Gregory Mannarino, AM 2/23/24
"Alert! Expanding War!
Food Inflation Rising; Fake Data"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, February 23, 2024
"Alert! Nationwide Outage! Putin In Nuclear Bomber! Poland Shuts Border! Israel F-35 Iran Strike"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/23/24
"Alert! Nationwide Outage! Putin In Nuclear Bomber!
Poland Shuts Border! Israel F-35 Iran Strike"
Comments here:
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"Putin Co-Pilots Supersonic Nuclear-Capable Bomber"
By Tyler Durden
"Russian President Vladimir Putin just sent the Western military alliance a not-so-subtle message just days after his top national security official Dmitry Medvedev warned that Moscow stands ready to use its entire strategic arsenal on London, Washington, Berlin and Kiev if Russian territory comes under direct attack from NATO.
On Thursday Putin entered the co-pilot’s seat in a nuclear-capable strategic bomber for a 30 to 40 minute flight, parts of which were filmed and quickly released by Russian state sources. Putin's brief flight in the upgraded Tu-160M supersonic strategic bomber also comes ahead of next month's Russian election, though of course we all know pretty much what the outcome will be. Watch below as Putin goes 'nuclear-capable'...
The Kremlin has released footage from Vladimir Putin’s flight on a Tu-160M nuclear bomber this afternoon pic.twitter.com/NYGiTFUKtP— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) February 22, 2024. "The plant has received state orders to produce a modernized version of the Tu-160 bomber that first flew in the 1980s and was code-named Blackjack by NATO." Putin subsequently hailed that the new bomber he rode in was "excellent". More footage:
Thursday, February 22, 2024
"Major Cellphone Outage Hits US; Communications Shutdown - Was It A Cyberattack?"
Jeremiah Babe, 2/22/24
"Major Cellphone Outage Hits US;
Communications Shutdown - Was It A Cyberattack?"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Peder B. Helland, "Sunny Mornings"
Full screen recommended.
Peder B. Helland, Soothing Relaxation,
"Sunny Mornings"
"I am a composer from Norway and I started this channel with a simple vision: to create a place that you can visit whenever you want to sit down and relax. I compose music that can be labeled as for example: sleep music, calm music, yoga music, study music, peaceful music, beautiful music and relaxing music. I love to compose music and I put a lot of work into it.
Thank you very much for listening and for leaving feedback. Every single day I am completely astonished by all your warm support and it really inspires me to work even harder on my music. If you enjoy my work, I would be very happy if you decided to subscribe and join our community. Have a wonderful day or evening!"
- Peder B. Helland, composer for Soothing Relaxation
"A Look to the Heavens"
“These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula left of center, and colorful M20 on the right. The third, NGC 6559, is above M8, separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant.
The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20's popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. The colorful skyscape recorded with telescope and digital camera also includes one of Messier's open star clusters, M21, just above the Trifid.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
•
"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where
he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."
- Walt Whitman
“The Myth of Human Progress”
“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.”
The Poet: Maya Angelou, “Alone”
“Alone”
“Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home,
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone.
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong,
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use,
Their wives run round like banshees,
Their children sing the blues.
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone,
But nobody,
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know…
Storm clouds are gathering,
The wind is gonna blow.
The race of man is suffering,
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody,
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody,
Can make it out here alone.”
- Maya Angelou
"Living In A Potemkin World" (Excerpt)
"Living In A Potemkin World" (Excerpt)
by Jim Quinn
Excerpt: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” - George Orwell, "1984"
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” - George Orwell, 1984
"I never thought I would experience the dystopian “fictional” nightmare Orwell laid out in his 1949 novel. Seventy-two years later and his warning about a totalitarian society, where mass surveillance, repressive measures against dissenters, mind control through government indoctrination and propaganda designed to convince the masses lies are truth, fake is real and the narrative can be manipulated to achieve the desired outcome of those in power, have come to fruition.
Everything is fake. I don’t believe anything I’m told by the government, the media, medical “experts”, politicians, military leadership, bankers, corporate executives, religious leaders, financial professionals, and anyone selling themselves as an authority on any subject matter. We are truly living in times of mass deception, mass delusion, and mass willful ignorance.
