So, we rise from the rubble...
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Sunday, November 17, 2024
"That's Where It All Begins..."
"That's where it all begins. That's where we all get screwed big time as we grow up. They tell us to think, but they don't really mean it. They only want us to think within the boundaries they define. The moment you start thinking for yourself - really thinking - so many things stop making any sense. And if you keep thinking, the whole world just falls apart. Nothing makes sense anymore. All rules, traditions, expectations - they all start looking so fake, so made up. You want to just get rid of all this stuff and make things right. But the moment you say it, they tell you to shut up and be respectful. And eventually you understand that nobody wants you to really think for yourself.”
- Ray N. Kuili, “Awakening"
"That's Why..."
"That's why crazy people are so dangerous.
You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage."
- Michael Buckley
"The Immortal Hymn of Mankind"
"The Immortal Hymn of Mankind"
By Paul Rosenberg
"If you could go back in time a thousand years, you’d find people who were eerily similar to your present companions. The same is true for people who will live a thousand years from now. Some of them will be nearly identical to the people you now love, and you would care deeply about those people, the same as you do their present-day counterparts. Please understand this: The men, women and children we would love in the future can advance only in the same way we have, by the benefaction of their predecessors.
Can you imagine how long it took for ignorant men and women to learn metallurgy? Or crop rotation? Or a hundred other things we can barely imagine being without? Our lives are advanced only because they created new ways of living and passed them down to us. Hundreds of generations of people just like us lived through dark times, fighting toward whatever bits of light they could find, opposed by others nearly the entire way, to bring us where we are now.
Someday our generation will also be gone, and we will have played – whether we’ve understood it or not – the crucial role of transmitting civilization to following generations. What do we want them to be like? How do we want them to live? Numberless men and women have struggled toward the future and spent all they had to bring us here. We owe them something. It may be that they no longer care, but their gifts to us will cease to exist unless we pass them along. We make them matter, and they deserve to matter.
We stand now at the threshold of the stars, but we’ve been immobilized by self-serving structures designed to control every human and reap from their every action. We must get past them if we are to continue forward. Foolishness and fear bid us to forget the future, to chase status instead of goodness, consumption rather than production, and stasis rather than expansion. A thousand self-serving voices call us aside, grasping at our minds and emotions. We must turn away from them all.
We owe this to the people of the past. We owe it to the people of the future. We owe it to ourselves. What happens next is up to you. It’s not up to leaders or bosses. It’s up to you. The consequences of your failures are inescapable, and the consequences of your good deeds are inescapable. Whether or not you acknowledge them, our descendants will live or die by them. What you are and what you do matter a very great deal.
Engage your will. Act. Awake."
o
- Blaise Pascal
o
“The sands of time blew into a storm of images... images in sequence to tell the truth! Glorious legends of revolutionaries, bound only by a desire to be true to themselves, and to hope! Parables of colliding worlds, of forbidden love, of enemies healing the wounds of circumstance! Projected myth of persecution through greed and selfishness... and the will to survive! The Will to survive! And to survive in the face of those who claim credit for your very existence! We survive not as pawns, but as agents of hope. Sometimes misunderstood, but always true to our story. The story of Man."
- Scott Morse
o
Despite ourselves, this song always suggested the images of
Mankind's relentless march through the ages to our unknown destiny...
Vangelis, "Alpha"
"Elon Musk Walks Into McDonald's Full Of First Responders – What He Does Next Is Unexpected"
Full screen recommended.
