"I Hope I End Up..."

“I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, “Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case.” I will turn and say to them, “It is you who are the basket case! For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!” And maybe, the passersby will drop a coin into my cup.”

- Henry Rollins

"A Walk in the Woods"

"A Walk in the Woods"

by Bill Bonner

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "It must have looked like this in 7th century Europe. Largely deserted. Overgrown. The ruins of an earlier civilization… covered in vines and trees. We are wandering in our own woods… and exploring the downswing of civilization. What causes it to walk backward? How do people forget how to do things… or lose track of what made them prosperous and free? Why does progress go into reverse?

Every day, here at the Diary, we see the bread and circuses – trillions of dollars’ worth of real wealth (purchased with phony “dollar” tokens) squandered – $5 trillion in the last 12 months… and more coming. We see, too, how the fake money – like fake road signs – sends people off in the wrong directions. Investors bet on money-losing companies. The government throws away trillions on delusions, boondoggles, and vote-buying. Households stop saving. Businesses shift from trying to create real wealth on Main Street to chasing after fast profits from SPACs, cryptos, and NFTs. Everybody wants to get rich. But nobody wants to do the hard work of building real wealth.

Battle Against Nature: Funded by an apparently inexhaustible well of EZ money, Americans wallow in fantasies that must make the gods roar with laughter. They think they can borrow their way out of debt… and print their way to prosperity. And if they can create fake money, why not fake math?

Yesterday, we saw that activists are targeting arithmetic as “racist” or “patriarchal.” Two plus two only equals four, they claim, because dead white males say so. But over in the English department, the battle against nature has been raging for years. "Everybody believes they can” is now correct, according to the woke grammarians (to avoid using the masculine pronoun “he” to refer to a person of unknown or inconsequential gender).

And there are new “rules” popping up all the time. Jane Austen and Emily Brontë could write about “females.” But no more. Here’s Buzzfeed: "When you refer to a woman as a female, you’re ignoring the fact that she is a female human. It reduces a woman to her reproductive parts and abilities. Also, not all women are biologically female, and the conflation of “female” to “woman” erases gender-nonconforming people and members of the trans community."

And here’s the latest trend from WND News: "Rutgers University recently determined that speaking and writing English correctly is – just like math – also totally racist. The school’s English department is altering its grammar standards to “stand with and respond” to the Black Lives Matter movement and emphasize “social justice” and “critical grammar” over irrelevancies like correct spelling and grammar. The English Department is even offering an internship titled “Decolonizing the Writing Center” to make writing “more linguistically diverse.”

What brings down an empire? These trivialities and vanities? Or the big issues – money and war? Probably both.

Inflation Sightings: When the money goes, everything goes. And now… there goes the money! Here’s MarketWatch: "Even now, the housing market is on fire, with prices surging across the world. “This is a way of spending that can also drag in some of that surplus labor,” [former Morgan Stanley managing director Manoj Pradhan] said. But the rise in house prices doesn’t show up in official measures of inflation.

The Fed already is trying to address the challenge of coming inflation readings that, into May and June, may show 3.5% to 4% year-over-year gains. “I will tell you that anything above 3.5%-4% will create a significant breakdown in correlations [between stocks and bonds], because people have not seen inflation really in a big way in the advanced economies for the last 30 years,” he said.

“The real challenge will come in 2022, when a lot of spending will have been deployed into goods or into housing, monetary aggregates will still be high with velocity rising,” he said. He expects the yield curve to steepen further, and that if the Fed implements another Operation Twist or yield curve control, it will push inflation even higher."

Also of interest… While inflation is on the upswing, sperm counts are falling. USA Today has the details: "Sperm counts among men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand declined more than 59% from 1973 to 2011, according to a meta-analysis [Shanna] Swan co-wrote in 2017. At the current rate, half of men in those countries would have no sperm by 2045, while many others would have very low counts, Swan told USA TODAY."

Rising prices. Falling sperm counts. Innumeracy. Illiteracy. Overspending. Dumb wars. Money-printing. Claptrap. An incompetent, greedy elite? What else do you need?

Fallen Empire: Collective human life has both ups and downs. Exploring our own – largely derelict – farm here in Ireland, we find traces of ups from 200 years ago. Some from 500 years ago. The wood structures are long gone. But the stones – walls and bridges – are still here. But now, they are overgrown. Tumbledown. Forgotten. Lost. What happened?

A visitor to England in 600 AD or 700 AD must have seen the same sort of thing. Broken-down villas. Markets covered in vines. Roads neglected. Roman civilization was kaput. Both Roman-era observers, Polybius and Plutarch, noted that birthrates had fallen – first in the upper classes, later in the lower classes. Whether this was true or not, we don’t know.

But we know that Rome went broke, with its currency so worthless that soldiers refused to accept it in payment of wages. The government itself demanded tax payments in gold or silver. So heavy was the tax burden, as the government tried to keep up with its expenses, that farmers sometimes walked away from their land and sold themselves and their families into slavery.