The term Potemkin Village comes from stories of a phony movable village built by Grigory Potemkin in the late 1700’s to impress his former lover, Catherine II, during her journey to Crimea in 1787. He supposedly erected fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper River, as her vessel sailed by, to impress her with the progress he was making on her behalf. After she passed, he would have the village disassembled and then reassembled further along downstream.
I guess this was an early version of fake news, though I am sure there were also plenty of falsities and propaganda in the newspapers of the time. But, in our current day, oppressors have taken lies, falsities, miss-truths, and propaganda to heights never conceived by Edward Bernays, George Orwell or Joseph Stalin."
Please view this outstanding,
and most highly recommended complete article here:
"Halt And Catch Fire"
"There's a great phrase, 'Halt and Catch Fire', which means, basically, you know sh&t's going to hit the fan, so you stop, accept it and move the [another expletive we'd prefer not to write] on. 'Halt and Catch Fire'is an early machine command that sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all conditions to compete for superiority at once."
- Addison Wiggin
Bill Bonner, "Elites Get The Benz"
"Elites Get The Benz"
Dishing the dirt on Internet tools, insider scams,
military hegemony and plenty more...
by Bill Bonner
"Government officials wanted Amazon to remove from its online catalog books containing “misinformation” regarding the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines, meaning anything questioning the government’s pro-vaccine propaganda."
~ Ron Paul
"We begin with this report from the American Conservative… “Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?” asks an Atlantic headline. The numbers are deadly. The grimmest news was from the Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper outside the East Coast. The paper announced it was cutting 115 people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom. In June of last year, the Times dropped 74 people. Some 2,900 newspapers have closed or merged since 2005.
Sports Illustrated is in trouble. The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, NPR, Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed, among others, have shed hundreds of journalists over the past year. (The author of the Atlantic article himself was a layoff from the Post.) Job losses among print, digital, and broadcast-news organizations grew by nearly 50 percent during 2023. Why so much downsizing in the mainstream media? It is possible that consumers don’t really want to pay for propaganda?
Hand in Glove: It is obvious that the media, the US firepower industry, and the government work closely together. All are arms of America’s Establishment – rich, well-educated, and powerful…with elites who have grown distant from ‘The People’ they were meant to serve. No conspiracy theory is necessary to explain it; their interests…and the interests of ‘the masses’… simply diverge. People with power tend to want more power. And as Eisenhower observed in 1961, pretty soon, they exert an ‘unwarranted influence’ over public policy to get it.
The rich are different. They have more money. More power. More influence. Can you blame them for wanting to control the government…and use it to their own advantage? Elites, already on top, typically aim to protect themselves by blocking innovation and competition. They control both political parties, for example; they don’t want any others butting in. But the rest of the population is better off in an open, dynamic society where they can go about their business without the costs and constraints imposed by the feds. This divergence explains much of America’s excess spending, its cancerous debt, and its lust for foreign wars. They are all obvious ways in which the insiders transfer more wealth and power to themselves. Less obvious is our subject for today: the extent to which the country has already become, in effect, a military dictatorship.
That, at any rate, is the charge leveled by Mr. Mike Benz. He is not saying anything we haven’t said. But he has taken it a step further. The US is not just in danger of being taken over by some form of insider rule; the federal government already has been captured. It is an explosive assertion; if true, it upsets hundreds of years’ worth of progress, in which fighting men were meant to serve civilized authorities, not the other way around.
Internet Tools: And he may be right. The deciders are selected, more or less, not by the voters, but by the political parties, the media and the firepower industry. They decide when we go to war and with whom, how much the feds spend…and, indirectly, where they get it.
One way they control the idea-flow, says Benz, Director of the Foundation for On-Line Freedom, is by using the latest internet tools. Benz: "Google is a great example of this. Google began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford PhDs, and they got their funding as part of a joint CIA NSA program to chart how “birds of a feather flock together online” through search engine aggregation. And then one year later they launched Google and then became a military contractor. From there it was one hop and one skip until Google was fully part of the Deep State program. At first, this was widely seen as helping independence movements – such as the famous Arab Spring – liberate their countries from dictatorial or backward leaders.
