Monday, December 20, 2021

"The World As I See It: Albert Einstein's Thoughts on the Meaning of Life"

"The World As I See It:
Albert Einstein's Thoughts on the Meaning of Life"
by Paul Ratner

"Albert Einstein was one of the worlds most brilliant thinkers, influencing scientific thought immeasurably. He was also not shy about sharing his wisdom about other topics, writing essays, articles, letters, giving interviews and speeches. His opinions on social and intellectual issues, that do not come from the world of physics, give an insight into the spiritual and moral vision of the scientist, offering much to take to heart.

The collection of essays and ideas "The World As I See It" gathers Einsteins thoughts from before 1935, when he was as the preface says, at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age.

In the book, Einstein comes back to the question of the purpose of life on several occasions. In one passage, he links it to a sense of religiosity. What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it many any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life, wrote Einstein.

Was Einstein himself religious? Raised by secular Jewish parents, he had complex and evolving spiritual thoughts. He generally seemed to be open to the possibility of the scientific impulse and religious thoughts coexisting. "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," said Einstein in his 1954 essay on science and religion.

Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einsteins spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes.

Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein's pantheism a sexed-up atheism, but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that's beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as a superior spirit, a superior mind and a spirit vastly superior to men. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he was quite familiar with various religious teachings, including a strong knowledge of Jewish religious texts.

In another passage from 1934, Einstein talks about the value of a human being, reflecting a Buddhist-like approach: "The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."

This theme of liberating the self is also echoed by Einstein later in life, in a 1950 letter to console a grieving father Robert S. Marcus: "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind."

In case you are wondering whether Einstein saw value in material pursuits, here's him talking about accumulating wealth in 1934, as part of the "The World As I See It": "I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?"
Freely download "The World As I See It", by Albert Einstein, here:

"What Can We Know?"

"What can we know? What are we all?
Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite,
with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human
 race proved to be nothing more than the story of 
an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump."
- David Ormsby-Gore

The Poet: John Clare, “I Am”

“I Am”
Read by Tom O'Bedlam

"I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in life and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best - 
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below - above the vaulted sky."

- John Clare

About the poet: John Clare (13 July, 1793- 20 May, 1864) was an English poet. He was born in Northamptonshire, England in the family of a farm laborer, and lived most of his life in abject poverty. His life was marred by bouts of mania and depression, and for the final 23 years of his life, Clare was locked in an insane asylum.

Clare's poetic work mostly showcases his celebratory representations of the English countryside. In his time, Clare was commonly known as "Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" His early work delights both in nature and the cycle of the rural year. "I Am" is a commentary on the complexity of existence.
“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering - these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for.”
- “Dead Poets Society”

"The Bewildered Herd..."

“The bewildered herd is a problem. We've got to prevent their roar and trampling. We've got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like "Support our troops!" You've got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they're properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they're not competent to think. Therefore it's important to distract them and marginalize them.”
- Noam Chomsky

The Daily "Near You?"

Rhododendron, Oregon, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Beware of Bank Jugging and the Worst Retail Christmas Ever"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 12/20/21:
"Beware of Bank Jugging and the Worst Retail Christmas Ever"
"Bank jugging is a huge problem. Have you heard of this growing problem? Crime continues at a horrible pace. The economy is growing tired and can’t be held up."

"The Omicron Fake-out"

"The Omicron Fake-out"
by Jim Kunstler

"My guess is that Americans, by and large, cherish Christmas more than they fear the latest Covid-19 government-sponsored terror campaign, and that the globalist tyrants - or whatever you want to call them - behind “Joe Biden” have now gone a mind-f**k too far. Omicron is all they have left, and it’s not much to work with. Spreads easily, mild presentation, immunizes naturally. What’s not to like about this variant of SARS-CoV-2? Kind of looks like an off-ramp from the Covid-19 mass formation psychosis nightmare.

Of course, the last thing the authorities want is an end to the pandemic panic. The Emergency Self-Authorized President Anthony Fauci was all over cable news Sunday night with dire warnings about a winter-of-death! “We have a tough few months ahead,” he warned. “Get boosted!” A CNN blonde told the nation: “The case for boosters has never been stronger.”

