Gregory Mannarino,
"COLLAPSE: The New America Welcomes You"
○
Food for thought:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, December 18, 2020
"16 Harsh Truths That Make Us Stronger "
"16 Harsh Truths That Make Us Stronger "
by Marc Chernoff
"1. Life is not easy. Hard work makes people lucky, it's the stuff that brings dreams to reality. So start every morning ready to run farther than you did yesterday and fight harder than you ever have before.
2. You will fail sometimes. The faster you accept this, the faster you can get on with being brilliant. You'll never be 100% sure it will work, but you can always be 100% sure doing nothing won't work. So get out there and do something! Either you succeed or you learn a vital lesson. Win, Win.
3. Right now, there's a lot you don't know. The day you stop learning is the day you stop living. Embrace new information, think about it and use it to advance yourself.
4. There may not be a tomorrow. Not for everyone. Right now, someone on Earth is planning something for tomorrow without realizing they're going to die today. This is sad but true. So spend your time wisely today and pause long enough to appreciate it.
5. There's a lot you can't control. Wasting your time, talent and emotional energy on things that are beyond your control is a recipe for frustration, misery and stagnation. Invest your energy in the things you can control.
6. Information is not true knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience. You can discuss a task a hundred times, but these discussions will only give you a philosophical understanding. You must experience a task firsthand to truly know it.
7. You can't be successful without providing value. Don't waste your time trying to be successful, spend your time creating value. When you're valuable to the world around you, you will be successful.
8. Someone else will always have more than you. Whether it's money, friends or magic beans that you're collecting, there will always be someone who has more than you. But remember, it's not how many you have, it's how passionate you are about collecting them. It's all about the journey.
9. You can't change the past. As Maria Robinson once said, "Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending. " You can't change what happened, but you can change how you react to it.
10. The only person who can make you happy is you. The root of your happiness comes from your relationship with yourself. Sure external entities can have fleeting effects on your mood, but in the long run nothing matters more than how you feel about who you are on the inside.
11. There will always be people who don't like you. You can't be everything to everyone. No matter what you do, there will always be someone who thinks differently. So concentrate on doing what you know in your heart is right. What others think and say about you isn't all that important. What is important is how you feel about yourself.
12. You won't always get what you want. As Mick Jagger once said, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need. " Look around. Appreciate the things you have right now. Many people aren't so lucky.
13. In life, you get what you put in. If you want love, give love. If you want friends, be friendly. If you want money, provide value. It really is this simple.
14. Good friends will come and go. Most of your high school friends won't be a part of your college life. Most of your college friends won't be a part of your 20-something professional life. Most of your 20-something friends won't be there when your spouse and you bring your second child into the world. But some friends will stick. And it's these friends, the ones who transcend time with you, who matter.
15. Doing the same exact thing every day hinders self growth. If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting. Growth happens when you change things, when you try new things, when you stretch beyond your comfort zone.
16. You will never feel 100% ready for something new. Nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means you won't feel totally comfortable or ready for it.
And remember, trying to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. Strength comes from being comfortable in your own skin. "
"Governing By Rage And Ridicule"
Click image for larger size.
"Governing By Rage And Ridicule"
by Simon Black
"Back in July, Yale University began a critical study on COVID vaccines. But there was an interesting twist to Yale’s study: scientists weren’t looking at the actual vaccine candidates; instead they were studying how to most effectively convince people to take a vaccine. One of the things they tested, in fact, was how guilt, embarrassment, and negative social stigma could pressure people into taking a vaccine, even if they have doubts or concerns about it. In other words, the study examined if shaming people would be an effective way to compel everyone to take a COVID vaccine.
The results of that study have not yet been reported. But the mainstream media and Twitter mob have already decided that shaming people is the best approach to vaccine compliance. As I wrote earlier this week, comprehensive trial results from a handful of vaccine candidates have only been published within the last week or so. But Twitter and the media have been essentially pre-shaming people for months. CNN ran a story in early AUGUST, for example, entitled, “Covid-19 conspiracy theories: 6 tips on how to engage anti-vaxxers”.
This is the perfect illustration of pre-shaming. There was practically zero data on any vaccine candidate back in August. Yet the luminaries at CNN had already decided that anyone who expressed concern was a conspiracy theorist. And now that some vaccines have received emergency authorization, tactics have moved from pre-shaming to full blown rage and intimidation.
Fines and jail time are now being openly discussed in the United States, Europe, Australia, etc. And many prominent companies in the private sector have piled on, proposing rules that could forbid unvaccinated customers from airplanes or hotels. I recently read an editorial in a British paper that went so far as to suggest that unvaccinated people should potentially be brought up on murder charges. But as we can see, this approach is nothing new. There are countless other examples of their ‘rule by rage and ridicule’.
Just look at tax policy - The Bolsheviks want to raise trillions of dollars in tax revenue; and they want to raise a good chunk of that money from large corporations and the richest citizens. Now… one possible method might be to approach billionaires and CEOs as respected partners. Explain to them that the country is in a deep fiscal hole, and ask if they’d be willing to make a financial sacrifice. Treat them with dignity and kindness, and vocally praise their generosity if they go along with it.
