So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, March 22, 2021
"Can the Fed Get Back Home?"
"Can the Fed Get Back Home?"
by Bill Bonner
“Go too far. Stay too long. Can’t get back.”
– Words of an old preacher.
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "The bond market is on the move. It packed up in August of last year, which now appears to have marked the top of the bull market in bonds that began 41 years ago. And last week, Treasury yields (which rise and fall inversely with bond prices) topped 1.75% after Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell let it be known that he was okay with rising inflation threats. One-point-seventy-five percent doesn’t sound like much. It’s not… still barely zero in real terms. (Consumer prices are rising at a 0.4% rate.) But it’s more than three times what it was last August.
Cash is on the move, too. Last Thursday, $271 billion of it bolted from the feds’ vaults, mostly to fund the stimmy checks. That was more than the entire GDP of Finland. Has the Fed already gone too far and stayed too long? Now, with rising rates in the bond market, and an almost infinite demand for new cash, can it ever get back?
Trillion-Dollar Wonders: Just to remind readers, “inflation” refers to the act of increasing the money supply. And just to be even clearer, while there are many factors that come into play, as the quantity of dollars increases, eventually… sooner or later… before Hell freezes over… ceteris paribus – so should prices.
The money supply – using the Fed’s balance sheet as a convenient, though incomplete, measure – rose from under $700 billion in 1999 to $7 trillion today. That is, in two decades, the Fed inflated the money supply by 10 times as much as all the Treasury secretaries and Fed governors had done in the previous 21 decades. Meanwhile, the goods and services available to buy with this money, measured loosely by GDP, only doubled, from $10 trillion to over $20 trillion.
The idea behind the post-1971 “monetarist” scheme was that the Fed would control money growth, allowing it to rise by about the same measure as the general economy. This was supposed to maintain price stability as well as eliminate sudden credit shortages. But as you can see, so far in the 21st century, the money supply grew nine times faster than GDP. And now it will have to grow even more – to replace the cash that just got away. And more after that… to pay for the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan… and more still… to pay for new infrastructure… and all the other wonders that the feds have in store for us.
So, we shouldn’t be too surprised that prices rose, too. Money bids for goods and services. If the quantity of money goes up faster than the supply of available goods and services… logically, prices will rise.
Waste of Money: To this bare skeleton, we add some fat. Included in GDP is government spending. But the services offered by the government are not the kind that you are usually looking for. Few people wake up in the morning and say, “Today, I’m going shopping for an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.” Instead, they want the things the government doesn’t make.
Government spending is almost completely focused on the consumption of wealth, not the creation of it. In other words, it doesn’t add to the supply side of the supply/demand teeter totter. It subtracts from it. So, when government spending increases as a percentage of GDP, that too should be cause for higher consumer prices.
After WWII, total government spending – state, local, and federal – shrank to a bit more than 25% of GDP. Last year, it was over 40%.
Flood of Liquidity: Economists describe inflation as more and more dollars “chasing” consumer goods. But dollars are not always ready to run. Sometimes, people choose to save, rather than spend. And if the feds create a dollar and it goes nowhere, it has little effect on prices. Where it decides to go matters, too. Most of the additional money generated in the 21st century was dropped off in the capital markets.
The Dow rose from around 11,000 in 2000 to over 30,000 today. Bitcoin was worth nothing (it wasn’t invented until 2008) and now sells for more than $57,000. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) didn’t appear until 2014. Since then, more than half a billion dollars’ worth of NFTs have been traded.
Don’t Fight the Fed: A flood of liquidity lifted most boats… but not all of them. Some 40% of U.S. stocks are still underwater from the washout of ’08-’09. As the feds pumped more and more liquidity (dollars) into the markets, the old timers – with their Graham and Dodd on their desks… and an autographed photo of Warren Buffett on their walls – were unsuited to it. They knew how gold provided protection from inflation, but they weren’t sure about bitcoin. Was it a protection against inflation… or just a measure of it? And NFTs? What the heck were they? Where were they going?
