So, we rise from the rubble...
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Friday, November 8, 2024
Adventures With Danno, "You Won't Believe What I Saw At Walmart"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 11/8/24
"You Won't Believe What I Saw At Walmart"
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"The Cruelest Joke Of All..."
"The smallest decisions made had such profound repercussions. One ten-minute wait could save a life or end it. One wrong turn down the right street or one seemingly unimportant conversation, and everything was changed. It wasn't right that each lifetime was defined, ruined, ended, and made by such seemingly innocuous details. A major life-threatening event should come with a flashing warning sign that either said ABANDON ALL HOPE or SAFETY AHEAD. It was the cruelest joke of all that no one could see the most vicious curves until they were over the edge, falling into the abyss below."
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
Jim Kunstler, "Aborted"
"Aborted"
Be careful what you wish for.
by Jim Kunstler
“Let folks cast their votes for Trump if that’s their choice. But mark my words, we won’t be certifying the election. He might win, but we’ll ensure he doesn’t step foot in the Oval Office.”
- Jamie Raskin (D-MD)
"At last, it appears that the Party of Chaos got its fondest wish: it aborted itself in the 2024 election. “Joe Biden” was the coat-hanger it used: this miserable, grifting, now-senile hack politician who will be remembered only for driving his country to the verge of ruin. And for what? All in an effort to cover-up a long train of crimes and abuses against the American people perpetrated by a permanent bureaucracy gone rogue that was the party’s partner-in-crime. And now it’s over.
The childishness of the Left - AOC whining about “fascism” - is under-appreciated. Note how the party’s most august mouthpiece, The New York Times, pretends to soul-search in the aftermath of the election debacle.
“Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them. They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda” - The New York Times
The New York Times diminished itself. It drove itself crazy with narratives - just as a crazy person with disordered thoughts can’t discern what’s real and what’s not. What they need is a serious mental health check. The time for incessant lying, hoaxing, and performative hysteria is over. On Thursday, in a three-minute speech, the President-elect set out a clear list of measures to reconstruct a national consensus based on reality. It includes firing a lot of people in the agencies, dis-embedding all the inspector-generals from the departments they oversee, establishing a “truth and reconciliation commission” to declassify and publish documents “related to alleged deep state activities, including spying, censorship, and corruption,” and finding out who exactly at the CIA/FBI/DHS / and other places has been leaking fables and falsehoods to the news media. In other words, clear away a shit-ton of untruth that burdens the consciousness of country.
Though the statement omitted to say so directly, it’s very likely that a number of public officials will find themselves before grand juries in the years ahead. If you haven’t figured it out already, you’ll learn that the term “misinformation” was just the gas in the gaslight used to confound the country about what has really been at stake - which is your personal liberty in what is supposed to be a free country. The Democratic Party and the Deep State blob really did try to steal that from you.
As they stole the 2020 election, which is probably one of the things to be revealed in the process. Look at this bar graph.
Note how many millions more votes were cast in the 2020 elections than in the two previous and now in the 2024 contest. How did that happen? Where did that surplus supply come from? The Covid-19 scam provided the cover for a profligate mail-in ballot operation. They deluged the country with paper. Mark Zuckerberg provided $450-million through his cut-out charities to hire thousands of party activists to harvest and fill-out fraudulent ballots, and stuff them in drop-boxes by the hundredweight, with special attention to the crucial precincts in swing states - and that’s what landed the basement-cringing candidate, “Joe Biden,” in the White House.
It was that simple, and that much in-your-face, and for four years the official organs of the news swatted the truth away claiming they were “false, baseless, conspiracy theories” - and half the country was credulous enough to believe that. Or mentally ill, not able to tell fantasy from reality, especially in the newsrooms. Even more shamefully, this half of the country was led by the better-educated, credentialed, managerial class of citizens, who, amazingly, managed to turn intelligence into a new kind of personal liability. (The simplest explanation for that astounding failure is that people who consider themselves “experts” eagerly believe other experts and credentialed authorities, making them easiest to dupe. That’s why the faculty lounges are full of Jacobins.)
The winning side in this contest didn’t vote against Kamala Harris so much as they voted against the Democratic Party, the Party of Chaos, of BLM riots, of drag queens in the school library, of men in the women’s swim lane (and locker room), of forced vaccinations (your bodily autonomy, sister?), of locking up grandmothers who walked through the Capitol rotunda, of state-driven censorship, of malicious political prosecutions, of ruinous proxy war, of flooding the country with criminal alien mutts, of Mao Zedong style erasing of history, of FISA court surveillance, and, finally, of the same sort of self-loathing for the nation that a three hundred pound sophomore with a nose ring and sleeve tattoos feels for herself.
Indeed, the page is turning, but the story has suddenly changed. It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Party blows up altogether now in what’s shaping up to be a time of harsh recrimination, or whether its front-line activists, Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco and Company skulk in the background hatching new schemes to try to drive the republic insane. They’ll have to work fast because the law might be coming after them in January. But they surely know that.
