Widow isn’t what he’s interested in. The consequences are lowered male investment and engagement in society. Women expect to be protected by men on the subway, but elect the District Attorney that turns the rapists back to the street, and sit on the juries that convict men attempting to protect them.

Additionally, men are shying away from doing the things that make them high value. Why engage in those behaviors if they can’t attract the attention of a decent woman? Despite modernity’s challenges, what men really want is a marriage and children. That’s it. It’s wickedly simple.

Women ask, “Where have all the good men gone?” The answer is simple. They’re either married to someone else, or the men never chose the path of radical self-improvement required to make them better. Why work fifty hours and then work out when the prospect of a family is raising Chad’s kid with Chad’s Alpha Widow?

Outside of the political consequences, this has also created a sharp political divide. The younger groups are skewing away from each other, based on sex. Women seek the party of least responsibility so they can kill babies at will and thus make the big bucks making PowerPoints™. Men are tired of the game, and are seeking what has been lost to them, which they see being fulfilled through nationalism and populism. It’s a train wreck ready to happen.

Again, the good news is we always win this one. Will it be horrible and difficult? Yes. But it is a battle that has been fought for centuries, and always, the family ends up winning in the end. Otherwise? None of us would be here. Which will also be the outcome if someone doesn’t stop Boeing®. Seriously. These guys need to be stopped before... oh, too late."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, “Where The Stars And Moon Play”

Full screen recommended.

2002, “Where The Stars And Moon Play”

“Pamela and Randy Copus are the duo known as 2002. Randy Copus plays piano, electric cello, guitar, bass and keyboards. Pamela Copus plays flutes, harp, keyboards and a wind instrument called a WX5. Both musicians also provide all of the vocals on their albums, recording their voices many, many times and layering them to create a "virtual choir" with a celestial, angelic quality.”

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Will our Sun look like this one day? The Helix Nebula is one of brightest and closest examples of a planetary nebula, a gas cloud created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce.

The Helix Nebula, given a technical designation of NGC 7293, lies about 700 light-years away towards the constellation of the Water Bearer (Aquarius) and spans about 2.5 light-years. The above picture was taken three colors on infrared light by the 4.1-meter Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. A close-up of the inner edge of the Helix Nebula shows complex gas knots of unknown origin.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120131.html

Chet Raymo, “As Time Goes By”

“As Time Goes By”

by Chet Raymo

“Is time something that is defined by the ticking of a cosmic clock, God’s wristwatch say? Time doesn’t exist except for the current tick. The past is irretrievably gone. The future does not yet exist. Consciousness is awareness of a moment. Or is time a dimension like space? We move through time as we move through space. The past is still there; we’re just not there anymore. The future exists; we’ll get there. We experience time as we experience space, say, by looking out the window of a moving train. Or is time…

Physicists and philosophers have been debating these questions since the pre-Socratics. Plato. Newton. Einstein. Most recently, Lee Smolin. Without resolution. What makes the question so difficult, it seems to me, is that time is inextricably tied up with consciousness. We won’t understand time until we understand consciousness, and vice versa. So far, consciousness is a mystery, in spite of books with titles like “Consciousness Explained”. Will consciousness be explained? Can consciousness be explained? If so, will it require a conceptual breakthrough of revolutionary proportions? Or is the Darwinian/material paradigm enough? Are we in for an insight, or for a surprise?

As I sit here at my desk under the hill, looking out at a vast panorama of earth, sea and sky, filled, it would seem, infinitely full of detail, so full that my awareness can only skim the surface, I have that uneasy sense that it’s going to be damnably difficult to extract consciousness, as a thing, from the universe in its totality. I think of that word “entanglement,” from quantum theory, and I wonder to what extent consciousness is entangled, perhaps even with past and future.