But that’s not how these people operate. Instead, they threaten to nationalize entire industries, propose outright asset confiscation, and publicly ridicule wealthy people simply for being successful; they think Jeff Bezos is the worst scum of the earth. Most strikingly they’ve managed to cast a dark cloud of suspicion on the entire idea of being rich. (A "dark cloud" is the very least these scum deserve, as 12 years of heaping scorn, contempt and ridicule on them on this blog will demonstrate. - CP) When I was growing up in the 80s, every kid I knew wanted to be a millionaire. Becoming rich was a common aspiration in the West. And wealthy people used to be admired. Now they’re despised. (My heart breaks, it breaks I tell you! These innocent little lambs, so abused and misunderstood... - CP)
These Bolsheviks have succeeded in shifting public opinion so much that wealth is now something you have to apologize for. AOC sums it up the best when she says, “You don’t MAKE a billion dollars. You TAKE a billion dollars.” People actually believe this nonsense. (This, coming from a person who sells ‘Tax the Rich’ sweatshirts for nearly $60 and books the revenue as tax-free campaign contributions.) It’s a perfect example of rage and ridicule in action.
We’ve also seen this approach with social justice (heavens forbid someone commit the heresy of saying that all lives matter…) We’ve clearly seen rage and ridicule over the past 9+ months of Covid lockdowns, because you now have the right to be pepper-sprayed by your fellow citizens if you’re not as terrified as they are. We’ve seen a whole lot of rage and ridicule over the election, with Twitter mob and Bolsheviks creating their ‘enemies list’ of people who espouse different ideological views.
(Some prominent Bolsheviks have even called for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in the new Biden administration.) And now we’re seeing this same rage and ridicule approach to vaccines. These tactics have been extremely effective; they keep sane, normal people quiet for fear of being publicly maligned and ostracized.
lol, lol, LOL...so very scary!
• You’re not allowed to talk about the vaccine.
• You’re not allowed to talk about the election.
• You’re not allowed to have an opinion about social justice (unless you’re groveling for forgiveness).
• You’re not allowed to ask intelligent, informed questions.
• Your assertions will always be baseless.
• You will always be an evil conspiracy theorist.
• Their assertions will always be true.
• They will always be righteous.
And anyone who believes their talk of openness, compromise, healing, and unity is in for a rude awakening."
○
Lest I be insensitively negligent in equally sharing my contempt, scorn,
and ridicule let's not forget the truly terrifying ANTIFA Amazons...
Click image for larger size... well, no, don't...
- CP
"Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop…"
"Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop…"
by Michael Snyder
"Do you feel like another major crisis could erupt at any moment? If so, you are certainly not alone. Here in 2020, it has just been one thing after another, and we have come to expect the unexpected. Right now, so many people that I am hearing from are anticipating that more big trouble is just around the corner, but as we wait for “the other shoe to drop”, economic conditions all over the United States continue to rapidly deteriorate. For example, on Thursday we learned that the number of initial claims for unemployment benefits last week was the highest in four months:
"The US job market continues to suffer, and Thursday brought more bad news. Another 885,000 people filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week - an increase from the week prior and higher than the 800,000 claims that economists were expecting. The latest figures, which are adjusted for seasonal factors and reported by the Labor Department, are particularly grim since last week’s numbers were revised up to 862,000. And even before the revision, that week had been the highest level since mid-September."
This isn’t how the numbers were supposed to be trending. For four of the past five weeks we have seen the number of new unemployment claims go up, and experts are warning that we should expect things to get even worse as we head into winter: ‘US weekly jobless claims continue to head in the wrong direction,” Edward Moya, an analyst at the currency trading firm OANDA, wrote in a research note. ‘The labor market outlook is bleak as the winter wave of the virus is going to lead to more shutdowns.”
Could we soon see more than a million Americans filing new claims for unemployment each week like we did earlier in the pandemic. To put this in perspective, the previous all-time record prior to 2020 was just 695,000, and that old record was set all the way back in 1982. We absolutely shattered that record once COVID-19 started spreading widely in the United States, and we have been above that old record every single week throughout this entire pandemic.
Just think about that. We are seeing numbers that we have never seen before in all of U.S. history every single week, and now they are starting to climb higher once again thanks to the new lockdowns. In addition, the number of Americans that are collecting unemployment aid from two major federal programs is also on the rise again: "The number of jobless people who are collecting aid from one of the two federal extended-benefit programs – the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which offers coverage to gig workers and others who don't qualify for traditional benefits – surged to 9.2 million from 8.6 million for the week that ended Nov. 28.
But the number of people receiving aid under the second program – the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which provides 13 weeks of federal benefits to people who have exhausted their state aid – also rose from 4.5 million to 4.8 million."
By now, the “recovery” was supposed to be in full gear, but instead major companies keep laying off more workers at an astounding pace. For example, on Thursday we learned that Coca-Cola will be eliminating 12 percent of their entire U.S. workforce: "Coca-Cola is planning to cut 2,200 jobs, including 1,200 in the United States, as it faces declining sales during the pandemic. In the United States, where there were about 10,400 employees at the end of last year, the cuts represent roughly 12% of the workforce. In Atlanta, where the company is headquartered, about 500 jobs are being eliminated, the company said Thursday."
Coca-Cola wouldn’t be doing this if the U.S. economy was about “to turn a corner”. All of these big corporations that are letting workers go can see what is about to happen, and they are slimming their payrolls in an attempt to make it through the coming storm.
Meanwhile, Congress is getting close to approving yet another “stimulus package”, and the Federal Reserve is promising to do whatever it takes to support the financial markets. Trillions upon trillions of dollars are being slammed into the system, and as a result M2 is up more than 60 percent so far this year. In other words, our money supply has been increasing at an almost vertical rate in 2020. Back in November I included a chart in an article that I wrote which shows exactly what I am talking about. If you are not one of my regular readers, you can find that article right here.
