"Feeling Overwhelmed: Breathing into Order"

"Feeling Overwhelmed: Breathing into Order"

by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM

"Always know, the Universe works in perfect order and you are never given more thank you can handle. Sometimes we may feel like there is just too much we need to do. Feeling overwhelmed may make it seem like the universe is picking on us, but the opposite is true: we are only given what we can handle. Difficult situations are opportunities to be our best selves, hone our skills and rise to the occasion.

The best place to start is to take a deep breath. As you do, remind yourself that the universe works in perfect order and therefore you can get everything done that needs to get done. As you exhale, release all the details that you have no control over. The universe with it‘s infinite organizing power will orchestrate the right outcome. Anytime stress begins to creep up, remember to breathe through it with these thoughts. Then, make a list of everything you need to do. Note what needs to be done first, and mark the things others may be able to do for you or with you. Though we often think no one else can do it correctly or well, there are times when it is worth it to exhale, let go of our control, and ask for help from professionals or friends. With the remaining things that feel you must do yourself, take another breath and determine their true importance. 

Sometimes they are things we’d like to do, but aren’t really necessary. After taking these quick steps, you will find you have a plan laid out, freeing you from frenzied thoughts circling in your head. With calming deep breaths, you are now free to focus more fully on our priorities. Herbal teas or flower remedies along with wise choices about caffeine and food can help keep us from becoming frantic too. But with nothing further from us than our breath, we can breathe in our best intentions and let the rest go with an exhale. Keeping ourselves centered and breathing into and through life’s challenges helps us learn what we are truly capable of doing, and we will find we have the ability to rise to any occasion. Remember you aren’t being picked on, and you are never alone."

- http://www.dailyom.com/

Chet Raymo, “Thinking About Thinking”

“Thinking About Thinking”

by Chet Raymo

“It is not easy to live in that continuous awareness of things which alone is true living," wrote the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch. And, of course, he was right. Our brains are separated from the world by a permeable membrane. Attention flows outwards. Sense impressions flow inwards. Of this two-way traffic- this awareness- we create a soul.

At this moment, as I sit at my desk on a hillside in the west of Ireland, I try to be aware. Sunlight streams across my computer keyboard; eight minutes ago these photons were on the surface of the sun. A Pholcus phalangioides spider spins its web under the shelf above the desk; I touch the web with a pencil point and the spider does a dervish dance. Outside the window, clouds scud in from the Atlantic; there will be rain in the afternoon.

Continuous awareness: It can be exhausting. Which is why, I suppose, we sometimes wish for the mind to go blank, for the windows of the soul to close, for darkness to fall.

Fortunately, the one thing we don't have to attend to is awareness itself. The brain does its thing without the least bit of conscious control on our part. And a good thing, too; if we had to attend to what is going on in the brain when we attend to the world, we'd... We'd go nuts.

Nothing we know about in the universe approaches the complexity of the human brain. What is it? A vast spider web of neurons, cells with a thousand octopuslike arms, called dendrites. The dendrites reach out and make contact at their tips with the dendrites of other cells, at junctions called synapses. A hundred billion neurons in the human brain, with an average of 1,000 dendrites each. A hundred trillion octopus arms touching like fingertips, and each synapse exquisitely controlled by the cells themselves, strengthening or weakening the contact, building webs of interlinked cells that are knowledge, memory, consciousness- self.

A hundred billion neurons. That's more brain cells than there are grains of salt in 1,000 one-pound boxes of salt. A roomful of salt grains, floor to ceiling. Each in contact with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of others. The contacts flickering with variable strength. Continuously. Unconsciously. Never ceasing. Remembering. Forgetting. Feeling joy. Feeling pain. Thinking. Speaking. Lifting a foot, moving it forward, putting it down again. Flickering. A hundred trillion flickering synapses. Just thinking about it is exhausting.

Neuroscientists are busy trying to figure it all out. Some folks would say that bringing the scrutiny of science to bear upon the human soul is the height of presumption. Others would say that the more we learn about what makes our brains tick, the more we stand in awe at the mystery of soul.

The sheer complexity of the human brain makes any adequate description a daunting task. Which is why some neuroscientists choose to work with simpler organisms- sea snails, for example- to get a grip on the basic structure and chemistry. In recent years, new scanning technologies enable neuroscientists to watch live human brains at work. Active neural regions flicker on the screens of computer monitors as subjects think, speak, recite poems, do math. Continuous awareness, displayed on the screen of a scanning monitor, can look like a grass fire exploding across a prairie.