Between now and then, prepare to put your shoulder to the wheel. It’s not just the US government that begs for reform, but many of the secular operations of daily life in America, especially of an economic scene dominated by freakishly gigantic monopolies that have impoverished so many local communities, destroyed livelihoods and whole ways of life, and made slaves of citizens. That story has hardly begun to be told."
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"Trumpquake"
"Trumpquake"
by Pepe Oscobar
"On the political Richter scale, that was a killer – literally. What was supposed to be a Liberal Totalitarian Show was brutally, unceremoniously, swept out of the park – any park. Even before Election Day, critical thinking was aware of the stakes. With fraud, Kamala wins. With no fraud, Trump wins. There were, at best, (failed) attempts at fraud. The key question still remains: what does the U.S. Deep State really want?
My inbox is infested with loads of weepy reports from U.S. Think Tankland wondering, in disbelief, why Kamala could possibly lose. It’s quite straightforward – apart from her sheer incompetence cum utter mediocrity literally cackling out loud. The legacy of the administration she was part of is ghastly – all the way from Crash Test Dummy to Little Butcher Blinkie.
Instead of bothering to care about the abysmal state of affairs, at every level, concerning that mythical entity, “the American people”, they chose to invest everything on a neocon-manufactured proxy war to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia – stealing Russian assets, unleashing a tsunami of sanctions, shipping an array of wunderwaffen. The weaponization of Ukraine led to countless Ukrainian dead and the inevitable, fast-approaching cosmic humiliation of NATO in the black soil of Novorossiya.
They invested everything to support a genocide in Gaza conducted with a huge arsenal of American weapons: a lebensraum-coded ethnic cleansing cum extermination op directed by a bunch of Talmudic psychos – and marketed under the “rules-based international order” spewed out by Butcher Blinkie in every bilateral or multilateral gathering.
It’s no wonder that West Asia and the wider Global South soon got the message of what may happen to anyone daring to go against the Hegemon’s “interests”. Thus the counterpunch: the strengthening of BRICS and BRICS+, celebrated for all the world to see two weeks ago in Kazan.
At least this administration had a merit, strengthening the bonds between all major “existential threats” to the Hegemon: three BRICS (Russia, China, Iran), plus the indomitable DPRK. All that in contrast with a meager tactical victory – which may not last long: the absolute vassalization of Europe.
Hanging Ukraine on Europe’s neck: Of course, foreign policy does not win U.S. elections. Americans themselves will have to solve their dilemmas, or plunge into civil war. As for the bulk of the Global Majority, it harbors no illusions. Trumpquake’s coded message is that the Zionist lobby wins – again. Perhaps not so unanimously when we consider all strands of neo-cons and Zio-cons. Wall Street wins again (BlackRock’s Larry Fink said so even before Election Day). And prominent silos across the Deep State also win again. That begs a modified question; what if Trump feels emboldened enough after January 25 to launch a Stalinist purge of the Deep State?
Election Day proceeded nearly simultaneously with the Valdai Club annual meeting in Sochi, where the superstar, not surprisingly, was eminent geopolitician Sergey Karaganov. Of course he directly referred to the Empire’s Forever Wars: “We are living in biblical times.”
And even before Trumpquake, Karaganov stressed, calmly, “We will defeat the West in Ukraine – without resorting to ultimate means.” And that “will provide for a peaceful withdrawal of the U.S. – which will become a normal superpower.” Europe, meanwhile, “will move to the sidelines of History.” All of that spot on. But then Karaganov introduced a startling concept: “The war in Ukraine is a replacement of WWIII. Afterwards, we can agree on some kind of order in Eurasia.” That would be the “indivisibility of security” proposed by Putin to Washington – and rejected – on December 2021, part of the “Greater Eurasia Partnership” that was conceptualized by Karaganov himself. The problem though is his conclusion: “Let’s make the Ukrainian war the last major war in the 21st century.”
Ay, there’s the rub: the real major war is actually Eretz Israel v. the Axis of Resistance in West Asia. Let’s have a quick pit stop in Europe before getting to the meat of this matter. Trumpquake is all set to hang Ukraine on Europe’s neck like a larger-than-life albatross. The shorthand: Exit American money financing the born-to-lose Project Ukraine. Enter German money filling the coffers of the weapons lobby inside the Ray McGovern-coined MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex).
The U.S. Treasury has issued an internal memorandum valid until April 30, 2025 – when Trump will be already three months in power – allowing transactions with Russian banks on anything related to oil, natural gas, timber and any form of uranium. As for the gullible, Brussels-run EU, they will pay the heavy load on weaponizing rump Ukraine while accepting wave after wave of new refugees and saying goodbye to any of their funds already invested in that humongous black hole.