Overseas, the CIA and other US intel agencies had been rigging elections and pulling strings for a long time. Benz recalls George Keenan, then head of the CIA, explaining: “…listen, it's a mean old world out there. We at the CIA just rigged the Italian election [of 1948]. We had to do it because if the Communist won, maybe there'd never be another election in Italy again, but it's really effective, guys. We need a department of dirty tricks to be able to do this around the world. And this is essentially a new social contract we're constructing with the American people because this is not the way we've conducted diplomacy before…”
The Biggest Danger: But after the surprise election of Donald Trump, the insiders began to see that it wasn’t only Italian voters who couldn’t be trusted. Benz…"Russiagate died in July, 2019 when Robert Mueller basically choked on the stand for three hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing. After two and a half years of investigation…they took all of this censorship architecture, spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it's actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself."
Get it? The threat is not just that foreign elections may not go the way the elites want. Domestic elections might go awry too. The biggest danger to ordinary Americans is a debt crisis – followed by defaults, depression and inflation. But the biggest danger to the powers-that-be is a sudden cut-off in the flow of deficit-financed spending…easy money…stock market gains…cushy jobs…contracts…directorships…and other government boondoggles.
Suppose, for example, that a ‘peace candidate’ were elected president? Suppose he used his office to make a logical and compelling case for America First, proposing to stay out of other peoples’ wars? And suppose he cut spending in the one and only area where substantial savings are readily available – the ‘discretionary’ budget for maintaining the US empire? It would be easy to save $500 billion with no loss in security for the homeland; the US would still be spending 6 times as much on ‘defense’ as Russia. A few other cuts to the empire budget and the federal deficit would be eliminated completely!
But what would the toady press say? How would the elites defend themselves? How much longer would this reformer live? More to come…"
Dan, I Allegedly, "Are You Sick Of Junk Fees?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 2/22/24
"Are You Sick Of Junk Fees?"
"We finally hear that a bank is getting sued for their junk fees. JP Morgan Chase has just been sued for charging people a bounced check fee. We are seeing junk fees in every aspect of our lives from airlines to insurance companies to restaurants."
Comments here:
Scott Ritter, "The US Finally Sanctions Israel After The IDF Continues To Attack Rafah"
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 2/22/24
"The US Finally Sanctions Israel
After The IDF Continues To Attack Rafah"
Comments here:
Canadian Prepper, "Alert! They're Going To War, Secret Mass Mobilization; NATO Flies F-16s In Ukraine"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper 2/22/24
"Alert! They're Going To War, Secret Mass Mobilization;
NATO Flies F-16s In Ukraine"
Comments here:
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Jeremiah Babe, "People Aren't Laughing Now, They're About To Lose It All"
Jeremiah Babe, 2/21/24
"People Aren't Laughing Now, They're About To Lose It All;
Jobs Are On Borrowed Time"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its more familiar outlines are seen in the brighter central region of the nebula in this impressive wide-angle view. But the composite image combines many short and long exposures to also reveal an extremely faint outer halo. At an estimated distance of 3,000 light-years, the faint outer halo is over 5 light-years across.
Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. More recently, some planetary nebulae are found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years. Visible on the left, some 50 million light-years beyond the watchful planetary nebula, lies spiral galaxy NGC 6552.”
○
"Our planet is a tiny porthole, looking over a cosmic sea.
Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception?"
"Doug Casey on the Migrant Crisis and the States Increasingly Defying the Feds"
"Doug Casey on the Migrant Crisis and
the States Increasingly Defying the Feds"
by International Man
"International Man: "During his presidency, Joe Biden implemented an open border policy with thousands of migrants entering the US daily. The number of migrants that have entered the US illegally since Biden took office is easily in the millions. The invasion has put immense pressure on frontline states. Where do you think this trend is headed?
Doug Casey: In December 2023 alone, at least 300,000 of these people crossed the border. The numbers are going up. And I wonder, where are you going to put them? They arrive with nothing more than the shirts on their backs, but need a place to sleep and something to eat.
What is the purpose of welcoming these people in to become wards of the State? There is already no place to put them, other than schools, airports, or public buildings. But millions more are on the way. Many hotels, like the Roosevelt in New York, have been rented for them. For the next step, people may be asked, or ordered, to make their second homes or guest houses available to the migrants. Or perhaps spare bedrooms in their homes. You might think that’s absurd. And it is. But something will be done to accommodate millions of aliens who are encouraged to enter the US. They’re immediately made into welfare recipients.
