So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, June 28, 2021
"We Do Not Make Anything in this Country - Here’s Proof'
Full screen recommended.
Dan, IAllegedly, AM 6/28/21:
"We Do Not Make Anything in this Country - Here’s Proof'
"We do not manufacture or make anything in this country. I am in LA Harbors and this is shocking to see all of the container ships coming in from China. There are thousands of empty containers that are just sitting here with no merchandise being shipped to other countries."
"Economic Market Snapshot PM 6/28/21"
"Economic Market Snapshot PM 6/28/21"
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"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
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"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/28/21:
"Bet Against The Debt Hyper-Bubble;
Economy Continues To Crater"
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
June 24th to 28th, Updated Daily
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Daily Job Cuts
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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And now, the End Game...
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Oh yeah...
"Falsehood Rules"
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
- Oscar Wilde
"Falsehood Rules"
by Jim Kunstler
"Who knew that reality could become such a squishy thing in the USA? But such are the agonies of a collapsing society that it becomes ever harder to know what’s real, especially with factions in power intent on gaslighting, manipulating, obfuscating, and coercing the raw material of public opinion, which is: what has actually happened in the past and what is happening now.
When I wrote "The Long Emergency", I expected we would be living through a period of confusion and disorder, but I didn’t know what it would feel like to go through it: a nauseating existential disorientation, like being seasick on dry land… like living in a German expressionist horror movie of the 1920s (and we know what that led to)… like being held prisoner inside Franz Kafka’s castle: an immersion in totalizing falsehood.
The collapse of authority is especially striking and disturbing now because ground zero for it is the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the very place that is charged with determining what is true and what is false, what is real and what is unreal, and especially what is okay, and what is not okay.
The collapse of authority at DOJ got sickening traction after the election of 2016, when FBI Director James Comey and his underlings, along with many high officials at its parent agency, DOJ, undertook a campaign to disable and expel the winner of that election, starting before his inauguration. The Russia Collusion operation was the epitome of falsehood concocted in bad faith, and the actions taken in it were never adjudicated - though an ectoplasm named John Durham is floating somewhere out in the national ether still delegated to make cases. Leaving all that hanging this long has been a grievous injury to the country’s identity as a place on this earth where fair play was supposed to be normal.
The Mueller Investigation was another insult to the public interest, devised to distract and cover up the all the previous seditious bad faith of Comey & Company, and the C-suite at DOJ - and, of course, the Special Counsel came up with absolutely nothing actionable, which was stunning considering the resources behind it, and the time spent. At a Senate hearing about it in 2018, Robert Mueller himself claimed to be unacquainted with key characters in his own investigation and key pieces of evidence. His performance was worse than not reassuring - he appeared to be lying or incompetent, or pretending to be incompetent, and since that moment he has gone-to-ground… untouchable.
Impeachment No. 1 was supposedly about a phone call that the President made to his counterpart in Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky, regarding suspicious activity of one Hunter Biden receiving large sums of money from a gas company there while his father was Vice-president. At the time, the FBI (and the DOJ) did not disclose their possession of a laptop computer owned by Hunter Biden containing hundreds of memoranda and emails detailing the Biden family’s lucrative business dealings in Ukraine and several other foreign countries, involving sums of money far greater than the Burisma Company of Ukraine was paying Joe Biden’s son, and how the income was split between the family members. In other words, evidence that then-Vice-president Joe Biden himself was on the take from foreign countries, including companies linked directly with the communist party of China. Not important, you think? Not germane to the impeachment?
Why was that information not turned over to the president’s lawyers during the initial hearings and then the impeachment trial itself? That has never been adequately addressed, not even a little, and largely because the mainstream media does not want to know, and didn’t ask, while the alt.media does not have access to ask the officials who might know - and Congress, under Mrs. Pelosi and Chuck Schumer certainly didn’t want to ask or know. Do you appreciate how damaging this act of institutional dishonesty was.
Then there was the election of 2020, held under the Covid-19 emergency, with new rules about mail-in voting that lent themselves to fraud - or so declared former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, who ran a commission on election reform in 2005 - and that appears to be exactly what happened. The specious and dishonest claim is made by the putative winners that the matter was completely settled in the courts post-election. That is simply not true. The actual evidence was not entertained, most particularly not by the Supreme Court, which declined on the basis of “standing,” a mere point of procedure.
Now there is one official forensic audit of the 2020 election underway in Maricopa County, Arizona, (the Phoenix metro area), ordered by the State Senate, and some conclusions from phase one, involving the paper ballots, are due to be released this week, with additional phases to come concerning the Dominion voting machines. Many other state legislatures sent delegations to Arizona to learn the ins-and-outs of conducting a forensic audit, and they are making noises about actually doing it.