Top Master, 11/13/24
"Elon Musk Walks Into McDonald's Full Of First Responders –
What He Does Next Is Unexpected"
"When Elon Musk unexpectedly walks into a small-town McDonald's packed with first responders on their lunch break, no one could have guessed what would happen next. What starts as a casual moment quickly turns into something far more meaningful. From lighthearted jokes to an emotional, unforgettable gesture, Musk leaves everyone in the room stunned. This surprising encounter takes an unexpected turn that will leave you thinking long after the video ends. Watch how a simple trip for a burger turns into a moment of connection, gratitude, and much more. Don’t miss this incredible story - click to see what happens next!"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Urgent Warning: Your ATM Card May Be Compromised"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 11/17/24
"Urgent Warning:
Your ATM Card May Be Compromised"
"Banks hide 6-month data breach: the truth finally exposed! Six banks just announced a massive data breach that could affect YOUR personal info and ATM card. In this video, we break down the shocking details of how Savers Bank, The Village Bank, Waterfront Bank, Webster 5 Cents Savings Bank, and Eagle Bank kept this breach secret for SIX MONTHS. Learn why you might need to monitor your account for up to 24 months and what steps you should take to protect yourself. "
Comments here:
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Jeremiah Babe, "Major Shockwave Will Hit U.S. In 2025"
Jeremiah Babe, 11/16/24
"Major Shockwave Will Hit U.S. In 2025;
Banks Keep Closing; Coming War On Drug Cartels"
Comments here:
"BRICS Better Get Ready, Trump Is About To End The Fed"
Full screen recommended.
Redacted, 11/16/27
"BRICS Better Get Ready,
Trump Is About To End The Fed"
Comments here:
o
Richard Wolff, 11/16/24
"BRICS Countries Replacing
the US dollar in International Trade"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
"NGC 1333 is seen in visible light as a reflection nebula, dominated by bluish hues characteristic of starlight reflected by interstellar dust. A mere 1,000 light-years distant toward the heroic constellation Perseus, it lies at the edge of a large, star-forming molecular cloud.
This telescopic close-up spans about two full moons on the sky or just over 15 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 1333. It shows details of the dusty region along with telltale hints of contrasty red emission from Herbig-Haro objects, jets and shocked glowing gas emanating from recently formed stars. In fact, NGC 1333 contains hundreds of stars less than a million years old, most still hidden from optical telescopes by the pervasive stardust. The chaotic environment may be similar to one in which our own Sun formed over 4.5 billion years ago."
Paulo Coelho, "Killing Our Dreams"
"Killing Our Dreams"
by Paulo Coelho
"The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams is the lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the Good Fight.
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
"Benedicto"
"The summit is believed to be the object of the climb. But its true object - the joy of living - is not in the peak itself, but in the adversities encountered on the way up. There are valleys, cliffs, streams, precipices, and slides, and as he walks these steep paths, the climber may think he cannot go any farther, or even that dying would be better than going on. But then he resumes fighting the difficulties directly in front of him, and when he is finally able to turn and look back at what he has overcome, he finds he has truly experienced the joy of living while on life's very road."
- Eiji Yoshikawa
○
"Benedicto"
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you - beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”
- Edward Abbey
"Making Your Best Guess"
"Making Your Best Guess"
by Arthur Silber
"We are not gods, and we are not omniscient. We cannot foretell the future with certainty. Most often, cultural and political changes are terribly complex. It can be notoriously difficult to predict exactly where a trend will take us, and we can be mistaken. We do the best we can: if we wish to address certain issues seriously, we study history, and we read everything that might shed light on our concerns. We consult what the best thinkers of our time and of earlier times have said and written. We challenge everyone's assumptions, including most especially our own. That last is often very difficult. If we care enough, we do our best to disprove our own case. In that way, we find out how strong our case is, and where its weaknesses may lie.
Barring extraordinary circumstances, we cannot be certain that a particular development represents a critical turning point at the time it occurs. If we dare to say, "This is the moment the battle was lost," only future events will prove whether we were correct. We do the best we can, based on our understanding of how similar events have unfolded in the past, and in light of our understanding of the underlying principles in play. We can be wrong. "
“The Bewildered Herd..."
“The bewildered herd is a problem. We've got to prevent their roar and trampling. We've got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like "Support our troops!" You've got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they're properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they're not competent to think. Therefore it's important to distract them and marginalize them.”
- Noam Chomsky
○
"Those who can make you believe absurdities
can make you commit atrocities."
- Voltaire
The Poet: Rolf Jacobsen, "When They Sleep"
"When They Sleep"
"All people are children when they sleep.
There's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
God, teach me the language of sleep."