Nobody knew for sure… but they were on the move. But then, just about everything is on the move now – the bond market… the way we work… gender… politics… culture…but to where?
Wall Street legend Marty Zweig’s famous line – “don’t fight the Fed” – turned out to be the best advice of the last 20 years. The Fed was inflating. And like plastic bottles on a sour tide, up popped the lightest – and often the trashiest – assets.
What will happen in the next decade is our subject for tomorrow. Will the old-timers get another chance? Will the Fed keep inflating, even as bonds go down? Or will it be able to get back to a more “normal” monetary policy? We will see. Stay tuned…"
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 3/22/21"
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 3/22/21"
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Related:
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March 22, 2021 8:10 AM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 123,268,600
people, according to official counts, including 29,842,972 Americans.
Globally at least 2,715,500 have died.
March 22, 2021 8:10 AM ET:
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"The COVID Tracking Project"
Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
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March 22, 2021 9:01 AM ET
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Where I Live:
3/22/2021, 9:01 AM: "Pinal County is at a very high risk level.The test positivity rate in Pinal County is very high, suggesting that cases are being significantly undercounted. We’ve recommended additional precautions below."
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 3/22/21"
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 3/22/21"
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"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
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"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/22/21
"Updates; Fed. National Activity Index NEGATIVE"
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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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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
March 21st to 23rd, Updated Daily
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Daily Job Cuts
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And now, the End Game...
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Oh yeah...
Musical Interlude: "Soothing Relaxation: Beautiful Piano Music 24/7 • Relax, Study, Sleep"
Full screen recommended.
"Soothing Relaxation:
Beautiful Piano Music 24/7 • Relax, Study, Sleep"
"Message from the composer and creator of "Soothing Relaxation": "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"
Sunday, March 21, 2021
“California Real Estate Nightmare; Swap Meets And Tent Cities; Beware Of Scams”
Jeremiah Babe,
“California Real Estate Nightmare;
Swap Meets And Tent Cities; Beware Of Scams”
"There Is A Shortage Of Everything And Prices Are Soaring: Prepare Yourself For The Worst!"
Full screen recommended.
"There Is A Shortage Of Everything And Prices Are Soaring:
Prepare Yourself For The Worst!"
by Epic Economist
"A perfect storm is sweeping across America as the trillions of dollars that were just pumped into the economy are driving consumer demand significantly higher. However, adding that to tight supplies and transportation issues, and the result we are getting is a massive shortage of everything, while prices reach astronomical highs. From steel and aluminum to electronic chips and control boards, from lumber to home appliances, cars, trucks, electrical equipments, and an enormously wide range of manufactured goods, industries are facing catastrophic supply disruptions, as production has been slowed down over the past few months, transportation problems continue to delay deliveries, and a sudden upsurge in demand is pushing the price of everything up at a much faster pace than people's income growth.
Although the $1,400 checks may be providing some short-term relief to millions of families, the mismatch between demand and output will make everything more expensive, which means the Weimar-like hyperinflation we warned about has just begun. If that's what authorities call "recovery", we must be prepared because we are about to face a generalized supply-chain breakdown and the rapid decay of our purchasing power. That's what we're going to expose in this video.
The arrival of stimulus money into the accounts of millions of Americans should come as financial relief for those who were deeply struggling during the recession. But soaring prices will cause the opposite effect since fewer people will be able to afford the same goods they used to consume. As we discussed in many of our previous videos, the Federal Reserve's constant liquidity pumps would eventually end up triggering runaway inflation, and that's exactly what's happening right now. As business owner Mike Shuler described in an interview, “people are making so much money being unemployed and then so much of the stimulus money, that a lot of people aren’t going back to work and it’s awful for the restaurant industry". Just as many other restaurant owners, he is having to face some difficult questions about the future of his business. But the restaurant sector is just one of the many dealing hardships right now.
