Wednesday, May 19, 2021

"The Only Time..."

“Go without a coat when it’s cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it’s all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you’re made of and what you’re capable of. If you’re never tested, you’ll never define your character.”
- Henry Rollins

"How It Very Really Is"



"Economic Market Snapshot 5/19/21"

"Economic Market Snapshot 5/19/21"
"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
"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/19/21:
"Alert! PAN Sell-off"
Dan, I Allegedly, "This Country is Going to the Dogs"
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates

CNN Market Data:

CNN Fear And Greed Index:
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
May 18th to May 20th, Updated Daily
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."
Daily Job Cuts
Commentary, highly recommended:
And now, the End Game...
Oh yeah...

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal: Unvaxxed Lives Matter"

Gerald Celente,
"Trends Journal: Unvaxxed Lives Matter"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 5/18/21: "Goldman Sachs Warning; Dollar Falls"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 5/18/21:
"Goldman Sachs Warning; Dollar Falls"

Musical Interlude: 2002, “Where The Stars And Moon Play”

Full screen recommended.
2002, “Where The Stars And Moon Play”

“Pamela and Randy Copus are the duo known as 2002. Randy Copus plays piano, electric cello, guitar, bass and keyboards. Pamela Copus plays flutes, harp, keyboards and a wind instrument called a WX5. Both musicians also provide all of the vocals on their albums, recording their voices many, many times and layering them to create a "virtual choir" with a celestial, angelic quality.”

"A Look to the Heavens"

“This colorful skyscape features the dusty, reddish glow of Sharpless catalog emission region Sh2-155, the Cave Nebula. About 2,400 light-years away, the scene lies along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus.

Astronomical explorations of the region reveal that it has formed at the boundary of the massive Cepheus B molecular cloud and the hot, young, blue stars of the Cepheus OB 3 association. The bright rim of ionized hydrogen gas is energized by the radiation from the hot stars, dominated by the bright blue O-type star above picture center. Radiation driven ionization fronts are likely triggering collapsing cores and new star formation within. Appropriately sized for a stellar nursery, the cosmic cave is over 10 light-years across.”

The Poet: Arthur O’Shaughnessy, "Music and Moonlight"

"Music and Moonlight"

"We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone seabreakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems…
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Ninevah with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth."

- Arthur O’Shaughnessy
"The Dreamers Of Dreams..."
"The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so nearly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain."
- Iris Murdoch

The Daily "Near You?"

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom.
Thanks for stopping by!

"Only One..."

"There is only one basic human right, 
the right to do as you damn well please.
And with it comes the only basic human duty, 
the duty to take the consequences."
- P. J. O'Rourke

"Be The Person..."

"We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn't. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don't look to the left, don't look to the right; we simply don't have the time. Never be afraid of fear."
- C. JoyBell C.

"What Just Happened Off The California Coast Can’t Be Explained! 2021"

Full screen recommended,
"What Just Happened Off The California 
Coast Can’t Be Explained! 2021"

"How ‘Woke’ May Be Leading Us to Civil War"

"A statue of Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola in Ferrara, Italy, on Sept. 25, 2018. Savonarola enforced a 1497 version of cancel culture on Florence, Italy, according to Roger L. Simon. (Gianni Careddu via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)"

"How ‘Woke’ May Be Leading Us to Civil War"
by Roger L. Simon

"The other day, I wrote that “woke” was the new conformism. It is, of course, but I undersold it. It’s much more than that and more dangerous. As Tal Bachman notes at Steynonline, it’s now our state religion, a state religion in a country that - constitutionally and for good reason - isn’t supposed to have one.

But “Wokism” is yet more than that, too. It’s a mass psychosis similar to many that have arisen throughout history when the masses followed leaders who, in their zeal or self-interest, took them to disastrous ends. A good example was when the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola - in a 1497 version of “cancel culture” - swept up everything secular in Florence from some of the most extraordinary paintings and sculpture of all time to the works of Boccaccio and burned them in the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities.

Being Jewish, I am also reminded of the bizarre tale of Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century Sephardic rabbi who proclaimed himself the long-awaited true messiah of the Jews, garnered thousands of followers, and then ended up leaving them completely in the lurch when he converted to Islam. (Interestingly, Bachman writes that “wokism” resembles Islam structurally.)

Closer to our time, the great Italian director Federico Fellini, in his film “La Dolce Vita” (1960), shows us what seems like hundreds of people rushing about, tears streaming, trampling each other, believing reports that the Madonna has been sighted. As the scene progresses, the crowd grows, with more and more people convinced of the sighting. Of course, what Fellini documents is more or less harmless - not so “woke.” This psychosis has a political dimension and the capability of changing a society, which it has already done.