For many years, many of us have been warning that hyperinflation would arrive someday. But now we can stop warning, because the process has actually started. Other industrialized nations have also been flooding their systems with new money, and this is really starting to drive up food prices all over the globe. The following comes from Zero Hedge:
"The reason this has suddenly become a hot topic is because while overall inflation remains subdued (we will spare a discussion here of why the CPI is purposefully distorted to stay as low as possible – readers can catch up here, here and here), food inflation has been on a tear in recent months. In fact, it has gotten so high that earlier this week Goldman published a report looking at “The Recent Spike In Food Inflation”, in which it noted that “in recent months, inflation has risen and surprised to the upside across a number of major EM economies (e.g. Turkey, South Africa, India, Brazil andRussia).” According to Goldman, one of the main drivers of these increases has been higher food inflation, which has coincided with a sharp increase in the price of some key agricultural commodities (e.g. grains, oils and soybeans).”
Sadly, this is just the beginning. Eventually, the food riots which have already started on the other side of the planet will start happening in the western world too. And as hungry people become increasingly desperate, I believe that eventually companies will start putting armed guards on food trucks. We aren’t quite there yet, thankfully, but things are really starting to get crazy out there. A few days ago I went to the supermarket again, and I really tried to economize and get things that were on sale, but I still spent more than 260 dollars on one cart of food. Just one cart!
As the cost of living continues to soar into the stratosphere, many American families are going to discover that they are no longer able to afford enough food for the week. And once millions upon millions of Americans get desperately hungry, that is when we will see absolutely insane economic riots in this country. All of these things are coming, and we definitely will not have to wait very long at all for “the other shoe to drop.”
"The Gyre Widens"
"The Gyre Widens" *
by Jim Kunstler
"The mind-numbing weirdness of Joe Biden’s insertion into the election of 2020 - like the furtive groping of an intern in a cloakroom - only signals the Democratic Party’s reckless drive to self-destruction, dragging the republic over the edge of an abyss with it. How did this hollowed-out figure of a grifting old pol find himself pretending to national leadership, and in an historic moment of crisis that goes far beyond the mere wrecking of an election? Who wanted him there so badly, and why?
My guess would be Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and John Brennan anxious to stay out of prison, heading a long list of officials present and former who committed crimes trying desperately to protect them, with accessories aplenty across the aisle. That’s what this four-year coup has been about, snowballing criminality, culminating in an orgy of blatant ballot fraud. At this fraught stage of the drama, they’re hiding behind the pretense that all the old rituals of torch-passing must be observed for the sake of decorum, and they’re mistaken.
The Biden family’s moneygrubbing exploits in foreign lands had already been revealed in the previous act of sedition, the ridiculous impeachment attempt. In that episode, it was well-established in the public record that Hunter Biden grifted more than a million dollars out of the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, and that his father had stupidly bragged on tape about covering for him. Yet William Barr’s DOJ was already in the possession of Hunter’s laptop, chock full of evidence that Hunter was raking in way more millions from other countries, and that the loot was being distributed to his relatives. Why did they keep that from the president’s lawyers with the Mr. Trump in jeopardy of being railroaded for asking Ukraine’s president to have a look at it? Would Mr. Barr say they were protecting an ongoing investigation by keeping it all secret? What a lame excuse, under the circumstances.
Just as impeachment concluded in failure, Mr. Biden got smoked in the early primaries, only to triumph mysteriously in the March Super Tuesday voting. After all, a primary is the party’s own election, and they can engineer it however they want. So, they contrived to elevate someone already criminally culpable in the mind of any citizen paying attention and capable of adding two-and-two to get four. Weird, a little bit?
But then Super Tuesday segued right into the Covid-19 virus crisis, with all the destruction to livelihoods and interruptions of normal life that ensued, and the lingering odor of the Hunter Biden story wafted away in the bleak spring zephyrs. Only to return in the fall, because the fellow who ran the computer shop where Hunter B foolishly abandoned his laptop - one John Paul Mac Isaac - became annoyed that the FBI seemed to be ignoring it, and gave a copy of the hard-drive to Rudy Giuliani, who examined its contents closely and went public with it - quite a trove of evidence, with an added frosting of selfie porn photographs showing Hunter enjoying sex and drugs. You know the rest, with the news and social media striving to bury all of it for two weeks before the election.
So, the Biden family must be strongly motivated to finish the burial by getting into the White House, installing an attorney general who will lower that casket of turpitude into a grave, and whistle the back-hoes to fill it in. And while they’re at it, dig a few more holes in the ground to bury the treasonous activities of the Clintons and Barack Obama in matters that might be labeled “Uranium One,” “Skolkovo,” “Hillary’s Emails,” “the Iran Deal,” “Fusion GPS,” “John Brennan’s 2017 IC Report,” “the Mueller Investigation,” and more. Donald Trump had to be prevented from winning a second term at all costs, lest that burden of rot get spewed into any actual courtrooms like so much spoiled lunchmeat.
The trouble is, Mr. Trump actually does have the evidence, and he intends to use it after four years of being remorselessly f**ked around by his antagonists. So, the nation is at the point in this long, winding drama that has become a fight to the death and there will be no rituals of torch-passing just to keep up appearances that everything is functioning normally. Mr. Trump has the evidence of widespread, yes widespread, ballot fraud. He is the president, after all, and he has all the information. As he’s said more than once, he’s caught them all. And they know it.