Beware of that Tony Soprano wannabe: Trumpquake – if taken at face value – is bound to further weaponize the U.S. dollar; Trump has threatened, on the record, to blacklist any nation that uses other currencies for international trade. BRICS and BRICS+ partners have registered it; and that will accelerate the testing of all models in the BRICS lab leading towards a multi-layered alternative trade settlement system.
BRICS and the Global Majority also know that Trump in fact signed off on Nordstream sanctions – when he referred recently to “killing” Nord Steam. And they also know he did less than zero during Trump 1.0 to find a solution for the proxy war in Ukraine.
Now we come to the clincher. Trump personally destroyed the JCPOA – the Iran nuclear deal – brokered by the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany). Moscow – and Beijing – know perfectly well how this led to further destabilization of the whole of West Asia, in conjunction to the Trump-ordered assassination of Gen Soleimani, which started what I termed the Raging Twenties.
Last but not least, Trump brokered the bombastically-named “Deal of the Century”: the Abraham Accords, which if implemented will forever bury any possibility of an Israel/Palestine two-state solution. The deal – which may be considered as nefarious as the 1917 Balfour declaration – may be in a coma. But MbS’s Whatsapp pal Jared Kushner is back, and will certainly renew the pressure. MbS still has not made up his mind when it comes to BRICS. Trump will go bonkers if MbS increasingly starts to navigate the petroyuan way.
All that brings us to a supremely nefarious character, Tony Soprano wannabe Mike Pompeo, who is a serious candidate to become head of the Pentagon. That would spell major trouble ahead. Pompeo was CIA director and Secretary of State under Trump 1.0. He is an uber-hawk on Russia, China and especially Iran.
Arguably the pressing question from now on is whether Trump – whose life was spared by God, in his own interpretation – does what is expected of him by his uber-wealthy donors, appoints Pompeo and similar gangsters for key posts, and invests on Israel’s war against Iran and the Axis of Resistance. If that’s the case, he won’t have to worry about another failed sniper. But if he really tries to run his own independent game, there’s no question he will be a dead man walking.
So the whole Global Majority waits with bated breath. How will Trumpquake translate in the geopolitical MAGA sphere? Sure bets focus on extensive use of private military companies (PMCs) for foreign policy “missions” and selected, targeted military “interventions”. Targets could include any Global South player from Mexico (to “secure the border”) to Venezuela (the Monroe doctrine “securing the oil”), Yemen (to “secure the Red Sea”) and of course Iran (a massive bombing campaign to “secure Israel”).
In a nutshell: no new wars (as Trump promised), just a few targeted incursions. Plus Hybrid War on maximum overdrive. Brazil, watch out: Trumpquake will not tolerate a truly sovereign BRICS member increasing its Global South influence in the “Western Hemisphere”.
"Trump's Stunning 10-Point 'Shatter Deep State' Plan"
Times Of India, 11/8/24
"Trump's Stunning 10-Point 'Shatter Deep State' Plan"
"US President Elect Donald J Trump's Plan To ‘Dismantle’ The American ‘Deep State’ is going viral on X ahead of his inauguration in January 2025 as the 47th President of the United States. The video of Trump proposing sweeping reforms in federal agencies, FISA courts, and government accountability to curb Washington corruption was released some time ago. Trump called it his bid to reclaim American democracy from Washington’s “corruption.”
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Ask JFK how this went...
"Goldman Sends Warning: 'Collapse Is Coming', Prepare For Huge Market Crash Sell Off"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 11/7/24
"Goldman Sends Warning: 'Collapse Is Coming',
Prepare For Huge Market Crash Sell Off"
"The recent warning issued by Goldman Sachs about a potential market crash has sent shockwaves through Wall Street and global markets. Goldman Sachs's analysts have sounded the alarm, urging investors to brace for a massive sell-off that could decimate portfolios and erode trillions in market capitalization. The warning from Goldman Sachs carries significant weight, as the firm is renowned for its market-moving predictions and unparalleled insights into the intricacies of the global financial landscape. With a reputation for being at the forefront of economic analysis, Goldman's alarming forecast has left investors scrambling to prepare for the potential fallout. Today, we will analyze Goldman's warnings and the potential consequences of a market collapse."
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"Parody Editorial: 'We Leftists Lost. Why?' Complete With Salt Mine Of Leftist Tears"
"Parody Editorial: 'We Leftists Lost. Why?'
Complete With Salt Mine Of Leftist Tears"
by Rebecca Applebaum
"Our mistake was thinking we lived in a better country. I want to assure you that, you, GloboLeftist voter, are perfect and pure. There was in no way a problem with a candidate whose major achievements in life was getting an attendance award and showing up. While the lies, resentment, racism and misogyny of the Trump campaign were apparent to anyone as pure as we are, I believe that democracy was lost when the majority of Americans chose a competent white convicted felon Hitler who wants to holocaust, um someone over a Black woman. Our mistake was to think that democracy would work when people wanted competency (a dog whistle for white supremacy!) over a diverse POC who could read a teleprompter. And she read so well, at least at an eighth-grade level!