On Your Own: From there, things got worse. Overstretched, with almost constant civil wars, Rome was overrun by Barbarians in the 4th and 5th centuries. Trade came to a halt. Skilled craftsmen went back to tilling the earth. No more aqueducts. No more “Roman” roads. No more high-quality goods, arriving from all over the Empire. The Empire was finished.

In the late 300s, while the Romans struggled to keep the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Sueves, and the Alans beyond the Rhine, Romanized Britannia had its own barbarians to contend with – raiding tribes of Picts, Scoti, and Saxons. Then, around 400, the last of the Roman troops were called away to defend Rome itself. So the Barbarians stepped up their raids. And in 410, leaders in Britannia pleaded with Rome to send back the troops. “You’re on your own,” came the reply from Emperor Honorius.

End of an Era: It wasn’t long after that that Roman rule in Britain came to an end (Ireland was never colonized by the Romans). And so did the Roman-era economy, along with its consumer goods, its money, its skills and technologies, its markets and commercial enterprises, and its comforts.

For a period of roughly 300 years, stonemasonry disappeared from England. During the period of Roman rule, there were thousands of skilled artisans, who knew how to quarry stone… how to burn lime to make mortar… and how to cut and fit the stones together to make fine villas. They knew how to construct a house with mosaics on the floor and central heating beneath it – and a clay tile roof. But in the 6th century, they forgot. And by the 7th century, there was perhaps not a single person in all of Britain who knew how to make a lime mortar. Or “spin” a pot.

There were no more imports from the Mediterranean – wine, olive oil, tableware, jewelry, spices, wheat. Nor was there any market to buy them in… or any money to buy them with. The mints closed. The only money still around had been minted before the Roman Empire collapsed.

People still made earthenware pots and bowls, but they were crude; the potters had forgotten how to make a pottery wheel, and how to get the fine clay they needed.

Farming techniques, tools, and organization were dealt a blow, too – perhaps because so many people died in the Barbarian invasions. Crops were stolen or destroyed. Barns were burnt. Cows, pigs, horses, and chickens were taken away or slaughtered. Fields, pastures, estates, farms, and gardens went “back to nature.”

Gone forever was the gracious, orderly life of the Roman era – with running hot and cold water, courtyards, and frescoes. In its place, were rude wooden huts with dirt floors. Gone, too, were the books… the essays… the ideas and the histories.

Derelict Abbey: Today, there are about 1,200 written works surviving from the Classical Period – Ancient Greece and Rome. There are some from the “dark ages,” too – but they are few and mostly religious texts. No Euclid. No Aristotle. No Plutarch or Pliny. Many of these old “classical” works survived the “dark ages” only because they were hidden away in monasteries… had been translated into Arabic… or copied by monks, who may not have had any idea what they were copying.

One of those monasteries, along the Blackwater River, just down the hill from us, was called Molana.

Molana Abbey (Source: Geograph.ie)

It was founded in 510, but the ruins we see there now were built by Raymond Le Gros (Fat Raymond), one of the Norman conquerors of the 12th century. Raymond was a lieutenant of the Norman leader Richard de Clare, also known as Strongbow. He is also thought to be the builder of the castle on the other side of the road from our lodge house. The stone work there – as well as the scale of it – is different from that of most of the buildings and walls you see in Ireland. It is older. Bigger. The walls are thicker and higher, too. The castle walls are still there… broken in some places, bent in others. They, too, speak to the upside and the downside.

Protection from the Enemy: It must have taken an army of masons – or slaves – to put them together. Perhaps, when the last of the Viking raiders came up the river, the locals took shelter behind the castle walls. Or maybe they used them to protect themselves from the English, who invaded later. Or from each other, for the Irish were always quarreling – the O’Briens against the O’Donnells against the O’Tooles against the McMahons… against the McSweeneys… against the McCravashys and the Sheehans… and on and on. There were ups and downs for them, too. It’s amazing any of them survived. To be continued…"

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/30/21: "Markets, A Look Ahead: Must Know Now Updates"

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

Only the consequences are real - to you!

Your guide:

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/30/21:

"Markets, A Look Ahead: Must Know Now Updates"

- https://traderschoice.net/

○

Related:

"Shades of 2008: Derivative Bets Blow Up Archegos 

Hedge Fund; Inflict Billions in Losses on Global Banks"

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

3/30/21 "The Archegos Capital Management hedge fund implosion has, thus far, delivered billions of dollars in losses to the shareholders of global banks Credit Suisse and Nomura, whose market values have plummeted; done serious reputational damage to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, both of whom are allowed to own federally-insured banks even after they came close to blowing themselves up in 2008 and surely would have without gargantuan secret bailouts from the Federal Reserve; cut the market value of ViacomCBS in half; dropped the market value of Discovery by 40 percent; shaved billions of dollars off the market value of major Wall Street banks yesterday as rumors ran wild about who is hiding losses; and raised critical questions, once again, about the competency of the Federal Reserve to supervise these federally-insured trading casinos.

The Archegos meltdown has done one more thing. It has reminded the readers of Wall Street On Parade that our decade of hand-wringing over the dangerous brew of allowing federally-insured, deposit-taking banks to own tens of trillions of dollars in opaque, over-the-counter derivatives remains the biggest threat to the financial stability of the United States."

