Wake Forest, North Carolina, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, May 26, 2023
"A Lot Of People..."
“When science discovers the center of the universe,
a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not it.”
- Bernard Baily
"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. "
Bill Bonner, "Paging Artificial Intelligence"
"Paging Artificial Intelligence"
Humanity, we've got a problem...
by Bill Bonner
Youghal, Ireland - "AI will change the world. Or, so they say. Bloomberg has a whole new section devoted to it. Microsoft says we need to regulate it. So does the head of OpenAI, Sam Altman. He wants the government to make sure everything in the AI space is carefully controlled: “…major governments around the world can create a program to bring together most of the projects that are underway, so that we can agree …that improvements to AI be limited to a certain annual rate.”
Right. Friedrich Hayek, one of the world’s greatest economists, explained that government planning of this sort can never work. The planners lack the necessary detailed, local knowledge; they don’t know what they don’t know, in other words. But that doesn’t stop them.
The Knowledge Problem: And now, some economists claim that AI will solve what they call the “knowledge problem,” making it possible for the feds to regulate every aspect of human life. Imagine you are driving down the road. A voice comes over the AI Driver Assist: “Mr. Jones. You are driving 2.5 miles per hour over the speed limit. Slow down or we will turn off your car.”
Or…you are reading the news. A voice: “The story you have requested has been deemed unreliable by our AI Truth Protection algorithms and therefore is unavailable.” Or…worse. “The polls close in an hour. We remind you that you must vote for the candidate of our…I mean your…choice or your Social Benefits, including your Universal Basic Income, will be terminated.”
A brave new AI-driven world? Maybe. What is AI really doing for us? We ask ChatGPT to explain: "AI tools like myself and Google's Bard can potentially reduce economic input costs… automate tasks… improve the efficiency of production processes… help businesses to make better decisions, which can lead to increased profits.
AI has the potential to be a major driver of economic growth. In fact, some experts believe that AI could be the biggest reduction in economic input costs since the discovery of oil and the invention of the steam engine and the internal combustion engine."
Old World vs New World: If AI is so great, how to get in on it? ChatGPT (AI) has an answer for that too: "Nvidia is a major player in the AI market, and its chips are used in a wide variety of AI applications. As a result, Nvidia is well-positioned to benefit from the growth of the AI market. Some experts believe that Nvidia could be the most important resource company since Standard Oil."
Oil provided energy to move things – machines, tractors, factories. You can test the importance of it yourself. Just stop your car on a hill. Then, try to push it up by hand. Ultimately, energy conserves time. It takes a long time to push a car up a hill – if you can do it at all. It takes much less time with the help of 70-octane gasoline. Oil – from Standard Oil and others – made it possible to haul, hammer, and heave more stuff, freeing time to study things and invent things which led to even greater productivity (output per hour). That’s why our standards of living are so much higher today than they were 200 years ago.
Oil moves tangible things. What does AI do? It moves words… letters… imagines… information…symbols…As we’ve seen with the Internet Revolution, more ‘information’ did us some good, some harm and a lot in-between. On average, Americans already spend 11 hours a day on some sort of electronic device – phone, tablet, computer. They are saving time. Sending a text is a lot faster than writing an old-fashioned letter and putting it in the mail. But nonsense and entertainment expanded to fill the time available to them. Time was wasted.
GDP growth went down. Information confusion increased. And as we’ve discussed many times, the typical American now has to work substantially more time to afford his wheels and the roof over his head.
AI promises to save even more time. If you want an answer to a factual question, AI can get it to you fast. Let’s test it: Which country produces the most copper? Two seconds later, AI has the answer: "As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, the country that produces the most copper is Chile.
We can expect AI to generate decent answers on questions that require some calculation or comparison, again saving time. Which is more likely…getting struck by lightning or dying of Covid? Statistically speaking, the likelihood of getting struck by lightning is relatively low. According to the National Weather Service in the United States, the odds of an individual getting struck by lightning in any given year are approximately 1 in 500,000. The risk can be further reduced by following safety guidelines during thunderstorms.
On the other hand, the risk of dying from COVID-19 is influenced by several factors, including age, overall health, and access to healthcare. The fatality rate varies among different populations and countries. It is important to note that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of people worldwide, leading to significant morbidity and mortality."