Who knows? Perhaps consciousness, or what I think of as my consciousness, is just a slice of cosmic consciousness, in the same way that the present is a slice of cosmic time. As a good Ockhamist, I am loathe to needlessly multiply hypotheses. But time will tell. Or consciousness will tell. Or something.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Casablanca", "As Time Goes By", 

Original Song by Sam (Dooley Wilson)

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "What I Have Learned So Far"

"What I Have Learned So Far"

"Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I

not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,

looking into the shining world? Because, properly

attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.

Can one be passionate about the just, the

ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit

to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a

story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.

Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of

light is the crossroads of - indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone."

~ Mary Oliver

"Not Such An Easy Business..."

“Over the years you get to see what a struggle life is for most people, how tough it is, how easy it is to be judgmental and criticize and stand outside of situations and impart your wisdom and judgment. But over the decades I've got more tolerant of people's flaws and mistakes. Everybody makes a lot of them. When you're younger you feel: "Hey, this person is evil" or "This person is a jerk" or stupid or "What's wrong with them?" Then you go through life and you think: "Well, it's not so easy." There's a lot of mystery and suffering and complication. Everybody's out there trying to do the best they can. And it's not such an easy business.”

- Woody Allen

"A Companion..."

"Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, that reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we live it. After all, Number One, we're only mortal."

- Captain Jean-Luc Picard

"The Daily "Near You?"

Erwinna, Pennsylvania, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Jeremiah Babe, "This Is Really Bad, People Need Help Now"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 10/23/24

"This Is Really Bad, People Need Help Now"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Humanity Today..."

"Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."

- Edward O. Wilson

Gregory Mannarino, "Out Of Time? This Is Going From Bad To Worse Rapidly"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 10/23/24

"Out Of Time? 

This Is Going From Bad To Worse Rapidly"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Israel Getting Crushed: Iran, Hezbollah & Yemen Decimate IDF, Netanyahu in Panic"

Danny Haiphong, 10/23/24

"Israel Getting Crushed: 

Iran, Hezbollah & Yemen Decimate IDF, Netanyahu in Panic"

"Rapper and journalist Lowkey and Beirut-based journalist Laith Marouf discuss Israel's upcoming planned attack on Iran and how Benjamin Netanyahu's backpedaling not only cannot be trusted but also reveals a much more serious fact about the ongoing war in the Middle East: Israel is losing and its end is near. This video breaks down why, and the answer will shock you."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 10/23/24

"John Mearsheimer Reveals:

 Iran & Hezbollah's Devastating Attack To IDF Is Coming!"

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- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

Judge Napolitano, "Max Blumenthal: The Zionist View of Human Life"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 10/23/24

"Max Blumenthal: The Zionist View of Human Life"

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- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "Here Comes the Bad News"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly AM 10/23/24

"Here Comes the Bad News"

"Brace yourselves for "The Hidden Cost of Natural Disasters Revealed" where I dive into the shocking realities behind insurance and disaster recovery. With hurricanes like Debbie wreaking havoc, insurance companies like Citizens are denying claims left and right! It's outrageous! You'll hear jaw-dropping tales of denied payments and lawsuits, including insights from Dr. Marvin in Florida. Plus, unexpected closures like Sherry's Restaurant in Oregon and food recalls at Coca-Cola and Treehouse Waffles show how these disasters ripple through our economy. From skyrocketing food prices to insane customer service stories, I've got it all covered."

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- https://www.youtube.com/

"Doug Casey on Rising Prices and Falling Values - Inflation and Social Decay"

"Doug Casey on Rising Prices and Falling Values -

 Inflation and Social Decay"

by International Man

"International Man: Whether it’s at the grocery store, the mall, restaurants, or airports -anywhere you turn - people are finding inferior goods and services at higher prices. Living standards have taken a big step backward recently and are trending even worse. What is really going on?

Doug Casey: There’s an inclination on the part of people to blame the producers of products - the butcher, the baker, and the gasoline maker - but that’s actually very silly, insofar as these people create real wealth.