The industry of electrical equipments, appliances, and components is also experiencing a major breakdown. According to Tim Fiore, who oversees the ISM survey, "things are now out of control. Everything is a mess, and we are seeing wide-scale shortages”. From steel and aluminum to electronic chips and control boards, there are shortages of everything. Over the past few months, after so many rounds of business shutdowns and the consequent deceleration of economic activity, several companies were forced to slow down production, and now in face of the growing demand, "shortages are way up," Fiore said. The unexpectedly strong demand for manufactured goods is providing a boom across many of the country's industries, but it is being followed by a big headache: as supply chains are getting the tightest they have ever been, critical industry components are proving a lot more difficult to procure.
Transportation problems are also leading to gas shortages all over the nation, and consumers are already feeling the impacts of it on their wallets. The latest AAA data suggests that gas prices in South Carolina are now trading at $2.64/gallon, a 36 cent raise from last month alone, and a 66 cent increase from last year. Even more worryingly, in the housing industry, shortages of critical materials used to build new homes are threatening to bring construction to a standstill. Shortages of cabinets, appliances, and vinyl to extrude windows have are halting the construction of new homes, as there was an 80% jump in copper prices. Homebuilders were already dealing with a major lumber shortage - which sent prices up by 180% and added roughly $30,000 to the cost of a smaller-sized home. Consequently, higher mortgage rates and rising prices of construction materials will “take some of the steam off the super-hot housing market,” according to Dr. Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. “If we don't have adequate supply, it's going to simply push up prices much faster than people's income growth,” Yun said.
And as more money flows into the economy, we are about to experience more shortages of multiple other goods, while watching how the Fed-fueled inflationary spike will ravage our purchasing power. We're now on phase two of the economic collapse, or, what some like to call: "The Everything Collapse" - which means we just entered an era where everything will spiral out of control and result in the most dramatic crisis this country has ever seen. Now more than ever, you should start to get ready for the troubles that are coming next."
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "I Giorni"
Ludovico Einaudi, "I Giorni"
"It is only when we become aware or are reminded that
our time is limited that we can channel our energy into truly living."
- Ludovico Einaudi
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Be kind to yourself, enjoy this...
Track List:
00:00 ; Experience
06:17 ; Giorni Dispari
11:55 ; Una Mattina
15:21 ; Nuvole Bianche
21:24 ; Fly
25:48 ; Oltremare
37:18 ; Divenire
43:57 ; I Giorni
50:51 ; Le Onde
56:04 ; Night
"A Look to the Heavens"
“NGC 253 is not only one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, it is also one of the dustiest. Discovered in 1783 by Caroline Herschel in the constellation of Sculptor, NGC 253 lies only about ten million light-years distant.
NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest group to our own Local Group of Galaxies. The dense dark dust accompanies a high star formation rate, giving NGC 253 the designation of starburst galaxy. Visible in the above photograph is the active central nucleus, also known to be a bright source of X-rays and gamma rays.”
The Universe
“Believe me, I know all about it. I know the stress. I know the frustration. I know the temptations of time and space. We worked this out ahead of time. They're part of the plan. We knew this stuff might happen. Actually, you insisted they be triggered whenever you were ready to begin thinking thoughts you've never thought before. New thinking is always the answer.”
“Good on you,”
The Universe
“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”
"The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease"
"The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions
Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease"
by Maria Popova
"I had lived thirty good years before enduring my first food poisoning - odds quite fortunate in the grand scheme of things, but miserably unfortunate in the immediate experience of it. I found myself completely incapacitated to erect the pillars of my daily life - too cognitively foggy to read and write, too physically weak to work out or even meditate. The temporary disability soon elevated the assault on my mind and body to a new height of anguish: an intense experience of stress. Even as I consoled myself with Nabokov’s exceptionally florid account of food poisoning, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming malaise that had engulfed me - somehow, a physical illness had completely colored my psychoemotional reality.