Is that so? Omicron supposedly started in South Africa some weeks ago and Covid deaths there are at an 18-month low. The existing “vaccines” appear to be completely ineffective against omicron, so how is more of that stuff going to help? And then why all the hysteria about vaxxing up the vaxx-resistant? Insofar as the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines present not insignificant risks of harmful-to-fatal side effects, plus being ineffective, what is the prudent bet there? Speaking of which, will the public even be able to discern whether the alleged winter death surge is a result of Covid or of adverse reactions to the vaxxes? My money would be on adverse vaxx events.

Why is there absolutely no talk - except in the state of Florida, run by Governor Ron DeSantis - about comprehensive early treatment of Covid? Why is the CDC not setting up early treatment centers around the USA, where people with symptoms can receive monoclonal antibody infusions and kits of well-known, cheap, safe and effective oral medicines that can be used easily at home to defeat the virus? (Those medicines have been surreptitiously outlawed by our own CDC, you know.) Is it outlandish to suppose that the official “Joe Biden” government objective is to allow as many people to die as possible in order to keep the public terrorized? Meanwhile, they’ve provoked the public to line up for Covid tests using a PCR system so discredited for Covid detection that months ago the CDC scheduled it to go offline on December 31st, (And, uh, why the long time-lag between the decision and the action? Answer: it allows the CDC to falsely jack up case numbers until the year’s bitter end.)

With the apparent defeat of the Build Back Better boondoggle, following a long list of other failures, the “Joe Biden” regime’s main chance for retaining any power is to keep the Covid panic going long enough to re-run the mail-in voting scams of 2020 in the 2022 congressional elections. It’s a weak play, though, since the opposition is fully onto it. And if the Democratic Party loses as many seats in Congress and the Senate as it deserves to lose, not a single piece of their toxic legislation will see daylight until the mastodons come home in the next ice age. Also consider that Democratic Party operatives by the limousine-load will be hauled in to testify before opposition-controlled committees and many of these will be subject to criminal referrals.

Anyway, that election is a long ways away while events are moving fast and furiously. Chiefly, the regime’s favorite narratives are falling apart along with its poll numbers and the collapsing economy. “Joe Biden” is programmed to make a pitch for Christmas lockdowns on Tuesday night. I’m sure that’ll go over well (not), on top of the renewed threat of vaxx mandates that will get millions of working people worried and pissed-off about losing their livelihoods - as they go about their frantic last-minute Christmas shopping while making plans for family gatherings that may be cancelled (including airline tickets). Let’s go, Brandon!

One useful idea floating around the Internet lately is for a nationwide general strike to take place on January Fourth, the first back-to-work day after the holiday. It’s simple: don’t show up for work and don’t spend a nickel. The message will be clear: Just stop it! Stop the coercion, stop the lying, stop the shenanigans, and stop the mind-f**kery. If that event comes off, a lot of people will be free for the day - maybe a few days - to take to the streets and demonstrate their principled opposition to illegitimate political leadership. ”Joe Biden” and company will jump up and down, calling it another “insurrection.” Guess what: nobody will believe them."

Gregory Mannarino, "New Lockdowns Begin! Moronic Fear Grips The Markets; Prepare For A Pan-Selloff At The Open"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/20/21:
"New Lockdowns Begin! Moronic Fear Grips The Markets;
 Prepare For A Pan-Selloff At The Open"

"How It Really Is"

 

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 12/20/21"

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 12/20/21"
"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
"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.
Dec. 16th to 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...

"Ive Studied Nuclear War For 35 Years - You Should Be Worried"

Full screen recommended.
"Ive Studied Nuclear War For 35 Years - You Should Be Worried"
A talk by Brian Toon, TEDxMileHigh

"For the first time in decades, it's hard to ignore the threat of nuclear war. But as long as you're far from the blast, you're safe, right? Wrong. In this sobering talk, atmospheric scientist Brian Toon explains how even a small nuclear war could destroy all life on earth - and what we can do to prevent it. A professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Brian Toon investigates the causes of the ozone hole, how volcanic eruptions alter the climate, how ancient Mars had flowing rivers, and the environmental impacts of nuclear war. He contributed to the U.N.’s Nobel Peace Prize for climate change and holds numerous scientific awards, including two NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. He is an avid woodworker. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community."

