Saturday, March 26, 2022

Musical Interlude: "Pianist SHOCKS Audience With Moonlight Sonata Dubstep Remix"

Full screen recommended.
MusicalBasics, March 13, 2022,
"Pianist SHOCKS Audience With Moonlight Sonata Dubstep Remix"
Relive the moment Kennedy Center experienced the
Dubstep version of Moonlight Sonata for the first time...
Watch the full version of this remix: https://youtu.be/Bfu1uFqV2qw

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Beautiful island universe M94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the hunting dogs, Canes Venatici. A popular target for astronomers, the brighter inner part of the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across.
Traditionally, deep images have been interpreted as showing M94's inner spiral region surrounded by a faint, broad ring of stars. But a new multi-wavelength investigation has revealed previously undetected spiral arms sweeping across the outskirts of the galaxy's disk, an outer disk actively engaged in star formation. At optical wavelengths, M94's outer spiral arms are followed in this remarkable discovery image, processed to enhance the outer disk structure. Background galaxies are visible through the faint outer arms, while the three spiky foreground stars are in our own Milky Way galaxy.”

"Children Of Hope..."

"Children of Hope, to life we fondly cling,
Though woe on woe bitter hour may bring;
the spirit shrinks, and Nature dreads to brave,
The doubt, the gloom, the stillness of the grave.
But what is death? – a wing from earth to fee –
a bridge o’er time into eternity."

- Michelle, in “The Fear of Death Considered”

"In The End..."

"What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end,
of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."
- John Ruskin

Chet Raymo, “In Wildness Is The Preservation Of The World?”

“In Wildness Is The Preservation Of The World?”
by Chet Raymo

“In earlier times, when I was still teaching, it was my habit to occasionally take a wildflower, or piece of rotten bark, or pinch of oil into a biology lab where I had access to a high-quality dissecting microscope. I'd put my sample on the stage of the scope and go exploring. A hawkweed blossom, say, became the concise equivalent of a tropical jungle, teeming with wildlife.

We bemoan the loss of wilderness, and rightly so I suppose. But there are vast tracks of wilderness that we do not despoil, on a scale too small for annihilation by our marauding hand. Elephants and gorillas may be in danger of extinction, but the ants are doing just fine.

In fact, they seem to find my kitchen countertops entirely to their liking. A paradise of crumbs. An Eden of spilled nutrition. Just look at them, armies of them, as small as the period at the end of this sentence, scampering in gleeful forays.

To my eye they are only featureless specks. But I know that they have legs, antennae, mouth and anus. Sense organs. Reproductive strategies. In other words, we have a lot in common, the ants and me, including common ancestry. It's all a matter of scale. For me the wilderness is mostly gone. For the ants, it's just changing form.

In "The Creation", E. O. Wilson writes: "Ants alone, of which there may be 10 thousand trillion, weigh roughly as much as all 6.5 billion human beings." In the kitchen, I still outweigh the interlopers, but take the whole island and I suppose they might outweigh me. In any case, they don't seem to be aware of a loss of wilderness.

And while we are on the subject of scale, consider the nematodes, mostly tiny, threadlike worms whose millions of species make up four-fifths of all animals on Earth. A handful of loam might contain a thousand. They live virtually everywhere- soil, water, desert sand, arctic ice, hot springs, and as parasites of plants and animals, including humans. Pinworms and hookworms are nematodes. For the nematodes, we are part of the wilderness.”

The Daily "Near You?"

Union, Kentucky, USA. Thanks for Stopping by!

"Clown Market Clown World"

"Clown Market Clown World"
By Chris Black

"There is no fundamental analysis for the pricing of any stock traded on US exchanges. The valuations are absurd across the board. Like the Democrat party, only the narrative matters. Not the true business fundamentals. The entire thing is like kids playing Monopoly. “Nuh, huh, my house is worth like a billion dollars because it is so much better than your house.”

Why not just go out and say Tesla should be worth $50 trillion. It doesn’t matter. If the company was actually valued based on somewhat objective analysis, you are maybe talking $15 billion max. The company is currently valued as if they control 120% of the entire global transportation market. Selling over 100 million automobiles a year. The fact that the company loses money on every car they sell, and only makes a profit off selling carbon credits gifted by world governments makes any valuation above $1 insane.

I pity the Enron executives. What they did doesn’t even register based on the fraud in the stock market today.

As Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and the rest of the Wall Street darlings hit multi trillion dollar valuations, millions of small businesses that supported moderate lifestyles were closed forever.