This experience, of course, is far from uncommon. Long before scientists began shedding light on how our minds and bodies actually affect one another, an intuitive understanding of this dialogue between the body and the emotions, or feelings, emerged and permeated our very language: We use “feeling sick” as a grab-bag term for both the sensory symptoms - fever, fatigue, nausea - and the psychological malaise, woven of emotions like sadness and apathy.
Pre-modern medicine, in fact, has recognized this link between disease and emotion for millennia. Ancient Greek, Roman, and Indian Ayurvedic physicians all enlisted the theory of the four humors - blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm - in their healing practices, believing that imbalances in these four visible secretions of the body caused disease and were themselves often caused by the emotions. These beliefs are fossilized in our present language - melancholy comes from the Latin words for “black” (melan) and “bitter bile” (choler), and we think of a melancholic person as gloomy or embittered; a phlegmatic person is languid and impassive, for phlegm makes one lethargic.
And then French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes came along in the seventeenth century, taking it upon himself to eradicate the superstitions that fueled the religious wars of the era by planting the seed of rationalism. But the very tenets that laid the foundation of modern science - the idea that truth comes only from what can be visibly ascertained and proven beyond doubt - severed this link between the physical body and the emotions; those mysterious and fleeting forces, the biological basis of which the tools of modern neuroscience are only just beginning to understand, seemed to exist entirely outside the realm of what could be examined with the tools of rationalism.
For nearly three centuries, the idea that our emotions could impact our physical health remained scientific taboo - setting out to fight one type of dogma, Descartes had inadvertently created another, which we’re only just beginning to shake off. It was only in the 1950s that Austrian-Canadian physician and physiologist Hans Selye pioneered the notion of stress as we now know it today, drawing the scientific community’s attention to the effects of stress on physical health and popularizing the concept around the world. (In addition to his scientific dedication, Selye also understood the branding component of any successful movement and worked tirelessly to include the word itself in dictionaries around the world; today, “stress” is perhaps the word pronounced most similarly in the greatest number of major languages.)
But no researcher has done more to illuminate the invisible threads that weave mind and body together than Dr. Esther Sternberg. Her groundbreaking work on the link between the central nervous system and the immune system, exploring how immune molecules made in the blood can trigger brain function that profoundly affects our emotions, has revolutionized our understanding of the integrated being we call a human self. In the immeasurably revelatory "The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions" (public library), Sternberg examines the interplay of our emotions and our physical health, mediated by that seemingly nebulous yet, it turns out, remarkably concrete experience called stress.
With an eye to modern medicine’s advances in cellular and molecular biology, which have made it possible to measure how our nervous system and our hormones affect our susceptibility to diseases as varied as depression, arthritis, AIDS, and chronic fatigue syndrome, Sternberg writes: "By parsing these chemical intermediaries, we can begin to understand the biological underpinnings of how emotions affect diseases…
The same parts of the brain that control the stress response… play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also play a role in depression, we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives… Rather than seeing the psyche as the source of such illnesses, we are discovering that while feelings don’t directly cause or cure disease, the biological mechanisms underlying them may cause or contribute to disease. Thus, many of the nerve pathways and molecules underlying both psychological responses and inflammatory disease are the same, making predisposition to one set of illnesses likely to go along with predisposition to the other.
The questions need to be rephrased, therefore, to ask which of the many components that work together to create emotions also affect that other constellation of biological events, immune responses, which come together to fight or to cause disease. Rather than asking if depressing thoughts can cause an illness of the body, we need to ask what the molecules and nerve pathways are that cause depressing thoughts. And then we need to ask whether these affect the cells and molecules that cause disease.
[…]
We are even beginning to sort out how emotional memories reach the parts of the brain that control the hormonal stress response, and how such emotions can ultimately affect the workings of the immune system and thus affect illnesses as disparate as arthritis and cancer. We are also beginning to piece together how signals from the immune system can affect the brain and the emotional and physical responses it controls: the molecular basis of feeling sick. In all this, the boundaries between mind and body are beginning to blur."