Face Excommunication: “Woke” gains adherents much in the manner of “est” - the cult-like Erhard Seminars Training - that I attended in the 1970s at the behest of a movie producer interested in making a film about it. (It never happened.) If you’re too in, you’re out. For est, several hundred people sat in a large conference room listening to the “training” for hours under instructions not to get up, even to go to the bathroom, until they raised their hands signaling they “got it” (i.e., effectively joined the cult). Nature’s calling being what it is, most eventually did.

Although operationally similar, “woke” is exponentially more perilous than the now-defunct est training. Our position in society, our livelihoods, and our children’s educations and futures are being held over our heads, not our mere use of a restroom. An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb - play along or face ex-communication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

It’s a psychosis approaching mass hallucination. In Franco’s Spain, they shouted, “Viva la muerte!” (“Long live death!”) Here we are asked to proclaim just as loudly “Black Lives Matter,” to display signs saying as much on our lawns, although we never thought otherwise and always thought (naively, we are told) that all lives mattered.

All key aspects, most parts of them anyway, of our society “get it” as they did in est (i.e., now believe in ”woke”) or, yet more ominously, cynically say they do - the media, the corporations (“Better woke than broke!”), the government bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the military (yikes!), entertainment, the university system, the K–12 system, the medical community, the scientific community (incredibly), the religious community (sadly), and on and on.

All, to one extent or another, believe in “woke” except - the people. Most of the people anyway. Most of what used to be called the common men (or women) in the street roll their eyes at “woke” - including even some silent, but browbeaten, Democrats - and do their best to move on, although many realize that “woke” and its sister “social justice” are in essence euphemisms for an ideology far more totalitarian than any ever in control of this country, communism.

Rebellion Brewing: How long can this gaping dichotomy continue? How long before they stop rolling their eyes? A rebellion against “woke” is brewing, particularly in red states, some of which are banning or have already banned critical race theory in their schools, among other pushbacks. (Kudos to Rep. Mark Green, Republican of Tennessee and Iraq War veteran, for introducing legislation to block critical race theory training at U.S. military academies.)

But will that be enough against a federal government that lives and breathes this evil ideology and that is essentially governed by a homegrown politburo - the thought that Biden acts by himself is ludicrous - determined to impose it? As this imposition increases, the “contradictions,” as the Marxists would say, are heightened. What the extremist ideology of “woke” actually provokes is talk of - and not just talk - secession and even civil war.

Few of us have heard anything like that in our lifetimes. But now it’s real. We have been driven apart as never before. We have been awakened indeed. Anything can happen and some of us, who would never have considered anything like secession and civil war, suddenly do - highly disturbing to us as those thoughts may be.

So why do we even tolerate “woke”? Bachman gives us a quotation from Austrian philosopher Karl Popper that is remarkably apposite for our times: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

From Antifa to BLM (whose leader apparently identifies with the mass murderer Chairman Mao) to the willfully blind talking heads of left-wing cable TV, no one is as intolerant as the ”woke” folks. They break all domestic records in that regard. Time to stop tolerating them."

Musical Interlude: The Who, "Tommy"

The Who, "Overture" from "Tommy"
The Who, "Tommy", "See Me, Feel Me/Listening to You"
The Who, "Tommy", Full Album 1969

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/18/21: "Market Updates; Gold And Silver- What You Must Know Now"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/18/21:
"Market Updates; Gold And Silver- What You Must Know Now"

"Eternal Springtime"

"Eternal Springtime"
by Bill Bonner

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – “Transitory” or not? Economists are studying the numbers. Is inflation heating up… or cooling off? Should they be looking at the Consumer Price Index (CPI)? The CPI-U (for urban customers)? With or without food and energy? The Personal Consumption Expenditure price index (PCE)? ShadowStats? They watch the thermometer and check the skies. In the following few words, we explain why we think they are wasting their time.

You can tell it’s getting warmer by looking at data points. Check the thermometer every day and you may begin to see a trend. But if you are planting a crop or planning a vacation… you might also check the calendar. Yes, there are bigger patterns… longer… more durable… more predictable. Temperatures go up and down. You may see the temperature going down every day for a week. But come the month of May, the flowers come out anyway.

Sunny Forecast: Politico gives us the forecast: The very firm conventional wisdom around the financial industry is that the recent spike in inflation – which just hit the highest level in a decade – will be entirely transitory. Janet, Joe, and Jerome are telling us not to get too excited about the latest inflation numbers. Put away the umbrellas and raincoats, they say. Sunshine ahead. They believe there is too much “spare capacity” in the economy. It will need to be taken up, they say, before business or labor have any real pricing power.