- Rolf Jacobsen,
"The Roads Have Come to an End Now"
"The Aenean Challenge" (Excerpt)
"The Aenean Challenge" (Excerpt)
The Reality of the Present Confronts the Possibility of the Future
by The Tree Of Woe
Excerpt: "Last week, in an uncharacteristic moment of optimism inspired by the red wave that swept across America, I announced the dawn of a new civilization - one based on what I call the Aenean soul, the successor to the Faustian soul that has animated the West from the Renaissance until now. But, in truth, the new civilization has not yet dawned. We remain in the twilight of the Faustian age. And in these darkening hours, the West faces a confluence of crises, some proclaimed loudly by environmentalists, others muttered in shadowed corners of boardrooms, and still others dismissed by those who believe tomorrow must always resemble today.
These crises are rooted in resource depletion, and they threaten to collapse Western civilization long before it can achieve its Aenean destiny. The prophets of decline - be they neo-Malthusians or the stewards of the Club of Rome - warn of limits that cannot be ignored. The Faustian soul denied that such limits existed except in the minds of doomsayers. The Aenean soul acknowledges the limits but aims to overcome them with courage and wisdom. This article is my effort to make that acknowledgment and assess the challenges we face."
Full, lengthy, and most highly recommended article is here:
"My Task..."
“My task, which I am trying to achieve, is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel; it is, before all, to make you see. That and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, all you demand – and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”
- Joseph Conrad
“Thoughts on Evil, Human Nature”
“Thoughts on Evil, Human Nature”
by W. Christopher Epler
“Carl Sagan, author and astrophysicist from Cornell, used to wonder if atomic weaponry would be the nemesis of most “advanced species”. A flight of fancy of sorts since whales and elephants are certainly advanced species but don’t feel the need for technology (and should we patronize them for this since they aren’t rapidly destroying the planet?). Is it possible that much of science and technology are actually synonyms of self destructive stupidity? A kind of short sighted greed, perhaps.
In any event, what has now totally blocked the evolution of the human species is pure evil. The fringe of astronomically rich sociopaths is the absolute outer limit of evil. Similarly, so do all mentally ill religious fanatics poison the march of human civilization. And, probably most of all, the Earth’s Paris Hiltons and astronomically rich parasites (and vampires – remember, it’s all really OUR wealth), necessitate convoluted social/financial structures and processes which are the “crown of thorns” or highway to hell (or your metaphor of choice) for Homo sapiens. Maybe the wrong species got killed off during the demise of the Neanderthals.
Remember, “human” is a generic word that evolution has experimented with in actually a great many forms – we’re just the form that is still standing. But what’s the problem? Not a candy ass “religious” problem or a candy ass “political” problem but THE problem? Why is our species well on its way to going extinct? Indeed, why is it a near certainly that Home sapiens are going bye bye in the relatively near future (and taking countless “innocent by-stander” species with us in the process)? However, alas, they are just a sample of evil, since evil is as omnipresent as our breath. But what IS evil? Well, we don’t have to get particularly metaphysical about this. Evil is a function of human society. It has to do with the interactions of quantities of us (or probably any advanced life form).
So there’s a decidedly “quantitative” variable here. As our numbers increase, so does the complexity of our social infrastructure. And that seems to be the rub, since invisibly and insidiously the “social game rules” are conditioned into our vulnerable, biological brains. And just here is the door to hell. This dimension can be called “consensus reality” and it’s an admixture of language (always language!), the past, memory (not always our friend), and the miscellaneous conditionings of our time, place, and families (often profoundly dysfunctional). More openly, here are the programmed religions, laws, constitutions, and “theories” we so love to worship. In short, here is the stopping point of our species. Not atomic weapons, but the accumulated programming of years of social/psychological conditioning. The “operational definition” of all of the above is thought, because consensus realty IS thought; hence the thing the human race does best is think itself to death.
On a positive note, words like liberation, transcendence, and Enlightenment are “mystical” (the shoe fits) alternatives to this “swallowed whole” existence. The intelligence limitations of our species are still sublimely unknown, but whatever pragmatic value consensus reality may offer, our lives don’t even BEGIN until we get straight that this fire storm of conditioning that has become the “mind set” of the entire human race (indeed, the very “God” of the human race), is fundamentally, radically, and biologically arbitrary and random. In the context of this piece, what this means is that the social game rules that perpetuate the “Have’s,” that justify their astronomical wealth and power, and that (worst of all!) give an obscene “righteousness” to deranged lunatics who so love to commit genocide for the glory of God, aren’t worth the toilet paper they are printed on.