"Washington Spits In the Kremlin’s Eye"

"Washington Spits In the Kremlin’s Eye"
by Paul Craig Roberts

"NATO promises to keep expanding, despite Russian objections
The two-bit punk Washington puppet, Jens Stoltenberg, responded for Washington to Russian Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Ryabkov by spitting in the Kremlin’s eye. Minister Ryabkov made it clear, finally after much too long of a time, that NATO would not be permitted to advance any further. But, as I said would be the case, Washington did not hear.
 Stoltenberg, a non-entity of no consequence, just told the world’s preeminent military power to go to hell.

As for the Kremlin’s opposition to Ukraine being incorporated into NATO, Washington’s puppet declared: “whether Ukraine joins NATO is up to the bloc’s member states and its leadership, and that Moscow doesn’t have input into the decision.”

Will the Kremlin pretend the strong rebuff didn’t happen? Stoltenberg is not going to let them: “NATO countries are already training Ukrainian troops and consulting with them,” he bragged. “They are conducting joint exercises and providing military supplies and technology.” As Biden and his Secretary of State already said: “We don’t give a hoot about Russian red lines. The exceptional US has red lines, not those inconsequential Russian jerks.”

What now will the Kremlin do? Will Lavrov rush out and “correct” Ryabkov so the Kremlin can continue to avoid the reality? Indeed, what can the Kremlin actually do? Having misplaced its trust in Western democracy, reasonableness, dialogue, negotiation, the Kremlin has been led by its pro-American intellectual class, its pro-Western Atlanticist Integrationists, and CIA-financed protesters inside Russia down a blind alley. Trapped in a blind alley, how is the Kremlin going to get out?

The West was astonished when suddenly the Russian foot came down in Syria and Washington’s overthrow of the Syrian government was blocked by Russian military force. With the West stunned, that was the time for the Kremlin to settle on its terms all other issues, but the vision simply was not there. The Kremlin worried that someone in the West might not speak well of them.

All the Kremlin has achieved is to show that it naively believes in all the professed values of the West that the West most certainly does not believe in.

I have said from the beginning that Russian foreign policy has been a mistake that is leading to nuclear war. We are at the point where Russia must back down or show in a highly convincing way that it will, indeed, use its superior force.

To comprehend how poorly the entire Western world is led, consider that while this most serious situation developed off the radar the idiot Western governments were preoccupied with boosting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry with an orchestrated fake “Covid pandemic” by marketing a “vaccine” that does not protect against Covid but does cause serious injuries and deaths.

Something has happened to human intelligence everywhere on the globe. Hype prevails over reality. Unimportant issues silence important issues. Truth is less preferred than illusion and delusion. Avoid reality at all cost. Pretend. Pretend. The utter fools who comprise the governments of the world don’t see what is coming."
Related:

Sunday, December 19, 2021

"A Market Veteran Just Revealed The Perfect Storm Is Brewing For Stocks To Suffer A Massive Crash!"

Full screen recommended.
"A Market Veteran Just Revealed The Perfect Storm 
Is Brewing For Stocks To Suffer A Massive Crash!"
by Epic Economist

"A 29-year market veteran is sounding the alarm about a devasting stock market crash as the Fed starts tapering and rising interest rates next week, effectively pulling its support out of the market. Jon Wolfenbarger, who runs BullandBearProfits.com and is a former investment analyst for Allianz Global Investors and JP Morgan, argues that the only positive thing keeping the market from falling apart was support from the Federal Reserve, which is now gone. As Wolfenbarger pointed out, the end of the policy typically is an indication of a poor future for stock returns and inflated valuations.

"This means bad news for investors," said Wolfenbarger during an interview with Business Insider. "That completely eliminates the main bull case that I think most investors are relying on". The financial analyst highlighted that a perfect storm for stocks to suffer a big crash is looming on the horizon. Exceedingly high valuations increase the odds of a brutal stock market crash since stock prices will have to sharply readjust to come back down to earth. At this point, the Warren Buffett indicator, which compares stock valuations to GDP, is at an all-time high, while the Schiller price-to-earnings ratio is at levels last seen during the peak of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. However, behind soaring valuations is an unsustainably bullish sentiment, which Wolfenbarger as a contrarian indicator. Wolfenbarger said that the initial pullback will be of about 20 percent. But the Fed tightening will trigger a bigger sell-off, that will make the market drop by an additional 60 percent.