Still other scientists attempt to model the brain in silicon, building electronic circuits called neural networks that mimic the activity of the brain as it creates constantly changing webs of neurons. So far, no electronic network begins to approach the complexity of the human brain, but the time is not far off when silicon brains will rival brains of flesh and blood. Just trying to make it happen teaches us a lot about how human brains work.

Perhaps the most exciting research is that of the scientists who study the biochemistry of neurons: How do the cells regulate synaptic connections to build new neural webs? One big surprise is just how much of the "thinking" of neurons is done by the dendrites, those hundreds of spidery arms that connect neurons to one another. DNA in a neuron's nucleus sends messenger RNA down along the dendrites to active synapses, where they are translated into proteins that regulate the strength of synaptic connections. Tiny protein factories in the dendrites are apparently key to learning and memory. Once the regulation of these protein factories is understood, drugs that ameliorate some kinds of hereditary mental retardation might be possible. As will drugs that help all of us to learn and remember. Are we ready for "smart" pills? Memory pills?

What all this amounts to is awareness of awareness. For the first time in the history of consciousness, the machinery of awareness has been turned upon itself. As neuroscientists have discovered, thinking about thinking is not easy. Thank goodness we don't have to think about thinking to think.”

- http://www.sciencemusings.com/

"Tell Yourself..."

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

- Louise Erdrich

Gregory Mannarino, "COLLAPSE: The New America Welcomes You"

Gregory Mannarino,

"COLLAPSE: The New America Welcomes You"

- https://traderschoice.net/

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Food for thought:

"What Would Happen If the Fed Ceased to Exist?"

The Daily "Near You?"

Frankfurt Am Main, Hessen, Germany. Thanks for stopping by!

"16 Harsh Truths That Make Us Stronger "

"16 Harsh Truths That Make Us Stronger "

by Marc Chernoff

"1. Life is not easy. Hard work makes people lucky, it's the stuff that brings dreams to reality. So start every morning ready to run farther than you did yesterday and fight harder than you ever have before.

2. You will fail sometimes. The faster you accept this, the faster you can get on with being brilliant. You'll never be 100% sure it will work, but you can always be 100% sure doing nothing won't work. So get out there and do something! Either you succeed or you learn a vital lesson. Win, Win.

3. Right now, there's a lot you don't know. The day you stop learning is the day you stop living. Embrace new information, think about it and use it to advance yourself.

4. There may not be a tomorrow. Not for everyone. Right now, someone on Earth is planning something for tomorrow without realizing they're going to die today. This is sad but true. So spend your time wisely today and pause long enough to appreciate it.

5. There's a lot you can't control. Wasting your time, talent and emotional energy on things that are beyond your control is a recipe for frustration, misery and stagnation. Invest your energy in the things you can control.

6. Information is not true knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience. You can discuss a task a hundred times, but these discussions will only give you a philosophical understanding. You must experience a task firsthand to truly know it.

7. You can't be successful without providing value. Don't waste your time trying to be successful, spend your time creating value. When you're valuable to the world around you, you will be successful.

8. Someone else will always have more than you. Whether it's money, friends or magic beans that you're collecting, there will always be someone who has more than you. But remember, it's not how many you have, it's how passionate you are about collecting them. It's all about the journey.

9. You can't change the past. As Maria Robinson once said, "Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending."  You can't change what happened, but you can change how you react to it.

10. The only person who can make you happy is you. The root of your happiness comes from your relationship with yourself. Sure external entities can have fleeting effects on your mood, but in the long run nothing matters more than how you feel about who you are on the inside.

11. There will always be people who don't like you. You can't be everything to everyone. No matter what you do, there will always be someone who thinks differently. So concentrate on doing what you know in your heart is right. What others think and say about you isn't all that important. What is important is how you feel about yourself.

12. You won't always get what you want. As Mick Jagger once said, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need."  Look around. Appreciate the things you have right now. Many people aren't so lucky.

13. In life, you get what you put in. If you want love, give love. If you want friends, be friendly. If you want money, provide value. It really is this simple.

14. Good friends will come and go. Most of your high school friends won't be a part of your college life. Most of your college friends won't be a part of your 20-something professional life. Most of your 20-something friends won't be there when your spouse and you bring your second child into the world. But some friends will stick. And it's these friends, the ones who transcend time with you, who matter.

15. Doing the same exact thing every day hinders self growth. If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting. Growth happens when you change things, when you try new things, when you stretch beyond your comfort zone.

16. You will never feel 100% ready for something new. Nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means you won't feel totally comfortable or ready for it. 

 

And remember, trying to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. Strength comes from being comfortable in your own skin."