Indeed, the relationship between memory, emotion, and stress is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Sternberg’s work. She considers how we deal with the constant swirl of inputs and outputs as we move through the world, barraged by a stream of stimuli and sensations:
"Every minute of the day and night we feel thousands of sensations that might trigger a positive emotion such as happiness, or a negative emotion such as sadness, or no emotion at all: a trace of perfume, a light touch, a fleeting shadow, a strain of music. And there are thousands of physiological responses, such as palpitations or sweating, that can equally accompany positive emotions such as love, or negative emotions such as fear, or can happen without any emotional tinge at all. What makes these sensory inputs and physiological outputs emotions is the charge that gets added to them somehow, somewhere in our brains. Emotions in their fullest sense comprise all of these components. Each can lead into the black box and produce an emotional experience, or something in the black box can lead out to an emotional response that seems to come from nowhere."
Memory, it turns out, is one of the major factors mediating the dialogue between sensation and emotional experience. Our memories of past experience become encoded into triggers that act as switchers on the rail of psychoemotional response, directing the incoming train of present experience in the direction of one emotional destination or another.
Sternberg writes: "Mood is not homogeneous like cream soup. It is more like Swiss cheese, filled with holes. The triggers are highly specific, tripped by sudden trails of memory: a faint fragrance, a few bars of a tune, a vague silhouette that tapped into a sad memory buried deep, but not completely erased. These sensory inputs from the moment float through layers of time in the parts of the brain that control memory, and they pull out with them not only reminders of sense but also trails of the emotions that were first connected to the memory. These memories become connected to emotions, which are processed in other parts of the brain: the amygdala for fear, the nucleus accumbens for pleasure - those same parts that the anatomists had named for their shapes. And these emotional brain centers are linked by nerve pathways to the sensory parts of the brain and to the frontal lobe and hippocampus - the coordinating centers of thought and memory. The same sensory input can trigger a negative emotion or a positive one, depending on the memories associated with it."
This is where stress comes in - much like memory mediates how we interpret and respond to various experiences, a complex set of biological and psychological factors determine how we respond to stress. Some types of stress can be stimulating and invigorating, mobilizing us into action and creative potency; others can be draining and incapacitating, leaving us frustrated and hopeless. This dichotomy of good vs. bad stress, Sternberg notes, is determined by the biology undergirding our feelings - by the dose and duration of the stress hormones secreted by the body in response to the stressful stimulus. She explains the neurobiological machinery behind this response:
" As soon as the stressful event occurs, it triggers the release of the cascade of hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal hormones - the brain’s stress response. It also triggers the adrenal glands to release epinephrine, or adrenaline, and the sympathetic nerves to squirt out the adrenaline-like chemical norepinephrine all over the body: nerves that wire the heart, and gut, and skin. So, the heart is driven to beat faster, the fine hairs of your skin stand up, you sweat, you may feel nausea or the urge to defecate. But your attention is focused, your vision becomes crystal clear, a surge of power helps you run - these same chemicals released from nerves make blood flow to your muscles, preparing you to sprint.
All this occurs quickly. If you were to measure the stress hormones in your blood or saliva, they would already be increased within three minutes of the event. In experimental psychology tests, playing a fast-paced video game will make salivary cortisol increase and norepinephrine spill over into venous blood almost as soon as the virtual battle begins. But if you prolong the stress, by being unable to control it or by making it too potent or long-lived, and these hormones and chemicals still continue to pump out from nerves and glands, then the same molecules that mobilized you for the short haul now debilitate you."