And those higher prices we are seeing? Don’t pay any attention to them, they add; they’ll be gone as soon as the problems in the supply chain are removed. Then, too, they say that price levels were so low a year ago – caused by the COVID-19 scare – that the latest measurement of inflation is cockeyed. What we are looking at is a statistical aberration, they say, not real inflation.

Irrelevant Argument: On the other side, the inflation alarmists believe the “spare capacity” argument is poppycock. They see storm clouds building. This inflation is “intentional, deliberate, and disastrous,” writes colleague Simone Wapler. It is structural, not cyclical. So the “spare capacity” is irrelevant.

Venezuela, for example, has idle factories, idle land, and idle labor aplenty. But it also had inflation two years ago at 10,000,000%. And in America, businesses can’t find people to take up jobs. They are forced to raise wages. But it’s not because there aren’t plenty of idle hands available. More likely, it is because the feds were too promiscuous with their stimmy money. In many cases, people got more money from being unemployed than they used to get on the job.

And then, too, 30 years of stimmy – with ultra-low interest rates and Fed-backed asset markets – has created a “financialized” economy… where the big money is no longer made by honest labor or investment – producing goods and services (real wealth) for others – but by borrowing and speculating.

Never Better: Naturally, the rich – and the elite – have never had it better. They own the assets the Federal Reserve has been pumping up. Can you blame the not-so-rich for wanting to join them? As we reported here, one of the latest fad cryptos went up 1,700% in just a week earlier this month. And the whole crypto sector came from nothing just over a decade ago to be now worth more than $2 trillion. That’s “wealth” that didn’t exist a few years ago. And it’s enough to make a whole generation believe it is more profitable to trade cryptos than to work. Again, it was the inflation that caused the “spare capacity,” not the other way around.

As for the “low base” argument, you can look through the freakish Plague Year figures by “stacking” the inflation readings up in two-year increments. What you see is the same rising trend line, but at a gentler angle.

Perpetual Springtime: Here at the Diary, we are sometimes right, sometimes wrong… and always in doubt. Will the April numbers mark the decisive turning point – when inflation turns definitively and dramatically upwards? Or will they turn out to be more like an exploratory mission by UFOs… before the full invasion force takes over the planet, making pets of the few humans who survive? We’ll know in a few months. In the meantime, we reach for a deeper insight.

Consumer price inflation comes as a result of monetary inflation; that is all we know for sure. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) tells us that government is the source of money (which the MMTers believe is the same as wealth). It’s government printing and spending that make the money world turn, they say. They add that the feds can print and spend as much as they want – “investing” to create a safer, more prosperous, and more perfect union – until consumer price inflation rises.

When that day comes, they promise, they will “pivot” to inflation-fighting policies. But lo! That day came last Wednesday. And what’s this? Quelle surprise! Their eyes still on the thermometer… they tell us why the recent readings are not to be trusted. “No need to pivot just yet,” they say.

We live in a world of perpetual springtime; they’re convinced of it. Stocks always push up, like jonquils in April. The warm rain of deficits and money-printing eternally stirs the dull roots of the economy. And any datapoint outside the springtime range must be a fluke.

Too Late: They would do better to go back to the calendar. It’s not government printing and spending that create real wealth; instead, as sure as June follows May, they create real inflation. And if you wait for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to confirm the trend, it may be too late to plant your radishes."

“This Was A Test, And We Failed”

“This Was A Test, And We Failed”
by Jim Quinn

“The Truth, when you finally chase it down, 
is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.” 
~ Hunter S. Thompson

"I think Hunter S. Thompson is being proven right by revelations becoming obvious daily. I’m a natural skeptic, so I rarely believe anything I’m told without verifying facts, analyzing data and understanding the motivation of those making declarations and assertions. For most of my life I thought I generally understood how the world worked.

Doubts about my understanding began to creep into my mind between 2000 and 2008, as I watched my government cover-up the truth about 9-11, use it to institute an Orwellian surveillance state through the Patriot Act, invade Iraq based upon a false narrative of WMD and links to 9/11, and watching those controlling the Federal Reserve create the dot.com bubble and follow it up with a housing bubble – all done to benefit Wall Street banks, billionaires, connected politicians, and Deep State apparatchiks.

The national debt was $5.6 trillion in 2000, the budget was as close to balanced as it had been in decades, the defense budget ($300 billion) was at decades low as there was no major conflicts in the world, and term limits were still a legitimately discussed election issue. If someone was told on January 1, 2000 that in 2021 the national debt was going to hit $30 trillion, with annual deficits of $3 to $4 trillion, a defense budget of $750 billion as war looms on the near-term horizon, and all semblance of governing through legislation to benefit the citizenry had dissipated, they would have laughed, accused you of being a conspiracy nutjob, and said the nation would be a hyperinflationary banana republic with 50% interest rates if any of that came to pass. The truth is always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.