And exactly here is where our species is probably doomed, since many are called but few are chosen when it comes to being true to your birthright self and finding a reality/creativity/intelligence center that trivializes millennia of evil-perpetuating conditioning. Remember phrases like, “Might makes right”, “Manifest Destiny”, “survival of the fittest” (translation, survival of the wealthiest), and the loathsomely hypocritical “Divine Right”.
Of course these sayings (and even laws) are merely the tip of the iceberg. The dungeon is elsewhere. It is deep within the infrastructure of the collective human mind. Do we know that it is infinitely unjust that the elites spend more money on their wardrobes than most of us spend on our families in an entire lifetime? Do we know it is evil when religious fanatics try to steal an entire country and turn the lives of the people who have been living there for centuries into a WW2 concentration camp?
One response to these questions could be that we’re not sure if these things are evil, but almost certainly the world does know these things are filthy, evil, and infinitely unjust. However, you can know things on the “surface” of your mind that you play games with in the depths of your mind. The tragedy is that the world basically turns the other way from these evils and injustices because in the depths of our conditioning we are historically programmed to accept them. Hence, it is the deep, collective mind set that permits and justifies evil. We know better, but our “unconscious” (to use that word) “accepts” evil because we have been programmed to adapt to it for millennia.
The literally unimaginable suffering that necessarily goes with the existence of Greek God-like elites would make Jesus weep, but we accept The Haves (the evil) – indeed, most of us probably envy them. This is the paradox of evil. If we didn’t “accept” evil, it couldn’t exist! But since literally billions of us DO accept evil, that makes us an evil species.
This is not intellectualizing or empty theory. If the human race said no to “The Beast”, to the “Have’s”, to genocidal religious fanatics, to the Rockefeller’s, to the Rothschild’s, to the Bush’s, to murder in the name of God subhuman filth, to Saudi Princes, etc., etc., we could destroy them in a week. And I mean “non theoretically” destroy them in a week. Remove them from the planet as in cease to exist – now you see them, now you don’t! There are times in life you must be limitlessly aggressive. We can either watch The Beast destroy Mother Nature and our children’s future, or WE can destroy the beast. Remember, we know exactly who they are and we know exactly where they are. So what in the name of truth, beauty, and goodness are we waiting for? Certainly not for the paper bullets of religion and politics. ULTIMATE hardball is the name of this game.
Hence, looked at one way, there is great hope. Looked at another way, it is hopeless. It all comes down to how each of us deals with a lifetime of conditioning. Liberation is transcending the box. The world IS the box. So consensus reality (the home of evil) can be left. This is called being true to ourselves, or perhaps even Enlightenment. However, as a species, the probability that we will leave the box in sufficient percentages to “eliminate” evil is probably very, very small. Fortunately, even though our paralyzed and conditioned species continues to equate life with a moronically defective consensus mind set, each of us is still able to stretch our intelligence/spiritual eagle wings and leave this evil box forever. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: we’re the dogs – never the tails.”
o
Freely download “Beyond Good And Evil”, by Friedrich Nietzsche, here:
"Do You Wish To Know?"
"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"
"I... don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."
- Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”
o
"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."
An excerpt from “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand.
Full text of “Francisco’s Money Speech” is here:
Freely download "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, here:
"Bankruptcies Will Surge 118% As Layoffs Smash 2009 Financial Crisis Levels"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, AM 11/16/24
"Bankruptcies Will Surge 118% As
Layoffs Smash 2009 Financial Crisis Levels"
"Recent data indicates that achieving the Federal Reserve's 2% inflation target may require more time than initially anticipated. Concurrently, companies are grappling with significant challenges to their sustainability, resulting in layoffs reaching historic levels not seen since 2009. As bankruptcies continue to surge, we're looking at the worst financial crash in the last 20 years."