Only we, the GloboLeft, knew where the problems were and wanted to fix them. It is amazing to think that places like X.com could allow unfettered speech that wasn’t controlled, so ideas couldn’t be rigorously vetted by GloboLeftist fact checkers! We knew that toxic masculinity would want sexist things like a “marriage” (code word for establishing a Handmaid’s Tale world!) and family (oppression of women’s right to take jobs to make PowerPoints™ rather than be domestic slaves to their unwanted offspring.
In fact, we know that we should not change. We need to make sure that trans girls can play basketball against other girls, despite being 6’3” and able to bench press 225, since we know that’s no advantage. They dared call us “weather retards” when we want to keep a particular climate that existed between 1895 and 1953 rather than allow dangerous climate change to require us to raise our buildings six centimeters if they’re on the beach! We let them complain about their housing costs when otherwise strawberries might cost as much as $0.50 more a quart if we didn’t allow Guatemalans to live in four-star hotels in New York.
The media has failed us – they didn’t portray Donald Trump nearly as Hitlerly as we wanted them to, despite showing a Nazi rally that happened only 87 years ago, yesterday, when Donald Trump held a rally in that same place. Which is not at all what Bill Clinton did when he accepted the Democratic nomination, since Bill Clinton is not at all Hitlery. Plus, Russian collusion!
It sticks in my craw that that this affront to democracy happened when a vast majority of Americans voted for someone. That’s not at all our democracy. It’s because the voters are awful who disagree with the GloboLeft. And I certainly think that you should try to get Hondurans deported now that we know LatinX voters are going to turn into Hitler supporters over time.
What is the solution? It is certainly not to look at our failings and how our message of incompetence and crony capitalism combined with mainly aimless spending coupled with bureaucratic incompetency isn’t right. Our message is right. Every white person is a racist and white women are even misogynist! Imagine that! I imagine they pretend they’re in Margaret Atwood’s glorious non-fiction book, "The Handmaid’s Tale," as those strong, virile, white men thrust against them as their hands are bound, and they’re powerless to resist them, finally giving up and giving over to the pleasure...oh, I’m sorry. Got lost for a moment. White women are awful. They voted for this.
And, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr! How dare Donald Trump consider replacing Rachel Levine, trans hero and doctor, as a member of our federal bureaucracy. Kennedy, a curse on that hallowed family name, even thinks that the glorious COVID vaccine wasn’t glorious. Even though science says this largely untested vaccine is certainly safer than breathing. Why, Kennedy, with those strong muscles and couldn’t stand for a second in Rachel Levine’s size 18 pumps!
But the worst is Elon Musk. Elon Musk dares to allow people to say almost anything they want to on his hate-filled platform, X. They can show mean pictures of things that aren’t even true, like that squirrel, Peanut, clad in armor and blame what they call an authoritarian state just for serving a search warrant and keeping that horrible man who saved Peanut from a life in a house with people he loved and then, mercifully, euthanized him. I don’t understand it. They don’t even make plate armor for squirrels. And if a squirrel can’t be wild, it must be killed.
Why can’t MAGA understand that? These are damaged people. What should we do? There is no way we should engage, at all, in self-reflection to understand why a vast majority of people in this country didn’t like our message. That majority simply doesn’t understand our democracy.
Also, we should keep looking for the most extreme cases of trans people, like the trans woman who wants to be on the girls' swim team and let people know how Hitlery they are when they are bigots who don’t want middle-aged men looking at naked young girls in the locker room. This is normal because science from the last six months of human existence says so!
And keep sharing your stories like this one: "I was at a voting location in a deep-red state and a man with a beard covered in tobacco juice was standing behind a woman. She had a black eye. The man was telling the woman, I assume his wife, how to vote. I reported this to the precinct clerk and he just put some tobacco in his lip and said, 'This is MAGA country, missy!'”
Or this one: "My twelve-year-old daughter came up to me and said, “If only twelve-year-olds could vote, Adolf Drump would never have been elected since we know that the potential impact of tariffs may have an inflationary impact on our economy.” And then everyone in the Starbucks™ clapped." Things like this don’t sound made up at all, and make us more relatable.
Again, the problem isn’t us and our message being incoherent or directly unconnected with reality. No. It’s someone else. And we’ll be the ones that will have to pick up the pieces, unless they put us in "Handmaid’s Tale" outfits and, oh, those thrusting hips. Whew. There must be Global Warming because it’s certainly getting hot in here."
(Inspired by this piece of trash – LINK)
Rebecca Applebaum is the author of the books, "Why Not Me: Why Do Men Ignore Me" and the follow-up,"Why White Men Who Won’t Date Me Are the Cause Of All Bad Stuff, Especially Brad Who I Had A One-Night Stand With And Who Never Called Me Back." Her new book, "Cats, Wine, and Toxoplasmosis Are Why I Hate Trump" is due to hit bookstores next month.
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Related, and very real insanity...