The number of migrants is certain to grow. Government-funded NGOs give most of them debit cards and cellphones. They come from the world’s poorest places. You can be certain that one of the first calls that they make is to friends back home, saying "Come to America." They all, understandably, want to leave their shithole countries. They walk across Mexico, and pile up at the border. They’re welcomed into the US, drawn by the certainty of food, lodging, medical care, and cash. They then become America’s problem.
Why is this happening? We can conjecture. Maybe the Dems see new voters for the coming election. Maybe it’s a desire to replace white people. Maybe altruists think it’s just the right thing to do. Maybe it’s a visceral hatred of America, and what it stands for. But the result will be utter chaos in the US over the next few years. Even if the border is closed after the elections, many millions more will still pile up in Mexico. Most migrants are young males. They (justifiably, at this point) hold Americans in complete contempt for being weak, soft, and lacking self-respect. Many will form up into criminal gangs. The situation hasn’t even started to get out of control yet. But it will as millions and millions more of these people enter in 2024.
International Man: Border states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico are at the forefront and dealing with large numbers of people. In response, Texas began sending migrants by bus and train to "sanctuary cities" like New York, Washington DC, and Chicago. The Mayor of New York, Eric Adams, has complained about the influx of migrants and the city’s inability to handle and house them. What do you think about this?
Doug Casey: I’m not a fan of local or state government officials. They’re mostly petty hacks trying to leverage themselves into the big time, which is to say, Washington DC. Don’t count on them to solve the problem. But it’s understandable why Texas doesn’t want the migrants hanging around. If the migrants were Americans, they might be called vagrants. That’s the traditional term for people who are homeless, penniless, and unemployed. Of course they want to ship them to "sanctuary" cities.
Among other problems, the local poor, especially blacks in northern ghettos, resent the newcomers being put up in hotels, with free debit cards, food, and cellphones. Of course, a lot of the blacks on welfare get these things anyway, but they resent incoming migrants getting them immediately. Earlier waves of Hispanics, who were mostly opportunity seekers, resent the newcomers getting a free ride. It’s a formula for discontent.
Meanwhile, although the US federal government can print any amount of money to import and support migrants, local governments have to tax the money from local residents. The wealthy will gather in gated communities, or just move out. Millions of penniless migrants from Mogadishu, Caracas, Port-au-Prince, and Lagos will degrade the quality of life wherever they land.
The situation will probably resolve itself over time. Fifty years from now things will have stabilized. But the future America will be quite different, and it’s likely to be an unpleasant trip as we find out how bad things have to get before they resolve.
Let’s say we have 20 million totally illegal recent migrants wandering around the US by the end of 2024. Can they be exported back to where they came from? That’s unlikely. Many of them (understandably and intelligently) burn their passports once they arrive. They can’t even get on a plane, barring special dispensation. If they do, when they arrive back in China, or Senegal, or wherever, the airlines are fined big bucks for letting somebody board without a legal document. And will be forced to carry them back to the US.
The question is: How do you get rid of these people once they’re in the US? Rounding them up would take a police state. I suspect they’re here to stay. Furthermore, these migrants are quite unlike those from the early 20th century. Then the migrants were culturally similar to Americans. That’s important. But more important, those people had to fend for themselves immediately. These people don’t. They’re being actively drawn to the US by massive welfare benefits, which encourage the wrong kind of immigrant, and corrupt all concerned. What’s now a flood will turn into a tidal wave in the months to come. Many will compete with native American derelicts for space on sidewalks in places like San Francisco.
As an AnCap, I’m for the free flow of people across borders. But that’s only reasonably possible when you have a true free market and strict property rights. If you enter a country without money, where are you going to stay? If all property was privately owned, nobody would tolerate squatters. Which, incidentally, is becoming a big problem. Migrants are starting to use real estate listings to find empty houses. They then use local laws (especially in blue states) to squat. In many locales, someone who gets into a house can’t be evicted, practically as well as legally, for months.
Why, we might ask, does the government even bother having immigration and customs formalities in places like New York or LA anymore? The people that fly in have visas, credit cards, suitcases with clothes, and homes. We trouble these people, but not the migrants, who are paid to enter, and become wards of the state.