“Complex and Interconnected”: Let’s take it a little further…we want to see if AI can save the time we would otherwise spend thinking. We ask: what has been the most important consequence of shifting away from a gold-backed dollar in 1971? ChatGPT replies: "The decision to move away from the gold-backed dollar in 1971, known as the Nixon Shock, had several significant consequences that reshaped the global economy and monetary system. One of the most important consequences was the shift toward a fiat currency system, where the value of money is not directly linked to a physical commodity like gold.
Increased Monetary Flexibility: Moving away from the gold standard provided governments and central banks greater flexibility in managing their monetary policies. They gained the ability to adjust interest rates, control money supply, and implement economic stimulus measures more freely. This newfound flexibility allowed for greater responsiveness to economic conditions and the ability to address financial crises.
Inflationary Pressures: One of the key consequences of abandoning the gold-backed dollar was the increased potential for inflation. With the gold standard, the money supply was tied to the availability of gold reserves. Without this constraint, governments could print more money and increase spending, which, if not managed prudently, could lead to inflationary pressures. This has been a concern for economies that have experienced excessive money creation.
Currency Volatility and Exchange Rates: The shift to fiat currencies introduced increased volatility in exchange rates among different currencies. The absence of a fixed gold peg allowed currency values to fluctuate based on market forces, economic conditions, and government policies. This volatility impacted international trade, investment flows, and global financial stability.
Global Reserve Currency: The U.S. dollar, which had been the primary global reserve currency under the gold standard, continued to hold its dominant position after the shift. However, the move away from the gold-backed dollar eroded some of its intrinsic value and raised questions about its long-term stability as a reserve currency. It also opened the door for the emergence of alternative reserve currencies, such as the euro, yen, and, more recently, the Chinese yuan.
Financialization and Speculation: The shift away from the gold standard contributed to the growth of financial markets and increased financial speculation. With fiat currencies, financial instruments, and derivatives, new opportunities for investment and speculation emerged. This expansion of financial markets brought benefits in terms of capital allocation but also introduced new risks and complexities to the global financial system.
It is important to note that these consequences are complex and interconnected, and their impacts vary across different economies and regions. The shift away from the gold-backed dollar marked a significant turning point in the international monetary system, influencing economic policies, financial markets, and the global economic landscape in subsequent decades."
More Blah-Blah: It’s not a bad answer. AI searches through millions of pages of ‘content.’ It then arranges its findings in a socially acceptable, academically correct way. It seems ‘intelligent,’ in the way that a bright person seems intelligent when he says what you think he ought to say. It has the ‘right answer.’ And it saves us the time of trying to figure it out ourselves. But it’s blah-blah. AI sifts and sorts…it homogenizes and certifies, providing the most ‘mainstream’ ideas, information and opinions – that is, those that are most common and most valued by the rest of the world.
As near as we can tell, it has no source of independent thought – ideas not supported by the mass of information and opinion already available. It merely streamlines access to “common knowledge” and saves time. It should reduce errors too. If A is bigger than C, and C is bigger than B…is B bigger than A? The typical voter found at a political rally will reply with something such as “bigger than A what?” AI will be smarter.
But wait…colleague Chris Mayer says he had to correct an answer given by ChatGPT, whereupon it apologized for its mistake. Likewise, our son Henry asked ChatGPT about Fed policy and got a summary blah-blah answer. He wanted to know if AI could deduce Fed policy – inflate or die? So, he sharpened the question: what’s most important to the Fed, financial stability or the value of the dollar? The machine replied that: The “Fed has a double mandate (a dual mandate) that consists of promoting:
Full employment.
Price stability.
Moderate long-term interest rates.
“The fact that there are three rather than two did not bother ChatGPT,” says Henry. Yes, there are bugs to be worked out.
No doubt, AI will bring change. Much of the world’s literary, clerical and informational output is blah-blah. Most people speak blah-blah. Politicians rarely depart from it. And people seem to like it. These new, smart machines can give them all they want.
Those thousands of customer service workers in India, for example, may have to find new jobs. Professionals, too, may find their burdens somewhat lightened. In law, where following precedent (stare decisis) is the rule, AI ought to be useful. And in medicine, where there is a growing body of knowledge and guesswork available electronically, AI might find an important role.