Click image for larger size. Die laughing in scorn and ridicule.
"Plan 4B: Don't Spread For Red"
"‘No man will touch me until I have my rights back’:
why is the 4B movement going viral after Trump’s win?"
Thursday, November 7, 2024
Jeremiah Babe, "The Next Phase Is Stagflation As The FED Fuels The Fire"
Jeremiah Babe, 11/7/24
"The Next Phase Is Stagflation
As The FED Fuels The Fire"
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"A Look to the Heavens"
“Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex.
About five light-years "tall", the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.”
Chet Raymo, “Strange”
“Strange”
by Chet Raymo
“In a review in the “New York Times” Book Review, Daniel Handler writes: “And strange? Well, let’s get this straight: All great books are strange. Every lasting work of literature since the very weird “Beowulf” has been strange, not only because it grapples with the strangeness around us, but also because the effect of originality is startling, making even the oldest books feel like brand new stories.”
Strange: Out-of-the-ordinary, unusual, curious. “The strangeness around us,” says Handler. There is a paradox here. What could be less strange than the world around us? It is the same world that was here yesterday, and the day before that. More to the point: It is a world ruled by law. Inviolable causal bonds. That’s what makes science possible.
And yet, and yet. I walk wary. Strangeness lurks on ever side. Strangeness leaps out of every pebble in the path, every wildflower, every spider web flung between weedy stalks. In the midst of the utterly ordinary the extraordinary abounds. Nothing is so commonplace as to be common. The strangeness of the world, as in literature, has its source in the head, in the convoluted interaction of mind with world. Strange, that we should be here, strangers in a strange land, pilgrims on our own yellow brick roads where nothing is ordinary because everything is perceived through the filter of a unique consciousness.
And strange? Well, let’s get this straight. I hope never to lose the capacity to see the strangeness in the familiar, the curious in the everyday, the exception in the unexceptional.
“I do not expect a miracle,
or an accident,
to set the sight on fire...”
wrote Silvia Plath. Just being here is enough. Just being here is surpassing strange.”
"Most People..."
"Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don't give a damn, as long as they don't get caught. But evil is a completely different creature. Evil is bad that believes it's good."
- Karen Marie Moning
Gerald Celente, "The Trump Boom: It's The Economy, Stupid!"
Gerald Celente, 11/7/24
"The Trump Boom: It's The Economy, Stupid!"
"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."
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Judge Napolitano, "Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Israel in Turmoil"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 11/7/24
"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Israel in Turmoil"
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"Housing Bubble Alert! Property Values Are Set To Plunge By 25% Until December"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 11/7/24
"Housing Bubble Alert! Property Values Are
Set To Plunge By 25% Until December"
"Picture this: a quarter of your home’s value – gone by December. It sounds impossible, right? But across the U.S., we’re seeing the housing market shift in ways few could have predicted. The question is…how deep will it go? 2024 started with sky-high home prices, but that could all change soon, according to new reports. Let's be clear: A home price correction started months ago. In parts of the country, the correction has already been considerable.
But now, a sudden cooling trend is leaving sellers desperate and buyers cautious. With inventories rising and sales collapsing, experts are warning of a possible 25% drop before year’s end. They say a price crash is a risk in more than 200 markets across America. While that's great news for first time buyers, it's a huge blow for those who already own a home and have been benefiting from elevated prices. So, what’s triggering this drastic shift? Is it merely a bubble on the edge of bursting, or is something more profound at play? Let’s uncover the truth today."
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"War..."
"War does not determine who's right... only who's left."
- Bertrand Russell
"The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting
each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals."
- Edward Abbey
"What Might Have Been..."
“Space I can recover. Time, never.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
“Lands can be reconquered, indeed in the course of a battle, a hill or a certain plain might trade hands several times. But missed opportunities? These can never be regained. Moments in time, in culture? They can never be re-made. One can never go back in time to prepare for what they should have prepared for, no one can ever get back critical seconds that were wasted out of fear or ego. Napoleon was brilliant at trading space for time: Sure, you can make these moves, provided you are giving me the time I need to drill my troops, or move them to where I want them to be. Yet in life, most of us are terrible at this. We trade an hour of our life here or afternoon there like it can be bought back with the few dollars we were paid for it. And it is only much, much later, as they are on their deathbeds or when they are looking back on what might have been, that many people realize the awful truth of this quote. Don’t do that. Embrace it now.”
- Ryan Holiday
Dan, I Allegedly, "Business Looks Great From Here"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 11/7/24
"Business Looks Great From Here"
"Welcome back to IAllegedly! Today, we're diving into the alarming trend of mortgage applications plummeting 40% year-over-year. Despite the Fed's interest rate cuts, we're seeing a puzzling decline. Why aren’t people refinancing? Let’s unpack this economic shift. Plus, hear about the rising layoffs from big names like GoPro and Schaeffler, and how it signals a broader economic issue. We'll also explore the impact on industries like retail and automotive, showcasing incredible setups at SEMA in Vegas."