You can make a six figure salary working for a megacap, but that salary doesn’t mean much where those megacaps exist. $150k a year in Silicon Valley is equivalent to $12 an hour in Indiana.

Balance is gone from the US economy and the oligarchs don’t care. They added even more to their immense wealth and they got the peons to beg for meaningless jobs."

"Ukraine Prediction"

"Ukraine Prediction"
by Chris Black

"So this is what’s going to happen geopolitically: The Americans sanctioned Russia as hard as they possibly could, openly trying to break the Russian economy. Most of America’s vassal states in the west followed suit.

India and China have not. So the Americans are now threatening India and China with sanctions of their own, unless they join the United States in punishing Russia. Paradoxically, America’s bullying tactics against both countries will wind up making them the best of friends.

India has exceedingly good relationship with Russia for several decades - they will not jeopardize it because of the Americans. So in retaliation for not doing what they want, the Americans will sanction India. It will be what my friend Alexandra Mercouris calls “the sanctions escalator”: Little by little at first, random officials here and there, and then slowly targeting the entire Indian economy.

Insofar as China is concerned, America has started this “sanctions escalator “, and the Chinese are under no illusions. But for China, Russia is much more important than the United States. China has spent over 25 years deliberately and consciously deepening its relationship with Russia. China views Russia as a primary partner, and will under no circumstances jeopardize that relationship. That’s why China will never sanction Russia. So China will take on American sanctions — but China realizes something crucial: The United States needs China much more than the other way around.

China and India have had long-standing border disputes. Because of this American pressure, the two countries are now quickly resolving these border issues, especially water rights issues. Both of them realize that, in order to resist American pressure, they must become allied.

So very quickly, a new super alliance will form between Russia, China and India. Iran, which has strong relationships with Russia and blossoming relationships with China, will inevitably join this partnership. If these four countries decide to cut out the west, Europe will not have gas for electricity and heat, and no customers for its cars and product. And the Americans will discover that no one wants their dollars - so the American financial architecture will completely collapse, and the US will find itself in the biggest depression of its history. (Yes you read right.)

The Americans do not realize that the US needs China/Russia/India far FAR more than the other way around. Americas hollowed out industrial base means that it does not produce anything. It needs products from Russia/China/India. And yet it is the United States which is busy alienating precisely those nations that it most needs.

The Americans have broken with the Russians – there is now a sanctions moat between Russia and the west. If the US and Europe does this with China and India, the west will sink, their economy completely shattered. And this new Eurasian block will become the literal center of the earth.

Through sheer incompetence, the United States is about to collapse. I am not being hyperbolic, this is what is happening right now. By the end of 2023, there will be catastrophic hyperinflation, over 50% unemployment, mass food shortages, and no gasoline in the United States of America. Don’t believe me? Watch."

"Crime and Punishment'

"Crime and Punishment'
by Joel Bowman

"A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country."
~ Mary “Texas” Guinan

Buenos Aires, Argentina  -  "Many are the brave, the patriotic... and the easily led. Barely a year ago, working Americans were urged to ignore what they saw before their eyes and felt in their pocketbooks: That prices were rising and, moreover, that they were rising faster than wages. Back in July, when the inflation rate was running at a “mere” 5.4%, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown charged his colleagues with a peculiar kind of monetary hypochondria, for seeing a mountain where there was but a molehill. “They won’t say aloud what this ‘inflation alarmism’ is really about,” observed the democratic senator from Ohio, “they simply don’t want workers to have more power.”

Chairman Brown, a career politician backed by an arts degree in Russian studies from Yale University, added insult to inanity when, at the very same meeting, he exhorted his fellow congressmen to “join the fight to make housing more affordable” and to help “curb Wall Street greed and excess.” Now, we’ve never met Chairman Brown. For all we know, he could be even dumber than he sounds. But surely even a Yale graduate must recognize that the quickest way to disempower the average worker is to undercut the purchasing power of his savings.

That is to say, generation-high inflation may seem like “alarmism” to multi-millionaire senators like the tone-deaf Chairman, but it’s a daily, sobering reality for the middle and working class Americans he so earnestly affects to serve... and whose taxpayer-funded salary he so breezily banks. Indeed, Chairman Brown has been serving his constituents - good and hard - for his entire adult career. Since entering public office, at the cocksure, world-improving age of 23-years old, Sherrod Brown has amassed a personal fortune estimated at roughly $10 million. Nice work, if you can get (someone else to pay for) it.

