Santiago De Compostela, Galicia, Spain. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, July 5, 2021
Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/5/21: "Markets, A Look Ahead: Expect An Inflationary Shock"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/5/21:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: Expect An Inflationary Shock"
"The Ice-Cream Flavor Next Time"
"The Ice-Cream Flavor Next Time"
by Jim Kunstler
"A nation mesmerized by its own weakness wanly celebrated the long-ago and faraway memory of standing up for itself, while it passively endures the current orgy of tyrannical cancellation and suppression of anyone talking back to the present folks-in-charge. Over just a few years, this tyranny has grown like a toxic slime mold from such an unlikely place, the Internet social app ecology of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, as they took over the public arena - where the battle of ideas is supposed to live - and did the government’s dirty work, complete with adorable emojis. 😃 You’re fired!
Who will stand up to Zuck, Jack, and Sundar Pichai? Who elected these megalomaniacs boss of the USA? What will it take to end their reign of terror? Some sort of… revolution? (Shhhh! That must be a dirty word, even considering we just celebrated the high point of the American Revolution: The Declaration of Independence, signed July 4, 1776.)
Don’t look to “Joe Biden,” the nation’s putatively elected leader - about whose election back in November, 2020, you are liable to hear more about as the summer stickily unspools. Zuck, Jack, and Sundar managed to protect “Joe Biden” from the stupendous depredations of his offspring, Hunter Biden, recorded in explosive detail on a laptop the public was not allowed to hear about. Don’t look to the Department of Justice, supposedly “investigating” that horde of memos and emails detailing the Bidens’ influence-peddling to the CCP and others - they’re busy surveilling “white supremacists” on the apps run by Zuck, Jack, and Sundar. And for sure don’t look to the news media, that coalition of sell-outs and quislings, busy decoding the foreign policy moves signified in “Joe Biden’s” ice-cream flavor choices. (Rocky Road means: Oh, let China have that….)
Wondering who is actually running the “Joe Biden” government? Some of us out here are. (Do you think we’re allowed to say that?) For instance, have you tried googling the name Susan Rice lately? Remember her? Maybe not. “Joe Biden” appointed her Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. From the looks of things across the country, you’d think her plate would be heaped mighty high, what with “insurrection” and other white mischief threatening to take down the republic. Anyway, I googled “news” for her. Hardly a goshdarn thing came up that wasn’t from months ago, and most of that was sheer puffery about how accomplished she is, and what a fabulous person. Don’t you wonder what her phone log looks like? All those calls to the Obama residence, day after day, hour after hour?
All of which raises the question: is the USA just floating merrily merrily down the stream of events under the beneficent reign of “Joe Biden” (Susan Rice, Barack Obama & Co…)? Or are we, rather, freefalling? I suspect it is the latter. And toward what? It being mid-year, I will venture a few guesses. Enjoy the summer while you can because Corona Virus is coming back in the fall and watch out for people who are vaccinated getting sicker than the un-vaxed. That will be a mind-bender, as if Americans are not already utterly perplexed and bewildered by one political swindle after another. The whining will drown out even the news of more “white supremacy.” But they told us….
An autumn wave of Covid-19 (one “variant” or another) would take out whatever remains of the service economy, the restaurants struggling just now to return to normality (ha!), the hair salons, the gyms, the florists, booksellers, sports, theaters, live music venues, what-have-you. Since we no longer have much of a manufacturing economy, the only thing left would be Wall Street - which was originally designed to raise money for the manufacturing and service sector but now only raises money for itself via the seemingly magical mingling of “leverage” with “liquidity” to conjure profit from black holes where the ghosts of productivity howl.
It’s some trick but, let’s face it, it’s still just a trick. Also in that picture is the weird three-legged race of deflation tied to inflation running both uphill and downhill at the same time like a nightmare out of M.C. Escher by way of Stephanie Kelton. The USA will be toting up a $3-trillion-plus deficit just for the current fiscal year at the same time that debt becomes ever more obviously unpayable. How does debt even mean anything if there is no prospect of paying it back? Especially in the form of financial instruments, namely: bonds. And how does a financial system based on debt behave when all that is the case? I guess we’re going to find out.
My guess would be a price collapse in financial instruments - abstract things represented by money - and then a collapse of money itself. You may be thinking: not a pretty picture. I know. And we thought the last days of the Soviet Union were bad in 1990. Hoo boy, are we in for a rough ride. One can hardly imagine the social side-effects of all that, but it would seem to imply people having a rather hard time finding something to eat, or getting anything else they need. Remember good ol’ Ross Perot talking about “a giant sucking sound?” Think of that against a background of things on fire. What flavor ice-cream will “Joe Biden” be ordering on Halloween?"