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"14 Words"
"14 Words"
by Paul Rosenberg
"Imagine a pretty spring day. You’re standing on your front porch or some other pleasant vantage point and looking out at a sunlit landscape: trees, grass, and singing birds. Then your five-year-old child or grandchild walks up to you and tugs on your hand to get your attention. You turn and the child asks, “What kind of world is this?” What do you reply?
This child deserves the truth. You won’t be able to use fancy words or long explanations, but truth doesn’t require those things. This child is ready to hear the truth about the world. This kind of moment comes along haphazardly, and you can’t be sure if or when another might show itself. Your answer may affect this child for the rest of his or her life. What do you say?
The 14 Words: As you stand on the porch, away from everything but nature and your child, the only intimidations, biases, and slogans present will be those inside of you… and your child should be insulated from such things. You have to speak truth. And as I say, it doesn’t have to be long and complex; in fact it can’t be, if you want to help a five year old. And it comes to just 14 words:
We are a beautiful species, living in a beautiful world, ruled by abusive systems.
Later – after true words have sunk into the young mind – you can explain that we’re not a perfectly beautiful species, that most people are often confused and that a few are just plain bad. You can further explain that volcanoes and hurricanes and grizzly bears exist. But if you value your child enough to tell them the plain truth, you’ll tell him or her the 14 words first and let them sink in before getting to the small print. With that said, I’ll move to some explanation for the adults.
A Beautiful Species: 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, humanity – perhaps five million of them – stumbled out from an ice age and began to spread across the earth, most of them having nothing in the way of science and technology. Since then, we’ve learned to fill the earth with food, build machines that race across the face of the earth, sail oceans and streams, and fly through the atmosphere at fantastic speeds. Imagine trying to explain these things to the people wandering away from their receding glaciers.
And not only this, but we’ve cured the vast majority of diseases, figured out the smallest parts of the machinery of life, built compendia of human knowledge, made them available anywhere and everywhere, and landed men on the moon. We are a magnificent species. If that triggers “Never forget the darkness!” voices in you, please hang on to “We are a magnificent species” until they subside.
Here are two passages from G.K. Chesterton’s book, "The Defendant," that bear upon dark, automatic thoughts: "There runs a strange law through the length of human history – that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility."
Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelly, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness. You can find the same thing in the Bible, by the way. Theologies be damned, this is what Psalm 82 says, and which Jesus repeated: "You are gods; all of you children of the most High."
A Beautiful World: This is a beautiful world. Get out and look at it: lay outside on a summer night and gaze at the stars for an hour; explore the wilderness. Don’t watch it on TV; go out and experience it. It is beautiful. Perhaps not perfectly beautiful, but one flaw among fifty beauties does not negate those beauties.
Abusive Systems: We all know the systems that rule mankind are abusive. I’m not going to itemize, since we complain about these things every day. You already know. The problem with most of mankind is not that they can’t recognize abuse; it’s that they think they deserve it.
Now, let’s be clear on another thing: Rulership requires us to stay focused on evil. They have to frighten people and portray their competitors as “evil Huns.” They have to publicize threat levels and convince people they need to be saved from impending death. And of course, their dear friends in the media promote evil-consciousness 24/7. Do you think, just maybe, that all this fear has bad effects upon us?
The Truth: The truth is that we are surrounded by people who cooperate, who assist one another, and who care about one another. But those aren’t the things we think about – those are things we’ve learned to ignore. The flashing images of evil surround us and scream at us, after all: The Russians are going to attack, the other candidate is going to destroy all you hold dear, SARS (or bird flu or swine flu or Ebola) is about to kill us all! It’s a long, dark symphony of manipulation. The truth is we’re a beautiful species, living in a beautiful world. The systems that wish to rule us are quite otherwise."
"The Signs Of The Next Times"
"The Signs Of The Next Times"
by The ZMan
"One of the weird things about how the American empire operates is that there is a long waiting period between the presidential election and the installation of the winner, if the winner is not the incumbent. In most countries with elections, the transition happens within a week or two of the election. In America, the new president has months to wait for his turn at the wheel and the outgoing administration has months to do their worst, often with the goal of hobbling the next president.
The latter was on full display after the 2016 election. The last months of the Obama administration were used to set up the Russian collusion hoax, along with other schemes to prevent a smooth transition. The Trump administration was crippled right out of the gate, forced to go through the absurd theater of a special counsel to investigate what everyone knew was a political dirty trick. Between November and January, the fate of the Trump administration was sealed.
That is something to keep in mind this time. Like 2016, the political class was sure they had fended off the invisible army of orange Hitlers, only to find that their blue wall had crumbled once again. Unlike 2016 there was no way for them to claim it was fraudulent or illegitimate, since the results were conclusive. This may explain the relative quiet this time compared to 2016. By the standards of presidential elections, this was a trouncing in both the electoral college and popular vote.