They’re fighting the effects of government inflation, which doesn’t create anything but fiat currency and fiat credit, which is what actually takes the prices higher. In fact, inflation of the currency, which is to say an increase in the amount of purchasing media above the increase in real wealth. It’s what inflation is all about; it’s the State subtly stealing capital and wealth from individuals.

The big problem with the depreciation of the dollar is that producers are blamed as being the problem. They’re the solution to the problem in that they create real wealth. The real enemy here is the State and its central bank, the Fed.

International Man: How does inflation erode ethical standards, leading people to cut corners, lie, cheat, or even steal as they try to maintain their living standards?

Doug Casey: The prime directive of life is to survive, and entities, whether they be governments, corporations, or individuals. They will basically do whatever they have to do to survive. Unfortunately, inflation is all about theft, subtle and hard to diagnose as it is, but theft breeds more theft.

Leaders of any organization, whether it be governments or corporations, set the moral tone. The average person may not understand much about economics, which is the study of how men produce and consume in order to survive, but they have an intuitive, even if not a technical, understanding of it. Inflation, the theft of people’s wealth, eventually leads to revolution and overturning of society itself.

International Man: How does inflation contribute to a more litigious society, with people increasingly looking to take money from others through the legal system?

Doug Casey: Once again, the average person doesn’t understand economics very well, but he does understand that some people in modern society are getting rich without producing anything. And, they’re benefiting from the subtle fiat currency creation.

In any event, they diagnosed that there’s a theft going on. In a society based less and less on production and more and more on the theft of pre-existing wealth, it’s natural enough that it becomes a Hobbesian war of all against all where counter-theft takes place through the legal system as opposed to actual physical violence.

It’s very much like Al Capone said. “One thug can rob a gas station of $100, and if he’s caught, he’ll go to jail for years. But a lawyer with a pen can rob a country of a million and never get caught.” That’s what’s going on.

The system has become entirely corrupt, and the government, which is supposed to protect the individual man, is actually the main culprit in stealing money from him. The fact that the US has over a million practicing lawyers is a symptom of corruption where people are using the legal system to steal.

International Man: What are some historical examples of inflation leading to significant social and cultural degradation, and what lessons can we learn from them?

Doug Casey: The destruction of the currency usually leads to a social upset because people who’ve produced in their lives and saved the difference do so with the national currency. But if the national currency is destroyed, everything they’ve worked for throughout their lives is also destroyed.

Inflation upsets the entire basis of civilized society. It was a major reason why Chiang Kai-shek’s regime collapsed in China after World War II and a major reason why the Communists, whatever else they’ve done to their society in China, have been reasonably competent managers of their own currency.

The Weimar Republic in Germany after World War I completely destroyed the mark, and the social upset that it caused led to rioting in the streets between the Nazis and the Communists, and of course, the Nazis won. Some countries suffer from perennial inflation, which results in a constant attempt to take over the government.

People find that when real wealth becomes hard to produce, there’s an inclination to go into politics to gain wealth and power as opposed to producing things. It’s why countries with unstable currencies become unstable socially, economically, and politically as well.

International Man: You have frequently discussed how to protect yourself from inflation’s financial and economic effects with gold and other hard assets. However, aside from the financial effects, how do people protect themselves from inflation’s negative social, cultural, and political effects we’ve discussed today?

Doug Casey: The most important thing that you can do is gain skills, lots of skills, both in breadth and in depth so that no matter how things are sorted out, you’ll always be in a position to produce things that people want. I’d like to share Robert Heinlein’s quote about what somebody should be able to do.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I suggest that there’s a practical path to doing that, to qualifying yourself to thrive no matter which way the economy evolves. And for 90% of the people, it’s not sitting at a college desk for four years listening to a woke professor drone on about politically correct topics. I suggest you subscribe to Matt Smith’s son Maxim’s blog, where he describes, on an ongoing basis, exactly what he’s doing to educate himself instead of going to college.