Please view this complete article here:

- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

"Fear Is A Viral Monster"

"Fear Is A Viral Monster"

by Donald Boudreaux

“Reading the late Hans Rosling’s 2018 book, “Factfulness”, during the summer of 2020 creates a sensation of surrealness that would have been absent had I read this volume in 2018 or 2019. On nearly every page of “Factfulness” Rosling busts the popular myth that we denizens of modernity face imminent calamities that will destroy us and the earth. Widespread fears – such as of overpopulation, of terrorism, and of the rich getting richer while the poor stagnate – are methodically revealed to be either completely unjustified or exorbitantly exaggerated.

But today, in the midst of the ongoing lockdowns and with no end in sight to the hysteria over COVID, I’ve lost all of the natural optimism that has long resided within me and that would have otherwise been fortified by Rosling’s splendid work.

Sledgehammered: The image that keeps coming into my head is of a sledgehammer. With brute force, a blunt and heavy instrument was swung down on society by the state. Sledgehammers crush. They demolish. That’s their only function. They do not build. And for as long as the dreadful weight of this particular sledgehammer – the massive mallet that is the COVID-19 lockdown – continues to press down on the rubble that it caused, there is very little opportunity for the human creativity and work effort unleashed by markets to bring about the kind of improvements that Rosling documents.

Will humanity recover? Will we – when the sledgehammer is lifted – rise, dust ourselves off, and climb back on to the happy track that we were on before March 2020? Of course it’s possible. But there’s now a novel reality that makes a renewed continuation of pre-COVID progress much less likely: the sledgehammer itself.

When this sledgehammer is lifted off of us, it won’t be lifted for long. We now know that this awful hammer is there, looming overhead. We have good reason to worry that government officials are likely to smash it down upon us when another communicable pathogen emerges and makes news – as such a pathogen inevitably will, for viral pathogens have been part of human existence from the start. How will entrepreneurship and investment be changed by this ever-present threat of a smashing sledgehammer? The creation, funding, and operation of venues in which individuals come into close physical contact with each other – either for recreation or for work – will surely be much less attractive.

More generally, the newly demonstrated willingness of state officials to destroy, with just a few executive diktats, hundreds of billions of dollars of capital value cannot but push some entrepreneurs and investors into inactivity. Why build, or build grandly, when some pompous governor or mayor – someone whose only ‘skill’ and most intense itch is to exercise power over fellow human beings – can, with a mere signature, smash down a sledgehammer and turn to mush the fruits of years of hard work and sacrifice?

And how will those in power – and those who seek power – be affected by the display by so many people of a sheepish willingness to be ordered by the state into house arrest? Did prime ministers, governors, and mayors know in mid-March just how easy it would be for them to herd millions of the rest of us away from the activities that we human beings have for generations enjoyed? Were these officials aware of their power to convince so many people under their command that each individual poses a poisonous threat to every other individual?

To prosper, we human beings must cooperate in production – Adam Smith called it the division of labor – and trade extensively. Most of these activities require face-to-face contact among individuals who see each other as partners in cooperation and exchange rather than as threatening carriers of death. And to enjoy what we produce also requires face-to-face contact, for we are a social species.

In possession of dictatorial power unknown just a few months ago, government officials – a group undeserving of much trust even in the best of times – will not shy away from wielding their newly discovered powers. The results will be ugly.

Attentive to Fear: Ironically, in his upbeat book Hans Rosling himself unintentionally offers justification for my pessimism. He does so in a chapter titled “The Fear Instinct.” Here’s a key passage: “When we are afraid, we do not see clearly… Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.

This undeniable reality means that a people in fear are a people who are unlikely to assess with much rationality the pros and cons of government policies. And the greater the fear, the less able people are to detect and resist government overreach.

Who is so naïve as to deny that this reality gives to government officials strong incentives to stir up fear? People who seek positions of political power generally are people who, by this very seeking, reveal that they are especially keen on exercising power over fellow human beings. And so if more power for the state grows out of more fear in the people, state officials have every incentive to exaggerate real dangers and to concoct fake ones. The result is a vicious cycle. The possession of power includes a disproportionately great ability to stir up fear, and stirred-up fear creates more power.”

Further, Rosling’s insights about the media imply that they contribute to this vicious cycle. Here again is Rosling: “We have a shield, or attention filter, between the world and our brain. This attention filter protects us against the noise of the world: without it, we would constantly be bombarded with so much information we would be overloaded and paralyzed. Most information doesn’t get through, but the holes [in our attention filter] do allow through information that appeals to our dramatic instincts. So we end up paying attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts, and ignoring information that does not.

The media can’t waste time on stories that won’t pass our attention filters. Here are a couple of headlines that won’t get past a newspaper editor, because they are unlikely to get past our own filters: “MALARIA CONTINUES TO GRADUALLY DECLINE.” “METEOROLOGISTS CORRECTLY PREDICTED YESTERDAY THAT THERE WOULD BE MILD WEATHER IN LONDON TODAY.” Here are some topics that easily get through our filters: earthquakes, war, refugees, disease, fire, floods, shark attacks, terror attacks. The unusual events are more newsworthy than everyday ones.”

