Gonzalo Lira, 9/6/22:
"The Macro Picture: Ukraine; Sanctions"
My Twitter, where I post regularly:
Brutal truth... a must view.
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, September 6, 2022
"A List Of 33 Things We Know About The Coming Food Shortages"
"A List Of 33 Things We Know
About The Coming Food Shortages"
by Michael Snyder
"Things are far worse than you are being told. Over the past few months, I have been carefully documenting facts that show that global food production is going to be way down in 2022. Unfortunately, most people out there don’t seem to understand that the food that isn’t being grown in 2022 won’t be on our store shelves in 2023. We are potentially facing an absolutely unprecedented worldwide food crisis next year, but the vast majority of the population doesn’t seem very alarmed about this. So I would encourage you to help me get this warning out by sharing this list with as many people as you possibly can. As you will see below, we now have so many data points that it is impossible to deny what is coming. The following is a list of 33 things we know about the coming food shortages…
#1 The hard red winter wheat crop in the United States this year “was the smallest since 1963”. But in 1963, there were only 182 million people living in this nation. Today, our population has grown to 329 million.
#2 It is being projected that the rice harvest in California will be “half what it would be in a normal year”.
#3 The U.S. tomato harvest will come in at just 10.5 million tons in 2022. That is over a million tons lower than a normal year.
#4 This will be the worst U.S. corn harvest in at least a decade.
#5 Year-to-date shipments of carrots in the United States are down 45 percent.
#6 Year-to-date shipments of sweet corn in the United States are down 20 percent.
#7 Year-to-date shipments of sweet potatoes in the United States are down 13 percent.
#8 Year-to-date shipments of celery in the United States are down 11 percent.
#9 Total peach production in the U.S. is down 15 percent from last year.
#10 Almost three-fourths of all U.S. farmers say that this year’s drought is hurting their harvests.
#11 Thanks to the endless drought, the total number of cattle in Oregon is down 41 percent.
#12 Thanks to the endless drought, the total number of cattle in New Mexico is down 43 percent.
#13 Thanks to the endless drought, the total number of cattle in Texas is down 50 percent.
#14 One beef producer in Oklahoma is now predicting that ground beef “could eventually top $50 per pound”.
#15 At least 40 percent of the United States has been suffering from drought conditions for 101 consecutive weeks.
#16 Overall, this is the worst multi-year megadrought in the United States in 1,200 years.
#17 Europe is currently experiencing the worst drought that it has seen in 500 years. In some parts of central Europe, river levels have fallen so low that “hunger stones” are being revealed for the first time in centuries.
#18 Corn production for the entire EU could be down by as much as one-fifth in 2022.
#19 We are being warned that there will be crop losses in France of up to 35 percent.
#20 It is being projected that crop losses in some areas of the UK could be as high as 50 percent.
#21 It is being reported that there will be crop losses “of up to 50 percent” in some parts of Germany.
#22 Some farmers in Italy have already lost “up to 80% of their harvest”.
#23 Agricultural production in Somalia will be down about 80 percent this year.
#24 In eastern Africa, the endless drought has already resulted in the deaths of at least seven million animals.
#25 In China, they are facing the worst drought that they have ever experienced in recorded history.
#26 India normally accounts for 40 percent of the global rice trade, but we are being warned that production in that country will be way down in 2022 due to “considerable rainfall deficits in key rice producing states”.
#27 A third of the entire nation of Pakistan was under water after recent floods absolutely devastated that nation, and agricultural areas were hit particularly hard. As a result, the vast majority of the crops in the country have been “washed away”…It has also been estimated that roughly 65 per cent of the country’s food basket - particularly crops like rice, cotton, wheat and onion - have been washed away. Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, in an interview to CGTN earlier this week, offered an even starker outlook by saying that “about 80 to 90 per cent” of the country’s crops have been damaged by the floods.
#28 The prices of some fertilizers have tripled since 2021, while the prices of some other fertilizers have actually quadrupled.
#29 One payment company is reporting that the number of Americans using their app to take out short-term loans for groceries has risen by 95 percent.
#30 Demand at U.S. food banks is now even worse than it was during the height of the COVID pandemic.
#31 The World Health Organization is telling us that millions of people in Africa are now potentially facing a very real possibility of starving to death.
#32 According to the World Food Program, 828 million people around the world go to bed hungry each night. Needless to say, that number will soon be much higher.
#33 UN Secretary General António Guterres has publicly stated that he believes that it is likely that there will be “multiple famines” in 2023.