So, in stepped Attorney General Merrick Garland. At the start of the Arizona audit, he sent a letter to the Arizona State Senate threatening to use the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ to halt the audit on the basis of depriving voters of their civil rights. Arizona responded by promising to jail any federal officials who laid their hands on any ballots. That was the end of that gambit for now - they may try it again in phase two.
In the meantime, a county judge in Georgia (one Brian Amero) has ruled that 147,000-odd ballots alleged to have chain-of-custody problems must be made available for inspection, and also that five members of the Fulton County (Atlanta Metro Area) Board of Elections are now individually parties to the lawsuit brought by nine Georgia voters, and may be subject to deposition (being questioned under oath). That is believed to be the beginning of an effort to conduct a full audit in Georgia.
So, again, in steps Attorney General Merrick Garland with his Civil Rights Division, led by political activist Kristen Clarke, bringing a lawsuit against the Georgia election reform act passed earlier this year - a shot over Georgia’s bow, shall we say. Ms. Clarke happens to be a colleague of Georgia activist Stacey Abrams, a former Democratic candidate for governor. Ms. Abrams is also a part-owner of a company, NOWaccount, that does payroll for a private company called Happy Faces, which furnished dozens of poll workers to tally the 2020 election in Georgia, as well as the 2021 US Senate runoff election that put two Democrats, John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, in office.
Elections are supposed to be conducted by public officials, not by private entities. Supposedly, the Georgia election officials turned to Happy Faces because it was a way to avoid hiring workers for less than 30 hours-a-week, which would have otherwise required providing them with health care under ObamaCare, the ACA Act. Was that legal? It has not been adjudicated.
Nor has the much bigger scandal of a private Chicago-based non-profit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which received $350-million from Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to arrange grants targeted at swing districts in Democratic strongholds such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, for the purpose of hiring ballot harvesters, among other activities. Mr. Zuckerberg met with Kristen Clarke, Stacey Abrams, Al Sharpton, and other Democratic activists at a dinner in 2019, at which he promised to help. Did his help cross any legal boundaries? It has not been investigated, nor has the use of the company he runs, Facebook, in its campaign to influence public opinion by blocking news and deleting accounts of non-Democrats exclusively.
Assistant AG Kristen Clarke’s DOJ lawsuit against Georgia’s election reform act alleges that it “imposes substantial fines on third-party organizations, churches, and advocacy groups that send follow up absentee ballot applications, and requires new and unnecessarily stringent identification requirements to obtain an absentee ballot.” In other words, the Georgia law seeks to restrict the activities of private, non-official entities - such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life - sprinkling gargantuan sums of money over key election districts to influence the outcome. Or for companies such as Happy Faces to supply activists for counting votes. That is how disingenuous Merrick Garland’s DOJ is, now a strictly political operation.
We haven’t nearly seen the end to any of this, nor the reaction that it is liable to provoke among citizens who have had enough of being played by their own government. Think about all that while you make plans to celebrate the Fourth of July, a holiday that commemorates an earlier time when the people of this land had enough of being played by their rulers."
Sunday, June 27, 2021
"Unforgettable: South Georgia Man Holds On To True Love"
Full screen recommended.
"Unforgettable: South Georgia Man Holds On To True Love"
"True love never has a happy ending because true love never ends."
Clarence Purvis passed away Friday, April 23 at Ogeechee Area Hospice.
"Endless Cycle Of Creation, Crisis, Collapse And Rebirth"
"Endless Cycle Of Creation, Crisis, Collapse And Rebirth"
by Hardscrabble Farmer
"A few years back the pigs were turning up the soil behind the house and uncovered an old worn down iron ax head. There wasn’t more than an inch of the bit left forward of the hole. I keep it around to remind me of how something that you imagine is impervious to wear- after all the ax chops the wood- can be worn down by time and the much less robust wood it repeatedly worked.
To think of how valuable a pioneer ax was to someone carving out a homestead in the midst of an impenetrable forest that they would use it up before discarding it, to imagine how many times it must have struck to have given up four inches of hardened steel to the task puts our own lives in perspective.
We are used up by life, and yet we roll out of bed every morning and get back at it whatever it is we do only to vanish at the end with all that work left undone and even more that has never been taken up.
God or Nature uses us like that ax to prepare a living space for all of Creation. We are the raw ore, cleansed in the crucible of our birth, fashioned in the forge of life itself, shaped by the anvil of our family, used to the point of failure by time only to be returned to the earth from which we- like the ax- once came.