Similarly, Seeking Alpha's market analyst Robbe Delaet argues that the first burst marks 'phase one' of the bubble collapse. And we're now headed to phase two. In a recent article, Delaet explained why so many investors are scratching their heads about what's going on in the stock market right now. Even though indices keep trading at all-time highs, a series of individual stocks are dramatically crashing. "Here's the explanation," he wrote: "The epic 2021 bubble, which I have been warning for several times, has already collapsed," he says. However, due to the very specific characteristics of a bubble collapse, the indices continued rallying, but as we enter phase two, that's about to change. The first part of the 2021 bubble burst began with the collapse of small-cap and meme stocks.

The first bubble to pop was fueled by a new wave of investors, mostly millennials who have no concern about valuations and see no problem in taking huge amounts of risk, the analyst explains. Many of those new investors still believe that these high growth rates are going to persist for many years. But "following the herd by buying hyped stocks can be a very costly mistake which I strongly discourage investors to do," Delaet warns. This group of investors loved to pour giant piles of money into extremely expensive hype stocks. But as companies started to release their growth reports based on real economic prospects, these hyped small-cap stocks have been hit by an outlook of little to no revenues in the near term. During the dot-com bubble, the exact same thing happened. Several unprofitable, hyped small-cap stocks aggressively dropped in 1999, but it took until March 2000 for the general Nasdaq Index to peak and then fatally crash.

It is in phase two that we will see growth stocks plunging to record-lows while the tech bubble burst finishes its course. Most of the new investors thought that growth stocks provided similar potential with lower risks. That could be true if the economy was stable enough to support growth. But that's not the case right now. This year, the amount of money that went into these stocks was so mind-blowing that many of them gained hundreds of percentages points. "As a consequence of valuations having grown to unsustainable levels, these investments became extremely risky as well. As valuation risks became unbearable and macro-economic challenges increased, this asset class started to sell off significantly in November," he wrote.

All signs are pointing to an imminent disaster, or as Wolf Richter from wolfstreet.com has put it: "This market doesn’t need more alarm bells – they’re already clanging and jangling all over the place." This extremely over-valued stock market is currently capitalizing on an economy that might exist by the year 2060, but not today. Leverage is starting to fade as companies report their declining quarterly earnings. And Fed tapering is only the tip of the iceberg for the stock market. Many problems are lying under the surface, and the truth is that the financial system is terminally broken. At this point, a stock market crash is not only a matter of logic but of gravity. Buyers beware."

Musical Interlude: Gnomusy, "Footprints on the Sea"

Gnomusy, "Footprints on the Sea"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"The beautiful Trifid Nebula is a cosmic study in contrasts. Also known as M20, it lies about 5,000 light-years away toward the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. A star forming region in the plane of our galaxy, the Trifid does illustrate three different types of astronomical nebulae; red emission nebulae dominated by light from hydrogen atoms, blue reflection nebulae produced by dust reflecting starlight, and dark nebulae where dense dust clouds appear in silhouette. 
But the red emission region roughly separated into three parts by obscuring dust lanes is what lends the Trifid its popular name. Pillars and jets sculpted by newborn stars, below and left of the emission nebula's center, appear in famous Hubble Space Telescope close-up images of the region. The Trifid Nebula is about 40 light-years across. Just too faint to be seen by the unaided eye, it almost covers the area of a full moon in planet Earth's sky."

"When I Hear..."

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard,"
I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"
- Sydney Harris

"What Keeps You Going..."

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"
- Barbara Kingsolver

“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.”
- Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”

"The Future..."

Real church sign...

“Of Time, Turnings, Stars & Wars”

“Of Time, Turnings, Stars & Wars”
by Doug "Uncola" Lynn

"Like nature, history is full of processes that cannot happen in reverse. Just as the laws of entropy do not allow a bird to fly backward, or droplets to regroup at the top of a waterfall, history has no rewind button. Like the seasons of nature, it moves only forward."
- Strauss and Howe: “The Fourth Turning”

"Contemplating the concept of time can be quite confounding, to say the least. In the extreme, considering the paradoxical nature of time’s passage will stretch the mind causing thoughts to invert like taffy in a rolling machine or light yielding to the gravity of an Event Horizon before the edge of a Black Hole in deep space.

Knowing Einstein was right means time stops at the speed of light. Surely then, waves of thought must generate their own specific gravity to capture both light and sound, together. Our eyes and ears record each moment and translate events into high definition digital memories which we can recall upon demand and view as celluloid film stock in a dark room.