What has occurred in the last year has befuddled me, as the level of treachery, deception, disinformation, and false narratives has reached excessive elevations, indicating a sense of urgency and desperation by those wielding power over society. It has been depressing and frustrating to witness the level of obedient compliance by the majority of frightened sheep in this country, with complete subservience to authoritarian dictates of their overlords.

The extremeness of the response to a bad annual flu virus leads me to believe the truth behind what has happened and is happening is far worse than most can conceive or comprehend. The level of pure malevolence and disregard for humanity exhibited by the despots wielding power over our political, economic, medical, and social structures has pushed the country to the edge of civil chaos, calculated political pandemonium, global conflict, and unavoidable debt manufactured financial collapse.

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether I’m the crazy one for not believing a piece of cloth will protect me from catching a flu virus with a 99.8% survival rate, or not voluntarily allowing a Big Pharma corporation, with no liability for the consequences of its experimental gene therapy, to treat me as their animal test subject to increase my survival chances to 99.85%, or questioning why I need to wear a face diaper because I can catch the virus while walking to my restaurant table but not once I sit down, or why six foot distancing is safe but 5 foot distancing is dangerous. Why are the predictions of doom by “experts”, which never come true, overlooked and disregarded by the corporate fake news media?
Why did Dementia Joe call the governors of Texas, Florida, and Mississippi Neanderthals six weeks ago for ending mask mandates and this week he ended the mask mandate for the entire country? I thought he followed the science. But it appears raging inflation, a terrible jobs report due to his policy of paying people not to work, a hemorrhaging border crisis, gas pipelines proving to be somewhat important, the Middle East exploding, and his woke executive order agenda being ridiculed on a daily basis, convinced Joe’s handlers to distract from his 100 days of disaster by reversing the ridiculous Covid restrictions and sending the Covid cult into convulsions of fury.

Their pathetic lives of mask virtue signaling, twitter haranguing, and vaccination shaming are about to be invalidated, as a return to normalcy will relegate the Biden brigade to their previous status of inconsequential drones on Facebook posting pictures of their nine cats.
What little faith I had in humanity after this past year of cowardly compliant obedience to totalitarian governmental dictates and proclamations, was fully extinguished this weekend while making an early morning stop at Wal-Mart. The Biden administration’s sudden reversal on masks, after fear mongering and preaching doom for months, immediately led to Trader Joe’s, Costco and Wal-Mart announcing no more masks required to enter their stores, with an unenforceable caveat about being vaccinated. After a year of mask mandates, I pondered whether I should enter the Wal-Mart like this fine gentleman.
But I just sauntered in like everyone else, expecting to see dozens of other unmasked Americans breathing fresh air, thankful to be free of those disgusting face diapers which have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to reduce the spread of this over-hyped annual flu with a scary name and largest marketing campaign in history. Instead, I witnessed dozens of masked sheep still following orders even after those orders had been rescinded by their self-appointed science shepherds.

An overwhelming feeling of disgust swept over me, as I only witnessed two other sensible human beings out of the hundred or so roaming the aisles. My disappointment with the vast majority of citizens in this country has now reached all-time lows. I am chalking it up to a new version of PTSD, in the era of covid hysteria, PMSD (Post-Mask Stress Disorder). A large portion of the populace have developed a mental illness, purposely provoked by their own lying government and authoritarian politicians. This entire scam has been a lesson in abuse, fear propaganda, lies, false appeals to science, and censorship of the truth.
There are now millions of sheep who do not know how to readjust to reality and lose the masks, which convinced them they were brave, noble and “in this together”. Trying to use facts and reason to convince these people masks never worked and their chances of dying from this flu were no higher than the annual flu is a useless endeavor. The Covid Cult cannot let go of their mask virtue signaling because they will lose that feeling of superiority and arrogance towards the unmasked masses.
The loss of this covid cudgel is being rapidly substituted with these Big Pharma multi-billion-dollar profit generating experimental gene therapies, disguised as vaccines. They desperately want to condescendingly force the jab upon everyone and force vaccine passports upon the masses as their new virtue signaling badge of compliant obedience. After spending tens of billions of your tax dollars on a vaccine marketing campaign, employing famous athletes, Hollywood influencers, medical “experts”, and non-stop TV commercials, only 37% of the American population is fully vaccinated. It has been a gigantic FAIL.