These effects of stress exist on a bell curve - that is, some is good, but too much becomes bad: As the nervous system secretes more and more stress hormones, performance increases, but up to a point; after that tipping point, performance begins to suffer as the hormones continue to flow. What makes stress “bad” - that is, what makes it render us more pervious to disease - is the disparity between the nervous system and immune system’s respective pace. Sternberg explains:
"The nervous system and the hormonal stress response react to a stimulus in milliseconds, seconds, or minutes. The immune system takes parts of hours or days. It takes much longer than two minutes for immune cells to mobilize and respond to an invader, so it is unlikely that a single, even powerful, short-lived stress on the order of moments could have much of an effect on immune responses. However, when the stress turns chronic, immune defenses begin to be impaired. As the stressful stimulus hammers on, stress hormones and chemicals continue to pump out. Immune cells floating in this milieu in blood, or passing through the spleen, or growing up in thymic nurseries never have a chance to recover from the unabated rush of cortisol. Since cortisol shuts down immune cells’ responses, shifting them to a muted form, less able to react to foreign triggers, in the context of continued stress we are less able to defend and fight when faced with new invaders. And so, if you are exposed to, say, a flu or common cold virus when you are chronically stressed out, your immune system is less able to react and you become more susceptible to that infection."
Extended exposure to stress, especially to a variety of stressors at the same time - any combination from the vast existential menu of life-events like moving, divorce, a demanding job, the loss of a loved one, and even ongoing childcare - adds up a state of extreme exhaustion that leads to what we call burnout.
Sternberg writes: "Members of certain professions are more prone to burnout than others - nurses and teachers, for example, are among those at highest risk. These professionals are faced daily with caregiving situations in their work lives, often with inadequate pay, inadequate help in their jobs, and with too many patients or students in their charge. Some studies are beginning to show that burnt-out patients may have not only psychological burnout, but also physiological burnout: a flattened cortisol response and inability to respond to any stress with even a slight burst of cortisol. In other words, chronic unrelenting stress can change the stress response itself. And it can change other hormone systems in the body as well.
One of the most profound such changes affects the reproductive system - extended periods of stress can shut down the secretion of reproductive hormones in both men and women, resulting in lower fertility. But the effects are especially perilous for women - recurring and extended episodes of depression result in permanent changes in bone structure, increasing the risk of osteoporosis. In other words, we register stress literally in our bones."
But stress isn’t a direct causal function of the circumstances we’re in - what either amplifies or ameliorates our experience of stress is, once again, memory. Sternberg writes: "Our perception of stress, and therefore our response to it, is an ever-changing thing that depends a great deal on the circumstances and settings in which we find ourselves. It depends on previous experience and knowledge, as well as on the actual event that has occurred. And it depends on memory, too."
The most acute manifestation of how memory modulates stress is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. For striking evidence of how memory encodes past experience into triggers, which then catalyze present experience, Sternberg points to research by psychologist Rachel Yehuda, who found both Holocaust survivors and their first-degree relatives - that is, children and siblings - exhibited a similar hormonal stress response.
This, Sternberg points out, could be a combination of nature and nurture - the survivors, as young parents for whom the trauma was still fresh, may well have subconsciously taught their children a common style of stress-responsiveness; but it’s also possible that these automatic hormonal stress responses permanently changed the parents’ biology and were transmitted via DNA to their children. Once again, memory encodes stress into our very bodies. Sternberg considers the broader implications:
"Stress need not be on the order of war, rape, or the Holocaust to trigger at least some elements of PTSD. Common stresses that we all experience can trigger the emotional memory of a stressful circumstance - and all its accompanying physiological responses. Prolonged stress - such as divorce, a hostile workplace, the end of a relationship, or the death of a loved one - can all trigger elements of PTSD."
Among the major stressors - which include life-events expected to be on the list, such as divorce and the death of a loved one - is also one somewhat unexpected situation, at least to those who haven’t undergone it: moving. Sternberg considers the commonalities between something as devastating as death and something as mundane as moving:
"One is certainly loss - the loss of someone or something familiar. Another is novelty - finding oneself in a new and unfamiliar place because of the loss. Together these amount to change: moving away from something one knows and toward something one doesn’t. An unfamiliar environment is a universal stressor to nearly all species, no matter how developed or undeveloped."
In the remainder of the thoroughly illuminating "The Balance Within," Sternberg goes on to explore the role of interpersonal relationships in both contributing to stress and shielding us from it, how the immune system changes our moods, and what we can do to harness these neurobiological insights in alleviating our experience of the stressors with which every human life is strewn."