As global food supplies get tighter and tighter, so will the risk of civil unrest. In fact, this has already been happening…"The risk of civil unrest has surged this year in more than half of the world’s countries, signaling a coming period of heightened global instability fueled by inflation, war, and shortages of essentials, a new analysis says. According to Verisk Maplecroft, a UK-based risk consulting and intelligence firm, 101 of the 198 countries tracked on its Civil Unrest Index saw an increase in their risk of civil unrest between the second and third quarters of this year."
In recent weeks, we have seen absolutely massive protests in cities all over the planet. But conditions aren’t even that bad yet. So what will things be like in 2023 when it finally becomes exceedingly clear that there simply will not be enough food for everyone? Wealthy countries will have the resources to buy up much of what is available on the market, and that means that many poor countries will deeply suffer.
If everything that you have read in this article sounds familiar, that is because we have been warned for years that such conditions were coming. In 2023, there will be famines and civil unrest all over the globe. This is not a drill. An extremely serious global food crisis has already begun, and I would encourage you to get prepared for what is ahead while you still can."
"Summer is Over - Trouble is Coming"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 9/6/22:
"Summer is Over - Trouble is Coming"
"Experts say UK inflation will hit 22% and that natural gas will go up to 38% in the next couple of weeks. People are asked to go back to the office this week and it’s a huge problem. People don’t want to do this."
Comments here:
"I Am Forced To Leave California; People Jumping Off Buildings As Wall St. Crisis Begins"
Jeremiah Babe, 9/6/22:
"I Am Forced To Leave California;
People Jumping Off Buildings As Wall St. Crisis Begins"
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "Look For Continued Instability In The Debt Market. If It Gets Worse - Look Out!"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/6/22:
"Look For Continued Instability In The Debt Market.
If It Gets Worse - Look Out!"
Comments here:
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Yeah...
Bill Bonner, "Two to Tango"
"Two to Tango"
What happens when income and expenses
fall out of step? Lessons from Argentina...
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "It’s a new week. So, let’s turn to the New World. Yes, it’s time to check in on one of the world’s daffiest, most mismanaged and most entertaining economies – Argentina. Today, we’ll visit the land of the pampas, the tango… Piazzolla and Gardel… gauchos… llamas… pickpockets… and slums…the vast country at the foot of South America, where 45 million people live, a third of them in and around the capital city, Buenos Aires.
We’ve been visiting Argentina for 25 years… invested in property there 15 years ago…and typically spend two or three months a year there, mostly trying to keep the locals from stealing our property. During that quarter of a century, the Argentine currency – the peso – has gone from 1 to 1 with the dollar… to 3 to 1… when we bought our property… to 150 to 1 now. (At the parallel ‘blue’ rate – which is to say, the ‘unofficial’ or black market – the rate is almost twice that; 270 – 1.)
In 1910, Argentina was the 7th richest country in the world. Now, its GDP per person puts it at #65, below Kazakhstan, Turkey and Guyana. Whee! But not everyone is enjoying the ride. Associated Press is on the story:
"BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — A man tried to kill Argentina's politically powerful Vice President Cristina Fernández outside her home, but the handgun misfired, the country's president said. The man was quickly overpowered by her security officers in the incident Thursday night, officials said. President Alberto Fernández, who is not related to the vice president, a former president herself, said the pistol did not discharge when the man tried to fire it." A close call!
Broken Promises: Many think the attempted murder was really a stunt to bring attention and sympathy to Ms. Fernandez. You might wonder, for example, why a fellow who really intended to kill the VP of a country wouldn’t make sure he had a working pistol in his hand. But what sadness it would have brought if the man had actually killed her. And what joy too!
Ms. Fernandez is one of the most corrupt figures in Argentine history… which offers some pretty heavy competition. She is a ‘Peronist,’ a follower of Juan Peron, who was no slouch at corruption either. He was also a master politician, a skill he learned by observing Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. Immediately after winning the Casa Rosada (the Rose House, Argentina’s answer to the White House) Peron headed down the wrong track, developing a ‘Five Year Plan” that put the government in charge of the economy and doomed the nation to slow growth and fast politics. Since then, it has been a long slide into on-again, off-again recession, poverty and inflation. By the early 1990s, consumer prices in Argentina were rising at a rate over 20,000%.
Inflation was brought under control by Carlos Menem, when he pegged the Argentine peso to the dollar. But it didn’t last. Menem broke the peg in 2002. Since then, inflation has increased amid episodic and bizarre financial crises.
A friend of ours, for example, a lawyer in New York, was once hired by the Argentine government to try to get back an Argentine navy ship in 2012. It had been tracked as it crossed the Atlantic then, by court order, was seized when it went into port in Ghana. It was the first time in history that a naval vessel was captured by a hedge fund.