Everyone who wanted to be vaccinated, is vaccinated. They have resorted to cash payments, million-dollar lottery prizes, free donuts, free burgers & fries, and a multitude of other bribes to get the jab. Now they are falling back on the totalitarian methods used during the lockdown. Get the jab or wear a mask forever threatens Dementia Joe. Colluding with corporations and schools to force employees and children to get the jab. Threatening to impose vaccine passports to travel, enter sports and concert arenas, and to generally cancel the non-vaccinated. It is failing.
With only 37% of the public sheeplike enough to get the jab, any “woke” business that continues to invoke mask mandates or require proof of vaccination will find their profits dissipate faster than Trump’s lead in swing states at 3:00 am. If you were to believe the fake news media and government drones, you would believe the majority have been vaccinated and the “anti-vaxxers” were a crazy conspiracy theorist minority. As with most things being fed to you daily, this is a big fat lie. The rational, resistant (not hesitant), critical thinking MAJORITY are done with this scamdemic. Biden and his handlers are being forced to throw in the towel, for now.

The propaganda press polluters of the truth are still selling a completely false narrative about the vaccines being the reason cases, hospitalizations and deaths have plummeted since January 1 of this year. The excess mortality rate in the country is now back below the averages from 2015 – 2019. The crash in death rates occurred while less than 15% of the population had been vaccinated. The bloviating about needing 70% of the population vaccinated to stop the pandemic is complete and utter bullshit.

Masks never protected anyone from infection and the vaccine is unnecessary to resume normal life. This flu follows the same infection pattern as the annual flu (which mysteriously disappeared from the globe in 2020-21) and has run its course. Vaccine rates per state are showing ZERO impact on the downward trend of cases and deaths. They are falling and have been falling with or without the vaccine.
The India variant and “surge” fear mongering has fallen on deaf ears as their death rate per 100,000 is only a fraction of the U.S. and U.K. These propaganda tactics have worn out their welcome. Very few are believing the feckless mainstream media miscreants. Their ratings are lower than whale shit.
No matter how hard they try to reinstall the fear, enough people are tired of this farce to derail further attempts at lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine passport requirements. Every day with declining cases, vaccination rates, and deaths makes it harder for the Covidian cult medical tyrants to pretend there is a national emergency. Their sense of desperation is palpable. This sense of desperation is seen in their attempt to force this experimental therapy on children and their complete lack of concern or acknowledgement of the hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions and thousands of deaths attributed to their gene therapy experiments on human guinea pigs.

These medical experts and doctors seem to have forgotten the first rule of their Hippocratic Oath – DO NO HARM. More likely, they sold their souls to Big Pharma for big bucks. The science says 1 in 300,000 of children under 18 will die from Covid but based on actual data 3 in 300,000 will die from the vaccine. They are pushing these vaccines on children for profits, not for health reasons. Always follow the money.
I believe Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote about “how we burned in the camps later” regarding what would have happened if they resisted and killed their oppressors when they had the chance will be restated years from now when the long-term consequences of these experimental gene concoctions are felt by the children forced to participate in this evil experiment. If we had only resisted.

This is communism in a new repackaged marketing campaign, where Bernays’ propaganda techniques have been perfected through technological mind manipulation by Big Government conspiring with Big Tech and Big Business. The tripe of political correctness, wokeism, anti-racism, cancel culture, and fear of the annual flu has been taken to a level never seen before. Theodore Dalrymple captures the essence of this new communism.

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” ― Theodore Dalrymple

Dalrymple is correct in pointing out how these modern communists use humiliation and shaming to ram their false narratives and authoritarian agendas down our throats through the power of fake news media and the Silicon Valley social media censorship tyrants. They blatantly flog provably false narratives through their media mouthpieces, disguised as impartial journalists, medical experts, university professors, and anyone the masses might look up to. Those who knowingly assent to these obvious lies have become just as evil as those telling the lies.

The lies have been piled high in the last year as the annual flu was weaponized to cover-up the disintegration of our financial system and as a means to fraudulently conduct a coup against a president; the deaths of two black law breakers were utilized to usher in the colossal lie of systematic racism bought into by woke corporations and college campuses across the world; a clearly stolen election was declared honest by those controlling the narrative; lockdowns and masks were pronounced to be the only way to slow the spread even though all data refutes those assertions; an armed insurrection (with no arms) lie on January 6 has been used to wall off Washington DC and sell the big lie of white supremacy being a threat to the republic; the Federal Reserve creating trillions out of thin air and pumping it into the pockets of billionaires and Wall Street fat cats has not created raging inflation and an all-time high in wealth inequality according to the talking heads on CNBC and the rest of the fake news media complex; emergency use authorized vaccines were the only solution to a flu that doesn’t kill 99.8% of those infected, even though ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have proven to be effective and safe in combating covid; and lastly these vaccines have been declared safe even though they are killing and maiming thousands and no one knows the long term effects on those who have chosen to be their lab rats.
We have become a society of emasculated liars, purposely deceiving ourselves because we are too cowardly to admit we have been had by those ruling over us with an iron fist. As a society we have decided resistance is futile and if we go along to get along, we will still be allowed to subsist, play with our techno-gadgets, and be sent stimmy checks, welfare payments, and be granted the ability to pay for stuff we cannot afford on credit. The willfully ignorant have chosen to become debt slaves and obey their masters, rather than resist tyranny and demand their independence from this dystopian nightmare we are currently living under.

