A Christmas Musical Interlude:
Placido Domingo, "La Virgen Lava Pañales"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
"Bank Meltdown, More Banks Are Closing; Stop Trusting Banks; Taxpayers To Pay Delinquent Home Owners"
Jeremiah Babe, PM 12/21/21:
"Bank Meltdown, More Banks Are Closing; Stop Trusting Banks;
Taxpayers To Pay Delinquent Home Owners"
Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal," "Happy New Year!"
Full screen recommended.
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal", 12/21/21:
"Happy New Year!"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
"The Great Supply Chain Collapse – Jim Rickards"
Full screen recommended.
"The Great Supply Chain Collapse – Jim Rickards"
by Epic Economist
"Global supply chains are facing a very chaotic crisis that only seems to get worse. While some bottlenecks ease others are just starting. With each passing day, new shortages emerge around the world due to delivery delays, shipping disruptions, and a record congestion of cargo ships at ports. The network of world trade is also being plagued by container backlogs, labor shortages, geopolitical tensions, energy shortages, travel restrictions, and lockdowns. The combination of these factors is creating a ripple effect all over the planet, but especially in the United States. For that reason, analysts at Capital Economics are predicting the supply chain crisis to last for at least another two years.
But have you ever wondered why supply chains have become so tangled up? Or what's the root of the supply chain collapse? In an article brilliantly written by the economist and financial commentator, James Rickards, which was recently published in his blog, the Daily Reckoning, the analyst explains that there's no simple answer for that question. In fact, he says that supply chains are so complex that the answer is essentially irrelevant. It is a very intricate network, whose scale and complexity can be compared to an ecosystem. That's why paying attention to the exact cause and effect to get to the root of the problem can be a dead-end. The processing power needed to understand the entanglement of supply chains exceeds our logic comprehension.
Even though most of us have a notion of how supply chains operate, only a few people in the world truly understand how elaborate, extensive and vulnerable they really are. That's why Rickards breaks down this complex explanation into a simple example to show us why one single failure can lead to a cascade of disruptions and cause unimaginable damages. Let's picture a single loaf of bread. For that loaf of bread to arrive at the store, a truck driver has to pick it up from the bakery. The bakery needs one or more suppliers to get all of the ingredients needed to make the bread. The ovens used to bake it and the packing used to wrap it when it's ready are also an essential part of the process that allows you to bring that loaf of bread home.
The manufacturer of the oven also needs its own supply chain to provide him with steel, tempered glass, semiconductors, electrical circuits, and other materials needed to build his product. The ovens can be handcrafted or mass-produced in a factory that requires production lines or manufacturing cells to assembly the product. For its part, the factory also needs its own supply chain of electricity, natural gas, heating, ventilation systems, and qualified labor to make its entire operation work. So the store that sells the bread needs only the receiver of a product that required numerous supply chains to exist. Every store requires warehouses or back rooms to keep their inventory, as well as loading docks, forklifts and conveyor belts to move their merchandise from truck to shelf
Now imagine all of the other items available at grocery stores: fresh produce, fruits, meat, pork, fish, poultry, canned goods, dairy, drinks, spices, and so on. Each of them requires the operations of several supply chains to be produced, processed, packed and transported to finally get to store shelves. Things are much more entangled than they seem.
The main turning point for the supply chain was the just-in-time model of production. The big problem is that the just-in-time model has made the whole system extremely fragile. One single disruption can compromise the operations of the entire global supply chain. The system is simply not prepared to handle external shocks. But those shocks are happening on an everyday basis. The health crisis, the Ever Given accident, trade conflicts, port shutdowns, financial swings and many more factors can weigh upon the system. That's why supply chains have collapsed.
The bottom line, as Rickards concludes, is that if the supply chains collapse, the economy starts to collapse as well. Every item, product, and service that keeps our economy running requires a series of supply chains to exist. And when the economy starts to fall apart, our social order begins to fall to pieces just as well. And the price to pay for social disorder is far higher than any savings the just-in-time model can offer. Sadly, our leaders are failing to assess the severity of this situation, and we are already feeling the impact of broken supply chains and a slumping economy. The global supply chain crisis is far from over. And the chaos that is about to emerge goes far beyond our imagination."
"Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?"