An invisible virus is the perfect troublemaker to portray as an existential monster. Like an evil spirit, it can live, usually silently, within the breast of each of us. And so if a large enough number of us can be convinced that an unseen, vile monster lurks in everyone else, the resulting widespread fear empowers government officials to do what government officials do best – and what they’ve done so horribly over the past year: destroy.”

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"The Great Unvaxxed - A 'Fictional' Look At What Lies Ahead"

"The Great Unvaxxed -

A 'Fictional' Look At What Lies Ahead"

by TE Creus

"The vaccine was a resounding success. Yes, there had been a final death rate of 10% among the vaccinated, but this was mostly among the elderly or the already ill, so it was probably not the vaccine’s fault, and if it was, no one could prove it one way or another, and even if they could, well, the vaccine manufacturers were not liable to lawsuits due to the agreements they had made with the various governments. In any case, the pandemic had ended, that was for sure.

Of course the masks and the lockdown mandates continued to be enforced; the reason was that while the pandemic had most certainly been defeated, the virus still existed in its natural form somewhere out there, and so it was vital to continue with the safety procedures to avoid any possible resurgence of the disease.

So what? People got used to it, as they had gotten used to so many other things before that. And was wearing a mask in the end much worse than wearing a helmet or a safety belt? Was being forced to stay at home for a few months every year much different than being forced to be at the office working for five days out of the seven in the week? Rules are rules, and those were not as bad as others that had been instituted in the past.

But there was something that worried the authorities. While most people had predictably complied with the mandatory vaccination campaign, there were a few groups that had refused them, alleging religious or health reasons, and found refuge in rural communities living off the grid. They had abandoned the use of mobile and network technology and so could not be traced so easily, and, since non-digital cash had been abolished, they appeared to have returned to a form of commerce based in the exchange of physical goods.

At first, the authorities ignored them; most people saw them as a minority of loser hicks, “anti-vaxxers” as they had been called in earlier pre-scientific times, and since it was unlikely that too many among the masses would opt for such a harsh lifestyle away from the comforts of modern urban life, they were not seen as a menace.

But what happened, in the end, was that rumors started to appear, even in the cities, about small communities where no one needed to wear masks, and people were dancing and smiling, and food was delicious and natural and people were even – gasp! – falling in love and procreating in natural ways.

Of course this was an obvious and mendacious falsity, but the authorities could not permit such fairy tales to gain acceptance among the people at large. So they started to persecute “the great unvaxxed”, as they called them, or the “free renegades” as they preferred to call themselves.

Their communities were dispersed. Their leaders were arrested. Planting organic, unmodified seeds became illegal. It was dangerous, the authorities alleged. Non-genetically modified crops were unsafe and could lead to sickness or birth defects. Many of the people who lived in the previously free rural communities were arrested and forcibly vaccinated, or were killed in shootings with the police.

But in the end it was not possible to arrest or forcibly vaccinate them all. Now, hidden among the normal population, using fake certificates, there lived an undisclosed number of unvaccinated people, whom the authorities had been unable to locate or identify.

A young woman named Miranda, who was born in a barn in the literal sense, and never vaccinated, was one of them. When organic farming was prohibited and most of the land was taken over by large companies using mechanized agriculture, she was forced to move to a small village where she subsisted doing odd jobs and occasionally teaching art classes. She had learned drawing and painting sill as a child, and was quite talented; she could sing very well too.

She had a fake vaccine certificate that looked for all purposes almost identical to the real ones, and while a bio-test could determine that she had not really taken the shot, or the “jab” as it was popularly called, she was careful never to be in any position that could require any kind of test.

For a few years she and hundreds of others like her had subsisted in this manner, but it was not ideal and never easy. Because before at least the renegades could live freely in their own communities, under their own rules, but now they had to hide and wear masks and follow dictates like everyone else, so what was the point? If they could not be free in any case, why not do like all the others and just take the jab and be done with it?

Miranda thought about it sometimes. But she had promised her parents – who had died in a shootout with the police – that she would always remain faithful to their ideals. And so she refused to compromise. She knew, or hoped, that the current tyranny could not be maintained forever. She wanted to believe that it would be possible, one day, to be free again.

Finally, they got her. It was her own stupid mistake; she was outside, a routine patrol was approaching and she had left her fake certificate at home. This would not normally happen, but she had recently bought a new jacket and had forgotten the certificate in the pocket of the old one. Walking around without a certificate was illegal, so they had to scan her arm, finding no signs of vaccination, and later a second test found no trace of antibodies in her system. Unable to explain the reason, or to produce a valid vaccine certificate – she knew now that the fake one she had at home would now be microscopically analyzed and would not be useful any longer – she was taken to the local jail, and later to a federal prison.

“There is an easy way out of this”, said Captain Antoine Huxley-Ehrlich, chief of the Vaccine Resistance Unit. “Just take the jab, and you’ll be free.” “Never”, replied Miranda. “You’ll have to do it by force.”