Furthermore, consider the whole idea of work visas. A law-abiding foreigner typically has to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to get a US work visa. Meanwhile, migrants are paid to just pile in. Even if an employer wants to hire someone who doesn’t speak English, have an address, or transportation, he can’t legally give them a job, since they don’t have Social Security numbers.
All of this is resulting in massive disrespect for laws. It’s true that many or most of the laws we have in the US are stupid and counterproductive. But when the whole idea of obeying the law is subverted, the result will be chaos.
International Man: Recently, the US border crisis escalated when the US Supreme Court approved the decision for federal agents to cut the razor wire which Texas put up to prevent the entrance of migrants. It led to a standoff between Texas and the federal government, which is still ongoing. Could the situation between Texas and the federal government escalate
What moves do you see each side taking, and how do you see it playing out?Doug Casey: What’s going on between Texas and Washington DC is mostly Kabuki theater. Abbott, a second-class political hack, is using it to grandstand and make himself better-known among Republicans. Anyway, the barbed wire dispute is centered on a four-mile stretch at the Eagle Pass entrance. The migrants have thousands of miles of border they can use freely. All they have to do is ask for asylum, and they’re home free, and on the gravy train.
Speaking of the Federal/Texas dispute, it’s important to note the antagonism that’s been building up for years between the Red people and the Blue people in the US. It’s increasingly serious. They can no longer even have a civil conversation. It’s the type of thing that presages a civil war, and it’s greatly aggravated by migrants being invited in at public expense.
I’ve said for years that a civil war was in the cards. The coming US civil war won’t, however, be along geographical lines, as was the War of Southern Secession from 1861 to 1865. The Blue people are concentrated on the coasts and big cities, the Red people are in flyover country and small towns. But they’re intermingled everywhere.
This civil war is likely to be quite localized, and personalized, if you will. No armies lined up against each other, but lots of fistfights, with a fair number of homicides and disappeared persons. You probably won’t want to voice controversial views among people you don’t know well. Shocking thoughts? America is no longer the land of "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver." It’s transformed into a multicultural domestic empire.
It’s important to remember that, dysfunctional as it is, the government in Washington DC is vastly more powerful than the state governments. It’s very much controlled by modern day Jacobins, the same kind of people who controlled the French Revolution. Little Robespierres, the types who guillotined about 30,000 of their countrymen in the early 1790’s.
When push comes to shove, most Americans will tend to do what the national government tells them to do. If the Jacobins - the Democrats - retain control of the apparatus of the State for another four years, when we’re experiencing financial, economic, political, and social chaos all at once… keep your head down.
International Man: During the Covid hysteria, some state governors acted independently from the federal government’s dictates. States like Texas, Florida, and South Dakota chose to open schools, end lockdowns, and ignore vaccine mandates. The border crisis has created another situation in which the federal and state governments are at odds. Where do you think this trend is headed?
Doug Casey: I think it’s not so much a question of various states being at odds with the federal government. It’s a question of the people being at odds with governments everywhere.
The average American, who’s under increasing financial stress, is increasingly disinclined to pay taxes, because he sees that he’s getting little in return but aggravation. In fact, with millions of aliens being imported at his expense, he sees that his taxes are being used against his own interests. It would be nice if they did, but I wouldn’t count on state governments to counter orders from DC. However, individual Americans are talking to each other and getting fed up.
Simultaneously, people within the DC Beltway are viewing Red Americans and MAGA people as threats. More gun regulations are in the works, including a bill recently proposed to make it a violation for more than three armed people to be together.
Don’t rely on your state government. Local law enforcement always rolls over when confronted by the FBI, or any of a score of similar Federal agencies. Were Provincial governments of any help to the truckers in Canada recently, when they confronted the federal government? No.
This relates to what we’re seeing in France, Germany and Holland, where common people, starting with farmers and truckers, are rising up against their national governments. They increasingly see their rulers as alien beings.
Speaking of aliens in the countries I just mentioned, as well as Britain, the migrant problem is actually much worse than in the US. That’s because their migrants are mostly Muhammadans. They’ve formed their own communities with their own laws, making it dangerous for Brits, Swedes, Frenchmen, or Hollanders to enter their enclaves.
That could also evolve into a type of civil war in Europe. The migrants hate the locals, hate Western civilization, and want to replace it. Their numbers are growing rapidly, and many want to enforce Sharia law on everyone. At some point these alien people, most of them perpetually unemployed and living off the massive European welfare benefits, will no longer be tolerated.