Comments here:
"Wars And Rumors Of Wars"
War Echo Zone TV, 11/16/24
"Scott Ritter: 30,000 Russia Troops Land In Iran,
Netanyahu Pushes Israel to Death"
"Scott Ritter provides a critical analysis of the intensifying geopolitical crisis in the Middle East, spotlighting the reported deployment of 30,000 Russian troops to Iran and its implications for the region. He discusses Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s aggressive strategies, which are pushing Israel into a precarious position, while the U.S. allegedly considers nuclear options to counter Iran’s growing power. Ritter examines the risks of escalation, the shifting balance of power with Russia’s involvement, and the catastrophic consequences of nuclear confrontation, emphasizing the urgent need for diplomacy and restraint."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Times Of India, 11/16/24
Elon Musk Shocks Zelensky On Ukraine;
'Not Putin, But U.S. Responsible
"Elon Musk shared a video of economist Jeffrey D. Sachs on X, where Sachs criticized U.S. and NATO expansion, blaming it for provoking Russia's military response in Ukraine. Sachs argued that U.S. ambitions to include Ukraine in NATO, despite Putin's warnings, escalated the conflict."
Comments here:
o
600,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers, 80,000 dead Russians, 20 million refugees escape to neighboring countries, $150 BILLION in "aid" to Ukraine while our own country rapidly descends into economic, social and societal chaos and destruction... WHY? Cui bono?
Adventures With Danno, "Very Shocking Prices At Aldi, Here We Go"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 11/16/24
"Very Shocking Prices At Aldi, Here We Go"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Banks Preparing For A Major Crisis"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 11/16/24
"Banks Preparing For A Major Crisis"
"Banks are hiding a dark secret about commercial real estate. Join me as we uncover the looming crisis and its potential impact on the economy. Hey everyone, it's Dan from IAllegedly. In today's video, we dive into the troubling state of commercial real estate loans and how banks are preparing for massive failures. We'll explore the Fed's recent report, Jamie Dimon's surprising statements, and the potential for banking deregulation."
Comments here:
Friday, November 15, 2024
Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Nuclear War With Iran! Economic Crash!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 11/15/24
"Alert! Nuclear War With Iran! Economic Crash!"
Comments here:
"Target Is Rapidly Deteriorating Before Our Eyes, And It’s Worse Than You Realize"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 11/15/24
"Target Is Rapidly Deteriorating Before Our Eyes,
And It’s Worse Than You Realize"
"Target seems to be facing a never-ending nightmare. Since early 2022, its financial performance has been disappointing executives and investors alike, and it’s been raising alarms cross the entire retail industry. How one of the biggest American companies can sustain itself if sales are falling all across the board quarter after quarter?
In fact, just a few months ago, Target revealed that it faced the first full-year decline in sales in a long time. This means the retail giant has faced acute losses for four quarters in a row in 2023, and it's on track for a repeat in 2024 as inflation-weary shoppers cut back on discretionary purchases, which accounts for more than half of Target's merchandise. The retailer is now taking desperate measures to save its business, but that may not be enough to prevent its imminent downfall. The chain continues to close multiple locations using excuses that do not stick anymore.
Something far more disturbing is behind Target’s woes. Target is a barometer of the American consumer. When shoppers are struggling financially, it shows on the retailer's bottom line. In October, the chain reported that, in 2023, it faced its first full-year of sales declines in seven years. Between Q1 and Q4 sales dropped by an average of 3.7% per quarter, a very concerning development considering that, in 2022, sales growth was already dismal, at just 0.8% year-over-year. In that year, the company lost money in all four quarters, but not mainly due to lower sales volumes. Target was forced to take a profit hit as it slashed prices for thousands of items consumers were not interested to buy.
The industry titan saw profits dropping by 49% in Q1, 90% in Q2, 54% in Q3, and 52% in Q4. That cost the chain an estimated $8 billion, according to retail experts. Now, CEO Brian Cornell is predicting a sluggish 2024 given that economic conditions have further deteriorated Americans purchasing power.
Target's middle-class customer base has been strained by higher prices over the past couple of years, leading many to pull back on discretionary goods. So far in 2024, Target’s sales have declined for three straight quarters, hinting that it might end in the red for yet another year. Investors are panicking about the prospect of another unprofitable quarter, and they have been dumping Target stock at an unprecedented rate. The company's shares have dropped by 43% since its peak."