That was an option, of course, and legally possible with the recent change in the constitution. But it was not what Antoine wanted. No, she had to freely choose the vaccine. Not only because otherwise she could have become a martyr and inspire other rebels, or because people could start to think that there really was something bad or sinister about the vaccine; but because he firmly believed that winning by persuasion was better than winning by force, and he was convinced of his own righteousness.

He could not understand her stubborn refusal – hadn’t he, like all others, voluntarily taken the vaccine? As a member of the upper classes, he reminded her, he was not required to do it at the time; and yet he had volunteered. Why? Because he believed in law and order, but, most of all, because he believed in the vaccine.

He was sure that sooner or later he would be able to convince her that her uneasiness with the medication had only been caused by the trauma of her childhood experiences, living in a harsh rural area and watching her parents die as criminals fighting the law. But Miranda was indeed very stubborn. She refused all the options she was given. She preferred jail to vaccination and denial to compromise. She even refused to see a psychiatrist. So she lingered in prison for months and months.

One day, the warden brought to her cell a new book that she had requested from the prison library – "Civil Disobedience," by Thoreau. As she began to read, she found a handwritten note stuck between the first pages. “When you get your dinner tonight, ask for salt”, it said. “A friend”, it was signed.

Who could that be? She was puzzled, as it was years since she last had any contact with anyone else from her former community. But later that evening, as the warden brought her dinner, she meekly asked if she could have an extra amount of salt. The warden didn’t betray any sign of recognition or suspicion; she just brought her a small white salt-shaker. There was nothing unusual about it, but when Miranda opened it, from the bottom, she found a small magnetic key and another note inside.

The note explained that the key would open her cell door, and that all the security guards had either been bribed or put out to sleep. She could safely escape. Further instructions indicated how to reach a cabin in the woods nearby where she would be able to join her colleagues from the resistance movement.

She waited until midnight; when all was silent, she tried the key. It worked. She slowly walked out of her cell, then out of the prison, undisturbed. She followed the instructions to cover her face with a mask and her hair with a veil to avoid recognition. She was afraid a patrol would stop her as she left the city, as police presence was constant and sometimes there were curfews, but all the time she saw only a small group of policemen that she had no trouble evading.

She walked for several hours; the note had been clear that she should avoid any form of public transportation. It was already morning when she reached the destination informed, a few miles outside town. She knocked. No one answered. But she turned the handle and realized that the door was unlocked. She entered, very quietly, as if afraid to disturb the eerie silence. Finally, she saw a man sitting in an armchair, his back turned to her. He was wearing a dark jacket and a black fedora hat.

“So you’re finally here”, he said. She seemed to recognize the voice, although she couldn’t quite locate it. Was it perhaps someone from her old community? Then he turned towards her. It was Antoine Huxley-Ehrlich. It had been a trap, of course. The idea was to raise her hopes only to crush them, as an additional form of torture, an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. Also, now that she had tried to escape and join a rebel movement, she could be accused of sedition and other charges. She could easily be tried by a military court and condemned to death. And that was exactly what happened.

She was offered a full pardon in exchange for vaccination, but still she refused. If she had to die, then she might as well die on her own terms. Like Saint Joan or the early Christian martyrs, she’d rather burn at the stake or be thrown to the lions than renege. They could not convince her to get the “jab”, but they also did not want to turn her into some sort of hero for a cause, even if a crazy and hopeless one. So they decided that the execution would be done in secret, and the official story would be that, since she had refused several times the vaccination, she was never immune to the virus and had finally contracted the disease.

Today Miranda will be shot. She refused all offers for public announcements of regret and even a last meal. She also refused the blindfold; she did not want anything to cover a single part of her face.

As the executioners raise their rifles, Miranda is not afraid. Her golden hair flutters in the wind, and she looks up at the soldiers with a confident smile. She knows that they can kill her body, but they cannot touch her soul. And as she waits for the bullets to slowly arrive, Miranda sings a song that she remembers from her childhood, a song that her mother taught her and perhaps she also sang before she died:

'And when you come and all the flowers are dying

If I am dead, as dead I well may be

You’ll come and find the place where I am lying

And kneel and say an Ave there for me.'"

- https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/

- https://off-guardian.org/

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"UK Now Considering Digital Face-Scanning To Enter Pubs"

"The ‘vaccine passport’ is a digital ID card..."

"UK Government Minister Says People Should 

"Call Out" Others For Hugging Their Loved Ones"

"...urged Brits to 'call out' others if they were seen 

engaging 'in an odd way,' such as hugging..."

"Don't You Dare..."

 

The Poet: John O'Donohue, "For The Time Of Necessary Decision"

"For The Time Of Necessary Decision"

 "The mind of time is hard to read.

We can never predict what it will bring,

Nor even from all that is already gone

Can we say what form it finally takes;

For time gathers its moments secretly.

Often we only know it's time to change

When a force has built inside the heart

That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul

Or the love where we once belonged

Calls nothing alive in us anymore.