Only Possible Outcome: Today, the inflation rate is supposed to be around 70%, with more than a third of the country living in poverty. And the inflation rate is rising. Argentines keep their money in dollar deposits – if they can. But now, the government is getting desperate. The ‘treasury secretary’ gave up trying to match income with outgo; he resigned suddenly in July. The ‘treasury secretary’ gave up trying to match income with outgo; he resigned suddenly in July. But what he was doing was idiotic. Mises.Org explains:
"After the pandemic was over, instead of returning toward a path of fiscal balance and debt reduction, Guzmán accelerated the path toward high deficits, which can only be sustained by money printing… As a result, public spending currently is increasing more rapidly than revenue, and it is uncertain whether the country will meet the deficit target that was agreed with the IMF only last year in order to avoid defaulting on its debt.
[…]
But if government policies on public spending stay the same, they will drive Argentina’s economy toward hyperinflation, which is the only possible outcome for a country with perpetually high deficits and no access to debt markets."
The Argentines have seen this show before. Bloomberg: "Argentines Withdraw $1 Billion From Bank Accounts During Turmoil." "Savers started pulling out their dollars from bank accounts at a fast pace when former Economy Minister Martin Guzman resigned on July 2, plunging the government deeper into crisis. Argentina’s third economy minister since then, Sergio Massa, enjoyed a brief market rally upon arrival before deposits declined again. Deposits offer an almost real-time pulse of Argentines’ economic expectations. In late 2001 during one of the country’s worst crisis, the government banned large ATM withdrawals, helping to fuel social chaos."
Hereditary Kleptocracy: But this weekend, crowds gathered outside Christina Fernandez de Kirchner’s apartment. They claimed they were there to “defend democracy.” Why they wanted to defend the system that has ruined the country was not explained. Besides, Argentina functions more like a hereditary kleptocracy. Like ‘Isabelita’ Peron before her, Ms. Fernandez was elected to take the place of her dead husband.
“Why do you stay there,” people ask? Maybe we’ll have a better answer some day. But for now, we can only say that we like the food, the wine, the challenge, the people and the learning experience. Yes, we’ve had some financial losses, but at least we’ve learned to ride a horse, and yell at cattle in Spanish. “Aiiihuuurrup! Vamonos!”
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Joel’s Note: “Is the problem cultural, we often ask ourselves, or systemic? Perhaps it’s both?” Yesterday morning your weekend editor attended a private conference in the Hotel Club Francés, down in the Recoleta neighborhood. Seated around the table were perhaps thirty men and women, all with the kinds of surnames you see on street signs and bronze plaques around the city. The speaker, himself a dapper, silver-haired gentleman in his 70s, was ruminating on his nation’s sordid political history.
“I’ve heard it said that you could drop the population of Switzerland into Paraguay and, within a few short years, the Swiss will have turned the place into a safe and prosperous place to live. I don’t know that could be said of our sorry nation.” A collective grimace rumbled around the table. “We have the natural resources,” he continued, “Oil, water, fertile plains for our cattle, our agriculture. What’s lacking is character. I wonder, even if we had a better system in place, with fairer rules and less corruption, we wouldn’t find some way to spoil it after all.”
Following a morning spent debating politics and economics, the group gathered for lunch in the grand old building’s atrium. There was lamb from Patagonia… wine from Mendoza… espresso and little cakes filled with dulce de leche for desert. Porteños are an amiable bunch. They welcome foreigners with open arms, even if they are confused by those of us who choose, voluntarily, to live in their midst.
“So you could have stayed in Australia, where everything… works?” inquired one attendee. “And your wife was born in Norway? And you’ve family in Texas?” echoed another. “And you’re okay, mentally speaking? Not crazy or anything?” joked a third, shaking her head just the same.
Fair questions. Why would anyone choose to live in a basket case economy like Argentina, with 90% projected inflation by year’s end and a seventy-year history of rolling political disaster?
We addressed some of these points in Part I of an essay we published a few weeks back. (See here: "Journey to the End of the Earth".) This Sunday, in Part II, we’ll take a look at some of the more practical aspects of life here in the Paris of the South… like access to private healthcare, cost of living, education options, safety/crime, lifestyle, etc. Stay tuned…"
"Stocking Up At Meijer! Prep The Pantry! Stock Up Now! Prices Are Rising!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 9/6/22:
"Stocking Up At Meijer! Prep The Pantry!
Stock Up Now! Prices Are Rising!"
