Full screen recommended.
Disturbed, "The Sound Of Silence"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Saturday, June 26, 2021
"US Food Banks Warn Soaring Prices Will Affect Distributions"
"US Food Banks Warn Soaring Prices Will Affect Distributions"
by Tyler Durden
"Soaring food prices aren't just impacting financially strapped families and the working poor. They're also affecting the mission of US food banks who are spending a lot more on food than ever before. "We're already spending a lot more on food than we have in years past," said Greg Trotter, a spokesman for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a large food bank, who spoke with VOA News. "Our food purchasing budget has doubled this year."
In the coming weeks and or months, food banks across the country may experience a surge in food demand from millions of folks who are set to have their stimmy checks expire. At least 25 states are ending federal unemployment benefits. The perfect storm of factors (soaring food costs and unemployment benefits expiring) may stress food banks even further. "The high prices are costing us more to feed a family in need," said Alison Padget, development and outreach director at Food for Others. "We'll have to rethink our purchasing decisions because economists say the prices are going to be high for at least a year."
In Phoenix, Arizona, Jerry Brown, director of public relations at St. Mary's Food Bank, told VOA that food banks could face severe difficulty once federal money dries up. It seems the problem has already begun at the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, which covers a large portion of the state. Impact leader Triada Stampas said the food bank serves more people than ever because of out-of-control prices at grocery stores.
According to Father English Food Pantry officials in Paterson, New Jersey, the food bank is already experiencing financial strain.
Kelly Mott, external affairs director at the Mississippi Food Network, said, "We already see the price changes will affect us soon, adding that "we are in the process of buying turkeys for the Thanksgiving holiday in November. And since they are so expensive, we won't be able to purchase as many as we usually do, especially for the families with children who rely on us." The crisis is far from over as food bank stress begins to materialize, and not everyone might be fed this year."
Musical Interlude: Il Divo, "Wicked Game" ("Melanconia")
Full screen!
Il Divo, "Wicked Game" ("Melanconia")
(Live In London 2011)
"A Look to the Heavens"
“This rock structure is not only surreal - it's real. The reason it's not more famous is that it is, perhaps, smaller than one might guess: the capstone rock overhangs only a few meters. Even so, the King of Wings outcrop, located in New Mexico, USA, is a fascinating example of an unusual type of rock structure called a hoodoo. Hoodoos may form when a layer of hard rock overlays a layer of eroding softer rock.
Figuring out the details of incorporating this hoodoo into a night-sky photoshoot took over a year. Besides waiting for a suitably picturesque night behind a sky with few clouds, the foreground had to be artificially lit just right relative to the natural glow of the background. After much planning and waiting, the final shot, featured here, was taken in May 2016. Mimicking the horizontal bar, the background sky features the band of our Milky Way Galaxy stretching overhead.”
"The Heart of Humanity"
"The Heart of Humanity"
by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM
"Sitting with our sadness takes the courage to believe that we can bear the pain and we will come out the other side. The last thing most of us want to hear or think about when we are dealing with profound feelings of sadness is that deep learning can be found in this place. In the midst of our pain, we often feel picked on by life, or overwhelmed by the enormity of some loss, or simply too exhausted to try and examine the situation. We may feel far too disappointed and angry to look for anything resembling a bright side to our suffering. Still, somewhere in our hearts, we know that we will eventually emerge from the depths into the light of greater awareness. Remembering this truth, no matter how elusive it seems, can help.
The other thing we often would rather not hear when we are dealing with intense sadness is that the only way out of it is through it. Sitting with our sadness takes the courage to believe that we can bear the pain and the faith that we will come out the other side. With courage, we can allow ourselves to cycle through the grieving process with full inner permission to experience it. This is a powerful teaching that sadness has to offer us - the ability to surrender and the acceptance of change go hand in hand.
Another teaching of sadness is compassion for others who are in pain, because it is only in feeling our own pain that we can really understand and allow for someone else’s. Sadness is something we all go through, and we all learn from it and are deepened by its presence in our lives. While our own individual experiences of sadness carry with them unique lessons, the implications of what we learn are universal. The wisdom we gain from going through the process of feeling loss, heartbreak, or deep disappointment gives us access to the heart of humanity."
"Life's Funny..."
"Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living."
- Alysha Speer
"The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool."
- Scott Turow
"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."
- Andrew Klavan
The Poet: Mary Oliver, “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field”
“White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field”
“Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings - five feet apart -
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow -
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows -
so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us -
as soft as feathers -
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light - scalding, aortal light -
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.”
“Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings - five feet apart -
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow -
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows -
so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us -
as soft as feathers -
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light - scalding, aortal light -
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.”
- Mary Oliver
"What Are You Spending Money On? - Prices Skyrocket"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, IAllegedly,
"What Are You Spending Money On? - Prices Skyrocket"
"The Economy is in horrible shape. What are people spending their money on right now? I am at the Outlets at Orange, CA. Let's share some national business news you can use."