We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere

Until we stand before a threshold we know

We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step

Into the unknown that beckons us;

Trust that a richer life awaits us there,

That we will lose nothing

But what has already died;

Feel the deeper knowing in us sure

Of all that is about to be born beyond

The pale frames where we stayed confined,

Not realizing how such vacant endurance

Was bleaching our soul's desire."

- John O'Donohue, 

"To Bless the Space Between Us"

Free Download: Nevil Shute, “On the Beach”,

“On The Beach”

by Nevil Shute

“Nevil Shute’s 1959 novel “On the Beach” is set in what was then the near future (1963, approximately a year following World War III). The conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and killing all animal life. While the nuclear bombs were confined to the northern hemisphere, global air currents are slowly carrying the fallout to the southern hemisphere. The only part of the planet still habitable is the far south of the globe, specifically Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the southern parts of South America.

From Australia, survivors detect a mysterious and incomprehensible Morse code radio signal originating from the United States. With hope that some life has remained in the contaminated regions, one of the last American nuclear submarines, the USS Scorpion, placed by its captain under Australian naval command, is ordered to sail north from its port of refuge in Melbourne (Australia’s southernmost major mainland city) to try to contact whoever is sending the signal. In preparation for this long journey the submarine first makes a shorter trip to some port cities in northern Australia including Cairns, Queensland and Darwin, Northern Territory, finding no survivors.

The Australian government makes arrangements to provide its citizens with free suicide pills and injections, so that they will be able to avoid prolonged suffering from radiation sickness. One of the novel’s poignant dilemmas is that of Australian naval officer Peter Holmes, who has a baby daughter and a naive and childish wife, Mary, who is in denial about the impending disaster. Because he has been assigned to travel north with the Americans, Peter must try to explain to Mary how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with the pill should he be killed on the ocean voyage.

The characters make their best efforts to enjoy what time and pleasures remain to them before dying from radiation poisoning, speaking of small pleasures and continuing their customary activities, allowing their awareness of the coming end to impinge on their minds only long enough to plan ahead for their final hours. The Holmeses plant a garden that they will never see; Moira takes classes in typing and shorthand; scientist John Osborne and others organize a dangerous motor race that results in the violent deaths of several participants. In the end, Captain Towers chooses not to remain with Moira but rather to lead his crew on a final mission to scuttle their submarine beyond the twelve-mile (22 km) limit, so that she will not rattle about, unsecured, in a foreign port, refusing to allow his coming demise to turn him aside from his duty and acting as a pillar of strength to his crew.

Typically for a Shute novel, the characters avoid the expression of intense emotions and do not mope or indulge in self-pity. They do not, for the most part, flee southward as refugees but rather accept their fate once the lethal radiation levels reach the latitudes at which they live. Finally, most of the Australians do opt for the government-promoted alternative of suicide when the symptoms of radiation-sickness appear.”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

○

Freely download “On the Beach”, by Nevil Shute, here:

- https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20131214

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- https://www.fadedpage.com/index.php

○

"On The Beach", full movie.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HusewgIe_1k

Full screen recommended.

"Denzel Washington's Life Advice Will Leave You Speechless"

"Denzel Washington's Life Advice

 Will Leave You Speechless"

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Hat tip to Stucky at The Burning Platform for this.

"Remember That..."

"Your country ain't your blood. Remember that."

- Santino "Sonny" Corleone

Must Watch! “California Going Bankrupt; Stock Market Record High; Eviction Ban Extended; Obesity Crisis”

Jeremiah Babe,

“California Going Bankrupt; Stock Market Record High;

 Eviction Ban Extended; Obesity Crisis”

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/29/21: "New Record High For Stocks; Two New 'Events' Will Occur Soon- Wait For It"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/29/21:

"New Record High For Stocks; 

Two New 'Events' Will Occur Soon- Wait For It"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"An Old Man in a Hurry"

"An Old Man in a Hurry"

by Brian Maher

"Mr. Biden is an old man in a hurry... There he is… atop his galloping steed, whip in his hand, glory in his eyes - and history on his mind. Axios: "President Biden recently held an undisclosed East Room session with historians that included discussion of how big is too big - and how fast is too fast - to jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America." All assembled agreed. Too big is inadequately big. Too fast is insufficiently fast: "The historians’ views were very much in sync with his own: It is time to go even bigger and faster than anyone expected." Here is what he would jam through: Bigger, faster legislation on climate. On firearms. On elections... to name some.

The Next FDR or LBJ? Here then is a potential Roosevelt, a potential Johnson: "Presidential historian Michael Beschloss told Axios FDR and LBJ may turn out to be the past century's closest analogues for the Biden era, "in terms of transforming the country in important ways in a short time." Beschloss said the parallels include the New Deal economic relief that Franklin Roosevelt brought in 1933, which saved the country from the Depression and chaos. And Biden is on track to leave the country in a different place, as Lyndon Johnson did with his Great Society programs."

A vast literature contests the theory that the New Deal “saved the country from the Depression and chaos.” The New Deal likely extended the Depression. It likely deepened the chaos. The Great Society, meantime, unquestionably left the country “in a different place.” But a better place? American society presently groans beneath a great pile of debt… in large part… because of it. And the poverty it would eradicate remains - in many respects - uneradicated. Have you looked in on Baltimore? Detroit? The Appalachian hills?