And perhaps in some great and glorious future, America’s president will be wired for AI…responding immediately to the latest polls…providing the blah most likely to meet the approval of AI-shaped public opinion. He will speak blah-blah…the press will report blah-blah…the schools will teach blah-blah…and AI-assisted goons will keep us in our place.
Who knows? Our brother in law – a Southern Baptist minister – says “At aowa age, the two most important things to know ar where ya ar and who ya ar.’ Maybe AI can help."
"Gregory Mannarino, 5/26/23"
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
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Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/26/23
"Inflation Rising, Deficits Skyrocket.
Stock Market Completely Detached From Reality"
Video and comments here:
"You Are Not Alone"
Dan, I Allegedly 5/26/23
"You Are Not Alone"
"So many people are telling me that they feel that the economic problems are just in their community. This is happening directly to you, but around the world. There is a global, economic, slow down happening."
Video and comments here:
Jim Kunstler, "Trial By Ordeal"
"Trial By Ordeal"
By Jim Kunstler
“Let’s put you in the dunking chair and we’ll figure out what nature says about your status in the next world, and then we’ll make a decision about what to do with your still-living body.”
- Matt Taibbi
I’m sure you’re asking yourself: what’s up with the company CEOs like Anheuser-Busch’s Brendan Whitworth, Target’s Brian Cornell, and North Face’s Todd Spaletto? Did they green-light the disastrous Pride Month marketing campaigns based on transgender activism that are suddenly wrecking their businesses? Or do these things just happen down the chain-of-command while the top dogs are otherwise occupied, knocking golf balls around or reviewing their stock options’ strike prices?
I’ll tell you what you’re not seeing and hearing: the red-faced shrieking in the board rooms as boycotts kill sales and directors face the wrath of the share-holders. It was one thing when Bud Light hitched trans “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney to the beer wagon in place of the traditional Clydesdale horses. After all, every state has a drinking age, though it’s pretty astounding that anyone at Anheuser-Busch thought “Ms.” Mulvaney’s cringy Instagram antics would sell beer to grown men moving appliances and fixing pot-holes.
It’s another thing, in the case of Target, to aim sexually-loaded gear to little children, for instance a line of T-shirts that proclaim “Satan Respects Pronouns” made by one Erik Carnell’s Abprellen company out of London. “Mr.” Carnell expounded on that idea on his company’s website (now taken down):
Satanists don’t actually believe in Satan, he is merely used as a symbol of passion, pride, and liberty. He means to you what you need him to mean. So, for me, Satan is hope, compassion, equality, and love. So, naturally, Satan respects pronouns. He loves all LGBT+ people. I went with a variation of Baphomet for this design, a deity who themself is a mixture of genders, beings, ideas, and existences.”
Baphomet, the goat-headed demon associated with Satanism and the occult
Would it surprise you to learn that children well beneath the age of puberty are not inclined to think about sex at all? In a well-ordered society that recognizes children as different from adults, they don’t. And if something sexual comes to their attention, they are generally perplexed by it. Unless they’re born into an era when adults are busy erasing boundaries, guard-rails, and cultural inhibitions, in which case I must imagine that young children exposed to, say, pornography in a chaotic household find it traumatically sinister. So, why the gleeful celebration about sexualizing children now?
I’ll tell you why: because we are living in a very badly-ordered society these days, a society in which anything goes and nothing matters, which is a poor principle for civilization. It’s the same principle that has people shitting all over the sidewalks of San Francisco, looting Walgreens stores in broad daylight, pushing ineffective and unsafe vaccines (and lying about it), and arresting people for thought crimes. It’s a degenerate society. Morally bankrupt. Wicked.
You might ask, how did it get that way? The concise answer is that a broken business model for daily life and a collapsing economy have so disordered millions of minds that values are seen as having no value. The scaffold for truth, beauty, honor, dignity, courage, prudence generosity, etc., folded some time ago, in slow-motion, so we didn’t notice.
The keepers of our culture have replaced it with a tacky system of ritual virtue-signaling fakery that they don’t really believe in, that persists simply because the moral vacuum it stands for provokes such unbearable anxiety. The main lesson of the recent Durham Report — missed by even the most punctilious observers — is that our country does not want to fix itself, indeed the whole broken apparatus of fixing it is in the hands of the people who broke it.