However, in this dimension, there is another aspect at play that comes attached to time. Space: The final frontier. These conflagrate together and then separate at any given moment never to coalesce again in quite the same way. Time can be recalled like a ghost, or a spectral hologram, on the mind’s screen, but the space will have changed and dissipated entropically like dust digested in the amorphous bellies of Stephen King’s Langoliers.

To put it another way, time changes everything. A couple of years ago one of my offspring had a milestone birthday so we went to a morning movie matinee followed by an expensive late lunch at a fine dining venue. It was there where I chewed my food and contemplated the confounding conceptual continuations of space and time.

The movie was the Star Wars flick, "Rogue One" and the state-of-the-art theater featured stadium seating and a massive UltraScreen Deluxe® with Dolby® Atmospheric Surround-sound which, according to the advertisements, offered the “ultimate moviegoing experience”. As I watched the story unfold in REAL D 3D® with my 3D glasses in place while eating my popcorn and nestled comfortably in the red leather DreamLoungerTM recliner, I thought to myself how I really am in the future. In the lobby after the movie, I checked Drudge on my smartphone and learned Carrie Fisher had died in Los Angeles.

This made me remember way back to my past when I was a preteen and first saw the original Star Wars. I watched it with several friends in an ornately vintage, and solitary, theater in my small town. Through the patina of time and the opaque looking glass of my mind’s eye, I remember hoping no one would tell my parents, or my orthodontist, that I was eating popcorn and lemon drops with new braces on my teeth. Although I was an avid reader back then with a keen appreciation for science fiction, I had not seen a film before that captivated me like the first Star Wars. The excellent storyline, superior special effects, and the characters in the film really made an impression on me.

If my current self could go back to that day, I would meet the geeky, metal-mouthed kid after the movie and tell him some things. I would also mention how, in 39 years, he will celebrate his progeny’s birthday who, at that time, will be several years older than he is now and how he will be seeing another Star Wars movie on the very same day that Princess Leia died in real life.

The ironic confluence of time and space, indeed.

I am sure the mini-me at that time would have pegged me as a brain-damaged old fool and, in turn, would have attempted to persuade me into buying him and his friends a six-pack of beer, a fifth of peppermint Schnapps, a Playboy and a can of chew. After all, according to "The Fourth Turning," by Strauss and Howe, the year 1977 was two and a half “Turnings” ago. Back then, the future wasn’t set. Or was it?

“We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik’s Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime. There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted – but that’s an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we’re in deep denial.”
- Strauss and Howe, “The Fourth Turning”

Written by the historians William Strauss and Neil Howe, “The Fourth Turning” was published in 1997 and was, at that time, boldly proclaimed by the authors to be an “American Prophecy”. The book is fascinating in that it very thoroughly documents recorded cycles of history across multiple cultures and eras in order to predict the timing of “America’s next rendezvous with destiny”.

Processing almost like a Cliff’s Notes summary, the book identifies the timelines of historical events and matches them to specific life cycles of people in the form of generational archetypes. What is also interesting is how Strauss and Howe quantify and compare the recordings of history of multiple authors throughout the millennia to find uncanny comparisons in both historical and generational cycles.  Ironically, the comparisons stand up not only to the test of time regarding recorded events in history, but the generational turnings and archetypes also translate to ancient literature and other writings as well, ranging from Homer’s Iliad to the Holy Bible.

The concept of time is discussed in the context of both circular and linear perspectives as Strauss and Howe describe what is called the “saeculum”. The saeculum represents a “long human life”, or approximately 80 to 90 years comprising of four turnings each lasting about 20 to 22 years.

Just as there are four seasons consisting of spring, summer, fall and winter, there are also four phases of a human life represented in childhood, young adulthood, middle age and old age, or elderhood. As each phase of human life represents approximately 20 years, so is each generational archetype identified within historical cycles, or turnings, as follows:

The generational archetypes experience the historical turnings according their life stage, or age. Amazingly, history shows a consistent pattern in how the generations both cause and affect historical events.  The patterns develop based upon how each generation interacts with the other and this also has documented consistencies that are delineated by the authors.

At any given “turning” during the saeculum, the set order of the generations on the age ladder is called a “constellation”. For example, during the Fourth Turning Crisis of 1929 through 1945, America experienced a financial crash, a great depression and a world war. During this period, the Prophet generation was entering Elderhood, the Nomad generation were middle-aged and the Hero generation fought WW II as young adults while the Artist generation were children during that time.