What “Getting Things Done” Really Means: A politician on the move sends us on the run. He menaces our happiness. It was our sincere wish that the Republican Party would retain its Senate majority in November’s election. Not because we blow a whistle for the Republican Party - but because we blow a whistle for gridlock.Mr. Biden and his party are out to “get things done.” Yet, we do not want things getting done.

Getting things done generally involves fantastic raids upon our liberties… and our wallets. If anything is to get done… we argue... it is the undoing of previous things. That is, the undoing of previous raids upon our liberties and our wallets. Democrats have a clear field to get things done - for now.

A Race Against the Calendar: But Mr. Biden’s race to get things done - to “jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America” - is a race against the calendar. Midterm elections are under two years distant. Republicans can drag Mr. Biden from his horse if they gain one Senate seat - or 10 House seats. One or the other is likely. Both are possible.

If Mr. Biden must flout the racing rules to beat the calendar… and to race into the history books… then flout the racing rules he will. Again, Axios: "He has full party control of Congress, and a short window to go big… If that means chucking the filibuster and bipartisanship, so be it… People close to Biden tell us he’s feeling bullish on what he can accomplish, and is fully prepared to support the dashing of the Senate’s filibuster rule to allow Democrats to pass voting rights and other trophy legislation for his party… He loves the growing narrative that he’s bolder and bigger-thinking than President Obama."

Mr. Biden must therefore apply a ruthless whip… and seize his spot in presidential history. He is - again - an old man in a hurry. But let us return to Mr. Biden and his pursuit of history…

Biden in 2005: We might call to your attention: Mr. Biden had previously mounted thundering defenses of the filibuster. But we will not call his flim-fambling to your attention. Our respect for the man and the high dignity of the office he holds is too vast. We will, therefore, not remind you that: "In 2005 Senator Biden delivered - in his very words - "one of the most important speeches for historical purposes that I will have given in the 32 years since I have been in the Senate."

Ending the filibuster, Delaware’s senior senator said: "Is not only a bad idea, it upsets the constitutional design and it disservices the country. No longer would the Senate be that “different kind of legislative body” that the Founders intended. No longer would the Senate be the “saucer” to cool the passions of the immediate majority… [Ending the filibuster] would eviscerate the Senate and turn it into the House of Representatives."

But that was before Senator Biden was President Biden... Before he sensed the opportunity to jam through “once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America”...Before the historians wooed and flattered him…In brief, before he seized the whip.

A Moderate? A question springs to mind: Would a man of moderate politics - as the advertising has Mr. Biden - scheme to “jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America?” We are far from convinced that he would. Jamming through implies a resistance. A resistance - that is - to be routed, overcome and conquered.

A man jams a quarter-inch rivet through an eighth-inch hole, for example. He jams a bayonet through an enemy’s ribs. He jams spinach through his shrieking child’s gullet. Are the American people hot for the rivet, for the bayonet, for the spinach? Do they want the country left “in a different place?” We must conclude they do not... Else why the jamming through? Why the secret huddling of conspirators to plot it?

Historians Love Action: We should not be surprised that the history-writers tickled the president’s ear. History smiles upon presidents of action - even of the wrong action. Presidential inaction makes dull history - and idle historians. It is not the Clevelands, the Pierces, the Buchanans or the Tafts that glitter in history. It is rather the Lincolns. It is the Roosevelts - I and II. It is the Johnsons - Lyndon Baines, not Andrew. It is the Obamas. That is, the presidents who seize the most power glitter brightest in history. President Biden wishes to glitter alongside them. He is after history. And he is in a hurry..."

- dailyreckoning.com

Musical Interlude: Peder B. Helland, "Flying" (Full Album)

Peder B. Helland, "Flying" (Full Album)

"A Look to the Heavens"

“This shock wave plows through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Moving toward to bottom of this beautifully detailed color composite, the thin, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge on. Cataloged as NGC 2736, its narrow appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula. 

About 5 light-years long and a mere 800 light-years away, the Pencil Nebula is only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. The Vela remnant itself is around 100 light-years in diameter and is the expanding debris cloud of a star that was seen to explode about 11,000 years ago. Initially, the shock wave was moving at millions of kilometers per hour but has slowed considerably, sweeping up surrounding interstellar gas.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120924.html

"Perhaps..."

Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens. 

~ Jason Q.

Chet Raymo, “What Not to Believe”

“What Not to Believe”

by Chet Raymo

“In Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra, I came across this epigraph from Euripides: "Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe." I have no idea which of Euripides' plays the quote is from, but it strikes me as a suitable source for reflection. Credulity is the default state of a human life. Children are born to believe, to accept as true what they are told by adults. An innate credulity has survival value in a dangerous world. If a grown-up says "There are crocodiles in the river," it is probably best to stay out of the water.

Skepticism, on the other hand, must be learned. I was late in realizing that I didn't have to believe the received "truth." My best teacher was a somewhat older Panamanian secular Jew I went to graduate school with at UCLA. We took our brown-bag lunches together in the university's botanical garden, and spent the hour talking about physics, religion, and the "meaning of life."