"America’s Social Order Is Unraveling"
"America’s Social Order Is Unraveling"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"What kind of nation boasts a record-high stock market and an unraveling social order? Answer: a failed nation, a nation that has substituted artifice for realism for far too long, a nation that now depends on illusory phantoms of capital, prosperity and democracy to prop up a crumbling facade of “wealth” that the populace now understands is largely in the hands of a few families and corporations, most of which pay little to support the citizenry they dominate politically and financially.
The social order sounds abstract, but it is all too real. The social order has two primary components: social cohesion, the glue of common purpose and shared sacrifice binding the social order, and the social contract, the implicit contract between the ruling elite, the state (government) and commoners (the middle class, the working poor and state dependents) that their labor, taxes and sacrifices will nourish a society with a level playing field, broad-based opportunity and security.
America’s social cohesion has been lost, ground under the heel of soaring inequality, a two-tiered economic/political order, systemic unfairness and the elite’s divide-and-conquer manipulation of the political and cultural orders.
Historian Peter Turchin characterized this social unraveling as disintegrative: people no longer find reasons to cooperate and share sacrifices to work towards a common national purpose. Rather, they find a multitude of reasons to offload sacrifices onto others, hoard their own wealth and seek to expand their power by accelerating the disintegrative forces.
There is no debate about the collapse of America’s social contract, there are only varying levels of self-serving denial. Commoners have awakened to the emptiness of the conventional promise to get a college degree, work hard and you’ll be rewarded with security and prosperity. Huge swaths of America are a ransacked, decaying shell of a society reminiscent of developing nations suffering under the jackboot of kleptocrats.
America’s fast-expanding class of billionaires are doing their best to mimic the clueless French nobility just before France’s convulsive revolution in 1789: America’s billionaires bleat that they should pay more taxes while their lobbying bulldozes gigantic loopholes in the tax code, enabling Apple and other global giants to escape U.S. taxes.
America’s billionaires are busy building $500 million private yachts and private spaceships while proclaiming their globally distributed sweatshops are raising all boats in a tide of money conjured out of thin air by the billionaires’ central bankers.
America’s ruling elite has rewritten the social contract to benefit itself at the expense of the bottom 99.9%. Studies have confirmed that the bottom 99.9% hold virtually no political power, and the bottom 90% collect a pitiful 3% of all income generated by capital and hold an inconsequentially thin slice of the nation’s wealth.
"Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018:" $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.
"Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age:": Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.
As I pointed out in "Is a Cultural Revolution Brewing in America?" (4/9/21), actions have consequences and cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.
When there is no relief valve in a collapsing social order, the explosive pressure is eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they’re threatening to the status quo and therefore suppressed at every turn. Put another way, if the pendulum is pushed to an extreme of exploitation, suppression and inequality, when it’s released, it will reach an equivalent extreme (minus a bit of friction) at the opposite end. That could be an unexpected but entirely foreseeable Cultural Revolution.
Those who claim that can’t happen in America are safely outside the pressure cooker, protected by a delusional confidence that since I’m doing great, everyone is doing great. Since real political agency is no longer allowed, the pressure will find release outside the political system. The lobbyists will still be haunting the hallways of governance, but no one will care, for The falcon will no longer hear the falconer. The unraveling of America’s social order is accelerating, and denial will not save us from the consequences of the plundering of the social contract."
Friday, June 25, 2021
“Investors Decimate Home Buyers; Consumers Buying Nikes Not Real Assets; Stop Buying Dumb Stuff”
Jeremiah Babe,
“Investors Decimate Home Buyers; Consumers Buying
Nikes Not Real Assets; Stop Buying Dumb Stuff”
"Infrastructure All Over America Is Crumbling At A Frightening Pace"
"Infrastructure All Over America Is Crumbling
At A Frightening Pace"
Full screen recommended.
by Epic Economist
"The tragic accident we just witnessed in Florida has left the entire nation in shock, and it is definitely a major alert signal for our country's aging infrastructure. It feels like the United States is literally falling apart right before our eyes. Just a few months ago, we had the devastating Texas power grid failure, which had catastrophic impacts for local residents during one of the coldest winters on record. Thousands of water pipes burst, millions of families were left without heat, water, and food for days, and billions of dollars worth of damage were done. But for those who don't live in Texas, it was easy to forget that terrible crisis ever happened. However, now we're being reminded one more time how the rapid deterioration of our key infrastructures is ravaging the once beautiful cities previous generations left for us. And what makes this disaster even worse is that it could have been prevented.
The collapse of the Champlain Towers unexpectedly happened on Thursday in the southeast corner of Surfside, Florida, right on the beach. The sea-view condo development was built in 1981 and it currently had a few two-bedroom units on the market, with asking prices ranging from $600,000 to $700,000. Authorities are still investigating what caused the accident, and everyone in the area seems extremely disturbed by how fast everything happened. “Buildings like this do not fall in America,” said Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett. “This is a third-world phenomenon, and it’s shocking.”