But how does a humble public servant - one who has made a career railing against “greed and excess,” no less - build an eight-figure pile, 83+ times the median US household net worth, on a dot.gov salary? Ah, that’s a question for another day, dear reader. Maybe an upcoming Sunday Sesh...

Suffice to say, working class “inflation alarmists” barely had time to digest the insult when they were told, in quick succession and from multi-decamillionaire politicians, that rising prices were merely “transitory,” then that they were actually good for the economy and then, most recently, that they were after all part of one’s patriotic duty... the “price we must pay”... you know, because... Ukraine.

Nothing to do with $800 billion dollar federal boondoggles junky stimulus “recovery” programs, the likes of which senator Brown cast the final vote in favor of back in 2009...

Nothing to do with the Fed “quantitatively easing” $8 trillion dollars into the economy’s track-marked veins since then...

Nothing to do with pinning interest rates to the floor... or $1.9 trillion candy scrambles to fight The Covid... or $2 - $5 trillion in Build Back Whenever programs... (Manchin’s apparently ready to trade horses again...)

Yippee! Spending other people’s money has never been so easy! Of course, one doesn’t need a bachelor’s degree in Russian studies from a fancy college to understand that, even if it is Brown and his gilded ilk doing the crime, it will be honest, hard working Americans copping the punishment."

Free Download: R.D. Laing, "The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness"

"The Divided Self:
An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness"
by R.D. Laing

"Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label. Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left..”

"First published in 1960, this watershed work aimed to make madness comprehensible, and in doing so revolutionized the way we perceive mental illness. Using case studies of patients he had worked with, psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that psychosis is not a medical condition but an outcome of the 'divided self', or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world.”
Freely download “The Divided Self: 
An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness”,
by R.D. Laing, here:
"Insights Of R.D. Laing"

"Decades ago, psychiatrist R.D. Laing developed three rules by which he believed a pathological family (one suffering from abuse, alcoholism, etc.) can keep its pathology hidden from even its own family members. Adherence to these three rules allows perpetrators, victims, and observers to maintain the fantasy that they are all one big, happy family. The rules are:
Rule A: Don't talk about the problems and abject conditions;
Rule A1: Rule A does not exist; 
Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A1, and/or A2."

“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.”

“Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.”

“We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”

“Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”

“We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.”

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

"It Matters..."

The sons - in the dungeon - think they hear Henry approach to kill them.
Richard: "He's here! He'll get no satisfaction out of me!
He isn't going to see me beg!"
Geoffrey: "Why, you chivalric fool - as if the way one fell down mattered!"
Richard: "When the fall is all there is, it matters."
- James Goldman, "The Lion In Winter"

"How It Really Is"

 

"It's a Big Club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
Strong language alert!

"2022: Doomsday Clock at 100 Seconds to Midnight"

"2022: Doomsday Clock at 100 Seconds to Midnight"

"The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists introduced the Doomsday Clock in 1947. It represents a countdown to global nuclear annihilation. During the height of the Cold War, it came its closest to midnight - 2 minutes - then cooled, stretching to 17 minutes by 1991.

In 2015, around the time the film was released, increased instability had moved the clock back to 3 minutes to midnight, due to modernizations in global nuclear weapons and "outsized nuclear weapons arsenals," with world leaders failing to "act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe." At the time, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists read: "The clock ticks now at just three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty - ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization."

In an update released January 20, 2022, however, the Bulletin reported that the world is "at doom's doorstep," with the clock moving to just 100 seconds to midnight: "The Clock remains the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment. In 2019 we called it the new abnormal, and it has unfortunately persisted. Leaders around the world must immediately commit themselves to renewed cooperation in the many ways and venues available for reducing existential risk.

Citizens of the world can and should organize to demand that their leaders do so - and quickly. The doorstep of doom is no place to loiter. Without swift and focused action, truly catastrophic events - events that could end civilization as we know it - are more likely. When the Clock stands at 100 seconds to midnight, we are all threatened. The moment is both perilous and unsustainable, and the time to act is now."
Related:
"Being This Close To Nuclear War Should Change How We See Things"
by Caitlin Johnstone

Excerpt: "I’m always stunned at how, whenever I talk about the way all this brinkmanship is bringing us ever closer to a precipice from which there is no return, people will often tell me “Yeah well if it happens it will be Putin’s fault for starting it.” Like that’s in any way a sane response to our plight. People are so confused and compartmentalized about this issue they seriously think “If nuclear war happens it will be Putin’s fault” is a complete position on this issue.