We continue to elect corrupt politicians and willingly follow the orders of traitors, crooks, and despots, so we have become collaborators, rather than casualties. As a society we do not want the responsibility of freedom and have gladly exchanged our liberties for the illusory chimera of security. Those controlling the levers of power have taken advantage of this cowardly trait to abscond with the nation’s wealth and keep the masses in constant fear of new bogeymen (terrorists, white supremacists, flu viruses, and now aliens).

As I observe what is happening over the last week or so, I fall back on the words of the patron saint of sanity in a world gone mad.
Everything our government tells us every day is a lie. Biden’s sudden reversal on masks, supposedly based on science, is a lie. The story about the DarkSide Russian hackers shutting down the Colonial pipeline is a lie. It is just as likely it was done by the CIA. If a pipeline can be hacked then voting machines can be hacked, but they continue to lie about that. Anyone with critical thinking skills knows this virus came from a Wuhan bio-lab, which was funded by Fauci to develop these gain of function viruses. Fauci lied to Congress and has lied to the American public since February 2020 about masks, lockdowns, risks, and vaccines. They are lying about vaccine effectiveness and risks.

Every time Jerome Powell or one of his Fed cronies opens their mouth, they are lying. Anyone with any financial acumen knows stock, bond, crypto, housing, and virtually all markets are experiencing the biggest bubble in world history, but the financial “experts” tell you to buy before it is too late. They are lying because they are paid handsomely to do so. Lies about the selfie insurrection in the Capitol continue unabated. Biden and his handlers have been lying about their man made purposeful border crisis. Lies about Dominion voting machines and rigged election results are perpetrated by the paid hacks on CNN, MSNBC and even Fox, every day. The lies will continue until morale improves, or the ruling class can abscond with another trillion or so.

This pandemic is over. It has served its purpose to those in power. Biden is now playing the part of President Snow in Hunger Games by giving the plebs a little hope. Dangling the return to relative normalcy in exchange for being jabbed with their DNA altering cocktail is the latest narrative being peddled to the sheep. Many have or will make that trade. But, as of now, the majority are not falling for it. My hope is the spark is not contained and that good men and women do not stand idly by while evil continues to flourish. It is time for decent human beings to stand up and be counted and not allow a darkness to settle upon this nation, ushered in by the likes of Gates, Schwab, Soros, Obama, Biden, Bloomberg and their ilk.

The ruling class would prefer a Hunger Games plot where they continue to pit groups against each other: blacks versus whites, masked versus un-masked, vaxxed versus unvaxxed, liberal versus conservative, men versus women, modestly rich versus poor, taxed versus untaxed, and neighbor against neighbor. They want us fighting each other so we do not realize they are the true enemy.

This entire plandemic was a test to see how far they could push us before we pushed back. As a nation, we failed the test miserably. They are loosening the reins for now, but they now know they can force the masses to cower and beg for safety and security. They are supremely confident they can easily manipulate the masses, based once again on using the Big Lie method.

Recent developments make me suspicious something big is happening and the narrative is going to take a dramatic turn. First the take down of Cuomo by a previously fawning press and now the man who bankrolled the pandemic, creepy Bill Gates, is in the process of being taken down over his relationship with the king of pedophilia – Jeffrey Epstein (who didn’t kill himself). Fauci is about to be thrown to the wolves over his funding of the Wuhan bio-weapon lab. All the pandemic superstars are being cast aside.

Why now? Crucial infrastructure is supposedly being hacked. War is breaking out in the Middle East. Saber rattling between China – Taiwan and Russia – Ukraine is provoking worries of global conflict. Raging commodity inflation, labor shortages, and financial markets giving signs of an imminent crash could be the trigger for the next leg down in this shitshow portion of the Fourth Turning. Something big is coming and I expect it will happen before the 2022 elections. If you thought the last year was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. But don’t worry, the planet will be fine.
“We’re so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody’s going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven’t learned how to care for one another. We’re gonna save the f***in’ planet? And, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are f***ed! Compared with the people, the planet is doin’ great. It’s been here over four billion years. The planet isn’t goin’ anywhere, folks. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, we’re goin’ away. And we won’t leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we’ll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.” - George Carlin
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Monday, May 17, 2021

Musical Interlude: "Beautiful Piano Music 24/7 Live Stream"

Full screen recommended.
Beautiful piano music 24/7 live stream featuring 
music to relax, study, sleep by me, Peder B. Helland.