It is possible that the energy has run out of crazy land. People want to think the madness set in during the 2016 election, but it started way back in 2000 when the people we call the left went nuts over the Florida recount. It has been a steady decline into madness for over two decades. That is a long time to sit in the pumpkin patch waiting for the conspiracy theories to be proven true. Perhaps they got tired of waiting and are making their way back to the fringes of sanity.
It is impossible to know, primarily because it is impossible for the non-ideological to understand the mind of an ideologue. The former group tends to the practical, while the latter tends to the fanciful. Most people think half a loaf is better than no loaf, while the ideologues look at such a compromise as a conspiracy against the tides of history and a justification for violence. It is why normal people are always surprised by how the ideologues react to events.
The best we can do is look for clues around the issues of the day. Project Ukraine, for example, has been central to the usual suspects for a decade. Trump is no fan of this project, and he is no fan of Ukraine. People tend to forget that Ukraine was central to his first impeachment. The people responsible for Project Ukraine are the main players in the anti-Trump stuff going back to 2016. They are also something like a drug-resistant virus that never stops trying to kill the host.
At the moment, what we are getting is the usual stuff from the usual suspects laundered in regime media as news and analysis. This Wall Street Journal story tries to frame the Trump plan as a choice between Russia surrendering or Russia giving Ukraine time to regroup and restart the war after Trump. This is the same narrative they have been shopping in one form or another for a year. In other words, the usual suspects may not have a scheme ready for Trump 2.0.
Another place to look for clues is in the antiwhite subculture. They have been weirdly muted for the past year. One reason is the backlash to DEI that took down a few prominent people. These were financed by members of the economic elite, which might mean money is drying up for the antiwhite bigots. This tweet from New York Times rage head Ida Bae Wells reads like a resignation letter. In 2016 these bigots were enraged by Trump winning, but this time they are despondent.
The antiwhite race rackets are worth billions, so there is no reason to think their relative quiet this time is a sign that they are about to fold up their tents and get jobs down at the local Home Depot. It is worth noting that crying “white nationalism” has lost all its punch over the last few years. In other words, their muted response could be part of a longer downward trend or simply part of a regrouping. Like the neocons, how these people respond over the next months will provide some clues.
Another area to watch to get a sense of what is happening is the media. Crazies like Rachel Maddow were slightly less nutty this time, but other nodes on the media rage machine were strangely sober. Again, the decisive victory this time might be the issue as there is no easy bogeyman for them to blame. On the other hand, the Biden debate performance and the aftermath may have broken whatever spell had kept these people within the narrative.
It feels like a lifetime ago, but the night of the Trump – Biden debate, it was clear that the chattering skulls were stunned to see that desiccated husk of Joe Biden drooling on himself and staring into the nothingness. It is possible that there was some sort of awakening among some parts of the media. These people are sociopaths, so no one should be optimistic, but how they react over the next months will provide some clues as to what is happening behind the scenes.
There are plenty of other places to look, but the reason it feels like there is an eerie calm over the battlefield is everyone expected the orcs to keep fighting, despite the results of the election. Instead, they have retreated over the hill and are murmuring amongst themselves. The thing to accept is they never quit. They will be back, so the question is in what form will they return? What path back to perfidy will they take in the coming months to continue the fight?"
o
Gregory Mannarino, "Trump Doubles Down On Crypto; Updates: Stocks, Banks, Crypto, Gold"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 11/7/24
"Trump Doubles Down On Crypto;
Updates: Stocks, Banks, Crypto, Gold"
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Bill Bonner, "Punched in the Face"
"Punched in the Face"
The Trump Team will stick with the Primary Political Trend, which is toward more
spending, bigger deficits and more debt. Investment markets know what time it is.
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - “That’s it. I’m voting for Trump.” Such were the words of [a member of our own household] when she got back from the grocery store on Monday. “I got a single bag of groceries. I’m sure it would have cost me about $50 a few years ago. Now, it’s $120. It’s no wonder Trump has so much support.” With these thoughts the country veered away from ‘more of the same’... to... more of the same. And today, we celebrate the exquisite blockheadedness of our great democracy.
The stock market reacted yesterday... anticipating easier credit. The Dow rose more than 1,500 points. And the world’s 10 richest people ended the day $64 billion dollars richer. During the four years of the Trump Team, 2016-2020, the US saw the greatest wingding of government spending in history. The federal budget went from $3.8 trillion in outlays during Obama’s last year, to $7.2 trillion in Trump’s last year. The nation had never seen anything like it... with trillions out the door and down the drains in stimmies, PPP loans, and the like.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, the Biden Team came into office and added another $1.2 trillion of boondoggles and giveaways. What happens when you add that kind of money to the economy? Milton Friedman, recently channeled by Elon Musk, explained:
"Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money, and any other attribution to other groups of inflation is wrong. Consumers don’t produce it. Producers don’t produce it. The trade unions don't produce it. Foreign sheiks don't produce it. Oil imports don't produce it. What produces it is too much government spending and too much government creation of money and nothing else."