Sunday, July 4, 2021
"Sorry, America, You Lost Me"
"Sorry, America, You Lost Me"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"I happened to be in a Big Box Emporium, buying two bags of whole wheat flour, when a strange revelation struck me: almost nothing in this giant emporium was made in the USA. Apologists will quickly point out that the two bags of whole wheat flour were "made in the USA," and note the US-made items in the food, liquor and beverage aisles; but wander out of these aisles and tell me how many of the hundreds of items are made in the USA (not assembled of foreign components, but made entirely in the USA). The answer is very few.
I suppose this fact is unremarkable to the majority of Americans, but my reaction was, sorry, America, you lost me: how is this not insane to depend on sweatshops thousands of miles away to make virtually everything on the shelves and warehouses of the U.S.?
It's as if a war was declared on manufacturing in America and we lost - or simply surrendered.
If you want to buy a bulldozer or electric vehicle, you can Buy American, and if you buy an iPhone, the firmware is conjured in Cupertino (the phone is assembled in China of components sourced globally). But below a certain price point and outside the snacks, magazines and beer aisles, U.S.-made good are "special order" if they're available at all.
Is this because the foreign made stuff is so high quality? No, it's virtually all garbage quality. A war was declared on quality, and America lost. Virtually nothing on the shelves of America's Big Box Emporiums and fulfillment warehouses is durable; it's either designed to fail (planned obsolescence) or it's so poorly made that it breaks, fades, rips, tears, delaminates or fails, and is dutifully hauled to the landfill as part of the entire Landfill Economy. (Forget trying to repair it; it's been designed to be impossible to repair, and all the components are junk, too.)
If stuff breaks or fails in short order, it isn't cheap, no matter what the price says. It's expensive because it must be constantly replaced. A war was declared on value, and America lost. Sorry, America, you lost me. How is the transition from quality and value to junk not a complete disaster for the nation?
So what is the business of America? Marketing. Everything boils down to marketing in America. Everything is a channel to collect consumer data that can be monetized (no, you can't monetize your own data; that's not how it works) or a channel to upsell anyone ensnared in the value chain.
You may naively think an iPhone is a device for phone calls and texts. Silly you! It's nothing but a channel to upsell you Apple services. The "settings" on my old SE still have a nag notice because "setting up" your iPhone means signing up for Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Pay, Apple Skim and Apple Scam.
My Mom-in-law is in her 90s and like many in her age group, she enjoys watching TV. She lives with us and so we handle the cable TV subscription for her. She asked us to get the commercial-free English-language network from Japan, NHK, and of course this is only available in a package of rubbish channels.
Since I have a basketball hoop for my fitness amusement and have long been a roundball fan, I clicked to the NBA channel listed. It was nothing but a series of moronic adverts. I tried again later, nothing but moronic adverts. I gave up on the third try, because it dawned on me that apparently this channel doesn't actually televise any actual basketball, it only promises to do so at some later date; and in the meantime, here is an endless stream of moronic adverts.
Sorry, America, you lost me. Marketing and upselling is not prosperity or success, it's ruination.
The list of channels that are nothing but data mining, marketing and upselling is endless in America. Every subscription service is nothing more than a channel to upsell you on "Premium services."
Social media: nothing but data mining, marketing and upselling.
Internet Search: nothing but data mining, marketing and upselling.
Media, telecommunications, banking, etc.: nothing but data mining, marketing and upselling. Look at the most profitable and highest valuation corporations in America, and their sole business model and reason to exist is data mining, marketing and upselling.
The Healthcare Borg is also nothing but data mining, marketing and upselling. If you want to get a look indicating profound suspicion of your motives and beliefs, tell your healthcare provider, "I'm over 65 and don't take any meds." Within the Borg, such a statement can only mean 1) you haven't yet signed up for Medicare/Medicaid, and we need to get you in the gravy-train pronto; 2) you're some kind of nutcase who refuses medications, or 3) you're a dangerous subversive who should be reported to Facebook as a potential extremist.
The Healthcare Borg's marketing has reached extremes of absurdity. Practitioners are under extreme pressure from Corporate HQ to bill you for something on a regular basis, and so I received increasingly frantic phone calls and emails demanding I set up a telemarketing, oops, I mean telemedicine confab with my PCP (primary care physician--the Borg loves acronyms as much as the Pentagon).
I halfway expected to be accosted on the street by thugs informing me to make a telemedicine appointment or "we're gonna have to break something." Sorry, America, you lost me. When healthcare stopped being about nurturing health, especially via basic preventative measures, and became a profit center and marketing channel, the well-being of the nation spiraled into the sewer.
While I foolishly waited for a basketball game to appear on the NBA channel - how naive of me! - I clicked through a few movie channels. The offerings were the most recent batch of the super-hero genre. As a huge fan of action films, I had hopes these might reverse my disinterest in the genre. Nope. The movies were not bad, they were simply... uninteresting and derivative.