Moises was the first person I had encountered after sixteen years of Catholic education who mentioned the word "skepticism." "Why do you believe that?" he would ask, and often I had no answer except that it was what my family and teachers told me was true. The idea that I might actually examine the basis for my beliefs was a rather new concept. In matters of religion, like almost everyone else in the world, I had embraced uncritically the faith story into which I was born.

And thus began my search for "a judicious sense of what not to believe." When later, as a teacher, I wrote a little column for each issue of the college newspaper, I called it "Under a Skeptical Star," from a line of the Scots poet/scholar William MacNeile Dixon: "If there be a skeptical star I was born under it, yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment." A liberating sense of what not to believe opened the door to a vastly more interesting world whose diverse and astonishing riches I continue to explore to this day."

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"If You Have Come..."

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.

But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine,

then let us work together."

- 1970s Aboriginal activists group, Queensland

"The Hazardous Detour in the Road to "Recovery" Few Foresee"

"The Hazardous Detour in the Road to "Recovery" Few Foresee"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"Without exception, every single board member I ever came

 into contact with was a sociopath that would murder their own 

grandmother with an ice-pick if they thought it would make them a penny.

These are some heartless, terrifying individuals."

- Nicklethrower

"You know the plot point in the horror film where the highway is blocked and a detour sign directs the car full of naive teens off onto a rutted track into the wilderness? We're right there in the narrative of "the road to recovery": the highway that everyone expected would be smooth and wide open is about to be detoured into a rutted track that peters out in a wilderness without any lights or signage.

Oops - no cell coverage out here either. Is that the road over there? Guess not - we just careened into a canyon alive with the roar of a raging river. Our vehicle keeps sliding downhill, even with the brakes locked... this trip to "recovery" was supposed to be so quick and easy, and now there's no way out... what's that noise?

You know the rest: the naive, trusting teens are picked off one by one in the most horrific fashion. Substitute naive punters in the stock market and you have the script for what lies ahead. The "recovery" has an unfortunate but all-too accurate connotation: recovery from addiction. The "recovery" we've been told is already accelerating at a wondrous pace does not include any treatment of the market's addiction to Federal Reserve free money for financiers; rather, the "recovery" is entirely dependent on a never-ending speedball of Fed smack and crack and a booster of Fed financial meth.

The addiction to Fed speedballs had already turned the entire financial sector into a casino of lunatic junkies who delusionally believe they're all geniuses. Beneath the illusory stability of the god-like Fed has our back, the addiction to free money has completely destabilized America's social, political and economic orders by boosting wealth and income inequality to unprecedented extremes.

While it's convenient to blame the carnage on the response to the Covid pandemic, the damage to the speedball-addicted financial system had already reached extremes before the pandemic: the addiction began decades ago, but like all addictions, the amount of stimulus needed to maintain the high keeps expanding, and eventually the need can't be met without toxic doses: then the junkie/addicted system collapses.

The ever-greater doses of Fed speedballs have unleashed both deflation (smack) and inflation (crack): real returns on ordinary savings have been crushed to zero (deflation of ordinary income), and as the cost of capital/credit have been dropped to near-zero, then the purchasing power of wages has deflated while the speculative gains of those who own assets have soared (asset inflation).

By lowering the cost of capital to zero, the Fed has generated fatally perverse incentives. With the cost of capital at zero, it makes sense to buy labor-saving technologies to replace costly labor - labor that is costly to employers because of America's perverse sickcare system, which burdens employers with ever-higher costs.

Not only have the Fed's free-money speedballs made it essentially free for financiers to speculate in the stock market casino, the Fed has rigged the game and bailed out its cronies whenever their bets soured. This has fueled infinite moral hazard: Go ahead and gamble with free money from the Fed, and go ahead and leverage it up 10-to-1 because the Fed will bail you out if you lose, but if you win, the stupendous gains are yours to keep.

The problem with addiction is you're dependent on the high, no matter what the eventual consequences may be. Long-term consequences are ignored because all that matters to the addict is to get the next Fed speedball and throw it on the gambling table to keep the high going.

Our entire economy is now dependent on ever-expanding speculative gains. Should the casino winnings falter, our economy will crash, and given the primacy of money and consumption in our society and political system, the financial collapse of the Fed's casino lunacy will sweep those systems over the falls.

As the level of Fed smack and crack needed to maintain the high increases, system fragility increases geometrically. The irony of addiction is that when the crack/meth kicks in, the addict feels god-like, in control, invulnerable. This artificial confidence is entirely illusory, a deadly combination of delusion and hubris.

In this delusional state of supreme confidence, the addict loses touch with reality, i.e. the fatal consequences of the addiction. That's the detour we've taken in becoming addicted to the Fed's free-money speedballs. Now the rutted road has ended in a trackless wilderness. There is no way back and no way forward. The addict's addled confidence will push them into the ice-cold river, and as they're swept over the falls, the realization that it was all a drug-induced delusion will come too late to make a difference."

- https://www.oftwominds.com/