"Exactly Which Dystopian Novel Are We Living In?"
by Tyler Durden
"There’s a debate going on among the disaffected/terrified over which dystopian novel we’re now living in. As John Rubino remarks, some point to social media addiction and designer drugs to suggest "Brave New World." Others see mass surveillance and pandemic lockdowns as putting us squarely in "1984". Still others cite online censorship and cancel culture as favoring "Fahrenheit 451".
Each of these opinions seems valid, which is confusing. A prisoner should know the shape of their cell. So it’s a relief to find out that someone (not sure who) has settled the argument by creating the following Venn diagram (Tweeted by our friend David Morgan).
Turns out we’re not in a single dystopian novel. We’re in all of them simultaneously."
"We Know..."
"We know they are lying, they know they are lying,
they know we know they are lying,
we know they know we know they are lying,
but, they are still lying."
- Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Musical Interlude: Deuter, "East Of The Full Moon"
Full screen recommended.
Deuter, "East Of The Full Moon"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.
Many young stars from this cloud are visible in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud. "
"Only One Basic Human Right..."
"There is only one basic human right,
the right to do as you damn well please.
And with it comes the only basic human duty,
the duty to take the consequences."
- P. J. O'Rourke
The Poet: T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
“Little Gidding”, Excerpt
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree.
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
- T.S. Eliot
"Little Gidding" is the last of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets,"
which you may read online here:
"Ah, You Miserable Creatures!"
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great!
You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything!
Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough. "
- Frederic Bastiat
Any questions?
"Lifes Impermanence..."
"Lifes impermanence, I realized, is what makes every
single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here.
It's what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted."
- Wes Moore
"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death. The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"
"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death.
The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"
By Dr. Gary G. Kohls
“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” – Roger Waters
“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.” – Dresden James
“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill
"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.
The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.
But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.
SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”
Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.
Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”
Postman ended his book by writing: “what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
“Amused To Death”
by Roger Waters
"Doctor Doctor what’s wrong with me
This supermarket life is getting long
What is the heart life of a color TV?
What is the shelf life of a teenage
queen?
Ooh western woman
Ooh western girl
News hound sniffs the air
When Jessica Hahn goes down
He latches on to that symbol of
detachment
Attracted by the peeling away of
feeling
The celebrity of the abused shell
of the belle
Ooh western woman
Ooh western girl
And the children of Melrose strut
their stuff
Is absolute zero cold enough?
And out in the valley warm and clean
The little ones sit by their TV screens
No thoughts to think
No tears to cry
All sucked dry down to the very
last breath.
Bartender what is wrong with me
Why I am so out of breath
The captain said excuse me ma’am
This species has amused itself to death
We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We oohed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah.
And when they found our shadows
Grouped ‘round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data in
their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed.
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry
No feelings left
This species has amused itself to death…"
○
Freely download “Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, by Neil Postman, here:
○
Freely download “Brave New World", by Aldous Huxley here:
"Regret..."
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
~ Sydney J. Harris
Free Download: Charles Mackay, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
- Carl Sagan
"'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841. The book chronicles its subjects in three parts: "National Delusions", "Peculiar Follies", and "Philosophical Delusions". MacKay was an accomplished teller of stories, though he wrote in a journalistic and somewhat sensational style.
The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetizers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics. Present-day writers on economics, such as Michael Lewis and Andrew Tobias, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles. Scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan mentioned the book in his own discussion about pseudoscience, popular delusions, and hoaxes.
In later editions, Mackay added a footnote referencing the Railway Mania of the 1840s as another "popular delusion" which was at least as important as the South Sea Bubble. Mathematician Andrew Odlyzko has pointed out, in a published lecture, that Mackay himself played a role in this economic bubble; as leader writer in the Glasgow Argus, Mackay wrote on 2 October 1845: "There is no reason whatever to fear a crash."
Freely download "Extraordinary Popular Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds", by Charles Mackay, here:
"First Of All..."
"First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?"
- Thomas Merton
"Retail Nightmare Before Christmas - A Worldwide Horror Story"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 12/21/21:
"Retail Nightmare Before Christmas -
A Worldwide Horror Story"
"Retail Sales are off worldwide. It is an absolute Retail Nightmare. It doesn’t matter what country you are in. There is a massive problem with consumer buying on the retail level. Yes, Amazon is shipping, but people are not walking in the stores and buying anything."
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