When the Crisis (Winter) era of financial hardship and war was over, the Spring of another First Turning began as the Hero generation led America into a season of unparalleled prosperity from 1946 through President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It was then the baby boomer, Prophet, generation began. As young adults, the boomers began to rock the nation with new age flower-power, feminism, guitars and free love. Thus began the Awakening that lasted through Ronald Reagan’s first term that ended in 1984. It was then the Third Turning of the Unraveling began.

In 1997, when the Fourth Turning was published, Strauss and Howe used their generational model to predict with remarkable accuracy, the start of the next Crisis in 2005:

“By the middle Oh-Ohs, institutions will reach a point of maximum weakness, individualism of maximum strength, and even the simplest public task will feel beyond the ability of government. As niche walls rise ever higher, people will complain endlessly how bad all of the niches are. Wide chasms will separate rich from poor, whites from blacks, immigrants from native borns, seculars from born agains, technophiles from technophobes. America will feel more tribal. Indeed, many will be asking whether fifty states and so many dozens of ethic cultures make sense any more as a nation – and, if they do, whether that nation has a future.”
- Strauss and Howe:  “The Fourth Turning”

In 1997 there was no way to foresee the sequencing of 911, the Patriot Act, Edward Snowden, government incompetence after Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis of 2007 – 2008, the subsequent TARP bailouts or the election of a mysterious, biracial pied piper to the presidency of the United States.

There is no way anyone could have predicted the ensuing eight years of Obama, the nationalization of healthcare, the orgy of greed hosted by Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, endless wars, unchecked immigration, the TSA, NSA, Homeland Security, the CIA versus the FBI, smart phones, drones, religious discriminations, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Alt-right, Black Lives Matter and fake news.

Given the accuracy and timing of Strauss and Howe’s predictions, perhaps there is real validity behind their generational theory after all. And, given this, then we are now within the Winter of a Fourth Turning Crisis.

Can you feel it in the air? High powers in dark places are gathering and sides are being chosen as potential treachery and intrigue lurk around every corner. A global empire stands prepared to battle with populist movements and sovereign nations across the globe while rumors of a neo American civil war abound here at home.

Captured corporate media propaganda outlets and deep state government agencies relentlessly shill for a global empire and stoke the fires of war against a free alternative media while simultaneously provoking a nuclear armed Russia.

Half of the nation’s electorate, on the brink of a financial abyss, would rather kneel before an evil empire than to support the outcome of a free election. Of course, there is no unity in America today. Those days are long gone.

“People young and old will puzzle over what it felt like for their parents and grandparents, in a distantly remembered era, to have lived in a society that felt like one national community. They will yearn to recreate this, to put America back together again. But no one will know how.”
- Strauss and Howe, “The Fourth Turning”

Winter is here.  War is coming. Battles will be waged and conflicts will rage. There will be no escape for what is coming and no guarantee as to any outcome, save one: After this Fourth Turning, there will remain only liberty or tyranny. One, but not the other. For this will be a fight unto the death.

Even so, do many Nomads now entering middle-age, and their Hero generation progeniture, actually understand what is about to befall them? Do they even care? And, for those who do understand and do care; do they know how to fight?

Truly, there are many variables to this historical cycle that were absent in the all of the previous Fourth Turnings throughout history. A few examples would include pervasive and devastating technology with the capabilities of either enslaving, or killing, entire generations of people; a global corporatocracy in control of government agencies, mass flows of information, food and resources; entirely misinformed and apathetic populations with no moral bearing, belief system, or willingness to accept truth in order to stand strong against the dark powers now encroaching; and, finally, there are so many who have been trained to embrace the utopian lie of one world under tyranny. Sadly, many of these may be the new Stormtroopers in waiting.

In the end, we must choose. And not choosing, by default, is a choice. Can a rag tag federation of freedom fighters with truth, liberty and history on their side under a flag of 13 stripes and 50 stars, with idea-fueled keyboards, a compromised internet, and semi-automatic weapons prevail against a galactic empire in control of a technocracy more powerful than any fictional Death Star?

We’re about to find out. Everything that has ever happened before has delivered us to where we are now. Hold on to that. Even more importantly, don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts and place your trays in the upright and locked position.The warp drive is about to be engaged. A new journey has begun.

May the Force be with you."

The Daily "Near You?"