Of course, the CIA and the FBI, those pillars of the Intel Community, are still trying to withhold what they can, but the president is not having it. He’s taking away the CIA’s most precious asset: its resources for making mischief on-the ground - its airplane fleet and its armaments, handing them over to the Pentagon - reducing the CIA to the simple task of analyzing signals from the world scene. And so, the CIA has been refusing to cooperate with the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, as a last gasp to preserve its long-running illicit prerogatives. That will eventually trigger the president’s invocation of the 2018 Executive order 13848, allowing, at long last, the arrest and prosecution of many desperate characters who tried to run away with the US Government.
But probably not before the last legal avenues have been traveled: Sidney Powell’s case against the Dominion vote system in the Supreme Court, a long-shot like all the other cases that the court is loath to touch; and the business of the alternate electoral college slates to be hashed out in the Senate on January 6, Vice-President Mike Pence, presiding. Democrats and their coastal elite supporters are not going to like it. If they call out their Antifa troops, those feckless weenies with their hoisted cell phones and stupid umbrellas are going to be crushed this time, not indulged like three-year-olds.
The wild-card all of a sudden is what the nation will also do about the foreign actors reportedly messing around with the government’s most critical computer systems. China? Iran? Russia? They’re a match for America’s own domestic enemies, who must be neutralized first before we’re capable of dealing with outsiders. The gyre widens."
○
*
○
DEC 18, 2020 - 11:12: "Pentagon Abruptly Halts Biden Transition Briefings, Leaving Officials 'Stunned'" "Axios' Jonathan Swan reports a bombshell potential major disruption in a key part of the presidential transition before President-Elect Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20: the Pentagon has without warning or explanation halted Biden's intelligence transition briefings. Reports Swan: "Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller ordered a Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation with the transition of President-elect Biden, shocking officials across the Defense Department, senior administration officials tell Axios."
December 18, 2020 by IWB: "BOOM! Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller has ordered a Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation with the transition of President-elect Biden. President Trump to meet Acting Defense Secretary Miller in the Oval Office at 3:30 pm today."
Ponder this, Good Citizen...
what could this most-unusual occurrence possibly mean?
"Market Fantasy Updates AM 12/18/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates AM 12/18/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
○
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
○
Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/18/20:
"UPDATES: Stock Market, Gold, Silver, Dollar, Bitcoin, Crypto, Debt"
○
12/18/20: "Millions of Americans dropped out of the labor force during the first two months of the pandemic. Many have not returned. These nine charts show how the economy is faring."
○
Updated live.
○
○
DEC 18, 2020 - 6:15: "Former Goldman CFO Calls For Universal Basic Income 'To Stave Off Revolution'"
○
○
Daily Update (Dec. 17th to 20th)
○
Insanity...
○
And now... The End Game...
Musical Interlude: Eagles, "Take It To The Limit"; "Seven Bridges Road" (Live)
Eagles, "Take It To The Limit"
○
Eagles, "Seven Bridges Road" (Live)
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 12/18/20"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 12/18/20"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"The election battle is as much about public relations (PR) as it is about actual evidence. Massive amounts of evidence have come out about things like voting machines flipping votes, huge drops of ballots in the middle of the night and reports of outright fraud in multiple states. Still, not even the Supreme Court will give these claims a fair hearing. So, the PR and education from the Trump side continues to gain steam ahead of the all-important vote in Congress to make official the Presidential Election. Congress has the last word in who actually won the election. Did Donald J. Trump win in November with a record amount of votes for a sitting President? Or, is Congress going to certify Biden after campaigning out of his basement?
The Supreme Court has not heard a single case concerning what President Trump calls “massive voter fraud” in battleground states. The Supreme Court is missing in action (MIA) for the most important election case in history. Now, it has finally accepted a case but will not hear it until after January 14th at the earliest. Is there enough time for the High Court to rule before the inauguration of Biden to keep Trump in office?
It was another week of awful unemployment numbers. A fresh 885,000 people filed for new unemployment claims. Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar is crashing to 6 year lows, and Bitcoin is vaulting well past $22,000 per unit. What’s going on?"
"Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he talks
about these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up."
"The Decimal Point That Blew Up The World" (Excerpt)
"The Decimal Point That Blew Up The World" (Excerpt)
by Jeffrey Tucker
"What was the basis of panic that led the lights to darken on civilization? The most important date here might be March 11, 2020. That’s when Congress itself flew into an unwarranted panic, and acquiesced to a lockdown at the urging of the “experts.” State governors followed one by one, with few exceptions, and the rest of the world joined the lockdown frenzy.
In February, people were aching to know the answer to the following. Would this “novel virus” have familiar patterns we associate with the flu, seasonal colds, and other predictable and manageable pathogens? Or would this be something entirely different, unprecedented in our lifetimes, terrifying, and universally deadly?
Crucial in this stage was public-health messaging. In previous pandemics from post-1918 throughout the 20th century, the central messaging was to stay calm, go to the doctor if you feel sick, avoid deliberately infecting others, and otherwise trust the systems in place and keep society functioning. This was long considered responsible public-health messaging, and this was pretty much where we stood throughout most of January and February, when publications regardless of their political outlook maintained sobriety and rationality.
Something dramatically changed this time. They pushed panic, tapping into a primal fear of disease. The reality of pandemic, as it turns out, has been familiar. The severity of its impact has been radically disparate across demographics, hitting mainly the elderly and infirm with 40% of deaths tracing to long-term care facilities with an average age of death nearly equal to the average lifespan. It is regionally migratory. It follows a seasonal pattern from pandemic to its endemic equilibrium.