This is an endless cycle of creation, crisis, collapse and rebirth. It will only end when the last of our species is gone and all that any of us can do, all that we are capable of is to be as utile in our own time as we can be, to fulfill whatever role our shape was destined to do in its time.
Be a good ax and keep cutting until your bit is worn away."
Hat tip to The Burning Platform.
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"Hours and days and months and years go by; the past
returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know;
but whatever the time gives us in which we live,
we should therefore be content."
- Cicero, “On Old Age”
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"Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says, 'I am coming.'"
~ Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)
"100 Survival Items You Forgot To Buy Before The Imminent Economic Collapse"
Full screen recommended.
"100 Survival Items You Forgot To Buy
Before The Imminent Economic Collapse"
by Epic Economist
You can never tell exactly when economic collapse will occur, but you can pay attention to the signs of a looming catastrophe and head out before it's too late. We're in a new era of unexpected emergencies, cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions, and growing social and geopolitical tensions. The economic collapse that started in 2020 was only the initial stage of a much bigger crisis the entire planet is about to face. And it feels like a single black swan event can trigger a cascade of systemic failures that will lead us to the beginning of the end of the world as we know it. We can't afford to sit and wait to see what happens. In fact, that's exactly what we shouldn't be doing. We must strategize and get ready to leave before panic and chaos take over. That's what prepping is all about. So even before an emergency occurs, we must be prepared to deal with it, otherwise, we might be consumed by desperation.
Many threatening events have been lining up to what appears to be THE perfect storm. And even though you might not have enough time or resources to build up your own shelter, or turn your home into one and create your own stockpile, that doesn't mean you can't escape from the storm and start over somewhere safe. Survivalism is about adapting to all sorts of situations using your knowledge, skills, and creativity. That's why bugging out when things go south can be a life-saving choice for you. However, you must be ready for that too, and to do so, you can start packing up a bug-out bag with the supplies you will need. As every person has their own needs, some choices are quite personal. That's why today, we gathered a list of survival items people usually forget to buy and put in their bug-out bags to prepare for the next stage of the economic collapse.
Before anyone says "It's just impossible to carry 100 items," we want to remind you that these are simply suggestions. Just pick the supplies that will fit the best for your bugging-out plan. We honestly do not expect you to fit all 100 items into your bug-out bag, because even if you managed to do that, it would probably be too heavy. Preparedness is also knowing your limitations and respecting them. Your bug-out bag should weigh about 15% of your body weight if you’re in good shape, and around 20% of your body weight if you’re in great shape. Choose your supplies carefully, because they will be all that you will own during an irreversible economic collapse. Take into account your own preferences, your skills, your region, who will be with you, and so forth. Take some time to learn from experienced preppers, such as those with Urban Survival Website, and Ask A Prepper. And don't forget to pay close attention to the menacing events that are emerging everywhere - in that way, you might not know when a catastrophe will occur, but you will know exactly when it's time to run. So keep tuned and keep your eyes open to the challenges that are coming for us."
Must Watch! “Get Out Of The Twilight Zone; Warning Signs Are Flashing Red; Sacrifice To Win; California Outage”
Jeremiah Babe, PM 6/27/21:
“Get Out Of The Twilight Zone; Warning Signs Are
Flashing Red; Sacrifice To Win; California Outage”
Musical Interlude: The Moody Blues, “Blue World”
Full screen recommended.
The Moody Blues, “Blue World”
"A Look to the Heavens"
“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.
The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
"Acceptance..."
"Acceptance is a crucial step forward for those who prefer the idea of living this life over simply existing within it. Accept all that you've said and what you've done, because you cannot change your past. Accept the idea of the unknown, because the future is the unknown waiting patiently to reveal itself. Accept the person you have become thus far in your journey, because you are the only person who will be there with you when you finish it. Do all of this so that you may never find yourself having to accept regret that haunts you at two a.m., leaving you sweaty and broken hearted. All you have is this minute; not this hour, or this day, or this year. Live in this minute so that you won't get stuck simply existing with your guilty past, or with nothing but anxiety for the future."
- Margaret E. Rise
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."
"Not Knowing..."
“Not knowing you can’t do something
is sometimes all it takes to do it.”
- Ally Carter
The Poet: William Stafford, ”Today”
”Today”
“The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays
come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
you could close your eyes and go on full of light.
And it is already begun, the chord
that will shiver glass, the song full of time
bending above us. Outside, a sign:
a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant
has passed through town, widening streets, touching
the ground, shouldering away the stars.”
- William Stafford
“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”
“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”
by MN Gordon
“In 1976, economist Herbert Stein, father of Ben Stein, the economics professor in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, observed that U.S. government debt was on an unsustainable trajectory. He, thus, established Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Stein may have been right in theory. Yet the unsustainable trend of U.S. government debt outlasted his life. Herbert Stein died in 1999, several decades before the crackup. Those reading this may not be so lucky.