Groningen, Netherlands. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: James Broughton, "Quit Your Addiction"

"Quit Your Addiction"

“Quit your addiction
to sneer and complaint.
Try a little flaunt,
Call for comrades
who bolster your vim
and offer you risk.
Corral the crones,
Goose the nice nellies,
Hunt the bear that hugs
and the raven that quoths.
Stay up all night
to devise a new dawn...”

- James Broughton,
“Little Sermons of the Big Joy”

"The Pure And Simple Truth..."

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
- Oscar Wilde

"The Great Supply Chain Collapse"

"The Great Supply Chain Collapse"
by James Rickards

"What’s at the root of the supply chain breakdown? That’s a critical question but the answer is almost irrelevant. The supply chain is a complex dynamic system of immense scale. It is of a complexity comparable to the climate as a system. This means that exact cause and effect cannot be computed because the processing power needed exceeds the combined processing power of every computer in the world.

Most people have some notion of how supply chains work, but few understand how extensive, complex and vulnerable they are. If you go to the store to buy a loaf of bread, you know that the bread did not mystically appear on the shelf. It was delivered by a local bakery, put on the shelf by a clerk, you carried it home and served it with dinner. That’s a succinct description of a supply chain – from baker to store to home.

Yet that description barely scratches the surface. What about the truck driver who delivered the bread from the bakery to the store? Where did the bakery get the flour, yeast and water needed to make the bread? What about the ovens used to bake the bread? When the bread was baked, it was put in clear or paper wrappers of some sort. Where did those come from?

Even that expanded description of a supply chain is just getting started in terms of a complete chain. The flour used for baking came from wheat. That wheat was grown on a farm and harvested with heavy equipment. The farmer hires labor, uses water and fertilizer and sends his wheat out for processing and packaging before it gets to the bakery.

The manufacturer who built the oven has his own supply chain of steel, tempered glass, semiconductors, electrical circuits and other inputs needed to build the ovens. The ovens are either hand crafted (engineered-to-order) or mass produced (made-to-stock) in a factory that may use either assembly lines or manufacturing cells to get the job done. The factory requires inputs of electricity, natural gas, heating and ventilation systems, and skilled labor to turn out the ovens.

The store that sells the bread is on the receiving end of numerous supply chains. It also requires electricity, natural gas, heating and ventilation systems and skilled labor to keep the doors open and keep merchandise in stock. The store has loading docks, back rooms for inventory, forklifts and conveyor belts to move its merchandise from truck to shelf.

Every link in these supply chains requires transportation. The farmer relies on trucks or rail for deliveries of seeds, fertilizers, equipment and other inputs. The oven manufacturer also relies on trucks or rail for deliveries of its inputs, including oven components. The bakery and the store rely mainly on trucks for deliveries of their inputs and the finished loaves of bread. The consumer relies on her automobile to get to the store and return home. These transportation modes have their own supply chains involving truck drivers, train engineers, good roads, good railroads, rail spurs and energy supplies to keep moving and keep deliveries on time.

This entire network (farms, factories, bakeries, stores, trucks, railroads and consumers) relies on energy supplies to keep working. The energy can come from nuclear reactors, coal-fired or natural gas-fired power plants or renewable sources fed to a grid of high-tension wires, substations, transformers and local connections to reach the individual user.

Everything described above sits somewhere in a complex supply chain needed to produce one loaf of bread. Now take everything else in the grocery store (fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry, fish, canned goods, coffee, condiments and so on) and imagine the supply chains needed for each one of those products. Then take all the other stores in the shopping center (home goods, clothing, pharmacy, hardware, restaurants, sporting goods) and imagine all the goods and services available from those vendors and the supply chains behind each and every one of those.

In case you think I have exaggerated the components and steps in making a loaf of bread in the above example, I didn’t. The example above is a grossly simplified description of the actual supply chain. A full description of the needed supply chain would reach back further (where do the seeds for the wheat come from?) and branch off in tangential directions (where do the bread wrappers originate?). A full description of the loaf of bread supply chain with choice of vendor analysis, quality-control tests and bulk purchase discounts among other decision tree branches could easily stretch to several hundred pages.

Now consider all of the supply chain links and possible bottlenecks described above are purely domestic. But very few supply chains are actually that local. CEOs, logistics engineers, consultants and politicians have spent the past 30 years making supply chains global. You’ve heard discussion of globalization since the early 1990s. What one may not have realized is that the process that was being globalized was the supply chain.