- http://www.marcandangel.com/

"Think..."

"Governing By Rage And Ridicule"

Click image for larger size.

"Governing By Rage And Ridicule"

 by Simon Black 

"Back in July, Yale University began a critical study on COVID vaccines. But there was an interesting twist to Yale’s study: scientists weren’t looking at the actual vaccine candidates; instead they were studying how to most effectively convince people to take a vaccine. One of the things they tested, in fact, was how guilt, embarrassment, and negative social stigma could pressure people into taking a vaccine, even if they have doubts or concerns about it. In other words, the study examined if shaming people would be an effective way to compel everyone to take a COVID vaccine.

The results of that study have not yet been reported. But the mainstream media and Twitter mob have already decided that shaming people is the best approach to vaccine compliance. As I wrote earlier this week, comprehensive trial results from a handful of vaccine candidates have only been published within the last week or so. But Twitter and the media have been essentially pre-shaming people for months. CNN ran a story in early AUGUST, for example, entitled, “Covid-19 conspiracy theories: 6 tips on how to engage anti-vaxxers”.

This is the perfect illustration of pre-shaming. There was practically zero data on any vaccine candidate back in August. Yet the luminaries at CNN had already decided that anyone who expressed concern was a conspiracy theorist. And now that some vaccines have received emergency authorization, tactics have moved from pre-shaming to full blown rage and intimidation.

Fines and jail time are now being openly discussed in the United States, Europe, Australia, etc. And many prominent companies in the private sector have piled on, proposing rules that could forbid unvaccinated customers from airplanes or hotels. I recently read an editorial in a British paper that went so far as to suggest that unvaccinated people should potentially be brought up on murder charges. But as we can see, this approach is nothing new. There are countless other examples of their ‘rule by rage and ridicule’.

Just look at tax policy - The Bolsheviks want to raise trillions of dollars in tax revenue; and they want to raise a good chunk of that money from large corporations and the richest citizens. Now… one possible method might be to approach billionaires and CEOs as respected partners. Explain to them that the country is in a deep fiscal hole, and ask if they’d be willing to make a financial sacrifice. Treat them with dignity and kindness, and vocally praise their generosity if they go along with it.

But that’s not how these people operate. Instead, they threaten to nationalize entire industries, propose outright asset confiscation, and publicly ridicule wealthy people simply for being successful; they think Jeff Bezos is the worst scum of the earth. Most strikingly they’ve managed to cast a dark cloud of suspicion on the entire idea of being rich. (A "dark cloud" is the very least these scum deserve, as 12 years of heaping scorn, contempt and ridicule on them on this blog will demonstrate. - CP) When I was growing up in the 80s, every kid I knew wanted to be a millionaire. Becoming rich was a common aspiration in the West. And wealthy people used to be admired. Now they’re despised. (My heart breaks, it breaks I tell you! These innocent little lambs, so abused and misunderstood... - CP)

These Bolsheviks have succeeded in shifting public opinion so much that wealth is now something you have to apologize for. AOC sums it up the best when she says, “You don’t MAKE a billion dollars. You TAKE a billion dollars.” People actually believe this nonsense. (This, coming from a person who sells ‘Tax the Rich’ sweatshirts for nearly $60 and books the revenue as tax-free campaign contributions.) It’s a perfect example of rage and ridicule in action.

We’ve also seen this approach with social justice (heavens forbid someone commit the heresy of saying that all lives matter…) We’ve clearly seen rage and ridicule over the past 9+ months of Covid lockdowns, because you now have the right to be pepper-sprayed by your fellow citizens if you’re not as terrified as they are. We’ve seen a whole lot of rage and ridicule over the election, with Twitter mob and Bolsheviks creating their ‘enemies list’ of people who espouse different ideological views.

(Some prominent Bolsheviks have even called for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in the new Biden administration.) And now we’re seeing this same rage and ridicule approach to vaccines. These tactics have been extremely effective; they keep sane, normal people quiet for fear of being publicly maligned and ostracized.

lol, lol, LOL...so very scary! 

• You’re not allowed to talk about the vaccine.

• You’re not allowed to talk about the election.

• You’re not allowed to have an opinion about social justice (unless you’re groveling for forgiveness).

• You’re not allowed to ask intelligent, informed questions.

• Your assertions will always be baseless.

• You will always be an evil conspiracy theorist.

• Their assertions will always be true.

• They will always be righteous.

And anyone who believes their talk of openness, compromise, healing, and unity is in for a rude awakening."

