Tuesday, November 5, 2024
"15 Restaurant Chains Being Wiped Out By A Perfect Storm In 2024"
Adventures With Danno, "America Is About To Change Forever...Listen Carefully"
Monday, November 4, 2024
Musical Interlude: Josh Groban, "You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Heaven And Hell..."
"The Only Final Sin..."
Adventures With Danno, "Listeria: This is Hard To Explain, Here We Go"
Dan, I Allegedly, "Don't Let Them Rip You Off"
Jeremiah Babe, "Warning! This Is The Calm Before The Storm - Tuesday Night Chaos"
"First Of All..."
"The Top Banana"
Bill Bonner, "Happy Times Are Here Again"
Gregory Mannarino, "A Warning From Warren Buffet? And I Repeat, After the Selection All Bets Are Off"
Jim Kunstler, "Escape from Psychopathocracy"
Judge Napolitano, "Alastair Crooke: Netanyahu’s Imaginary Victories"
"A 'Lockdown Economy' Without The Lockdowns: 48 Percent Of U.S. Small Businesses Couldn’t Even Pay Their Rent Last Month"
"Close to half of small business owners couldn’t pay their rent in September, marking a new three-year high. According to business networking platform Alignable’s September Revenue & Rent Report, 48% of small business renters could not make their rent payments. That was up from 41% in July and August. And it was the highest it has been since the Covid recovery era in March 2021, when 49% of small business owners were delinquent."
Meanwhile, the percentage of middle-income households that rate their financial situations negatively has just hit a brand new high…"America’s middle class is feeling the squeeze like never before, according to new data. Primerica’s latest Financial Security Monitor report for the third quarter found 55% of middle-income households now rate their personal financial situation negatively, a 6-point jump from the previous survey. “For the first time in a year, a majority of middle-income households are feeling negative about their personal finances,” said Glenn Williams, CEO of Primerica. “In fact, this latest report represents the highest negative rating we’ve seen since we began fielding the survey exactly four years ago.” The middle class is being absolutely eviscerated, and it is getting worse with each passing month.
Last week, I was stunned to learn that hundreds of people had applied to rent a “sleeping pod” in San Francisco for $700 a month…"A company that rents “sleeping pods” in downtown San Francisco for $700 a month has had 300 people apply for its remaining 17 beds, the company’s CEO said. Brownstone Shared Housing describes its mission as “providing low cost housing in the most expensive cities”. Its bunkbed-style “pods” measure approximately 3.5ft-by-4ft-by-6.5ft, large enough to fit a twin mattress. The pods come with privacy curtains, inside lighting and charging ports."
I still remember the days when you could rent a spectacular luxury apartment for $700 a month. Now all you get for $700 is a “pod” that allows you to sleep in a large room with a bunch of other stinky people.
It is being reported that Nissan “is planning on cutting production of its main U.S. models by 30%”…"In continuing signs that the U.S. consumer is tapped, Nissan is planning on cutting production of its main U.S. models by 30%, according to a new report from Nikkei, which says the cuts could jeopardize the automaker’s 2024 global sales targets. Nissan forecasts a 99% drop in quarterly operating profit to 995 million yen ($6.52 million) and a 12% decline to 500 billion yen for the year, citing weakening U.S. market earnings, the report says. The company’s target of 3.65 million vehicles sold for 2024 is now at risk, it says." If Nissan thought that the economy was about to turn around, they wouldn’t be doing this.
Warren Buffett continues to sell off stocks, and he now has a cash stockpile of 325 billion dollars…"Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate headed by Warren E. Buffett, extended its retreat from stocks in the third quarter, cutting its holdings in Apple and Bank of America and increasing its cash to a record $325.2 billion." If Warren Buffett thought that the economy was about to turn around, he wouldn’t be doing this.
Adventures With Danno, "Massive Changes Happening At Dollar Tree!"
"Economic Market Snapshot 11/4/24"
Sunday, November 3, 2024
"Emergency Alert! Election Civil War Plan; Iran War Will Be Diversion; 1,000 Missiles Prepped"
Jeremiah Babe, "These People Are Pure Evil, This Country Is In Big Trouble"
Musical Interlude: Il Divo, "Wicked Game (Melanconia)"
"A Look to the Heavens"
Chet Raymo, “Examination of Conscience”
by Chet Raymo
"I have been reading Stephanie Smallwood's “Saltwater Slavery,” a close examination of the trade in human beings between the coast of West Africa and the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a sobering read, but if there is one thing I came away with, it was this: We have an enormous capacity to rationalize the most horrendous crimes. Everyone involved in the slave trade - the European owners of the ships, the masters of the trading companies, the ship captains and crews, the plantation owners in the West Indies and the Chesapeake, the African tribal chiefs who captured and sold their neighbors to the European merchants - knew in some part of their souls that what they were doing was wrong. All of them - good Christians among them, pillars of their communities - found ways to rationalize their participation.
Who among us is immune to self deceit? To what extent am I implicated in the horrendous tragedies that are Darfur and Iraq? What do I owe to the global environment? Is there such a thing as innocence when we are so intimately connected that people in Fiji and Japan will read these words only moments after I write them?
What about science, the favored subject of this blog? Here is Smallwood: “The littoral [of the West African coast]...was more than a site of economic exchange and incarceration. The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied upon a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas.”
Even science, like religion and democratic politics, can be pressed into the service of evil. We are all of us to some extent in the grip of economic forces as powerful and sometimes as pernicious as those that drove the saltwater slave trade. Few of us are required to personally face the direst evils. We are saved from moral anguish only by the fact that our acts of commission and omission ripple outward until their consequences are diluted and lost in the general happiness or unhappiness of humankind.”