"In today's vlog we are at Meijer, and are stocking up on preps for our pantry! Prices on groceries continue to go up, and we are sharing some of the deals we are finding at the grocery stores! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:
"5 Psychological Experiments That Explain The Modern World" (Excerpt)
"5 Psychological Experiments
That Explain The Modern World"
by Kit Knightly
Excerpt: "The world is a confusing place. People do things that don’t make any sense, think things that aren’t supported by facts, endure things they do not need to endure, and viciously attack those who try to bring these things to their attention. If you’ve ever wondered why, you’ve come to the right place.
Any casual reader of the alternate media landscape will eventually come up with a reference to Stanley Milgram, or Philip Zimbardo, the “Asch Experiment” or maybe all three. “Cognitive Dissonance”, “Diffusion of Responsibility”, and “learned helplessness” are phrases that regularly do the rounds, but where do they come from and what they mean? Well, here are the important psycho-social experiments that teach us about the way people think, but more than that they actually explain how our modern world works, and just how we got into this mess."
View this outstanding complete article, with videos, here:
"Economic Market Snapshot 9/6/22"
"Economic Market Snapshot 9/6/22"
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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Latest Market Analysis, Updated 9/6/22
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
September 5th to 7th
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Job cuts and much more.
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
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And now... The End Game...
Jim Kunstler, "Labor Day Assessment"
"Labor Day Assessment"
Uncertainty rules at the top of our slide into the dark half of the year…
by Jim Kunstler
"There will be a Great Re-set, of course, but it’s not exactly the one that Western Civ is blabbering about - a mere shuffling of political and financial protocols. It’s happening with or without “Joe Biden,” the EU, and der Hoch Schwabenklaus, though the aggregate stupidity they represent is surely making the entry process worse. The Great Re-set is what happens when the business model goes bust for powering the world with oil and other fossil fuels - even if there is quite a bit of all that stuff left in the ground. Years ago, I called it The Long Emergency.
Everything emanates off of that, including the astonishing bouts of mischief made in attempts to work around it, assign the blame for it, grub money off it, and shift the effects of it from one group of people or one region of the world to another. Steve St. Angelo says it neatly: “Energy drives the economy; finance steers it.” That’s so. When the oil business model broke in 2008, industrial society lost its mojo and, after that, finance steered it into a ditch.
The Great Re-Set is an emergent phenomenon. It unspools naturally out of circumstances that reality presents. It goes its own way and we have to adapt to it, like it or not. Is our climate changing? Maybe. But so what? The climate has changed many times since the Bronze Age. If preventing that is actually out of the question, which it is, then what else are you going to do? The answer is: adapt intelligently to new conditions. When you clear away all the mental resistance to that - which amounts to a titanic struggle to keep things just the way they are - you’re going to have to make changes anyway.
America was, for a time, the greatest industrial society and now that appears to be over. The disorder in all the moving parts of it is probably too gross to arrest at this point. We shoved it into disorder by making some very bad choices, like getting rid of our factories and squandering our wealth on an absurd suburban living arrangement. Shale oil was a financial stunt to keep our set-up going a little longer. It was part of the colossal debt roll-up - the steering function of finance - that was used to compensate for our actual loss of mojo, and now that gambit has hit the wall. You can’t pretend to issue more debt when everyone knows it can never be paid back.
Europe, the old home-base of Western Civ, never got around to shale oil, and its financial structure was such - reckless bond issuance with no fiscal accountability whatsoever - that now it is collapsing faster and worse than America. Europe’s leadership is clearly insane and it will likely be overthrown before long. The foreign minister of Germany, the winsome Annalena Baerbock, promised last week to keep demonizing Russia to support Ukraine’s black hole of racketeering “no matter what my German voters think or how hard their life gets.” Stand by to see how that goes over.
The angst around these circumstances is expressing itself in a generalized political nervous breakdown featuring the sort of tragi-comic behavior previously confined in lunatic asylums. Have you ever seen anything more patently insane than the sexual confusion acted out in American schools? Drag Queen story hours? Litter boxes in the bathrooms for students who identify as “furries”?
That was the funny part. The Covid-19 event is no joke - rather a psychopathic mass murder. Obviously, it was no accident. We have a pretty good idea who made it, and set it loose into the world. And the “vaccine” response looks plainly malevolent at this point. Yet the Covid episode is shot through with mystery. How did all those sedulously trained doctors get so mind-f**ked as to persist in saying the “vaccines” were safe-and-effective, when the vaxxes were obviously killing and maiming people? They’re still stuck in that disgraceful posture, busy punishing their colleagues who demur, and dishonoring medicine - not to mention the thousands of public health officials still pushing vaxxes and boosters to this day. We can attribute that to mass formation psychosis, but even that reeks of mystery. Maybe, as the old American hymn goes, farther along we’ll understand why….