For many years, I’ve considered college to be a complete misallocation, even worse, a waste of four of the best years of your life and a lot of money to have your head filled with incorrect ideas, which are hard to wash away. So, the answer to the question is to prepare yourself intellectually, psychologically, and skill-wise.

It’ll put you in a position to produce more than you consume. And what we usually talk about in this newsletter is what you do with the wealth that you save so it’s not inflated away by your government. The truth is, we’re on the cusp of an economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. And most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming."

- https://internationalman.com/

Bill Bonner, "Holding vs. Hoarding"

"Holding vs. Hoarding"

The feds have no choice. They not only have to borrow, they have

 to ‘print.’ They have to inflate the money supply. And they can only

 do so as long as people take their fake money as if it were real.

by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "In the never-ending press babble is news that Kamala Harris is warming up to crypto. Benzinga: "Kamala Harris is taking a different approach to cryptocurrency than President Joe Biden and she's making moves. Harris isn't just talking about being more crypto-friendly. As reported by Joseph Zeballos-Roig from Semafor, she's already sending her aides out to build relationships with crypto investors and Democrats in Congress who support digital assets."

It is the home stretch for the election. (Want to know which way to vote? Look for our Special Election Issue coming soon!) Ms. Harris will take votes wherever she can find them. She is in favor of new ‘innovations,’ she says. But neither she nor Donald Trump can permit a new innovation to undermine the inflation grift. Crimes need victims. And if the elites are going to keep the show on the road, they need to steal money from consumers, savers and lenders to pay for it.

They face $2 trillion deficits. They have to finance them somehow. Since 1980 US debt has been growing about eight times faster than GDP. Raising middle class taxes is political suicide. So is cutting benefits. The politicians must borrow to keep the show on the road.

But households only save 5% of their incomes. Take US GDP as the ‘income’ for the nation... and you have about $1.4 trillion of available savings. Even if the feds borrowed every penny of it, it still wouldn’t be enough to plug the gap. In the fiscal year just ended, for example, the deficit was $1.8 trillion.

There’s also the ‘crowding out’ problem. As the feds borrow more and more, they push up interest rates... and leave the real economy with less credit to draw upon for new factories and new homes. The economy shrinks, causing tax receipts to fall and deficits to grow larger. The feds have no choice. They not only have to borrow... they have to ‘print.’ They have to inflate the money supply. And they can only do so as long as people take their fake money as if it were real.

Tin-pot dictators... as well as great empires... resort to inflation from time to time. It robs the masses... and destroys the economy... but it keeps the cash flowing to the elites - for a while. Typically, ‘sh*t hole’ countries with an inflation problem impose capital controls, making it impossible to have overseas accounts or exchange your local money for dollars or gold. Argentines were forced to become math whizzes as they juggled white money, blue money and black money - each with different rates of exchange that were adjusted hourly. ATMs ran out of cash. And traveling overseas was almost impossible as the government limited how much money they could take with them.

In order to make inflation work for them, the feds have to make sure it doesn’t work for you. But what will they do if Americans turn to crypto? Bitcoin was widely used in Argentina as the inflation rate rose over 200% last year. But not to buy beer and cigarettes. It was largely an intermediate form of money. People got paid in BTC, for example, and then forwarded their electronic data to a moneychanger who gave them paper dollars or pesos to spend.

But BTC is limited. And its price rises as it becomes more popular. People who switch to BTC early might find that they not only avoided losses to inflation... they actually got rich. This would have strange repercussions.

People don’t like to use an appreciating asset for living expenses. They would rather spend a depreciating asset - paper money. Then too, in BTC terms, consumer prices would be falling rapidly... creating an incentive for crypto hodlers to hodl (hold on for dear life) even more. In other words, if the consumer economy switched from using fake dollars to real BTC, the incentives would turn around. Instead of spending, people would save... and instead of growing, the economy would shrink - at least at first. A BTC-based economy would probably trigger a depression, in other words.