"Splendid!"; "America"; "Living In America"
A little fun... ;-)
Full screen!
Leonard Bernstein, "West Side Story", "America"
Full screen!
James Brown, "Living In America"
"Be That Guy"
"Be That Guy"
by Scott Faith
"Sometimes a person must fight for what he or she feels is right, even against the majority. Something that is wrong does not change to right just because the majority approves it, ignores it, or the government says it is right. It is still wrong."
- Kenneth Ead
"We’re frequently told “don’t be that guy,” often with good reason. Drunk and stupid at a party? Don’t be that guy. Park in a spot someone else shoveled out of the snow? Don’t be that guy. Chow thief at Ranger School? Definitely don’t be that guy. But sometimes situations arise where you DO need to be that guy.
Sometimes going along with the crowd is the absolute wrong thing to do. It takes guts to swim against the current, and sometimes it might cost you more than you intended. I was reminded of this when I saw a picture of a 1930s-era Nazi rally contained in a Buzzfeed article I read recently. All of the men and women of the crowd were enthusiastically giving the Nazi salute… except for “that guy.” One lone man stood, arms folded, with a look of contempt on his face. He alone was willing to buck the system and not acquiesce to something he knew was deeply flawed.
Unfortunately, as happens in many similar cases, the lone dissenter paid the price. Already on the outs with the Nazi Party for committing the cardinal sin of daring to love a Jewish woman, August Landmesser was later jailed and eventually sent to a military penal battalion, and was reportedly killed in action. Landmesser joined the Nazi Party in 1931 in hopes of gaining employment and was a member until 1935, when he was expelled for marrying a Jewish woman named Irma Eckler. Landmesser had two daughters with Eckler and it cost him jail time for Rassenschande (dishonoring the race). Landmesser is believed to have served prison time from 1938–1941, after which he was discharged to serve in the military. Landmesser, however, quickly went missing and was presumed dead. His wife, Irma, suffered a similar fate. She was jailed by the Gestapo and died during the war. The children of Irma and Landmesser were separated.
While many of us won’t face death for our beliefs, there are often negative consequences for doing or saying the right thing. We might face social ostracization, the loss of friends or even a job. We might get attacked physically, verbally, or virtually. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stand up for what’s right. You can read the original Buzzfeed article for yourself here. Sometimes all it takes is a spark to ignite a revolution. Do you have what it takes to “be that guy?”
The Poet: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "What If?"
"What If?"
"What if you slept?
And what if,
In your sleep
You dreamed?
And what if,
In your dream,
You went to heaven
And there plucked
A strange and
Beautiful flower?
And what if,
When you awoke,
You had the flower
In your hand?
... Ah, what then?"
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Choices..."
"The human life is made up of choices. Yes or no. In or out. Up or down. And then there are the choices that matter. Love or hate. To be a hero or to be a coward. To fight or to give in. To live. Or die. Live or die. That's the important choice. And it's not always in our hands."
- Dr. Meredith Grey, "Grey's Anatomy"
“This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist. If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...would you slow down? Or speed up?"
- Chuck Palahniuk
"When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,'
I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'"
- Sydney J. Harris
"What if when you die they ask, "How was Heaven?"
~ Author Unknown
A truly terrifying thought...
"$200 Monthly Extra or 4th Stimulus Check? Will Social Security, SSDI, SSI, and VA Beneficiaries Get a $200 Per Month Raise to Their Benefits?"
Blind to Billionaire,
"$200 Monthly Extra or 4th Stimulus Check? Will Social Security, SSDI,
SSI, and VA Beneficiaries Get a $200 Per Month Raise to Their Benefits?"
Gregory Mannarino, 3/21/20: "Markets, A Look Ahead: Important Updates, LinkedIn Suspension"
Gregory Mannarino, 3/21/20:
"Markets, A Look Ahead:
Important Updates, LinkedIn Suspension"
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