Mass migration is going to change the nature of America, as it has Europe. You can’t fight the tide of history. The West has lost faith in itself. It’s natural for demographics of any place in the world to change. But it’s a pity if you value things like free minds and free markets. The West in general and America in particular were not just unique, but hugely better than the rest of the world in many ways. But they’re being overturned. It’s not change itself that’s the problem. It’s that these changes are destructive and degrading.
Part of the change is because Wokeism has become a new religion. The migrants are accelerating the change because they’re not drawn to America out of love for the idea of America and freedom. They’re being drawn here because they love freebies, not freedom.
International Man: How does the trend of the states increasingly defying the feds play into your big-picture outlook? What are the investment and other implications?
Doug Casey: Well, for one thing, if you are in a Blue state or a sanctuary city, I would bail out now. The pot is likely to boil over, and things could get violent. Even if violence is avoided, taxes are necessarily going up to support welfare receiving migrants. More important, you might want to establish a second residency outside of the US. Current trends are likely to continue accelerating. If the Dems can round up the many millions of recent migrants, and get them voting in the 2024 election, it’s likely game over.
We’re just at the early stages of a major cultural change. Higher taxes, more crime, and general chaos are part of it. It’s not going to be any fun to watch anywhere, but absolutely not out of your front window in the US."
"Can't You See..."
"Can't you see that the courage to risk, to dare, to toss that gold coin up in the air over and over again, win or lose, is what makes humans human? They are fragile, doomed creatures, blinder than worms yet braver than the gods. "
- Jennifer Donnelly, "Stepsister"
o
Steve Cutts, "MAN"
“What a chimera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?”
- Blaise Pascal
Fred Reed, "It Cometh from the Pit, and It Hath a Knout"
"It Cometh from the Pit, and It Hath a Knout"
By Fred Reed
"Once upon a time there was a fairy kingdom that lived inside a place called The Beltway, and was surrounded on all four sides by a land called America. The Beltway was aligned with another kingdom called Manhattan, inhabited by disembodied heads that spoke from the walls of bars, and with yet another closed kingdom called Hollywood, the abode of half-educated narcissists. These kingdoms were in eternal political syzygy, and spoke not with the people of the surrounding lands, of whom they knew nothing. The following is a chronicle of what befell them, and why.
After years of peace, the Kingdoms were taken greatly aback by the rise of the Trump Monster, their surprise being proof that they knew nothing of the surrounding lands. They knew nothing for good reasons, of which there were two. The first was that they passed their lives with each other and among each other and talking to each other and writing about each other and reading about each other behind the high walls of their kingdoms. In organs like National Review and The Weekly Standard they endlessly wrote stories of the form “A soothsayer in Manhattan replies to what some other sayer of sooths said about yet another’s attack on someone else.”
They had all dwelt in monasteries called Harvard and Princeton, where they learned that they were the wisest of men, and inerrant. They had no idea that they were hated in the strange lands without the walls, which on their maps were drawn as fog with notations such as “Here dwelleth dragons.” They did not know that there were people who agreed not with them. For were they not right about all things?
The other reason for their puzzlement was a powerful spell called “Political Correctness.” This strong magic prevented the outlanders from saying anything that the Three Kingdoms did not want to hear. Anyone who engaged in incantations called “slurs,” which were truthful thoughts about sacred tribes, or who said Inappropriate Things about a certain little country whose only importance was being that little country, was thrown into durance vile. Thus the Three Kingdoms never heard anything they didn’t like, and so believed that almost everyone without the walls loved them. They had scarce an idea what furies were roiling and boiling and stirring under the surface of the Outer Realms.
Now, until the Trump Monster appeared, America was ruled by a pseudo-democracy of one bicephalous party with two names. The Only Party consisted of blackguards and Quislings and pickpockets bought and paid for by the plutocratic oligarchy of large corporations, AIPAC, and the. very rich. These told the two halves of the One Party what to do. Every four years there was played a great tournament in which candidates of the Two Names of the One Party engaged in the most savage combat imaginable. This was to distract the people outside the walls. Afterwards nothing changed and all went on as before, though the division of the spoils shifted a bit.