I always want to shake them and ask them, “If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, would the words ‘It was Putin’s fault’ give you any comfort? Or would you, perhaps, wish measures had been taken early on to prevent it from getting to this point?”

It’s a useful thought experiment that can be applied in many areas, while we sit here on the brink waiting to see what happens.

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, how good would you feel about the decision not to guarantee Moscow that Ukraine would never receive NATO membership?

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, would you be able to say you tried everything you could to prevent this from happening?

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, would you feel okay about how you’ve been treating the people you care about?

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, would you feel okay about how you’ve been spending your time?

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, will you wish you’d spent more time at the office? Wish you’d participated in more social media drama? Wish you’d taken fewer chances? Wish you’d loved with less abandon?

The swelling likelihood of imminent armageddon draws everything into focus. Helps clarify your priorities. Helps you figure out how to live your life from moment to moment.

And from where I’m sitting this clarity brings with it a sense of responsibility as a human being. A responsibility to really be here now. To truly live our lives with presence and appreciation. To drink deeply of the cup of human experience. Because the only thing worse than everything ending would be if it ended without having been seen and valued while it lasted.

We have control over so very little in this insane little pickle we’ve found ourselves in. But one thing we can definitely control is whether we’re really showing up for however much time we’ve got left on this amazing blue planet.

“Treasure each moment” is something you hear so often in life that it becomes a cliche and loses all its meaning. But there has never been a better time to take another look at it with fresh eyes and begin putting it into practice.

Treasure each moment, because there might not be very many of them left. This is the moment. This is our moment. If this does wind up being humanity’s last scene on this stage, let’s at least help make sure we shine as radiantly as possible before the final curtain."

Please read this complete article, with my highest recommendation, here:
Related:

Friday, March 25, 2022

Tucker Carlson, "We May Not Have Enough Food Soon"

Tucker Carlson, PM 3/25/22:
"We May Not Have Enough Food Soon"

“Don’t Buy Dumb Stuff, Buy Food Now; Mortgage Rates Hit Danger Zone; Housing Boom Over, Sales Sink”

Jeremiah Babe, PM 3/25/22:
“Don’t Buy Dumb Stuff, Buy Food Now; 
Mortgage Rates Hit Danger Zone; Housing Boom Over, Sales Sink”

30 Signs American Families Are Getting Pulverized By This Economy"

Full screen recommended.
"30 Signs American Families 
Are Getting Pulverized By This Economy"
by Epic Economist

"How can Americans afford to survive in today’s economy? The cost of everything is going through the roof, and wages are stagnating amid rampant inflation. Today, the median household income is a little over $65,000 a year, which means that the average family earns around $5,400 a month. But before any of that money gets spent, you have to take out at least $1,100 in taxes. That leaves about $4,300 a month to pay all the bills. So if you have to pay the mortgage or rent, at least another $1,100 goes away, which means that now you have $3,200 to make make your car payments, student loan payments, energy bills, water bills, phone bills, cable bills, internet bills, health insurance, home insurance, and most importantly, you have to provide three meals a day for every member of your family and the cars need to be filled up with gas or you won’t go anywhere. On top of that, there are always extra expenses such as home or car repairs, or new clothes and shoes for your kids.

With all things considered, it’s understandable why so many families are struggling financially. Workers are facing immense hardships as labor conditions continue to decay. The number of good jobs is steadily dropping, and most positions do not support middle-class lifestyles anymore. Meanwhile, millions of families are seeing their purchasing power getting squeezed harder and harder with each passing month as the cost of living just keeps going up. To make things worse, as supply chains collapse, global tensions rise, markets react and the economy falls back into recession, the American family is going to have an even more difficult time trying to survive financially in the coming months. Most people in the U.S. are living in an almost constant state of financial despair right now. Parents are spending sleepless nights wondering how they are going to explain to their children that they cannot provide for the same things they used to or how are they going to stay above water for another month.

In modern-day America, if you can keep yourself from getting evicted by your landlord or prevent your home from being foreclosed, and if you’re able to put food on the table every day, and put clothes on the backs of your children, then you’re extremely lucky because there are millions out there that don’t have the conditions to do so. This once was a nation for the great. But now, the American dream has turned into a horrifying nightmare. n today’s video, we compiled 30 facts that prove that the average American family is getting absolutely pulverized by this economy. "

"Our Leaders Have Gone Mad"

"Our Leaders Have Gone Mad"
by Jeffrey Tucker

"Have a look at the shock on people’s faces as they leave the grocery stores these days or as they stand filling up their tanks at the gas station. Their jaws drop and they wonder what is happening to the world. The answer is the policy disasters of the last two years. The bill is coming due and everyone but the masters of the universe is paying it. The value of the dollar is sinking rapidly, more rapidly than in our lifetimes. Nor is it coming back.