This epic negligence leaves the doors wide open for the broad range of lower-order criminal mischief we’re seeing expressed all around us. Now I will venture into shadowland. There is a rumor floating around the Internet that this seemingly coordinated campaign to sexualize children and initiate them into marginal behaviors was started to soften up the public for forthcoming shocking revelations contained in the much-whispered-about Jeffrey Epstein archive of videos that show eminent international figures caught in compromising sexual situations that include sexual acts with children.
I wouldn’t commit to saying there’s anything to that, but there have been an awful lot of signs and portents pointing in that direction, and so I also wouldn’t dismiss it altogether. There can be little doubt that the videos exist, or did exist - we know that Epstein’s various mansions were rigged to the eaves with cameras, and that he was an “asset” of more than one nation’s intel service trafficking in blackmail - and I’d expect that there are at least a few copies of the videos out there, just like there are many copies of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard-drive out there.
There’s something definitely programmatic about the way the drag queens were rolled out into the kiddie korners the past year. It doesn’t feel organic, shall we say, but rather directed, like a sinister grand opera. And the effort to enlist and initiate schoolchildren into a psychodrama of hyperbolic sexual confusion looks absolutely orchestrated.
What we might be seeing is the convergence of a world-beating political scandal with an economy-killing financial crisis that will destroy the entire post-WW2 armature of money and credit. That event would usher in a period of appalling turbulence in our everyday life, severing supply chains, killing businesses, and disturbing every imaginable social arrangement as well as public order. If that comes to pass, and it’s looking likely, then that will be the last we hear about personal pronouns and trans influencers for a thousand years."
"Stock Up Now At Aldi! Major Holiday Weekend Deals! Don't Miss This!"
Adventures With Danno, 5/26/23
"Stock Up Now At Aldi!
Major Holiday Weekend Deals! Don't Miss This!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Aldi and are noticing that they are having a huge sale on holiday items this week! We are stocking up and showing the best deals as we take you shopping with us. It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Video and comments here:
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 5/26/23"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 5/26/23"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
Ron DeSantis has announced he’s running for president in 2024 despite the fact he’s being creamed by President Trump in the polls. Is the fix in to convict Trump and jail him in Washington D.C. with the hyped-up classified documents case? Remember, Hillary Clinton won Washington D.C. with 96% of the vote in 2016. So, the jury pool is nearly 100% Deep State Democrats. A stacked jury would find it easy to convict their arch enemy, Donald Trump, on phony charges just like the totally false Russia collusion case. Is DeSantis running revealing this is the RINO/Deep State Dem plan?
The phrase “died suddenly” is a common term used when referring to the CV19 bioweapon/vax deaths. It should be changed to “murdered suddenly” because that is really what it is. There is no stopping the debilitating injuries and awful deaths happening every week. The Lying Legacy Media (LLM) is ignoring this huge problem that has so far killed or injured 30% of the American workforce. The trend is unabating, and it appears it will continue for some time to come. The official numbers say more than 675 million CV19 bioweapon injections have been delivered in America alone. This is a murder program and not healthcare because bioweapons do not help a single person. It is that simple. Let’s start calling it what it is - murder.
Even if there is a new debt ceiling deal reached in Washington (and that is still a big if), the economy will continue to sink. All the charts show that the economy is clearly going down, and top bankers like Jamie Dimon are calling for even higher interest rates. The economy is doomed, so get ready for a much lower standard of living. There is much more in the 48-minute newscast."
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these
stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 5/26/23.
Thursday, May 25, 2023
"Society is Out Of Control; More Stores Closing; Debt Default Danger; Mortgage Rates Above 7%"
Jeremiah Babe, 5/25/23
"Society is Out Of Control; More Stores Closing;
Debt Default Danger; Mortgage Rates Above 7%"
Video and comments here:
"A Green Beret's Warning About What's Coming to USA: "People Have No Idea..."
Canadian Prepper, 5/25/23
"A Green Beret's Warning About What's
Coming to USA: "People Have No Idea..."
"Think you're ready for SHTF? Think again, in todays video
we discuss the horrors of societal collapse and how to deal with it."
Video and comments here:
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "The Royal Albert Hall Concert"
Full screen recommended.
Ludovico Einaudi,
"The Royal Albert Hall Concert" ( 2010 )
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Do you see the bat? It haunts this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. While the Veil is roughly circular in shape and covers nearly 3 degrees on the sky toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus), NGC 6995, known informally as the Bat Nebula, spans only 1/2 degree, about the apparent size of the Moon. That translates to 12 light-years at the Veil's estimated distance, a reassuring 1,400 light-years from planet Earth.