"The False God"

"The False God"
by Jim Kunstler

"Beneath all the psychotic babble that sore besets the collective national hive-mind over a pandemic that comes and goes in waves, and phantoms of contrived identity animus, looms an economy that would collapse without gigantic IV infusions of “money” from the false god that our government has become. The collapse is working its way out in strange ways as we create ever stranger work-arounds for avoiding it - such as the unanswered “help wanted” signs while legions of unemployed adults cash government support checks.

Of course, a lot of those unanswered signs are for what used to be called shit-jobs, flipping burgers, bagging groceries, and such. For a lot of Americans, those are the only jobs. We can argue about whether the government ushered better-paying low-skill factory jobs offshore or whether other nations would have developed industries in the natural course of things (or a combo of both). But the end result is a country full of people who can barely support themselves, let alone a family, and the consequent loss of all the psychological infrastructure for a society that can respect itself.

With the spring zephyrs blowing, the great expectation rises for a return to “normal,” which seems to mainly consist of bustling restaurants, brisk car sales, and the construction of suburban houses. It’s not that these are the only things we can do in life, but they’re what the dynamics of the moment allow. Those dynamics include incentives, laws, regulations, habits, and customs.

The zoning laws and building codes allow only certain types of habitations, generally ones too expensive for people seeking to establish households, not to mention the social costs of building even more unsustainable suburbia based on the selling of ever more unaffordable cars. The work-around for that is official manipulation of the debt markets, artificially-low interest rates, and discarding the framework of creditworthiness. The unintended consequences include the inflation of house prices and exposure of house-buyers to greater fragility (risk) in foreclosure. Ultimately, backstopping the banks that hold the mortgages and their derivative securities keeps the whole dishonest shootin’ match going… until it stops.

One thing that will stop all of that will be the slow death of money, inflation, which is just now transforming from a distant specter on the horizon to a condition in the here-and-now. You will have plenty of money and that money will become increasingly worthless. The authorities probably think that’s better politically than the people having no money at all, but it’s really the same thing dragged out over time to fool everybody. Governments like it because it reduces the nominal cost of debt — except now the government debt-load is so supernaturally gigantic, really nothing will avail to fix that, and meanwhile they’re very busy making the debt situation worse by giving away as much newly borrowed money as the situation requires to maintain the illusion of a functioning economy.

Anyway, as the time-frame for inflation compresses, the people notice that their money won’t buy what they need, and they get restless, perhaps dangerously so. In the process, the government begins to look incompetent, on top of the usual perception that it is corrupt, and before you know it, legitimacy slips through the widening cracks of the floor. Until now, the authorities have been successful in pitting citizens against each other, and the ill-will unleashed has been spectacular. But the memes of “white supremacy” are so obviously dishonest that they’ve only succeeded in hugely pissing off the substantial demographic of white people who struggle desperately to remain employed, housed, mobile, and capable of raising children who are not being driven crazy.

The coronavirus situation is not so reassuring. We are one more serious up-wave of illness from tanking whatever remains of this vaporific economy. An emerging pattern suggests that higher vaccination rates might generate new-and-improved iterations of the disease more efficiently - just as the government tries more aggressively to sell vaccination to the public. The public is also noticing the alarming statistics, and many remain unconvinced that the vaccines are even vaccines in the usual sense, but rather insufficiently tested exotic experiments desperately employed against something that looks more and more like a bio-weapon that the government itself was complicit in creating.

My state of New York is supposedly “reopening” today. Who’s not longing to get back to “normal?” But who’s not a little anxious that mixing normally with other people won’t start the whole cycle all over again? And, anyway, who doesn’t wonder whether normal is really a thing of the past now, disappearing in the rear-view mirror. Just as the hopeful meme floats over the Internet that the storm is over, we fail to see that there’s a larger storm of history whirling around us that we’re only in the eye of."

"Worthy..."

Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl writes that the sort of person we become is not just a result of our external circumstances, but of our “inner decision.” He remembers the most unimaginable suffering in the concentration camps, and yet shares about men and women who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread: “Proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

As he goes on to write: "The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life… Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings." Few can say they are...