And in their ignorance and pride the Three Kingdoms engendered a monster called Trump, and it bit them.
The Only Party had always controlled the villeins because it controlled the choice of pretenders to the throne. A pretender gained the Presidency by buying it, and the rich who provided that money controlled as vassals those who accepted it. The pretenders were as straw and melons sold in a market.
Furthermore, the scribes and oracles of the Kingdoms said aloud only those things that were meet for the surrounding peasantry to hear. The puissant spell of Political Correctness amounted to a societal mute button and prevented the Holy Orders within the Three Kingdoms from noticing what stirred without.
Until the Trump Monster came raging, slouching toward Bethlehem, with which the Kingdoms confused themselves.
And there was afright and desperation and rending of teeth and gnashing of hair for many were the rice bowls threatened.
The darkest of horrors was that the serfs might come to choose the manner of their government. For long years the Bicephalous Party had presided over that most desirable form of democracy in which the people had no power. This laudable state they had maintained by never talking about anything of substance, such as unending wars in remote lands beyond the edges of the maps, or the importation of slaves from curious and unwholesome countries or the manufacture of all things by foreign dwarves.
A great broil ensued. The people saw for the first time a chance to manage their destinies and rose up for the Trump Monster. Inside the Beltway, the Wise and Good–for did they not so denominate themselves?–were greatly astonished. “What manner of wight can this be?” they asked in wonder. They said that the Trump Monster was beguiling fools, the cracked, and those who represented the worst in America. And the scribes and oracles were sore afraid, for most of the outlying populace appeared to belong to these tribes.
One of the Two Names of the One Party, the Democrats, sent forth a dreadful creature called Hillary to fight in single combat with the Trump Monster. Her very visage turned men to stone, it was said. She was held to be of one blood with Boadicea, Jeanne d’Arc, Lucretia Borgia, and Bonnie Parker.
The Three Kingdoms were at one with her, as she was corrupt, mendacious, criminal, and ugly, as well as suffering coughing fits and dizzy spells. Surely, said the scribes and oracles, any monster must fly screaming from her mere presence.
Yet it seemed that the Trump was no common monster. Every time he was beset by the scribes and oracles of the Beltway, he grew stronger, and a sulfurous smoke breathed from his mouth. With drawn swords the Trump Monster and the crumbling ruin clept Hillary circled each other.
And beyond the parapets and crenelations of the Three Kingdoms the sky grew darker. Inside the Beltway and in Manhattan, the disembodied heads railed and raged, but with every blast the helots joined the Trump Monster in larger numbers, for they hated the Insiders. In Hollywood the Half-Educated Narcissists said ever stupider things, but these had not their usual effect.
In their pride the Three Kingdoms had engendered Nemesis, and they watched in terror behind the ramparts as the sky grew darker and strange shapes twisted in the looming clouds and the Trump Monster strode ever nearer, breathing fire." (This reposted from before Trump’s victory as being of current relevance."
Adventures With Danno, "Shopping At Dollar General For Cheap Food Items!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 2/21/24
"Shopping At Dollar General For Cheap Food Items!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Dollar General and are searching around for some cheaper grocery options. With prices on food at an all-time high, we are trying to find options that are more budget friendly!"
Comments here:
o
Meanwhile, elsewhere, in a sane civilized society...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell. 2/21/24
"Where Did Tucker Carlson Go Shopping in Russia?"
"Where did Tucker Carlson go shopping in Moscow. Discover with me the place he visited, and see if it was exactly like he showed in his videos. Walk with me inside a Russian typical Supermarket, Auchan with me."
Comments here:
Just like where you live, right Good Citizen? Right?
Bill Bonner, "US Military Rule"
"US Military Rule"
The real political power Congress dare not oppose.
by Bill Bonner
"What I’m describing is military rule…
It’s the inversion of democracy."
~ Mike Benz
Youghal, Ireland - "As you’ll recall from our episodes on Monday and Tuesday…John Hussman predicts, with 99.9% certainty, a big drop in stock prices…particularly the Magnificent 7. His figures suggest an average decline of only 12%. But he bases this on an analysis of the period 1972-2023. This period, however, included the biggest stock market boom in history, boosted by the most successful ‘fake’ (not backed by anything) money system ever invented.