In the composite of image data recorded through narrow band filters, emission from hydrogen atoms in the remnant is shown in red with strong emission from oxygen atoms shown in hues of blue. Of course, in the western part of the Veil lies another seasonal apparition: the Witch's Broom Nebula."
"When We Least Expect It..."
"When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. "
- Paulo Coelho
"Ex Obscurum"
Full screen recommended.
"Ex Obscurum, Adagio for Strings, Op. 11"
"From emotional turmoil, hatred, and addiction the miracle of recovery begins in this Spadecaller Video entitled "Ex Obscurum" (From Darkness). Featuring original poetry narrated by the author and visual artist, Matthew Schwartz. Composer Samuel Barber's powerful musical score, adopted for the movie "Platoon", (Adagio for Strings) sets the background for this spiritual exodus "From Darkness."
"The Threat of Russia"
Col. Douglas Macgregor, 5/25/23
"The Threat of Russia"
Video and comments here:
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Hindustan Times, 5/25/23
"Putin Dares Biden; Decides To Deploy
Newest Nuclear Submarine In The Pacific"
"Russia has decided to challenge the U.S. in the Pacific amid constant poking. The Russian Navy's newest nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine will be moved to a permanent base on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Pacific Ocean. The decision has been taken to step up Moscow's Pacific military presence. Russia has been boosting defences in its vast far eastern regions bordering the Asia-Pacific, accusing the U.S. of expanding its presence there and raising security concerns. The so-called vengeful decision is being seen as a direct dare to the United States. This is another proof that Russia under Vladimir Putin is anything but submissive."
Video and comments here:
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Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 5/25/23
"Team Biden Antagonizing Putin -
Alastair Crooke, Fmr. Brit Ambassador"
Video and comments here:
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Hindustan Times, 5/25/23
"Russia's Nuclear Dare To West;
Putin Deploys Tactical Nukes In Belarus"
Russia moved ahead on Thursday with a plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, whose leader said the warheads were already on the move.
Video and comments here:
"None Of You Seem To Understand..."
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet ‘for sale’, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence – briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing – cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity.” - Erich Fromm
"I often question my sanity. Occasionally, it replies."
- Darynda Jones
"20 Foods That Will Double In Price This Summer"
"20 Foods That Will Double In Price This Summer"
By Epic Economist
"If you're fed up with soaring grocery prices, unfortunately, we bring some more bad news. Thousands of grocery staples will cost you 50% more than they did last summer, and some of them are likely to face even steeper increases due to a myriad of issues impacting food production. From drought to snow to storms and massive floods, extreme weather has battered the U.S. in recent years, and shoppers likely will feel the lingering effects at the grocery store over the next few months. Good weather, especially in the spring when planting season starts, is crucial to growing a bountiful crop of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. But the extreme swings this year have left many growers behind schedule, which means we are no longer talking about temporary food inflation, but a new normal where prices are more expensive, and do not return to historical averages.
For example, the global inventory of maize, rice, wheat, barley, and oat remains about 11% lower than it was before the Ukraine crisis broke out in February 2022. The two countries are major cereal producers, but the conflict is impeding farmers from exporting their goods. This is keeping the cost of cereals at the stores about 26% higher compared to 2021 levels. And prices are going to rise even further considering that our domestic production has been disrupted by extreme weather events that caused extensive losses. Cereal-based products will cost 8% to 9% more in 2023, and that increase can add up fast and actually make a world of difference for many struggling families. All in all, cereals may end up costing almost 40% more than they did in November 2021.
Americans' favorite bakery goods including bagels, pretzels, cakes, pies, muffins, and more, are becoming increasingly more expensive, impacted by the soaring costs of cereals, flour, vegetable oils, and dairy all at the same time. While prices already rose by 34% compared to 2021 levels, another 12% increase is likely to occur by the end of the year, with peak prices expected during the summer.