- https://www.sovereignman.com/

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Lest I be insensitively negligent in equally sharing my contempt, scorn,

and ridicule let's not forget the truly terrifying ANTIFA Amazons...

Click image for larger size... well, no, don't...

- CP

"How It Really Is"

"Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop…"

"Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop…"

by Michael Snyder

"Do you feel like another major crisis could erupt at any moment? If so, you are certainly not alone. Here in 2020, it has just been one thing after another, and we have come to expect the unexpected. Right now, so many people that I am hearing from are anticipating that more big trouble is just around the corner, but as we wait for “the other shoe to drop”, economic conditions all over the United States continue to rapidly deteriorate. For example, on Thursday we learned that the number of initial claims for unemployment benefits last week was the highest in four months:

"The US job market continues to suffer, and Thursday brought more bad news. Another 885,000 people filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week - an increase from the week prior and higher than the 800,000 claims that economists were expecting. The latest figures, which are adjusted for seasonal factors and reported by the Labor Department, are particularly grim since last week’s numbers were revised up to 862,000. And even before the revision, that week had been the highest level since mid-September."

This isn’t how the numbers were supposed to be trending. For four of the past five weeks we have seen the number of new unemployment claims go up, and experts are warning that we should expect things to get even worse as we head into winter: ‘US weekly jobless claims continue to head in the wrong direction,” Edward Moya, an analyst at the currency trading firm OANDA, wrote in a research note. ‘The labor market outlook is bleak as the winter wave of the virus is going to lead to more shutdowns.”

Could we soon see more than a million Americans filing new claims for unemployment each week like we did earlier in the pandemic. To put this in perspective, the previous all-time record prior to 2020 was just 695,000, and that old record was set all the way back in 1982. We absolutely shattered that record once COVID-19 started spreading widely in the United States, and we have been above that old record every single week throughout this entire pandemic.

Just think about that. We are seeing numbers that we have never seen before in all of U.S. history every single week, and now they are starting to climb higher once again thanks to the new lockdowns. In addition, the number of Americans that are collecting unemployment aid from two major federal programs is also on the rise again: "The number of jobless people who are collecting aid from one of the two federal extended-benefit programs – the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which offers coverage to gig workers and others who don't qualify for traditional benefits – surged to 9.2 million from 8.6 million for the week that ended Nov. 28.

But the number of people receiving aid under the second program – the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which provides 13 weeks of federal benefits to people who have exhausted their state aid – also rose from 4.5 million to 4.8 million."

By now, the “recovery” was supposed to be in full gear, but instead major companies keep laying off more workers at an astounding pace. For example, on Thursday we learned that Coca-Cola will be eliminating 12 percent of their entire U.S. workforce: "Coca-Cola is planning to cut 2,200 jobs, including 1,200 in the United States, as it faces declining sales during the pandemic. In the United States, where there were about 10,400 employees at the end of last year, the cuts represent roughly 12% of the workforce. In Atlanta, where the company is headquartered, about 500 jobs are being eliminated, the company said Thursday."

Coca-Cola wouldn’t be doing this if the U.S. economy was about “to turn a corner”. All of these big corporations that are letting workers go can see what is about to happen, and they are slimming their payrolls in an attempt to make it through the coming storm.

Meanwhile, Congress is getting close to approving yet another “stimulus package”, and the Federal Reserve is promising to do whatever it takes to support the financial markets. Trillions upon trillions of dollars are being slammed into the system, and as a result M2 is up more than 60 percent so far this year. In other words, our money supply has been increasing at an almost vertical rate in 2020. Back in November I included a chart in an article that I wrote which shows exactly what I am talking about. If you are not one of my regular readers, you can find that article right here.

For many years, many of us have been warning that hyperinflation would arrive someday. But now we can stop warning, because the process has actually started. Other industrialized nations have also been flooding their systems with new money, and this is really starting to drive up food prices all over the globe. The following comes from Zero Hedge:

"The reason this has suddenly become a hot topic is because while overall inflation remains subdued (we will spare a discussion here of why the CPI is purposefully distorted to stay as low as possible – readers can catch up here, here and here), food inflation has been on a tear in recent months. In fact, it has gotten so high that earlier this week Goldman published a report looking at “The Recent Spike In Food Inflation”, in which it noted that “in recent months, inflation has risen and surprised to the upside across a number of major EM economies (e.g. Turkey, South Africa, India, Brazil andRussia).” According to Goldman, one of the main drivers of these increases has been higher food inflation, which has coincided with a sharp increase in the price of some key agricultural commodities (e.g. grains, oils and soybeans).”