This is really too far out for us to think about very clearly... so let’s go back to our moorings. If BTC ever becomes a ubiquitous alternative... allowing people to escape dollar inflation... expect the feds to make it illegal, tax it, or regulate it so much that it poses no threat to them. Fed researchers and strategists are already laying plans for it. And what about gold? On April 20, 1933, the Roosevelt Administration banned citizens from holding gold. Should we prepare for an encore? More to come..."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Target Shopping: Price Drops On Thousands Of Items"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 10/23/24

"Target Shopping: 

Price Drops On Thousands Of Items"

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o

Adventures With Danno, 10/23/24

"Where Do We Begin: McDonalds, A Not So Happy Meal"

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Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Thousands Of Korean Troops In Europe! Iran Plans Strike On Israel's Nuclear Plant; BRICS"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 10/22/24

"Alert! Thousands Of Korean Troops In Europe!

 Iran Plans Strike On Israel's Nuclear Plant; BRICS"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Banks And Credit Card Companies Will Now Stop Lending, Customers Are Shocked"

Full screen recommended.

The Atlantis Report, 10/22/24

"Banks And Credit Card Companies Will Now

 Stop Lending, Customers Are Shocked"

"A lawsuit against major credit card companies, like Visa and Mastercard, has sent shockwaves through the financial industry. Interchange fees, which are transaction charges merchants must pay every time a customer uses a credit or debit card, have been a contentious issue in the retail industry. Retailers have argued that these fees are excessively high, unfair, and ultimately passed on to consumers through higher prices for goods and services. The lawsuit aimed at resolving a long-standing dispute over swipe fees charged to retailers has far-reaching consequences for consumers and businesses."

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- https://www.youtube.com/

Gerald Celente, "Numbskulls Race To The White House... Don't Forget To Vote"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 10/22/24

"Numbskulls Race To The White House...

 Don't Forget To Vote"

"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."

- https://trendsjournal.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "We Went To Marshall, N.C., It Looks Decimated - A City Turned To Rubble"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 10/22/24

"We Went To Marshall, N.C., It Looks Decimated - 

A City Turned To Rubble"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "River Of Stars"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "River Of Stars"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Riding high in the constellation of Auriga, beautiful, blue vdB 31 is the 31st object in Sidney van den Bergh's 1966 catalog of reflection nebulae. It shares this well-composed celestial still life with dark, obscuring clouds recorded in Edward E. Barnard's 1919 catalog of dark markings in the sky. All are interstellar dust clouds, blocking the light from background stars in the case of Barnard's dark nebulae. For vdB 31, the dust preferentially reflects the bluish starlight from embedded, hot, variable star AB Aurigae.

Exploring the environs of AB Aurigae with the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the several million year young star is itself surrounded by flattened dusty disk with evidence for the ongoing formation of a planetary system. AB Aurigae is about 470 light-years away. At that distance this cosmic canvas would span about four light-years.”

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

"When The World Goes Mad..."

"When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity;

 since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the

 madness on which the whole world happens to agree."

   - George Bernard Shaw

The Poet: W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

“The More Loving One”

“Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.”

- W. H. Auden

"A Message From the Hopi Elders"

"A Message From the Hopi Elders"

"You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.

Now you must go back and tell the people that this is The Hour.

Here are the things that must be considered:

Where are you living?

What are you doing?

What are your relationships?

Are you in right relation?

Where is your water?

It is time to speak your Truth.

Create your community.

Be good to each other.

And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

This could be a good time!

There is a river flowing now very fast.

It is so great and swift, that there are those who will be afraid.

They will try to hold on to the shore.

They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.

Know the river has its destination.

The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river,

keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history, we are to take nothing personal. Least of all, ourselves.

For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!

Banish the word "struggle" from your attitude and your vocabulary.

All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we have been waiting for!"

- Oraibi, Arizona, Hopi Nation

The Daily "Near You?"

Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand. Thanks for stopping by!