Sorry, America, you lost me. Everything that's a derivative of something that was creative and fresh decades ago is uninteresting, and virtually everything is a derivative. America is subjected to a remake of a remake of a remake, with a switch of media being the supposed creative magic.
Star Wars 24 plus the novelized version, amusement park ride, podcast, action figure and OnlyFans pages, anyone?
America's cultural obsession with super-heroes made me wonder, in a dangerously subversive fashion, what this means beneath the superficiality of reaping reliable profits. Does it now require super-human powers to survive the onslaught of exploitation, profiteering, overwork and exposure to fanatical marketing, data mining and upselling that is life in the USA?
Or does this cultural obsession reflect our fear that we're so far gone down the road of worshiping billionaires blowing billions on space tourism that only super-heroes can save us?
Sorry, America, you lost me. Many readers will write all this off as the sour rantings of some out-of-it geezer. But ask yourself: what if everything said here is correct, but nobody dares talk about it because that might make it real?"
"Happy Birthday America"
"Happy Birthday America"
by Eric Utter
"The U.S. Capitol building has been an iconic symbol of democracy for well over two hundred years, much like the U.S. itself. It remained so through the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and too many lesser crises to count, all while remaining largely accessible to the citizens whose interests those who work there are supposed to represent. However, this Independence Day finds the Capitol off-limits to all but a select few. Our elite overseers can't be expected to open themselves up to a possible "insurrection," can they? Sad.
The tragic events of the past year and a half, and our "representatives'" reaction to them, as well as our own response, have left me wondering what the Founders and other astute political observers might say to us now if they had the chance. Then I realized they would say pretty much what they said back then. Here are some of the most profound, universal - and yet timely - words of wisdom ever uttered with regard to societies, governments, and freedom:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin. COVID-19?
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." - Benjamin Franklin.
Sound familiar? I wonder what Franklin's preferred pronouns were.
"For true patriots to be silent, is dangerous." - Samuel Adams.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson.
"But a constitution of government once changed from freedom can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever." - John Adams.
We might want to take this one to heart.
"When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty." - John Basil Barnhill.
One of the great truisms of all time.
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." - Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson was a Democrat. He would've been summarily canceled today.
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms." - Hubert H. Humphrey. Trigger warning! Humphrey was a Democrat!
"When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it." - Frédéric Bastiat. We are seeing this now with our elites on Wall Street, in Big Tech, and in government. So sad.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it." - H.L. Mencken. The most accurate description of leftists ever stated, in my humble opinion. No truer words have ever been spoken.
"I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts." - Ronald Reagan. Absolute and irrefutable.
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln.
"We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth." - Abraham Lincoln. The last quote is from Lincoln's message to Congress on December 1, 1861. It is just as true today. We are once again at a tipping point, an existential moment.
And I leave you with another quote, this one from Toby Keith's new song, "Happy Birthday America": "Seems like everyone's pissin' on the red, white, and blue. Happy birthday America, whatever's left of you."
Full screen recommended.
"A Look to the Heavens"
"You can't walk along the Milky Way. Still, under a dark sky you can explore it. To the eye the pale luminous trail of light arcing through the sky on a dark, moonless night does appear to be a path through the heavens. The glowing celestial band is the faint, collective light of distant stars cut by swaths of obscuring interstellar dust clouds.
It lies along the plane of our home galaxy, so named because it looks like a milky way. Since Galileo's time, the Milky Way has been revealed to telescopic skygazers to be filled with congeries of innumerable stars and cosmic wonders."
Chet Raymo, “We Are Such Stuff…”
“We Are Such Stuff…”
by Chet Raymo
“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again.”
“Caliban is talking to Stephano and Trinculo in Shakespeare’s “Tempest”, telling them not to be “afeard” of the mysterious place they find themselves, an island seemingly beset with magic, strangeness, ineffable presences. And you and I, and, yes, all of us, find ourselves inexplicably thrown up on this island that is the world, and we too, if we are attentive, hear the strange music, the sounds and sweet airs, that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere
No, I’m not talking about the usual ubiquitous clamor, the roar of internal combustion, the blare of the television, the beeping of mobile phones. I’m not talking about the Limbaughs and the Becks, the televangelists, the blathering politicians, the twitterers and bloggers (including this one). I’m not even talking about the exquisite music of Mozart, the poetry of Wordsworth, the theories of Einstein.
I’m talking about the sounds we hear in utter silence, in moments of repose, in the heart of darkness, when we are a little bit afraid, disoriented, off kilter. A strange music that comes from beyond our knowing, a felt meaning. You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. You’d have to be deaf not to have heard it.