Comments here:
"Things Aren't Normal; Social Security Is A Ticking Time Bomb, You Will Work Till You Die"
Jeremiah Babe, 11/15/24
"Things Aren't Normal; Social Security Is A Ticking Time Bomb,
You Will Work Till You Die"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Soothing Relaxation, "Stardust: Relaxing Fantasy Music with Beautiful Night Skies"
Full screen recommended.
Soothing Relaxation, "Stardust:
Relaxing Fantasy Music with Beautiful Night Skies"
"Relaxing fantasy music with beautiful night skies filled with stars.
This soothing instrumental music is called "Stardust" by Peder B. Helland."
"I am a composer from Norway and I started this channel with a simple vision: to create a place that you can visit whenever you want to sit down and relax. I compose music that often can be described as sleep music, calm music, yoga music, study music, peaceful music, beautiful music and relaxing music. I love to compose music and I put a lot of work into it.
Thank you very much for listening and for leaving feedback. Every single day I am completely astonished by all your warm support and it really inspires me to work even harder on my music. If you enjoy my work, I would be very happy if you decided to subscribe and join our community. Have a wonderful day or evening!"
Peder B. Helland, composer for Soothing Relaxation
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The massive star that created the bubble, a Wolf-Rayet star, is the bright one near the center of the nebula. Wolf-Rayet stars have over 20 times the mass of the Sun and are thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova phase of massive star evolution.
Fast winds from this Wolf-Rayet star create the bubble-shaped nebula as they sweep up slower moving material from an earlier phase of evolution. The windblown nebula has an age of about 70,000 years. Relatively faint emission captured by narrowband filters in the deep image is dominated by the glow of ionized oxygen atoms mapped to a blue hue. Presenting a mostly harmless outline, SH2-308 is also known as The Dolphin-head Nebula.”
The Poet: Mary Oliver, “October”
“October”
"There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.
What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re
not there? and there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.
I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the
green pine tree:
little dazzler
little song,
little mouthful.
The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes-
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.
Near the fallen tree
something - a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down - tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.
It pulls me into its trap of attention,
And when I turn again, the bear is gone.
Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?
Look, I want to love this world
as thought it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive and know it.
Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.
One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me - and I thought:
so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful."
- Mary Oliver
Dan, I Allegedly, "The End of Shoplifting?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, PM 11/15/24
"The End of Shoplifting?"
Comments here:
"Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Address to Harrow School on October 29, 1941"
"Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Address
to Harrow School on October 29, 1941"
"Almost a year has passed since I came down here at your Head Master's kind invitation in order to cheer myself and cheer the hearts of a few of my friends by singing some of our own songs. The ten months that have passed have seen very terrible catastrophic events in the world - ups and downs, misfortunes - but can anyone sitting here this afternoon, this October afternoon, not feel deeply thankful for what has happened in the time that has passed and for the very great improvement in the position of our country and of our home?
Why, when I was here last time we were quite alone, desperately alone, and we had been so for five or six months. We were poorly armed. We are not so poorly armed today; but then we were very poorly armed. We had the unmeasured menace of the enemy and their air attack still beating upon us, and you yourselves had had experience of this attack; and I expect you are beginning to feel impatient that there has been this long lull with nothing particular turning up!
But we must learn to be equally good at what is short and sharp and what is long and tough. It is generally said that the British are often better at the last. They do not expect to move from crisis to crisis; they do not always expect that each day will bring up some noble chance of war; but when they very slowly make up their minds that the thing has to be done and the job put through and finished, then, even if it takes months - if it takes years - they do it.
Another lesson I think we may take, just throwing our minds back to our meeting here ten months ago and now, is that appearances are often very deceptive, and as Kipling well says, we must "...meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same."
You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination.
But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period - I am addressing myself to the School - surely from this period of ten months, this is the lesson:
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.
Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.
You sang here a verse of a School Song: you sang that extra verse written in my honor, which I was very greatly complimented by and which you have repeated today. But there is one word in it I want to alter - I wanted to do so last year, but I did not venture to. It is the line: "Not less we praise in darker days." I have obtained the Head Master's permission to alter darker to sterner. "Not less we praise in sterner days."
Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race."
"Whiskey And Car Keys..."
"Giving money and power to government is like
giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
- P.J. O'Rourke
"The Worst Part..."
"People cry not because they are weak.
It's because they've been strong for too long."
- Johnny Depp
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