The people who hold power today seem completely clueless about why this is happening. Actually, that’s a charitable interpretation. They might just think it is great. High gas prices are pushing a shift to electric cars, presumably to manage global climate (I’m a serious doubter that anything like that is possible by policy). Or maybe there is an impulse here just to redistribute wealth and disorient people to create new levels of dependency. Whatever the reason, I’m seeing absolutely no signs that anyone at the top has any intention to put a stop to this.

Kill the Snake in the Garden! The Biden administration - total geniuses up there! - have been hunting around for the source of price increases, as if there is some single-greatest offender out there in the markets. They won’t blame the Fed of course because the Biden administration considers a monetary policy war against inflation to be a potential political disaster. It would drive the economy into a statistical recession. Then they would doom themselves at the midterm. Better to let inflation rip than risk that.

So instead, they are looking to scapegoat market actors. It’s preposterous: Markets are linked in ways that are impossible to trace and understand. You cannot map it. It’s too complex. It cannot be designed. It cannot be gamed. But tell that to the credentialled experts who believe that they have it all going.

So some geek in the White House noted that shipping prices are through the roof. They reasoned that these high costs are putting pressure on all producers, which in turn are being passed on to consumers. What to do? Crack down on the shippers!

That’s exactly what they have done by unleashing the Federal Maritime Commission, an independent government agency that oversees ocean transport for American consumers and shipping firms. What the heck is the FMC going to do? Oh, harass people. Send letters. Investigate. Make big demands. But this much is clear during inflation: Everyone, without exception, has a thoroughly valid reason to raise prices. In this sense, they are all telling the truth that it is not their fault. Finding the key offenders during a hyperinflation is like hunting for the offending cloud during a hurricane.

Another Stimulus: One of the great independent journalists who has really found his mojo during this crisis has been Jordan Schachtel. His Substack account seems often ahead of the major news. He drew my attention to something so bizarre that I never imagined it would happen. He believes that the politicians are, right now, plotting another stimulus check drop on citizens as a way of helping people deal with inflation.

True story! It’s actually a level of policy insanity I’ve not seen in my lifetime. This would be like pushing a drowning man deep underwater. Far from coming to terms with their mistakes and acknowledging their errors, the rulers of our fiat system, in their infinite wisdom, may soon decide to fight inflation with… you guessed it, more inflation.

Sounds crazy? No way they would be that ridiculous, right? Well, I have some news for you. It’s already happening in Canada. Quebec has announced that they will give a $500 stimulus check to everyone that makes $100,000 or less. This handout, which is expected to reach 6.4 million Canadians, will "help Quebecers cope with the sharp increase in the cost of living that we have seen in recent months,” Finance Minister Eric Girard said Tuesday.

Following Canada’s lead, a group of Democrat congressmen have just introduced a bill to hand out “gas price stimulus checks” to Americans. The timing of this new bill should not go unnoticed, as midterm elections are just around the corner in November. Three congresspeople are hyping a bill to give up to $300 a month to citizens who live in areas where gas prices are above $4 per gallon. Do the math on this and you end up with an annual bill of $340 billion. This comes after many people in Congress have started to slightly worry about their spending programs.

And of course, once you do this with gas, there is no reason not to do this with food, rent, medical bills or anything else. You end up with a mind-blowing system in which government is forever printing up the currency to compensate people for the consequences of previous money printing.

CNN is helping to drum up support: "The administration should ask Congress to authorize a payment of $1,100 per household to pay for four months of higher prices going forward, and provide an option for the president to provide a second or even third check to low-and-moderate income families for an additional four months in the event that prices remain high. We don’t know when this crisis is going to end or when prices for essential goods and services will return to more affordable levels."

It’s the Interwar Period All Over Again: Here we have a scenario straight out of the history books. We are talking about Weimar-level insanity here. But what’s to stop it? The current political winds all lean in this direction. So long as Democrats are in control and the Republicans are stupid and afraid, even as the Fed is embarassingly bowing to every political pressure, something like this cannot be stopped.

If this continues, we could be looking at a full-scale monetary crisis of epic proportions, as we approach the midterms. Even then, Congress under Republican control simply cannot manage the Fed, which owes its entire allegiance to the executive in the White House and the deep state. That means two more years even after November of utter policy disasters. Wow, I really do get tired of reporting terrible news!