Sadly, this is just the beginning. Eventually, the food riots which have already started on the other side of the planet will start happening in the western world too. And as hungry people become increasingly desperate, I believe that eventually companies will start putting armed guards on food trucks. We aren’t quite there yet, thankfully, but things are really starting to get crazy out there. A few days ago I went to the supermarket again, and I really tried to economize and get things that were on sale, but I still spent more than 260 dollars on one cart of food. Just one cart!

As the cost of living continues to soar into the stratosphere, many American families are going to discover that they are no longer able to afford enough food for the week. And once millions upon millions of Americans get desperately hungry, that is when we will see absolutely insane economic riots in this country. All of these things are coming, and we definitely will not have to wait very long at all for “the other shoe to drop.”

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"The Gyre Widens"

"The Gyre Widens" *

by Jim Kunstler

"The mind-numbing weirdness of Joe Biden’s insertion into the election of 2020 - like the furtive groping of an intern in a cloakroom - only signals the Democratic Party’s reckless drive to self-destruction, dragging the republic over the edge of an abyss with it. How did this hollowed-out figure of a grifting old pol find himself pretending to national leadership, and in an historic moment of crisis that goes far beyond the mere wrecking of an election? Who wanted him there so badly, and why?

My guess would be Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and John Brennan anxious to stay out of prison, heading a long list of officials present and former who committed crimes trying desperately to protect them, with accessories aplenty across the aisle. That’s what this four-year coup has been about, snowballing criminality, culminating in an orgy of blatant ballot fraud. At this fraught stage of the drama, they’re hiding behind the pretense that all the old rituals of torch-passing must be observed for the sake of decorum, and they’re mistaken.

The Biden family’s moneygrubbing exploits in foreign lands had already been revealed in the previous act of sedition, the ridiculous impeachment attempt. In that episode, it was well-established in the public record that Hunter Biden grifted more than a million dollars out of the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, and that his father had stupidly bragged on tape about covering for him. Yet William Barr’s DOJ was already in the possession of Hunter’s laptop, chock full of evidence that Hunter was raking in way more millions from other countries, and that the loot was being distributed to his relatives. Why did they keep that from the president’s lawyers with the Mr. Trump in jeopardy of being railroaded for asking Ukraine’s president to have a look at it? Would Mr. Barr say they were protecting an ongoing investigation by keeping it all secret? What a lame excuse, under the circumstances.

Just as impeachment concluded in failure, Mr. Biden got smoked in the early primaries, only to triumph mysteriously in the March Super Tuesday voting. After all, a primary is the party’s own election, and they can engineer it however they want. So, they contrived to elevate someone already criminally culpable in the mind of any citizen paying attention and capable of adding two-and-two to get four. Weird, a little bit?

But then Super Tuesday segued right into the Covid-19 virus crisis, with all the destruction to livelihoods and interruptions of normal life that ensued, and the lingering odor of the Hunter Biden story wafted away in the bleak spring zephyrs. Only to return in the fall, because the fellow who ran the computer shop where Hunter B foolishly abandoned his laptop - one John Paul Mac Isaac - became annoyed that the FBI seemed to be ignoring it, and gave a copy of the hard-drive to Rudy Giuliani, who examined its contents closely and went public with it - quite a trove of evidence, with an added frosting of selfie porn photographs showing Hunter enjoying sex and drugs. You know the rest, with the news and social media striving to bury all of it for two weeks before the election.

So, the Biden family must be strongly motivated to finish the burial by getting into the White House, installing an attorney general who will lower that casket of turpitude into a grave, and whistle the back-hoes to fill it in. And while they’re at it, dig a few more holes in the ground to bury the treasonous activities of the Clintons and Barack Obama in matters that might be labeled “Uranium One,” “Skolkovo,” “Hillary’s Emails,” “the Iran Deal,” “Fusion GPS,” “John Brennan’s 2017 IC Report,” “the Mueller Investigation,” and more. Donald Trump had to be prevented from winning a second term at all costs, lest that burden of rot get spewed into any actual courtrooms like so much spoiled lunchmeat.

The trouble is, Mr. Trump actually does have the evidence, and he intends to use it after four years of being remorselessly f**ked around by his antagonists. So, the nation is at the point in this long, winding drama that has become a fight to the death and there will be no rituals of torch-passing just to keep up appearances that everything is functioning normally. Mr. Trump has the evidence of widespread, yes widespread, ballot fraud. He is the president, after all, and he has all the information. As he’s said more than once, he’s caught them all. And they know it.