Meanwhile, barbecue season is right at the corner, and all .meat lovers should expect to spend significantly more than they did last year. All of the top beef steak cuts like fillet, scotch fillet, porterhouse, T-bone, rump, round, as well as ribeye, brisket, lamb chops, chicken legs, and pork, and even humbler alternatives like beef mince, sausages, and hamburgers are going to cost between 12.8% to 25% more this summer compared to a year ago, and about 45% to 55% more compared to 2021 levels, according to estimates released by the USDA. That's because this year our domestic beef supply is far smaller than it was in 2022. The cattle selloff that was spurred by drought and higher feed prices initially resulted in a surplus of meat in our food supply chain. But now that these products have already been sold, and more supply isn't coming in, we're likely to see some empty shelves and much higher prices as seasonal demand peaks over the next couple of months.
Now more than ever is time to get ahead of these increases and start stocking up on everyday necessities before they become far too expensive and out of our reach. Today, we listed several products that will cost you roughly double than they did just a year ago."
Video and comments here:
"The Direction Of America"
"The Direction Of America"
By John Leaps
"Men, like nations, think they're eternal What man in his 20s or 30s doesn't believe, at least subconsciously, that he'll live forever? In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it's harder to hide from reality.... as you lose friends and relatives.
Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.... Forever was about 500 years, give or take.... not bad, but gone!!
France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire; now Albion exists in perpetual twilight. Its previous 96-year-old sovereign was a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.
In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.
I was born in 1940, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century - the American century. America's prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the 'Greatest Generation,' we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity.
We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world. We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA...the blueprint of life.
But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism - which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world. We've gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year. Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We've traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution.
The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, 'Dr. Jill' had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency.
We can't defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.
The president of the United States can't even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence ('You know - The Thing') correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd Amendment and slash police budgets.
Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they're women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they're inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about 'unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.'
We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It's a $31-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our 'entertainment' is sadistic, nihilistic, and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.
Patriotism is called an insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We're asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in.
How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lockdowns, and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit.
How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity?
* Fighting endless wars they can't or won't win.
* Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay.
* Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde.
* Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule.
* Allowing indoctrination of the young.
* Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarch.
* Losing national identity.
* Indulging indolence.
* Abandoning God, faith and family - the bulwarks of any stable society.
In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease. Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had? I'm surrounded by ghosts urging me on: the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected.
This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don't want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely.
During Britain's darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, 'Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.'
The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us? While the prognosis is far from good. Only God knows if America's day in the sun is over."
"How It Really Is"
"Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come, nor care beyond today.”
- Thomas Gray,
“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
Gregory Mannarino, "Something Is About To Break, Important Updates"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 5/25/23
"Something Is- About To Break, Important Updates"
Video and comments here:
"Get Ready For More"
Dan, I Allegedly 5/25/23
"Get Ready For More"
"Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Bank says that we need to get ready for more banking closures. We have not seen the end of this yet. The Banking crisis is far from over."
Video and comments here:
"Grocery Prices Are Getting Ridiculous! This Is Crazy!"
Adventures With Danno, 5/25/23
"Grocery Prices Are Getting Ridiculous! This Is Crazy!"
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, and are noticing some major price increases on groceries! This is not good as stores are already charging extremely high prices on most items!"
Video and Comments here:
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
MUST VIEW! "Insane News! WW3 Is About To Explode! Jets in Black Sea, Moscow On Fire"
Canadian Prepper, 5/24/23
"Insane News! WW3 Is About To Explode!
Jets in Black Sea, Moscow On Fire"
"At this point nuclear war is likely. Time is of the essence."
Video and comments here:
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- Jim Quinn
"Starbucks Mass Store Closings Have Begun And It's Worse Than You Think"
"Starbucks Mass Store Closings Have
Begun And It's Worse Than You Think"
by Epic Economist
"Things aren’t looking good for the biggest coffee chain in the world. Starbucks is closing hundreds of stores right now, and there are many reasons behind this decision. Some store formats are simply not working anymore. In addition, several locations have been reporting poor financial results for years, franchisees are going bankrupt, and experts say rising labor tensions and leadership uncertainty are making the company’s stock a bad investment right now. The coffeehouse chain is actually shuttering all stores in one U.S. city due to a combination of all of these problems. As it turns out, Starbucks’ issues are much more complicated than people imagine, and even CEO Howard Schultz is saying that the company “has lost its way”. It is clear that something is deeply wrong with the coffee retailer’s business in 2023, and today, we investigate which factors are threatening to push Starbucks over the edge in the months ahead.