I wouldn’t have to if the major media could cover these topics with any level of intelligence or honestly. But they don’t. And the failure to do so is having a major impact on the standard of living, which is taking a hit much harder than we have seen since the early 1930s. This is both in the U.S. and Europe. Really all over the world.

We can hope and pray for policy rationality to return. But we must also be realistic. This is a crisis with no end in sight."

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Endless Horizon"

Full screen recommended.
Deuter, "Endless Horizon"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Two stars within our own Milky Way galaxy anchor the foreground of this cosmic snapshot. Beyond them lie the galaxies of the Hydra Cluster. In fact, while the spiky foreground stars are hundreds of light-years distant, the Hydra Cluster galaxies are over 100 million light-years away.
Three large galaxies near the cluster center, two yellow ellipticals (NGC 3311, NGC 3309) and one prominent blue spiral (NGC 3312), are the dominant galaxies, each about 150,000 light-years in diameter. An intriguing overlapping galaxy pair cataloged as NGC 3314 is just above and left of NGC 3312. Also known as Abell 1060, the Hydra galaxy cluster is one of three large galaxy clusters within 200 million light-years of the Milky Way. In the nearby universe, galaxies are gravitationally bound into clusters which themselves are loosely bound into superclusters that in turn are seen to align over even larger scales. At a distance of 100 million light-years this picture would be about 1.3 million light-years across."
Related, highest recommendation:
"How Many Galaxies Are In The Universe?"
"The deepest image ever taken, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, revealed ~5,500 galaxies over an area that took up just 1/32,000,000th of the sky. But today, scientists estimate that there are more than ten times as many galaxies out there than Hubble, even at its limits, is capable of seeing. All told, there are some ~2 trillion galaxies within the observable Universe. Here's how we know."
View this complete, extraordinarily fascinating, article here:

"The World Rests In The Night..."

“The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.”
- John O'Donohue,
"Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom"
“On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.”
John O'Donohue was an Irish author, poet, philosopher and former Catholic priest. He was born in County Clare on January 1, 1956. He died suddenly on January 4, 2008. He is best known for popularizing Celtic spirituality and is the author of a number of best-selling books on the subject.

“The Cloak Of The Past..."

“The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.”
- Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”

Gregory Mannarino, "FED Says: 'Asset Purchases Will Continue'; Major Oil Facility Attacked"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/25/22:
"FED Says: 'Asset Purchases Will Continue'; 
Major Oil Facility Attacked"

Gerald Celente, "Ukraine War, Propaganda War- Who'll Win?"

Full screen recommended.
Gerald Celente, Interview with Regis Tremblay"
"Ukraine War, Propaganda War- Who'll Win?"
"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."

"A Lot of People Will Have No Place to Live - Housing Crisis"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, PM 3/25/22:
"A Lot of People Will Have No Place to Live - Housing Crisis"
"There are no more eviction moratoriums or forbearance programs in the United States. People have to pay up or they will not be able to live in their homes. Rent have increased so much in the last two years that we have seen prices that we’ve never seen in the history of the country."

The Daily "Near You?"

Mukwonago, Wisconsin, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Bill Bonner, "The Bolshevik Blueprint"

"The Bolshevik Blueprint"
by Bill Bonner

San Martin, Argentina - "As predicted… rich Russians are using America’s sanctions war to get richer. Bloomberg: "… almost one month of suspension, shares in Moscow climbed, with the benchmark MOEX Russia Index rising as much as 12%. While only 33 stocks resumed trading, Russians with fortunes linked to them added $8.3 billion combined, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index tracking the wealthiest 500 people in the world.

Scores of Russian billionaires got sanctioned by the European Union and the U.K. after the Kremlin started its war against Ukraine. Some got their possessions in those jurisdictions seized, and others rushed to shift ownership of their stakes while they still could. But for the 10 tycoons whose shares resumed trading, the advances were adding to their paper gains."

Western sellers dump their stocks at fire sale prices. Who buys them, for pennies on the dollar? Russians!

Bonehead Central: Oh what a wicked world! A pistol in every hand… and every target has toes. The whole sanctions program is backfiring… driving Russians, Chinese, Iranians and Indians closer together… hastening the decline of the dollar-dominated international money system… raising prices for US consumers...slowing US economic growth… and leaving the oligarchs with more real wealth than they started with.