Chad Champion adds empirical evidence: "A recent study out of MIT showed that “the overwhelming driver of that burst of inflation in 2022 was federal spending, not the supply chain.” Recall that there was about $7.5 trillion in additional spending from March 2020 when COVID hit, through December 2022."
Trump planted wicked seed. Biden (and Harris) fertilized it and reaped the bitter harvest. Price increases showed up the year after Trump left office, with inflation ramping up to a 7% annual rate in the first quarter. In June, 2022, inflation hit a 9% rate. And while the rate of inflation has come down since then, the effect of sustained inflation at relatively high rates has raised prices across the board.
During the Biden years, the cost of energy rose 34%. Car insurance went up 56%. Hotels 45%. Peanut butter, 41%. The price of the basic Ford F-150 went from $30,000 in 2019 to $39,000 today - up 30%. The price of a new house rose from $380,000 in 2019 to more than $500,000 today - a 25% increase.
More than any human being on the planet, Donald Trump was responsible for these price increases. He was where the buck should have stopped. Instead, he passed out trillions of bucks. These are the bucks that raised consumer prices... and turned people against the Biden Team, helping Donald Trump retake the White House.
And now, apart from the personal wackiness and unpredictability of the man himself, the Trump Team will stick with the Primary Political Trend... which is toward more spending, bigger deficits and more debt. Investment markets know what time it is. Barrons: "Treasury debt gets ‘punched in the face’. The Treasury market, arguably the world’s financial backbone, is seeing yields erupt higher as investors respond to the big shifts that could come from a second Donald Trump presidency. This isn’t a buying opportunity. The yield on the 10-year note, a metric that sets rates on mortgages and credit cards, leapt Wednesday to close at 4.425%, its highest end-of-day value since July, from 4.290% on Tuesday."
Bloomberg: "US Treasury yields surged - with the 30-year rising the most since the global flight to cash in March 2020 - as investors piled back into bets that Donald Trump’s return to the White House will boost inflation."
Donald Trump is, after all, a “low interest guy.” As a leveraged New York real estate speculator, he understands as well as anyone what artificially low interest rates can do for rich people with financial assets. But as we’ve seen, ultra-low rates have a wretched effect on the real economy and real people with real jobs. That is the indiscreet charm of American democracy. The politicians do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. And the public, bloodied and abused, then re-elects the scoundrels who did it to them."
Adventures With Danno, "I Was In Complete Shock At Kroger Today"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 11/7/24
"I Was In Complete Shock At Kroger Today"
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Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Musical Interlude: 2002, "Chrysalis"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Chrysalis"
“Oceans of strings and choirs, flutes and keyboards lift us
out of the trials and tribulations of our daily lives as though
we were on a ship with gossamer sails, sailing on the moonlight.”
– Steve Ryals
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a mere 35 million light-years away, toward the constellation Leo. Relatively bright in planet Earth's sky, NGC 3521 is easily visible in small telescopes but often overlooked by amateur imagers in favor of other Leo spiral galaxies, like M66 and M65. It's hard to overlook in this colorful cosmic portrait, though. Spanning some 50,000 light-years the galaxy sports characteristic patchy, irregular spiral arms laced with dust, pink star forming regions, and clusters of young, blue stars.
Remarkably, this deep image also finds NGC 3521 embedded in gigantic bubble-like shells. The shells are likely tidal debris, streams of stars torn from satellite galaxies that have undergone mergers with NGC 3521 in the distant past."
"I Keep Saying That..."
"Angel: Well, I guess I kinda worked it out. If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters... then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy, but I never got it.
Kate Lockley: And now you do?
Angel: Not all of it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help, because I don't think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.
Kate Lockley: Yikes. It sounds like you've had an epiphany.
Angel: I keep saying that, but nobody's listening."
"The Mark Of Him..."
“The barbarian hopes, and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.“
- Hilaire Belloco
Dan, I Allegedly, "It’s Time to Pay the Bill"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, PM 11/6/24
"It’s Time to Pay the Bill"
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"Scott Ritter: Hezbollah Wipes Out Israeli Ground War, IDF Collapses on All Fronts"
Danny Haiphong, 11/6/24
"Scott Ritter: Hezbollah Wipes Out Israeli Ground War,
IDF Collapses on All Fronts"
Former UN Weapons Inspector and US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer Scott Ritter EXPOSES Israel's massive defeat at the hands of Hezbollah as the IDF's ground operation in Lebanon is put to a screeching halt. This must see video breaks down the massive impact that Israel's rapidly deteriorating situation in Lebanon will have on the region at large.
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o
"The Day Has Been So Full Of Fret And Care..."
“The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone. Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night’s heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but angels of God.”
- Jerome K. Jerome
"Too Often..."
"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word,
a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring,
all of which have the potential to turn a life around."
- Leo Buscaglia
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