This summer, your local Starbucks may disappear. According to a report released by the Seattle Times, roughly 20 Starbucks stores are being closed in the state due to rising theft, safety problems, and declining foot traffic. That comes after the company shuttered about the same number of locations in the state just a year ago citing similar concerns.
The outlet also identified dozens of closings across 6 states spurred by declining sales and persistent underperformance. Amongst them are four stores in the surroundings of Universal Studios, in Florida. A dozen shops in Nashville, Tennessee, and six closings in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as well as an unspecified number of closings in Louisville and Bowling Green, Kentucky, a spokesperson said. On top of that, the company also decided to close all of its stores in Ithaca, New York. Executives cited worsening financial conditions and unprofitability, but some allege that the closures were tied to the stores' attempts to unionize, according to Insider.
Other locations are going dark because franchise operators have gone bankrupt. That’s the case of Starbucks shops in Aspen, Colorado, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Due to “issues of nonpayment” of millions of dollars in fees, Starbucks sued Manhattan Capital, which then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy noting that it was incapable to pay the debt due to a lack of cash flow. As a result, all Starbucks stores operated by Manhattan Capital are in the process of closing down permanently.
When it comes to brick-and-mortar retail stores, Starbucks has already shuttered 150 locations in the United States this year. "We are beginning to close stores," interim CEO Howard Schultz said in a video posted to Twitter. "This is just the beginning. There are going to be many more." Over the past 12 months, Starbucks closed 424 U.S. company-operated stores or about 5% of its total. Today, there are roughly 9,000 company-operated Starbucks stores in the country, down from 11,300 in 2020.
Over the past two years, the company is coping with a $3.2 billion loss in sales due to the pandemic, inflation, supply chain issues, and shortages of key ingredients and materials. That’s an alarming figure considering that the company’s most recent balance sheet released on February 2, 2023, showed total debt is at $14.93 billion. That's the reality of a company rotting from the inside, and the saddest part is that the biggest losers of this narrative will be U.S. consumers, who will end up losing their beloved coffee spots due to a severe case of mismanagement and lack of respect with its employees and the public."
Video and comments here:
"Jeremiah Babe, 5/24/23"
Jeremiah Babe, 5/24/23
"Truck Market In Crisis Mode; Credit Card Limits Rise;
Mortgage Applications Drop Like A Rock"
Video and comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
"It’s always nice to get a new view of an old friend. This stunning Hubble Space Telescope image of nearby spiral galaxy M66 is just that. A spiral galaxy with a small central bar, M66 is a member of the Leo Galaxy Triplet, a group of three galaxies about 30 million light years from us. The Leo Triplet is a popular target for relatively small telescopes, in part because M66 and its galactic companions M65 and NGC 3628 all appear separated by about the angular width of a full moon.
The featured image of M66 was taken by Hubble to help investigate the connection between star formation and molecular gas clouds. Clearly visible are bright blue stars, pink ionized hydrogen clouds - sprinkled all along the outer spiral arms, and dark dust lanes in which more star formation could be hiding."
The Universe
“There are no accidents. If it's appeared on your life radar, this is why: to teach you that dreams come true; to reveal that you have the power to fix what's broken and heal what hurts; to catapult you beyond seeing with just your physical senses; and to lift the veils that have kept you from seeing that you're already the person you dreamed you'd become. There are no accidents. And believe me, that was one heck of a dream.”
“Tallyho,”
The Universe
“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”
"The Poet: David Wagoner, "Getting There"
"Getting There"
"You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You're there. You've arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.
What did you want to be?
You'll remember soon.
You feel like tinder under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change.
The sky is pulsing against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression
On the self you were,
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power,
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.
What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,
Telling it haltingly like a dream,
That lost traveler's dream under the last hill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.
You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings."
~ David Wagoner
“The Myth of Human Progress”
Full screen recommended.
“The Myth of Human Progress”
By Chris Hedges
“Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth – intellectually and emotionally – and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury – as well as unrivaled military and economic power – for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.
Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.
“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada.
“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today – about 2 billion – is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.
If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”
Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.
Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.
Wright explained this further on our call. “The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again.
We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”
As Wright told me: “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable – the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun – would disappear.
We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we let oil and gas exploration rip when we knew that expanding the carbon economy was suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.
If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”
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