Whose boneheaded idea was it to get involved in this Russo-Ukrainian squabble anyway? That is our subject for today - where do these boneheaded ideas come from?

Chelsea Clinton didn’t have to figure things out entirely by herself. She attended Stanford and Oxford, for example. But we have it on the authority of German journalist Ernst Wolfe, who may be a complete crackpot for all we know, that she has another alma mater, not listed on her Wikipedia page. Run by the World Economic Forum (sponsor of the Davos shindig… where rich influencers fly in on their private jets and lecture the middle classes against using gas ovens)… it is by invitation only. And the list of those who wear the school colors is breathtaking. Larry Fink, Larry Page, Christine Lagarde, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Gavin Newsom, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates… almost the entire company of the Great and Good… captains of industry… cherubim and seraphim… the leaders of the New World Order… the indefatigable improvers of the world we live in. Yes, it’s a very elite club, dear reader, and you ain’t in it.

Some reports put the number of “Davos Deciders” in the thousands. Indeed, if all these people were laid end to end… well… that would be nice.

The (Dis)Invitee List: Conspicuously absent from the list is Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump was never accepted by the elite. Out of control. Shooting from the hip. He said what he thought. And often what he thought was neither very smart nor very nice. Most important, it was ‘off message.’ That’s why the media worked so tirelessly to unseat him, claiming that the election of 2016 was illegitimate because of Russian interference. The charge was preposterous from the get-go. Everyone was trying to influence the election; there was no plausible reason to think that the Russians, with a very limited budget and very limited reach, would have had any effect at all.

The mainstream elite saw The Donald as a threat. It turned out, they had nothing to worry about. Instead of dismantling the elites’ programs… he expanded them. He didn’t close a single overseas military base. He didn’t cut a single dollar from the federal budget. He went along with the Covid Panic… pushed for even lower interest rates… and then, borrowed, spent, and printed more money than any president in history.

Also not among the distinguished alumni of the WEF is Russian president Vladimir Putin. He explained why in a speech on October 18th, 2021; he wanted to no part of it: “We see with bemusement the paralysis unfolding in countries that have grown accustomed to viewing themselves as the flagships of progress. Of course, it’s none of our business… the social and cultural shocks that are happening in some Western countries… Some believe that aggressive blotting out of whole pages of your own history, the affirmative action in the interest of minorities, and the requirement to renounce the traditional interpretation of such basic values as mother, father, family, and the distinction between sexes are a milestone… a renewal of society.

The recipes they come up with are nothing new… the Bolsheviks followed the dogmas of Marx and Engels. And they also declared that they would go in to change the traditional lifestyle, the political, the economic lifestyle, as well as the very notion of morality, the basic principles for a healthy society. They were trying to destroy age- and century-long values, revisiting the relationship between the people, they were encouraging informing on one’s own beloved, and families. It was hailed as the march of progress. And it was very popular across the world and it was supported by many. As we see, it is happening [again] right now… when great authors of the past such as Shakespeare are no longer taught in schools and universities because they [are considered] as backward classics that did not understand the importance of gender or race.”

But the assault on the past goes beyond the ‘woke’ values of California and East Coast universities. Of special interest to us is the attack on traditional money; that’s where the real damage will be done. Today, the dollar is being intentionally inflated and sanctioned away.

And now, the feds have no choice. Stuck in an ‘inflate or die’ trap, either they inflate the dollar and destroy America’s middle class… or they crash the stock market, the economy, and much of their own wealth and power. The elite deciders will make the call. Which way will it go? Stay tuned…"

"The Future..."

 

"The Skyrocketing Price Of Fertilizer Has Caused A Worldwide Nightmare That Global Leaders Can No Longer Deny"

"The Skyrocketing Price Of Fertilizer Has Caused
 A Worldwide Nightmare That Global Leaders Can No Longer Deny"
by Michael Snyder

"Please read this article very carefully, because it contains very important information that is going to affect you and your family. In fact, it is going to affect every man, woman and child on the face of the planet. For the past couple of years, I have been specifically warning that a major global food crisis was coming. In fact, in recent months I have been writing about this multiple times per week. At first, I think that a lot of people out there thought that I was exaggerating, but at this point the reality that we are heading into a major global food crisis has become undeniable. In fact, Joe Biden just told a press conference in Brussels that worldwide food shortages are “going to be real”…

President Joe Biden said that the world will experience food shortages as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and production increases were a subject of discussions at a Group of Seven meeting on Thursday. “It’s going to be real,” Biden said at a news conference in Brussels. “The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.” And Biden is definitely not alone.