Sometimes the end of the world comes and goes, while some of us are still here. We believe our present episode of debt, deficits, and state sponsored economic destruction, is one of these times.. We’ll have more on this in just a moment. But first, let’s peer back several hundred years. There we find context, edification, and instruction.
In 1696, William Whiston, a protégé of Isaac Newton, wrote a book. It had the grandiose title, “A New Theory of the Earth from its Original to the Consummation of all Things.” In it he proclaimed, among other things, that the global flood of Noah had been caused by a comet. Mr. Whiston took his book very serious. The good people of London took it very serious too. Perhaps it was Whiston’s conviction. Or his great fear of comets. But, for whatever reason, it never occurred to Londoners that he was a Category 5 quack.
Like Neil Ferguson, and his mathematical biology cohorts at Imperial College, London, Whiston’s research filled a void. Much like today’s epidemiological models, the science was bunk. Nonetheless, the results supplied prophecies of the apocalypse to meet a growing demand. It was just a matter of time before Whiston’s research would cause trouble…
Judgement Day: In 1736, William Whiston crunched some data and made some calculations. He projected these calculations out and saw the future. And what he witnessed scared him mad. He barked. He ranted. He foamed at the mouth to anyone who would listen. Pretty soon he’d stirred up his neighbors with a prophecy that the world would be destroyed on October 13th of that year when a comet would collide with the earth.
Jonathan Swift, in his work, “A True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London on a Rumour of the Day of Judgment,” quoted Whiston: “Friends and fellow-citizens, all speculative science is at an end: the period of all things is at hand; on Friday next this world shall be no more. Put not your confidence in me, brethren; for tomorrow morning, five minutes after five, the truth will be evident; in that instant the comet shall appear, of which I have heretofore warned you. As ye have heard, believe. Go hence, and prepare your wives, your families, and friends, for the universal change.”
Clergymen assembled to offer prayers. Churches filled to capacity. Rich and paupers alike feared their judgement. Lawyers worried about their fate. Judges were relieved they were no longer lawyers. Teetotalers got smashed. Drunks got sober. Bankers forgave their debtors. Criminals, tobe executed, expressed joy.
The wealthy gave their money to beggars. Beggars gave it back to the wealthy. Several rich and powerful gave large donations to the church; no doubt, reserving first class tickets to heaven. Many ladies confessed to their husbands that one or more of their children were bastards. Husbands married their mistresses. And on and on…
The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, had to officially deny this prediction to ease the public consternation. But it did little good. Crowds gathered at Islington, Hampstead, and the surrounding fields, to witness the destruction of London, which was deemed the “beginning of the end.” Then, just like Whiston said, a comet appeared. Prayers were made. Deathbed confessions were shared. And at the moment of maximum fear, something remarkable happened: the world didn’t end. The comet did not collide with earth. It was merely a near miss.
In The Long Run We Are All Alive: The experience of Whiston, and his pseudoscience prophecy, shows that predictions of the end of the world come and go while people still remain. Sometimes the fallout of these predictions, and the foolishness they provoke, is limited. Other times the foolishness they provoke leads to catastrophe. Here’s what we mean…
“In the long run we are all dead,” said 20th Century economist and Fabian socialist, John Maynard Keynes. This was Keynes rationale for why governments should borrow from the future to fund economic growth today. Of course, politicians love an academic theory that gives them cover to intervene in the economy. This is especially so when it justifies spending other people’s money to buy votes. Keynesian economics, and in particular, counter-cyclical stimulus, does just that.
U.S. politicians have attempted to borrow and spend the nation to prosperity for the last 80 years. Over the past decade, the Federal Reserve has aggressively printed money to fund Washington’s epic borrowing binge. The world as it was once known – where a dollar was as good as gold – has come and gone. Today, in life after the end of that world, we are witnessing the illusion of wealth, erected by four generations of borrowing and spending, crumble before our eyes. Moreover, contrary to Keynes, in the long run we are not all dead. In fact, in the long run we are all very much alive. And we are all living with the compounding consequences of shortsighted economic policies.”
"Noontime LALATE 6/27/21: Fourth Stimulus Check Update Today"
"Noontime LALATE 6/27/21:
Fourth Stimulus Check Update Today"
"The Economy Is Worse Now Than Ever"
Full screen recommended.
"The Economy Is Worse Now Than Ever"
Success Attraction, 6/27/21:
"Peter Schiff Interview with Ben Shapiro on
economy, money printing, taxes, inflation and more."
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