Of course, the CIA and the FBI, those pillars of the Intel Community, are still trying to withhold what they can, but the president is not having it. He’s taking away the CIA’s most precious asset: its resources for making mischief on-the ground - its airplane fleet and its armaments, handing them over to the Pentagon - reducing the CIA to the simple task of analyzing signals from the world scene. And so, the CIA has been refusing to cooperate with the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, as a last gasp to preserve its long-running illicit prerogatives. That will eventually trigger the president’s invocation of the 2018 Executive order 13848, allowing, at long last, the arrest and prosecution of many desperate characters who tried to run away with the US Government.

But probably not before the last legal avenues have been traveled: Sidney Powell’s case against the Dominion vote system in the Supreme Court, a long-shot like all the other cases that the court is loath to touch; and the business of the alternate electoral college slates to be hashed out in the Senate on January 6, Vice-President Mike Pence, presiding. Democrats and their coastal elite supporters are not going to like it. If they call out their Antifa troops, those feckless weenies with their hoisted cell phones and stupid umbrellas are going to be crushed this time, not indulged like three-year-olds.

The wild-card all of a sudden is what the nation will also do about the foreign actors reportedly messing around with the government’s most critical computer systems. China? Iran? Russia? They’re a match for America’s own domestic enemies, who must be neutralized first before we’re capable of dealing with outsiders. The gyre widens."

- https://kunstler.com/

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DEC 18, 2020 - 11:12: "Pentagon Abruptly Halts Biden Transition Briefings, Leaving Officials 'Stunned'" "Axios' Jonathan Swan reports a bombshell potential major disruption in a key part of the presidential transition before President-Elect Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20: the Pentagon has without warning or explanation halted Biden's intelligence transition briefings. Reports Swan: "Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller ordered a Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation with the transition of President-elect Biden, shocking officials across the Defense Department, senior administration officials tell Axios."

December 18, 2020 by IWB: "BOOM! Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller has ordered a Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation with the transition of President-elect Biden. President Trump to meet Acting Defense Secretary Miller in the Oval Office at 3:30 pm today."

Ponder this, Good Citizen... 

what could this most-unusual occurrence possibly mean?

"Market Fantasy Updates AM 12/18/20"

"Market Fantasy Updates AM 12/18/20"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

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"The more I see of the monied classes, 

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/18/20:

"UPDATES: Stock Market, Gold, Silver, Dollar, Bitcoin, Crypto, Debt"

- https://traderschoice.net/

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12/18/20: "Millions of Americans dropped out of the labor force during the first two months of the pandemic. Many have not returned. These nine charts show how the economy is faring."

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Updated live.

- https://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary

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- https://markets.businessinsider.com/

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

DEC 18, 2020 - 6:15: "Former Goldman CFO Calls For Universal Basic Income 'To Stave Off Revolution'"

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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Daily Update (Dec. 17th to 20th)

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

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Insanity... 

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And now... The End Game...

Musical Interlude: Eagles, "Take It To The Limit"; "Seven Bridges Road" (Live)

Eagles, "Take It To The Limit"

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Eagles, "Seven Bridges Road" (Live)

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 12/18/20"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up 12/18/20"

by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"The election battle is as much about public relations (PR) as it is about actual evidence. Massive amounts of evidence have come out about things like voting machines flipping votes, huge drops of ballots in the middle of the night and reports of outright fraud in multiple states. Still, not even the Supreme Court will give these claims a fair hearing. So, the PR and education from the Trump side continues to gain steam ahead of the all-important vote in Congress to make official the Presidential Election. Congress has the last word in who actually won the election. Did Donald J. Trump win in November with a record amount of votes for a sitting President? Or, is Congress going to certify Biden after campaigning out of his basement?

The Supreme Court has not heard a single case concerning what President Trump calls “massive voter fraud” in battleground states. The Supreme Court is missing in action (MIA) for the most important election case in history. Now, it has finally accepted a case but will not hear it until after January 14th at the earliest. Is there enough time for the High Court to rule before the inauguration of Biden to keep Trump in office?

It was another week of awful unemployment numbers. A fresh 885,000 people filed for new unemployment claims. Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar is crashing to 6 year lows, and Bitcoin is vaulting well past $22,000 per unit. What’s going on?"

- https://usawatchdog.com/

"Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he talks 

about these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up."

"The Decimal Point That Blew Up The World" (Excerpt)

"The Decimal Point That Blew Up The World" (Excerpt)

by Jeffrey Tucker 

"What was the basis of panic that led the lights to darken on civilization? The most important date here might be March 11, 2020. That’s when Congress itself flew into an unwarranted panic, and acquiesced to a lockdown at the urging of the “experts.” State governors followed one by one, with few exceptions, and the rest of the world joined the lockdown frenzy. 