We expect he is right about the likelihood of a stock decline. But he may be wrong about the damage it will cause. In 1990, the Japanese market collapsed by 80%. It still hasn’t recovered – nearly a quarter of a century later. In the US, the Dow peaked out in 1929, dropped 88% and didn’t really recover until 1961. And if you keep track in terms of gold, you could have traded 18 ounces of gold for all the 30 Dow stocks of 1929. By 1980, it only took 2 ounces of gold. And twenty years later, it was at over 40.
All of which is to say that stocks swing up and down dramatically, sometimes a lot more than 12%. This is why, academic researchers believe, the rate of return from stocks should be higher than from bonds. There is a ‘risk premium’ that you get from stocks, theoretically, to compensate you for the big, episodic drawdowns in stock prices. NB: today, you can take 18 ounces of gold and buy all 30 Dow stocks again, just as you could in 1929. So, the real value of the best stocks on the market has not increased over the last 95 years.
Clusterf*ck of Woe
Yesterday, we looked more closely at why the next 40 years will probably not be as felicitous as the last 40…that is to say, the Dow/gold ratio is probably more likely headed to 2 rather than to 40. It may not be the ‘cluster of woe’ Hussman predicts, in other words, but a real ‘clusterf*ck of woe.’
After the funny money was introduced in 1971, the unfaithful dollar seemed to introduce an insidious, infectious disease…faithlessness crept into America’s vital organs. We saw how the elites of both parties try to limit voters’ choices, for example…in order to ‘protect democracy.’ The media has been captured by them too, and used to promote policies that serve their interests, but not those of ‘The People’ they are supposed to serve.
After 1971, marriage rates declined. Young people moved in with their parents. In 1971, you could buy an average house for $25,000. Now, The New York Times reports on a new trend: shrinkflation in housing, with tiny houses of only 600 sq. ft. selling for almost $300,000. Single income families have become rare. More children are born out-of-wedlock…and then, childbearing has declined to the point where, without immigration, the population would decline and Social Security would go broke.
Drug use increased. (Legal and illegal.) The prison population grew. Wages gains ceased. Americans got fatter. Federal debt rose 100 times. And the rich and poor parted company; by 2010, the top 5% earned more than the entire 90% of the population beneath them.
Americans have no dog in the Ukraine-Russia fight. But hundreds of billions of their dollars are used to keep it going. So too are billions of US dollars sent to Israel so it can buy weapons from the US firepower industry. All of which leads us, and Mike Benz, to believe that Congress, the administration, and the press are so deep in the pocket of the firepower industry, they can’t get out.
Gov Spooks and Jackboots: Dwight Eisenhower warned about it in 1961. Today, the danger he foresaw has not only arrived…it has taken a shape even he did not foresee – a silent military coup d’etat. Joe Biden doesn’t appear on TV as ‘Generalissimo Biden,’ bespeckled with medals and ribbons. Tanks do not patrol Pennsylvania Ave. Nor are dissidents rounded up, tortured and killed.
But, says Mike Benz: the military and the spooks rule. Few members of Congress dare to oppose them. Few mainstream media outlets dare to present their situation reports without the opinion of some retired, often disgraced, general officer. And, says Forbes, the firepower industry has become a ‘defining feature of the US economy.’ Forbes: "Congress in December belatedly passed an omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal 2023 including $858 billion for national defense, roughly half of which will be dispersed in the form of contracts to the private sector."
That is, by any measure, big business. In fact, at over $400 billion annually, defense contracts awarded to the private sector are worth an amount equivalent to a quarter of the entire Russian economy.
The Congressional Research Service estimates the U.S. defense industrial base currently includes over 200,000 companies... the bottom line is that the defense industry has become a permanent, in fact defining feature of the U.S. economy.
The US defense budget when Eisenhower issued his famous warning was $47 billion. It’s now over $850 billion – 18 times higher. Even adjusted for inflation, it’s three times what it was during the Cold War. Why? Do we have thrice as many enemies now as then? We send billions to ‘protect’ Europe and Israel. Why? Both are rich and fully capable of protecting themselves.
The explanation is given to us by the aforementioned Mike Benz. The firepower industry has become expert, he says, in using the media to promote its own agenda. We’ll hear from Mr. Benz more tomorrow…and you’ll get more of our Spenglerian view: this time, the West really is in decline."
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