What has been different has been the messaging that has almost universally been structured to create public frenzy, from the New York Times’s February 28 urge to “go medieval” to Salon’s latest demand that we panic even more.
My own sense of impending doom began on March 6 with the cancellation of "South by Southwest" in Austin, Texas, an action of the mayor alone, and completely without modern precedent. I wrote about it on March 8. Four days later, President Trump gave a nationwide address that ended with a shocking announcement that all flights from Europe would be stopped to keep the coronavirus out even though the virus had been here since January. The next day, on March 13, the administration issued what amounted to a shutdown plan for the nation.
This timeline, however, misses a crucial step. We should be grateful to Ronald B. Brown of Waterloo University for his extraordinary paper that appears in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness (Vol 14, No. 3): “Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation.” It also appears on the website of the National Institutes of Health with a date of August 12.
Our author’s thesis was that the wild overreaction and unprecedented lockdowns of life began with what was a terminological mixup that led to a misplacement of a decimal point in a report from the National Institutes of Health.
It was a seemingly small error but it provided the basis on which Anthony Fauci testified at the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the seriousness of novel coronavirus spreading across the globe."
Please view this complete, critically important article, here:
OMG...
“Retail Stores Collapse; Economic Warning Signs; Jobs Get Decimated; Dollar Will Lose”
Jeremiah Babe,
“Retail Stores Collapse; Economic Warning Signs;
Jobs Get Decimated; Dollar Will Lose”
The Poet: Neil Gaiman, "What You Need To Be Warm "
"What You Need To Be Warm "
by Neil Gaiman
"A baked potato of a winters night to wrap
your hands around or burn your mouth.
A blanket knitted by your mother's cunning fingers.
Or your grandmother's.
A smile, a touch, trust, as you walk in from the snow
or return to it, the tips of your ears pricked pink and frozen.
The tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house.
To surface from dreams in a bed,
burrowed beneath blankets and comforters,
the change of state from cold to warm is all that matters, and you think
just one more minute snuggled here before you face the chill. Just one.
Places we slept as children: they warm us in the memory.
We travel to an inside from the outside.
To the orange flames of the fireplace
or the wood burning in the stove.
Breath-ice on the inside of windows,
to be scratched off with a fingernail, melted with a whole hand.
Frost on the ground that stays in the shadows, waiting for us.
Wear a scarf. Wear a coat. Wear a sweater.
Wear socks. Wear thick gloves.
An infant as she sleeps between us. A tumble of dogs,
a kindle of cats and kittens.
Come inside. You're safe now.
A kettle boiling at the stove. Your family or friends are there.
They smile.
Cocoa or chocolate, tea or coffee,
soup or toddy, what you know you need.
A heat exchange, they give it to you, you take the mug
and start to thaw.
While outside, for some of us, the journey began
as we walked away from our grandparentshouses
away from the places we knew as children:
changes of state and state and state,
to stumble across a stony desert, or to brave the deep waters,
while food and friends, home, a bed, even a blanket become just memories.
Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a
badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say
we have the right to be here,
to make us warm in the coldest season.
You have the right to be here. "
- Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman reads "What You Need To Be Warm" here:
"Life's Funny..."
"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."
- Andrew Klavan
"This Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words"
"This Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words"
by Tyler Durden
"The New York Times' Hiroko Masuike captured customers at The Smith restaurant in Manhattan Wednesday evening, bundled up in winter jackets, underneath propane heaters on a sidewalk patio, while the first major winter storm of the season blanketed the city nearly one foot of snow.
Thanks to Andrew Cuomo's decision to once again shut down indoor dining in New York on Monday, these patrons had to eat outside in the middle of a freakin' snowstorm. As the wind blew, the propane heaters appeared worthless as a few of the patrons were sipping on soup and have likely downed a liquor shot or two to stay warm. Perhaps the patrons on Wednesday night were devoted customers supporting their local restaurants, rain or shine, considering a record number of eateries across the country can't pay December rent.
As we've mentioned before, Goldman Sachs has noted that if daily average temperatures slide below 40°F - then it would be associated with a steep drop off in consumer activity at eateries.
So back to the picture - patrons can thank the government for why they had to eat a nice meal outside in the middle of a major snowstorm."
"Winter Is Coming: 62% Of U.S. Business Owners 'Fear The Worst Is Still To Come'"
"Winter Is Coming: 62% Of U.S. Business Owners
'Fear The Worst Is Still To Come'"
by Epic Economist
"Winter will officially arrive in a few days, but its gloomy effects are already impacting the survival of our population, our businesses, and our economy. As the pace of economic deterioration picks up speed due to the new restrictions in economic activity, our nation keeps being devastated on several different fronts and the consequences of it won't be solved with the arrival of a vaccine nor with a utopian V-shape recovery. We will be seeing the results of this winter's economic devastation for years. That's what we will be talking about in this video.
The current economic situation is making business owners fear they won't be able to make it to the start of spring. Sectors that rely on face to face interaction have been particularly impaired by so many rounds of shutdowns and this time might be the final round for many of them.
Right now, according to a brand new U.S. Chamber-MetLife poll, 62% of small-business owners are concerned with further impacts of the health crisis, saying they believe the worst moment of the crisis is still ahead of them. The same poll has also highlighted that most small business owners are in desperate need of federal assistance, with nearly 74% of the owners saying they need further aid to weather the fallout of the crisis. That figure rises to 81% for minority-owned businesses.