If you can believe it, things are already so serious in France that the government is actually considering implementing a food voucher system… "French President Emmanuel Macron said his government is considering food vouchers to help middle and low-income families afford to eat, calling the problem a “worldwide food crisis.” “I want to put in place a food voucher [system] to help the most modest households and the middle class facing these additional costs,” Macron said in an interview with France Bleu radio on Tuesday."

Wow. I was floored when I read that. People need to understand that this is not a game.

One of the biggest reasons why the outlook for the months ahead is so grim is due to the soaring cost of fertilizer. The American Farm Bureau Federation is telling us that in some cases the price of fertilizer has risen 300 percent… "Fertilizer is a necessity for farmers, allowing them to achieve the high yields needed to meet demand and keep their operations afloat. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, fertilizer costs have risen as much as 300% in some areas - adding significant pressure to farmers’ pocketbooks."

As global energy prices continue to go higher, so will the price of fertilizer. And now the war in Ukraine threatens to make things even worse, because Russia is such a key exporter of various fertilizers… "In 2021, Russia was the world’s top exporter of nitrogen fertilizers and the second-largest supplier of both potassic and phosphorous fertilizers, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization."

Most Americans don’t understand that when we sanction other nations such as Russia we are also sanctioning ourselves. We have unwisely become very dependent on the rest of the world for so many things, and that puts us in a very vulnerable position. For the foreseeable future, the price of fertilizer is going to be incredibly high. As a result, farmers all over the globe will be using less fertilizer, and this will result in reduced agricultural production.

In other words, a lot less food will be grown. And in some instances, farmers that are still willing to pay for fertilizer are not able to get it. In fact, in certain cases that is now even happening in the United States… "Corn and soybean farmer Jon Bakehouse faces a daunting question. In years past, he’s never had to ask for what he could get or what he could apply to his crops within the usual agriculture system. But now, the situation has completely shifted. “For the first time, we’re talking about ‘it’s simply not available, fertilizer is simply not available, some chemicals are simply not available.’ For the first time, you kind of recognize you’re standing on a three-legged stool with one of the legs starting to weaken,” Bakehouse said."

In all my years, I have never heard of a corn farmer in Iowa being unable to buy fertilizer. But here we are. And Bakehouse is admitting that a lack of fertilizer would really impact the amount of corn that he is able to produce this year… “If, for instance, we were only able to get half of our fertilizer needs, it would cut into the corn yields substantially, probably at least 30%, perhaps higher depending on the year,” Bakehouse said."

That is very alarming to hear. Sadly, there are millions upon millions of other farmers all over the world that are being faced with incredibly difficult choices right now… "The pivot can be seen in agricultural powerhouse Brazil, where some farmers are applying less fertilizer to their corn, and some federal legislators are pushing to open protected indigenous lands for the mining of potash. In Zimbabwe and Kenya, small farmers are reverting to using manure to nourish their crops. In Canada, one canola farmer has already stockpiled fertilizer for the 2023 season in anticipation of even higher prices ahead."

Meanwhile, there are other major disasters that are also threatening food production. The new bird flu pandemic that erupted inside the United States in February continues to escalate. In fact, we just learned that more than half a million broiler chickens in Nebraska will have to be put down… "The Nebraska Department of Agriculture (NDA) announced on Tuesday that it has confirmed a case of the highly contagious bird flu in a commercial flock of 570,000 broiler chickens and that the birds will be “humanely depopulated and disposed of.” NDA, in conjunction with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), said in a press release the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was confirmed in a chicken flock in Butler County, Neb." Overall, more than 12 million chickens and turkeys in the U.S. have already died as a result of this horrifying outbreak. Needless to say, that will drive up the price of meat to even higher levels.

On the other side of the world, colossal swarms of locusts are devouring crops in Africa once again this year. This time around, it is South Africa that is being hit the hardest… "Farmers in the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Eastern Cape Karoo are struggling to control the locust swarms that have damaged and consumed thousands of hectares of grazing land. According to Agri SA, this is one of the biggest locust swarms in years and, with the assistance of donors and the Department of Agriculture, farmers are trying everything to save their land and food."

There is so much more that I could say about the global food crisis, but I will stop there for today. The head of the UN World Food Program has said that this is the worst global food crisis that we have seen since World War II, and I very much agree with him. But even though global leaders are now admitting that things are going to get really bad, most people in the western world still seem to think that everything is going to work out just fine somehow."
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