In an interview, Burkett said the "worst has yet to come". Right after the calamitous accident, County Mayor Daniella Levine declared a state of emergency and asked the governor to do the same so that the area could receive streamlined state resources for the recovery effort. Gov. Ron DeSantis then declared a state of emergency in the entire Miami-Dade County, but help only arrived in the evening, hours after the collapse.
According to a USAToday report, last year, a researcher at Florida International University conducted a study that found that this particular building had severe infrastructural problems that only worsened over the years. "The building has been sinking at an alarming rate since the 1990s," noted the 2020 study conducted by Shimon Wdowinski, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment.
Experts have been warning about America’s crumbling infrastructure for decades now, but their alerts are being left unheard. At this point, horrible catastrophes are occurring all across the nation on a regular basis. Even before the Florida accident, other structures were falling apart as well. Just a couple of days ago, Washington D.C. residents witnessed the sudden collapse of the Kenilworth bridge, which caved in over a highway, halting dozens of cars. Shocking images show that the bridge fell on top of three lanes of traffic, with debris stretching all along the way.
However, several months before the Kenilworth bridge collapsed, Fox reporter Evan Lambert reported that a past inspection indicated that consideration should have been given to replacing the bridge. At the end of the day, none of this should come as a surprise for us. The American Society of Civil Engineers has been giving warnings about America’s crumbling infrastructure for a very long time, but our leaders haven't been listening. The federal government should be focusing on preserving and optimizing the use of the country's major infrastructures, but instead, some of them haven't had inspections or have been entirely abandoned for years.
Now, in an attempt to remedy what has been neglected for decades, the new administration revealed plans to make a big effort to patch up some of our decaying infrastructures. But the approach they intend to take to accomplish that goal will end up causing a lot of economic pain in the long run. Even though it is unquestionably a noble goal, government officials are proposing an enormous amount of new spending instead of using existing funds to make these renovations.
Although it may sound like a reasonable short-term solution, in the long term, it only intensifies our financial problems and makes our economic conditions even worse. We desperately need to fix our aging infrastructure, but for that, we should be using existing funds instead of letting them be diverted to fund unnecessary projects that aren't nearly as urgent as this one. Lamentably, most Americans don't know or just don't care about the repercussions the current monetary policies will have on their lives in the future. It was just a matter of time before both of these structures collapsed, and it is also just a matter of time before our entire economy breaks down. The whole system is falling apart all around us, and things are doomed to get worse as only a few people are worried enough to try to save our country."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Grand design spiral galaxy Messier 99 looks majestic on a truly cosmic scale. This recently processed full galaxy portrait stretches over 70,000 light-years across M99. The sharp view is a combination of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared image data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
About 50 million light-years distant toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Bernices, the face-on spiral is a member of the nearby Virgo Galaxy Cluster. Also cataloged as NGC 4254, a close encounter with another Virgo cluster member has likely influenced the shape of its well-defined, blue spiral arms."
○
"Everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes towards the stars? Why?"
- Mikhail Bulgakov, "The White Guard"
The Poet: W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”
“The More Loving One”
“Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.”
- W. H. Auden
"Be That Guy"
"Be That Guy"
by Scott Faith
"We’re frequently told “don’t be that guy,” often with good reason. Drunk and stupid at a party? Don’t be that guy. Park in a spot someone else shoveled out of the snow? Don’t be that guy. Chow thief at Ranger School? Definitely don’t be that guy. But sometimes situations arise where you DO need to be that guy.
Sometimes going along with the crowd is the absolute wrong thing to do. It takes guts to swim against the current, and sometimes it might cost you more than you intended. I was reminded of this when I saw a picture of a 1930s-era Nazi rally contained in a Buzzfeed article I read recently. All of the men and women of the crowd were enthusiastically giving the Nazi salute… except for “that guy.” One lone man stood, arms folded, with a look of contempt on his face. He alone was willing to buck the system and not acquiesce to something he knew was deeply flawed.
Unfortunately, as happens in many similar cases, the lone dissenter paid the price. Already on the outs with the Nazi Party for committing the cardinal sin of daring to love a Jewish woman, August Landmesser was later jailed and eventually sent to a military penal battalion, and was reportedly killed in action. Landmesser joined the Nazi Party in 1931 in hopes of gaining employment and was a member until 1935, when he was expelled for marrying a Jewish woman named Irma Eckler. Landmesser had two daughters with Eckler and it cost him jail time for Rassenschande (dishonoring the race). Landmesser is believed to have served prison time from 1938–1941, after which he was discharged to serve in the military. Landmesser, however, quickly went missing and was presumed dead. His wife, Irma, suffered a similar fate. She was jailed by the Gestapo and died during the war. The children of Irma and Landmesser were separated.
While many of us won’t face death for our beliefs, there are often negative consequences for doing or saying the right thing. We might face social ostracization, the loss of friends or even a job. We might get attacked physically, verbally, or virtually. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stand up for what’s right. You can read the original Buzzfeed article for yourself here. Sometimes all it takes is a spark to ignite a revolution. Do you have what it takes to “be that guy?”
"You Think..."
"That's why crazy people are so dangerous.
You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage."
- Michael Buckley
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