As we head towards a dark winter, a considerable amount of them can't even afford rent. According to an Alignable rent survey, 35 percent of all small businesses in the U.S. couldn’t pay their rent this month, up 3% from 32% in November. When businesses don't even find the means to pay rent and stay open, we can clearly understand that we have gotten to a point where there's no way to argue that this is simply a recession. When over a third of all small businesses in the world's richest country can't make enough revenue to keep their doors open, that is called an “economic collapse”.
To give you further proof, let's just spare a moment to examine what has been going on with federal tax receipts this year. In a recent note, former chief economist at Alliance Bernstein, Joseph Carson, has pointed out how weak tax receipts are sending a signal of economic distress. Carson outlines that now that we're 9 months into the downturn triggered by the health crisis, federal gross withheld income tax receipts declined 13% from a year ago. The tax data records from the US Treasury suggest that the slump in tax receipts over the past 9 months is the biggest ever recorded. The only historical parallel we can compare to is the 14% fall witnessed in 2009 during the Great Financial Recession.
In other words, the level of economic wreckage is just unprecedented. And every day it passes at the University of Chicago informed that the U.S. poverty rate has considerably climbed over the last five months, with 7.8 million Americans falling into poverty. The economists maintain that such a high spike in poverty was driven by two main reasons: Millions of Americans cannot find jobs, and government assistance for the unemployed has abruptly dwindled since the summer.
However, even in households with adult workers who are still collecting paychecks, poverty is not out of the picture. In fact, a recent report has described how thousands of military officials and their families have been suffering from food insecurity. This spring, the base has seen a 40 percent increase in requests for groceries.
As opposed to civilian families who managed to collect federal benefits and qualified for food programs, considering military families are often provided with housing allowance, that leaves them ineligible to receive food assistance, a quirk in the law that Congress has repeatedly failed to address. Although military families are only a small part of the tens of millions of food-insecure Americans, hunger experts say most people have no idea that military servicers often rely on external help to have enough to eat.
Now, Congress remains deadlocked over the next bipartisan stimulus bill, and democrats are choleric that they are being forced to choose either enhanced unemployment benefits or $600 stimulus checks for our citizens. As there's no sign of when a relief bill will be launched, our collapse is only intensifying and all the bubbles in our economy are already in the process of bursting. For those expecting a “return to normal” next year, we're sorry to say that all evidences are pointing to a return to a much deeper recession. It appears that 2021 is going to be a really painful year."
Winter is here...
Gregory Mannarino, PM 12/17/20: “Today New All Time Highs For the Market, But a Monster Is Coming”
Gregory Mannarino, PM 12/17/20:
“Today New All Time Highs For the Market,
But a Monster Is Coming”
"A Look to the Heavens"
“What will become of these galaxies? Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Typically when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides.
Close inspection of the above image taken by the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile shows a bridge of material momentarily connecting the two giants. Known collectively as Arp 271, the interacting pair spans about 130,000 light years and lies about 90 million light-years away toward the constellation of Virgo. Recent predictions hold that our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130825.html
Chet Raymo, “Angling For Happiness”
“Angling For Happiness”
by Chet Raymo
“There is a concept in physics called angle of repose. Set an object, a book say, on a plank. Now slowly tip up one end of the plank until the moment when the book just starts to slide. The angle between the plank and the horizontal is the angle of repose, where the component of the gravitational force down the plank becomes greater than the maximum friction force holding the book at rest. Or, in more evocative terms - as I write I am lying on the couch with the laptop in my lap, in perfect repose. If you started tipping up the couch, at some point I'd go sliding into a heap at the bottom. That's the angle of repose, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the angle of the end of repose.
This comes to mind because I just spent fifteen minutes on my knees in the yard watching ants excavate a nest in the ground. One by one they scurry out of the hole carrying a tiny grain of sand, which they dump in a ring around the hole. A circular pile. Now if the ants just dumped their burdens at the mouth of the hole, pretty soon the pile would get so steep that the sand grains would slide back into the hole. Instead, the circular ring gets higher and wider, with a slope that never exceeds the angle at which the grains will slip - the angle of repose. Now here's the thing: the ants almost invariably carry their grain to just beyond the top of the pile. If the grain slips, it will slide away from the hole. These tiny ants, hardly bigger than sand grains themselves, understand a little physics in their mysterious instinctive way.
Wallace Stegner has a novel titled "Angle of Repose." It is indeed an evocative phrase. In a job, in a relationship, in life itself, many of us instinctively seek that maximum degree of individual gratification that will satisfy emotional needs without doing violence to our essential repose, and that of those around us - the art of walking close to the edge, the thrill without the spill. Every day in the news we hear of folks - politicians or celebrities - who tipped the plank too far, whose lives went sliding into self-destruction, who failed to grasp, metaphorically speaking, something that a tiny ant instinctively understands.”
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
"In the Inbox"
"In the Inbox"
"From: Coordinator of Volunteer Services
We have a young man, thirty-six, on hospice who has a very young child. They want someone to help him do a life review and perhaps put some pictures together for he and his wife so the child will know him. Call me if you are willing to do this."
"The next time, friend, your life seems too hard, check your Inbox."