Where we differ is how we describe it. Mostly, we give its source a name. Angels. Fairies. Gods or demons. Yahweh. Allah. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Nixies, E.T.s, shades and shadows. Naiads, dryads, Ariel and Puck. A host of invisible creatures who are, in one way or another, images of ourselves. And, in naming, we are a little less afraid.
And some of us are just content to listen, to take delight. Having woken to the inexplicable mystery of the world - the sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not - we let the music lull us back into a sweet slumber, a kind of dreamless dream, a reverie. Does reverie share a deep root with reverence? I don’t know.”
“I Pity You, Too...”
“Said a philosopher to a street sweeper, “I pity you. Yours is a hard and dirty task.” And the street sweeper said, “Thank you, sir. But tell me, what is your task?” And the philosopher answered saying, “I study man’s mind, his deeds and his desires.” Then the street sweeper went on with his sweeping and said with a smile, “I pity you, too.”
- Kahlil Gibran
Greg Hunter, "Using Disaster Capitalism to Control All Humans"
"Using Disaster Capitalism to Control All Humans"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Investment advisor and former Assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts contends CV19 and vaccines to cure it are all part of the “Going Direct Reset.” Fitts explains, “This is so simple at the root. The central bankers are using the government to shut down the main street economy, and then they are going direct and injecting money into the private equity firms and Wall Street who are running around the country buying things. Think of this as a leverage buyout of the world. We are being purchased with our own money. Also, we are liable. If you look at all the debt the government is issuing, our assets are liable for that debt. This is a continuation and consolidation of the financial coup that we have been taking about.”
Fitts goes on to say, “We have had a small group of people who have gotten away with crime, and crime that pays is crime that stays. Now, they are in full blossom. We have been talking about this, and many people have tried to stay in the middle of the road. Now, the message in 2021 is there is no middle of the road. You’ve got to pick sides. This is freedom or tyranny, and tyranny is slavery. We are talking about very invasive slavery because they are planning on installing the smart grid into our bodies. There will be 24/7 surveillance and control of your money. If you don’t behave, they will turn off your money. If they don’t want you to go more than five miles, your money won’t work further than five miles.”
Fitts says the entire CV19 virus and vaccines to fix the problem is simply part of the cruel and brutal plan. Fitts says, “There is no legal basis for an ‘emergency authorization’ even though they have done that. More important, if you look at what we know about the vaccine injuries, the type of vaccine injuries and the extent of them, it is shocking that these have not been shut down. We are talking about serious physical harm coming to the people who are taking them. There is recent information that has come out of the Japanese health agency, and one of the indications is we are seeing toxicity in the female organs. If you look at the damage that is being done, I am told it’s impossible to not know this before they started giving these injections. We may be looking at a full blown sterilization program.”
Fitts has much more to say in this 36 min interview. Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with Catherine Austin Fitts, publisher of "The Solari Report".
Happy Birthday America! Ray Charles, "America the Beautiful"
Full screen recommended.
Ray Charles, "America the Beautiful"
Happy birthday America!
The Poet: Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"
"Let America Be America Again"
"Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek -
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold!
Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean -
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today - O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home -
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me?
The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay -
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again -
The land that never has been yet -
And yet must be -
the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine -
the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME -
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry,
whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose -
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath -
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain -
All, all the stretch of these great green states -
And make America again!"
- Langston Hughes
Saturday, July 3, 2021
Happy Independence Day!
Have a safe and happy holiday folks!
Full screen recommended.
John Philip Sousa, "Stars and Stripes Forever"
National march of the United States of America.
"Ominous Times Ahead For Consumers; Is Your Money Safe From Cyberattacks; AI Will Replace You"
Jeremiah Babe, PM 7/3/21:
"Ominous Times Ahead For Consumers;
Is Your Money Safe From Cyberattacks; AI Will Replace You"
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "Una Mattina"
Full screen recommended.
Ludovico Einaudi, "Una Mattina"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The Flame Nebula is a stand out in optical images of the dusty, crowded star forming regions toward Orion's belt and the easternmost belt star Alnitak, a mere 1,400 light-years away. Alnitak is the bright star at the right edge of this infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope. About 15 light-years across, the infrared view takes you inside the nebula's glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds though. It reveals many stars of the recently formed, embedded cluster NGC 2024 concentrated near the center.
The stars of NGC 2024 range in age from 200,000 years to 1.5 million years young. In fact, data indicate that the youngest stars are concentrated near the middle of the Flame Nebula cluster. That's the opposite of the simplest models of star formation for a stellar nursery that predict star formation begins in the denser center of a molecular cloud core. The result requires a more complex model for star formation inside the Flame Nebula.”
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