In February, people were aching to know the answer to the following. Would this “novel virus” have familiar patterns we associate with the flu, seasonal colds, and other predictable and manageable pathogens? Or would this be something entirely different, unprecedented in our lifetimes, terrifying, and universally deadly?

Crucial in this stage was public-health messaging. In previous pandemics from post-1918 throughout the 20th century, the central messaging was to stay calm, go to the doctor if you feel sick, avoid deliberately infecting others, and otherwise trust the systems in place and keep society functioning. This was long considered responsible public-health messaging, and this was pretty much where we stood throughout most of January and February, when publications regardless of their political outlook maintained sobriety and rationality. 

Something dramatically changed this time. They pushed panic, tapping into a primal fear of disease. The reality of pandemic, as it turns out, has been familiar. The severity of its impact has been radically disparate across demographics, hitting mainly the elderly and infirm with 40% of deaths tracing to long-term care facilities with an average age of death nearly equal to the average lifespan. It is regionally migratory. It follows a seasonal pattern from pandemic to its endemic equilibrium. 

What has been different has been the messaging that has almost universally been structured to create public frenzy, from the New York Times’s February 28 urge to “go medieval” to Salon’s latest demand that we panic even more. 

My own sense of impending doom began on March 6 with the cancellation of "South by Southwest" in Austin, Texas, an action of the mayor alone, and completely without modern precedent. I wrote about it on March 8. Four days later, President Trump gave a nationwide address that ended with a shocking announcement that all flights from Europe would be stopped to keep the coronavirus out even though the virus had been here since January. The next day, on March 13, the administration issued what amounted to a shutdown plan for the nation. 

This timeline, however, misses a crucial step. We should be grateful to Ronald B. Brown of Waterloo University for his extraordinary paper that appears in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness (Vol 14, No. 3): “Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation.” It also appears on the website of the National Institutes of Health with a date of August 12.

Our author’s thesis was that the wild overreaction and unprecedented lockdowns of life began with what was a terminological mixup that led to a misplacement of a decimal point in a report from the National Institutes of Health. 

It was a seemingly small error but it provided the basis on which Anthony Fauci testified at the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the seriousness of novel coronavirus spreading across the globe."

Please view this complete, critically important article, here:

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

OMG...

“Retail Stores Collapse; Economic Warning Signs; Jobs Get Decimated; Dollar Will Lose”

Jeremiah Babe,

“Retail Stores Collapse; Economic Warning Signs; 

Jobs Get Decimated; Dollar Will Lose”

The Poet: Neil Gaiman, "What You Need To Be Warm "

"What You Need To Be Warm" 

by Neil Gaiman

 "A baked potato of a winters night to wrap

your hands around or burn your mouth.

A blanket knitted by your mother's cunning fingers. 

Or your grandmother's.

A smile, a touch, trust, as you walk in from the snow

or return to it, the tips of your ears pricked pink and frozen.

The tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house.

To surface from dreams in a bed, 

burrowed beneath blankets and comforters,

the change of state from cold to warm is all that matters, and you think

just one more minute snuggled here before you face the chill. Just one.

Places we slept as children: they warm us in the memory.

We travel to an inside from the outside. 

To the orange flames of the fireplace

or the wood burning in the stove. 

Breath-ice on the inside of windows,

to be scratched off with a fingernail, melted with a whole hand.

Frost on the ground that stays in the shadows, waiting for us.

Wear a scarf. Wear a coat. Wear a sweater. 

Wear socks. Wear thick gloves.

An infant as she sleeps between us. A tumble of dogs,

a kindle of cats and kittens. 

Come inside. You're safe now.

A kettle boiling at the stove. Your family or friends are there. 

They smile.

Cocoa or chocolate, tea or coffee, 

soup or toddy, what you know you need.

A heat exchange, they give it to you, you take the mug

and start to thaw.

While outside, for some of us, the journey began

as we walked away from our grandparentshouses

away from the places we knew as children: 

changes of state and state and state,

to stumble across a stony desert, or to brave the deep waters,

while food and friends, home, a bed, even a blanket become just memories.

Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,

to hold out a 

badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say

we have the right to be here, 

to make us warm in the coldest season.

You have the right to be here. "

- Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman reads "What You Need To Be Warm" here:

- https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/

"Life's Funny..."

"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."