- Jose Orez
- Jose Orez
“The Christmas Truce of 1914”
“The Christmas Truce of 1914”
by Simon Rees
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
“You are standing up to your knees in the slime of a waterlogged trench. It is the evening of 24 December 1914 and you are on the dreaded Western Front. Stooped over, you wade across to the firing step and take over the watch. Having exchanged pleasantries, your bleary-eyed and mud-spattered colleague shuffles off towards his dug out. Despite the horrors and the hardships, your morale is high and you believe that in the New Year the nation’s army march towards a glorious victory.
But for now you stamp your feet in a vain attempt to keep warm. All is quiet when jovial voices call out from both friendly and enemy trenches. Then the men from both sides start singing carols and songs. Next come requests not to fire, and soon the unthinkable happens: you start to see the shadowy shapes of soldiers gathering together in no-man’s land laughing, joking and sharing gifts. Many have exchanged cigarettes, the lit ends of which burn brightly in the inky darkness. Plucking up your courage, you haul yourself up and out of the trench and walk towards the foe…
The meeting of enemies as friends in no-man’s land was experienced by hundreds, if not thousands, of men on the Western Front during Christmas 1914. Today, 106 years after it occurred, the event is seen as a shining episode of sanity from among the bloody chapters of World War One – a spontaneous effort by the lower ranks to create a peace that could have blossomed were it not for the interference of generals and politicians.
The reality of the Christmas Truce, however, is a slightly less romantic and a more down to earth story. It was an organic affair that in some spots hardly registered a mention and in others left a profound impact upon those who took part. Many accounts were rushed, confused or contradictory. Others, written long after the event, are weighed down by hindsight. These difficulties aside, the true story is still striking precisely because of its rag-tagged nature: it is more ‘human’ and therefore all the more potent.
Months beforehand, millions of servicemen, reservists and volunteers from all over the continent had rushed enthusiastically to the banners of war: the atmosphere was one of holiday rather than conflict. But it was not long before the jovial façade was torn away. Armies equipped with repeating rifles, machine guns and a vast array of artillery tore chunks out of each other, and thousands upon thousands of men perished. To protect against the threat of this vast firepower, the soldiers were ordered to dig in and prepare for next year’s offensives, which most men believed would break the deadlock and deliver victory. The early trenches were often hasty creations and poorly constructed; if the trench was badly sighted it could become a sniping hot spot. In bad weather (the winter of 1914 was a dire one) the positions could flood and fall in. The soldiers – unequipped to face the rigors of the cold and rain – found themselves wallowing in a freezing mire of mud and the decaying bodies of the fallen.
The man at the Front could not help but have a degree of sympathy for his opponents who were having just as miserable a time as they were. Another factor that broke down the animosity between the opposing armies were the surroundings. In 1914 the men at the front could still see the vestiges of civilization. Villages, although badly smashed up, were still standing. Fields, although pitted with shell-holes, had not been turned into muddy lunarscapes. Thus the other world – the civilian world – and the social mores and manners that went with it was still present at the front. Also lacking was the pain, misery and hatred that years of bloody war build up. Then there was the desire, on all sides, to see the enemy up close – was he really as bad as the politicians, papers and priests were saying? It was a combination of these factors, and many more minor ones, that made the Christmas Truce of 1914 possible.
On the eve of the Truce, the British Army (still a relatively small presence on the Western Front) was manning a stretch of the line running south from the infamous Ypres salient for 27 miles to the La Bassee Canal. Along the front the enemy was sometimes no more than 70, 50 or even 30 yards away. Both Tommy and Fritz could quite easily hurl greetings and insults to one another, and, importantly, come to tacit agreements not to fire. Incidents of temporary truces and outright fraternization were more common at this stage in the war than many people today realize – even units that had just taken part in a series of futile and costly assaults, were still willing to talk and come to arrangements with their opponents.
As Christmas approached the festive mood and the desire for a lull in the fighting increased as parcels packed with goodies from home started to arrive. On top of this came gifts care of the state. Tommy received plum puddings and ‘Princess Mary boxes’; a metal case engraved with an outline of George V’s daughter and filled with chocolates and butterscotch, cigarettes and tobacco, a picture card of Princess Mary and a facsimile of George V’s greeting to the troops. ‘May God protect you and bring you safe home,’ it said. Not to be outdone, Fritz received a present from the Kaiser, the Kaiserliche, a large meerschaum pipe for the troops and a box of cigars for NCOs and officers. Towns, villages and cities, and numerous support associations on both sides also flooded the front with gifts of food, warm clothes and letters of thanks.
The Belgians and French also received goods, although not in such an organized fashion as the British or Germans. For these nations the Christmas of 1914 was tinged with sadness – their countries were occupied. It is no wonder that the Truce, although it sprung up in some spots on French and Belgian lines, never really caught hold as it did in the British sector.
With their morale boosted by messages of thanks and their bellies fuller than normal, and with still so much Christmas booty to hand, the season of goodwill entered the trenches. A British Daily Telegraph correspondent wrote that on one part of the line the Germans had managed to slip a chocolate cake into British trenches. Even more amazingly, it was accompanied with a message asking for a ceasefire later that evening so they could celebrate the festive season and their Captain’s birthday. They proposed a concert at 7.30pm when candles, the British were told, would be placed on the parapets of their trenches. The British accepted the invitation and offered some tobacco as a return present. That evening, at the stated time, German heads suddenly popped up and started to sing. Each number ended with a round of applause from both sides. The Germans then asked the British to join in. At this point, one very mean-spirited Tommy shouted: ‘We’d rather die than sing German.’ To which a German joked aloud: ‘It would kill us if you did’.