“Credit Cards Are A Debt Trap; Housing Market Buyer Beware; Middle Class Debt Slaves”

Jeremiah Babe,
“Credit Cards Are A Debt Trap; 
Housing Market Buyer Beware; Middle Class Debt Slaves”

"Megadrought Nightmare Is Here: No Water For Crops, Horrific Wildfires And Colossal Dust Storms"

Full screen recommended.
"Megadrought Nightmare Is Here: 
No Water For Crops, Horrific Wildfires And Colossal Dust Storms"
by Epic Economist

"The entire western half of the United States is facing an extremely painful megadrought that has been putting millions of acres of crops in a death grip, as irrigation water is being completely cut off for a multitude of farmers, resulting in a lost year for many of them. Extremely dry weather conditions are a total nightmare for millions of western producers and farm workers because, without water, there are simply no crops and without crops, their jobs are at risk. The timing of this crisis couldn't be worse. After a ravaging wildfire season, scientists are warning that the next one could be even worse than last year due to the bone dry conditions. This megadrought has been gradually aggravating throughout several years, and if there were any hopes that things would get better in the future, at this point, they have been entirely crushed.

In a recent CBS News report, experts explained that this exceptionally dry weather started in 2000, hitting some parts of the Western U.S., and as years passed by, it has expanded across several states, becoming the second-worst drought in 1,200 years - catalyzed by a combination of a natural dry cycle and human-caused climate change. Over the past 20 years, the two worst periods of drought came in 2003 and 2013 - but what is unfolding right now seems to be the beginning stages of something even more dangerous, with scientists warning that the region is on the precipice of permanent drought.

And as we approach the summer dry season - with a very little chance of seeing conditions getting any better - the stage is set for another period of extremely dry weather, with yet another brutal fire season, and, on top of all that, several states are at risk of experiencing widespread water restrictions. Already, the California-Oregon border is seeing things going from horrible to catastrophic as irrigation water stopped flowing into the region. Producers were anticipating that they would be getting much less water this year, but now federal regulators have decided to completely shut off the water from a critical reservoir, affecting most local farmers. Officials also said they would not send any extra water to dying salmon downstream or to dozens of wildlife refuges that harbor millions of migrating birds each year, because "there simply is not enough water for everyone".

In California, the nation's biggest vegetable producer, the water crisis is causing a critical impact on Central Valley farms, forcing many farmers to make some heartbreaking decisions, such as choosing which crops they will have to destroy in order to save others. With asparagus crops completely gone, at least 50 to 60 farmworkers are out of a job next year. And the more crops are lost, the more jobs will be cut. In a year of continual shortages and explosive prices, the fact that this nightmarish megadrought is going to further contribute to our food supply chain woes signals that we're getting closer to another steep national crisis.

Dust storms are becoming a regular event in those areas and, according to NASA, "Valley fever is a dangerous threat to human health - and cases are on the rise in the arid southwestern United States, as the wind from increasing dust storms can transport the fungal spores that cause the disease. Valley fever is caused by the Coccidioides fungus, which grows in dirt and fields and can cause fever, rash, and coughing".

Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that such extraordinarily dry conditions create an ideal environment for wildfires. In 2020, we had one of the most ravaging wildfire seasons in U.S. history. Only in California, almost 10,000 blazes and 4.25 million acres have burned, corresponding to more than 4% of the state’s territory, and damaging or destroying nearly 10,500 structures - and now similar scenes started to be witnessed in Los Angeles County. Local news are reporting that a massive fire is burning out of control in the exclusive Pacific Palisades area near Topanga Canyon. Los Angeles County authorities are investigating who or what might have set off a brush fire that forced the mandatory evacuation of roughly 1,000 people.

With so many things happening right now, it feels like the United States is under some sort of curse. Wherever we look we see emergencies and disasters erupting and every time it appears things couldn’t get any worse, somehow they do. Now, scientists are telling us that Dust Bowl conditions have returned and we're about to face another very dry summer, whose devastating effects will likely trigger more chaos on our broken food supply chains while sparking a dangerous water crisis and ravaging our soil. So much pain seems to be coming for us and it will likely linger for longer than one could have ever expected."

Musical Interlude: Chuck Wild, Liquid Mind, “Dream Ten”

Chuck Wild, Liquid Mind, “Dream Ten”

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Point your telescope toward the high flying constellation Pegasus and you can find this expanse of Milky Way stars and distant galaxies. Centered on NGC 7814, the pretty field of view would almost be covered by a full moon. NGC 7814 is sometimes called the Little Sombrero for its resemblance to the brighter more famous M104, the Sombrero Galaxy.  


Both Sombrero and Little Sombrero are spiral galaxies seen edge-on, and both have extensive central bulges cut by a thinner disk with dust lanes in silhouette. In fact, NGC 7814 is some 40 million light-years away and an estimated 60,000 light-years across. That actually makes the Little Sombrero about the same physical size as its better known namesake, appearing to be smaller and fainter only because it is farther away. A very faint dwarf galaxy, potentially a satellite of NGC 7814, is revealed in the deep exposure just below the Little Sombrero.”