- Andrew Klavan

"This Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words"

"This Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words"

by Tyler Durden

"The New York Times' Hiroko Masuike captured customers at The Smith restaurant in Manhattan Wednesday evening, bundled up in winter jackets, underneath propane heaters on a sidewalk patio, while the first major winter storm of the season blanketed the city nearly one foot of snow. 

Thanks to Andrew Cuomo's decision to once again shut down indoor dining in New York on Monday, these patrons had to eat outside in the middle of a freakin' snowstorm. As the wind blew, the propane heaters appeared worthless as a few of the patrons were sipping on soup and have likely downed a liquor shot or two to stay warm. Perhaps the patrons on Wednesday night were devoted customers supporting their local restaurants, rain or shine, considering a record number of eateries across the country can't pay December rent. 

As we've mentioned before, Goldman Sachs has noted that if daily average temperatures slide below 40°F - then it would be associated with a steep drop off in consumer activity at eateries. 

So back to the picture - patrons can thank the government for why they had to eat a nice meal outside in the middle of a major snowstorm."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"Winter Is Coming: 62% Of U.S. Business Owners 'Fear The Worst Is Still To Come'"

"Winter Is Coming: 62% Of U.S. Business Owners 

'Fear The Worst Is Still To Come'"

by Epic Economist

"Winter will officially arrive in a few days, but its gloomy effects are already impacting the survival of our population, our businesses, and our economy. As the pace of economic deterioration picks up speed due to the new restrictions in economic activity, our nation keeps being devastated on several different fronts and the consequences of it won't be solved with the arrival of a vaccine nor with a utopian V-shape recovery. We will be seeing the results of this winter's economic devastation for years. That's what we will be talking about in this video.

The current economic situation is making business owners fear they won't be able to make it to the start of spring. Sectors that rely on face to face interaction have been particularly impaired by so many rounds of shutdowns and this time might be the final round for many of them.

Right now, according to a brand new U.S. Chamber-MetLife poll, 62% of small-business owners are concerned with further impacts of the health crisis, saying they believe the worst moment of the crisis is still ahead of them. The same poll has also highlighted that most small business owners are in desperate need of federal assistance, with nearly 74% of the owners saying they need further aid to weather the fallout of the crisis. That figure rises to 81% for minority-owned businesses.

As we head towards a dark winter, a considerable amount of them can't even afford rent. According to an Alignable rent survey, 35 percent of all small businesses in the U.S. couldn’t pay their rent this month, up 3% from 32% in November. When businesses don't even find the means to pay rent and stay open, we can clearly understand that we have gotten to a point where there's no way to argue that this is simply a recession. When over a third of all small businesses in the world's richest country can't make enough revenue to keep their doors open, that is called an “economic collapse”. 

To give you further proof, let's just spare a moment to examine what has been going on with federal tax receipts this year. In a recent note, former chief economist at Alliance Bernstein, Joseph Carson, has pointed out how weak tax receipts are sending a signal of economic distress. Carson outlines that now that we're 9 months into the downturn triggered by the health crisis, federal gross withheld income tax receipts declined 13% from a year ago. The tax data records from the US Treasury suggest that the slump in tax receipts over the past 9 months is the biggest ever recorded. The only historical parallel we can compare to is the 14% fall witnessed in 2009 during the Great Financial Recession.

In other words, the level of economic wreckage is just unprecedented. And every day it passes at the University of Chicago informed that the U.S. poverty rate has considerably climbed over the last five months, with 7.8 million Americans falling into poverty. The economists maintain that such a high spike in poverty was driven by two main reasons: Millions of Americans cannot find jobs, and government assistance for the unemployed has abruptly dwindled since the summer.

However, even in households with adult workers who are still collecting paychecks, poverty is not out of the picture. In fact, a recent report has described how thousands of military officials and their families have been suffering from food insecurity. This spring, the base has seen a 40 percent increase in requests for groceries.

As opposed to civilian families who managed to collect federal benefits and qualified for food programs, considering military families are often provided with housing allowance, that leaves them ineligible to receive food assistance, a quirk in the law that Congress has repeatedly failed to address. Although military families are only a small part of the tens of millions of food-insecure Americans, hunger experts say most people have no idea that military servicers often rely on external help to have enough to eat.

Now, Congress remains deadlocked over the next bipartisan stimulus bill, and democrats are choleric that they are being forced to choose either enhanced unemployment benefits or $600 stimulus checks for our citizens. As there's no sign of when a relief bill will be launched, our collapse is only intensifying and all the bubbles in our economy are already in the process of bursting. For those expecting a “return to normal” next year, we're sorry to say that all evidences are pointing to a return to a much deeper recession. It appears that 2021 is going to be a really painful year."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com

Winter is here...