December 24 was a good day weather-wise: the rain had given way to clear skies. On many stretches of the Front the crack of rifles and the dull thud of shells ploughing into the ground continued, but at a far lighter level than normal. In other sectors there was an unnerving silence that was broken by the singing and shouting drifting over, in the main, from the German trenches. Along many parts of the line the Truce was spurred on with the arrival in the German trenches of miniature Christmas trees – Tannenbaum. The sight these small pines, decorated with candles and strung along the German parapets, captured the Tommies’ imagination, as well as the men of the Indian corps who were reminded of the sacred Hindu festival of light. It was the perfect excuse for the opponents to start shouting to one another, to start singing and, in some areas, to pluck up the courage to meet one another in no-man’s land.
By now, the British high command – comfortably ‘entrenched’ in a luxurious châteaux 27 miles behind the front – was beginning to hear of the fraternization. Stern orders were issued by the commander of the BEF, Sir John French against such behavior. Other ‘brass-hats’ (as the Tommies nick-named their high-ranking officers and generals), also made grave pronouncements on the dangers and consequences of parleying with the Germans. However, there were many high-ranking officers who took a surprisingly relaxed view of the situation. If anything, they believed it would at least offer their men an opportunity to strengthen their trenches. This mixed stance meant that very few officers and men involved in the Christmas Truce were disciplined. Interestingly, the German High Command’s ambivalent attitude towards the Truce mirrored that of the British.
Christmas day began quietly but once the sun was up the fraternization began. Again songs were sung and rations thrown to one another. It was not long before troops and officers started to take matters into their own hands and ventured forth. No-man’s land became something of a playground. Men exchanged gifts and buttons. In one or two places soldiers who had been barbers in civilian times gave free haircuts. One German, a juggler and a showman, gave an impromptu, and given the circumstances, somewhat surreal performance of his routine in the centre of no-man’s land.
Captain Sir Edward Hulse of the Scots Guards, in his famous account, remembered the approach of four unarmed Germans at 08.30. He went out to meet them with one of his ensigns. ‘Their spokesmen,’ Hulse wrote, ‘started off by saying that he thought it only right to come over and wish us a happy Christmas, and trusted us implicitly to keep the truce. He came from Suffolk where he had left his best girl and a 3 h.p. motor-bike!’ Having raced off to file a report at headquarters, Hulse returned at 10.00 to find crowds of British soldiers and Germans out together chatting and larking about in no-man’s land, in direct contradiction to his orders. Not that Hulse seemed to care about the fraternization in itself – the need to be seen to follow orders was his concern. Thus he sought out a German officer and arranged for both sides to return to their lines.
While this was going on he still managed to keep his ears and eyes open to the fantastic events that were unfolding. ‘Scots and Huns were fraternizing in the most genuine possible manner. Every sort of souvenir was exchanged addresses given and received, photos of families shown, etc. One of our fellows offered a German a cigarette; the German said, “Virginian?” Our fellow said, “Aye, straight-cut”, the German said “No thanks, I only smoke Turkish!” It gave us all a good laugh.’ Hulse’s account was in part a letter to his mother, who in turn sent it on to the newspapers for publication, as was the custom at the time. Tragically, Hulse was killed in March 1915.
On many parts of the line the Christmas Day truce was initiated through sadder means. Both sides saw the lull as a chance to get into no-man’s land and seek out the bodies of their compatriots and give them a decent burial. Once this was done the opponents would inevitably begin talking to one another. The 6th Gordon Highlanders, for example, organized a burial truce with the enemy. After the gruesome task of laying friends and comrades to rest was complete, the fraternization began.
With the Truce in full swing up and down the line there were a number of recorded games of soccer, although these were really just ‘kick-abouts’ rather than a structured match. On January 1, 1915, the London Times published a letter from a major in the Medical Corps reporting that in his sector the British played a game against the Germans opposite and were beaten 3-2. Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxons recorded in his diary: ‘The English brought a soccer ball from the trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.’
The Truce lasted all day; in places it ended that night, but on other sections of the line it held over Boxing Day and in some areas, a few days more. In fact, there were parts on the front where the absence of aggressive behavior was conspicuous well into 1915.
Captain J C Dunn, the Medical Officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, whose unit had fraternized and received two barrels of beer from the Saxon troops opposite, recorded how hostilities re-started on his section of the front. Dunn wrote: ‘At 8.30 I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with “Merry Christmas” on it, and I climbed on the parapet. He [the Germans] put up a sheet with “Thank you” on it, and the German Captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots in the air, and the War was on again.’ The war was indeed on again, for the Truce had no hope of being maintained. Despite being wildly reported in Britain and to a lesser extent in Germany, the troops and the populations of both countries were still keen to prosecute the conflict.
Today, pragmatists read the Truce as nothing more than a ‘blip’ – a temporary lull induced by the season of goodwill, but willingly exploited by both sides to better their defenses and eye out one another’s positions. Romantics assert that the Truce was an effort by normal men to bring about an end to the slaughter. In the public’s mind the facts have become irrevocably mythologized, and perhaps this is the most important legacy of the Christmas Truce today. In our age of uncertainty, it comforting to believe, regardless of the real reasoning and motives, that soldiers and officers told to hate, loathe and kill, could still lower their guns and extend the hand of goodwill, peace, love and Christmas cheer. The Irish poet, Thomas Kettle, who was killed in the War in September 1916, captured that spirit in a poem he wrote to his little daughter, Betty, shortly before he died:
“So, here while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor –
But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the secret scripture of the poor.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)