You know your iPhone comes from China. Did you know that the specialized glass used in the iPhone comes from South Korea? Did you know the semiconductors in the iPhone come from Taiwan? That the intellectual property and design of the iPhone are from California? The iPhone includes flash storage from Japan, gyroscopes from Germany, audio amplifiers, battery chargers, display port multiplexers, batteries, cameras and hundreds of other advanced parts.

In total, Apple works with suppliers in 43 countries on six continents to source the materials and parts that go into an iPhone. That’s a quick overview of the iPhone supply chain. Of course, every supplier in that supply chain has its own supply chain of sources and processes. Again, supply chains are immensely complex.

Once the global perspective is added, we have to expand our transportation options from trucks and trains to include ships and planes. That means ports and airports are additional links in the chain. Those facilities have their own links and inputs including cranes, containers, port authorities, air traffic controllers, pilots, captains and the vessels themselves. And to our list of trucks, trains, ships and planes we can add pipelines that transport liquids such as petroleum, gasoline and natural gas.

You get the idea. Supply chains may be hidden but they are everywhere. They are interconnected, densely networked and unimaginably complex. The touchstone of these efforts was the idea of just-in-time inventory (JIT). If you’re installing seats on an automobile assembly line, it is ideal if those seats arrive at the plant the same morning as the installation. That minimizes storage and inventory costs. The same is true for every part installed on the assembly line. The logistics behind this are daunting but can be managed with state-of-the-art software.

All these efforts are fine as far as they go. The cost savings are real. The supply chains are efficient. The capacity of this system to keep a lid on costs is demonstrable. The supply chain revolution since the early 1990s has been about cost reduction, which gets passed to consumers in the form of lower prices. That practically explains the entire phenomenon.

There’s only one problem. The system is extremely fragile. When things break down, everything gets worse at the same time. One missed delivery can result in an entire assembly line shutting down. One delayed vessel can result in empty shelves. One power outage can result in a transportation breakdown.

In a nutshell, that’s what has happened to the global supply chain. There’s a lack of redundancy. The system is not robust to shocks. The shocks have occurred nevertheless (pandemic, trade wars, China-U.S. decoupling, bank collateral shortages and more) and the system has broken down. The failures have cascaded. Delays in receiving commodity inputs in China have resulted in manufacturing delays for exports. Energy shortages in China have resulted in further disruption of steel production, mining, transportation and other basic industries.

Port delays in Los Angeles have resulted in component and finished goods delayed in the U.S. Semiconductor shortages have halted production of electronics, appliances, automobiles and other consumer durables that rely on automated applications. You’ve seen how complex the system is.

The bottom line is if supply chains are breaking down, the economy is breaking down. If the economy breaks down, the breakdown of social order is not far behind. And the costs of social disorder are far higher than any possible savings from supposedly efficient supply chains."
Related:

"How It Really Is"

Of course the above cartoon inspired by this classic:
Full screen recommended.
West Side Story, "America" (1961)

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: 100% Irrefutable Proof That The FED Is Lying"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/19/21:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: 
100% Irrefutable Proof That The FED Is Lying"

Saturday, December 18, 2021

"Do You Own Anything? Financial Gunslingers Will Lose; Warning Signs Of Collapse"

Jeremiah Babe, 12/18/21:
"Do You Own Anything? Financial Gunslingers Will Lose;
 Warning Signs Of Collapse"

Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind I: "Ambience Minimus"

Full screen recommended.
Liquid Mind I: "Ambience Minimus"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"The first identified compact galaxy group, Stephan's Quintet is featured in this eye-catching image constructed with data drawn from the extensive Hubble Legacy Archive. About 300 million light-years away, only four of these five galaxies are actually locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. The odd man out is easy to spot, though. The interacting galaxies, NGC 7319, 7318A, 7318B, and 7317 have an overall yellowish cast. They also tend to have distorted loops and tails, grown under the influence of disruptive gravitational tides. But the predominantly bluish galaxy, NGC 7320, is closer, just 40 million light-years distant, and isn't part of the interacting group. 
Stephan's Quintet lies within the boundaries of the high flying constellation Pegasus. At the estimated distance of the quartet of interacting galaxies, this field of view spans about 500,000 light-years. But moving just beyond this field, up and to the right, astronomers can identify another galaxy, NGC 7320C, that is also 300 million light-years distant. Including it would bring the interacting quartet back up to quintet status."