Anyway, and in the meantime, we’re obliged to see where all this is taking us and what we have to do about it. The survivors of this disorder will be living in a world of generalized contraction, facing much-reduced standards of living. All the giant enterprises will be gone, including probably the federal USA government as we know it, and all the supports it offered. We’ll be gravely disappointed by the failures of advanced technology to mitigate any of this, and much of that technology will disappear, including reliable electric service and the Internet. Whatever you do will have to be much more local and, in one way or another, these activities will revolve around growing food.
I called it a World Made by Hand in the cycle of four novels I churned out between 2008 and 2017. You can look there for a detailed, graphic description of how this new disposition of things might work. The society depicted is still recognizably an American culture, and the people still find joy, purpose, and meaning in being here on this planet, despite the reduction in comfort and convenience. In many ways, it is a world in recovery from the ravages of the super high velocity way-of-life we’re leaving behind, and because of that, it is shot through with grace. That is our destination.
Keep that in mind - if you still have a mind - as you witness the unravelings ahead. This is not the end of the world or the end of the human project in this world. Not everybody will be violent or insane and the number of reality-based people with their emotional equipment intact will, oddly, grow in proportion as the others depart this plane of existence. For some of us, this is a movie with a happy ending. Make some popcorn while there is still some corn, and some electricity to pop it with."
Monday, September 5, 2022
Canadian Prepper, "Wow... This is Alarming News"
Canadian Prepper, 9/5/22:
"Wow... This is Alarming News"
A new article documents in DETAIL
the elites plans to survive the coming crisis.
Comments here:
"Chinese Lockdowns Trigger Panic Buying Frenzy Of Food Supplies As Shortages Emerge"
Full screen recommended.
"Chinese Lockdowns Trigger Panic Buying Frenzy
Of Food Supplies As Shortages Emerge"
by Epic Economist
"Chaotic scenes of desperate people panic buying food and energy supplies are rapidly spreading all around the world – and the U.S. could be next. In several countries, supermarkets and local stores are quickly running out of everyday necessities as residents rush to stock up on crucial goods before shortages worsen. Simultaneously, the global energy crisis is driving the demand for alternative energy sources to stratospheric heights on a consumer and industrial level. Industry insiders exposed that even major manufacturers in global markets are panic buying raw materials and commodities in anticipation of further disruptions. Purchasing limits, rationing, and empty shelves are ahead, and the commotion we’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
Even as the rest of the world emerged from the global pandemic, Chinese citizens are still facing strict stay-at-home mandates. This time, millions of residents in Chengdu city dipped into a snap lockdown which triggered widespread desperation among the population. The new measures sparked a panic buying frenzy of essential supplies that stripped store shelves bare in record time.
The residents were given less than six hours to stock up on critical supplies, which resulted in the mass hoarding of vegetables and fruits, seafood, and red meat by locals who were in an all-scrambling state. Some drivers were captured filling their cars to the brim with slabs of red meat and were even captured fastening dead chickens to the roofs of their vehicles. At this stage, the restrictions have no end date and they’re likely to cause a major economic fallout, particularly for the manufacturing and technology sectors. The new curbs prompted widespread alarm in global markets, with major manufacturers hurrying to ensure supplies of raw materials and commodities to keep operations running. During the Global Financial Derivatives meeting on Friday, the 2022 Economics Bulletin noted that tight supplies for critical materials “have driven global manufacturers and local investors to front-load their inventory requirements with panic buying as industrial activities slumped with weak supply chains and unavailability of raw materials.”
Meanwhile, the race to hoard energy supplies amid skyrocketing natural gas prices is leaving Europeans scrambling for alternative energy sources. In Germany, where households are facing a 720% rise in their gas bills, people are resorting to stockpiling firewood. However, suppliers of the raw material are unable to keep up with the growing demand, leading to a scarcity of firewood. To prevent the panic-buying wave from escalating any further, some sellers have been rationing supplies and limiting purchases to three boxes of wood at a time.
In the U.S., even the corporate-controlled media is admitting that “social media is getting swamped with pictures of empty grocery shelves”. The federal government promised to solve our supply chain problems, but in the past two years, they just kept getting worse. In some states, inventories have never recovered from the early shortages caused by the health crisis, which makes common delivery delays result in extensive product shortages.
Now more than ever, it’s important to make common sense preparations for the time when economic chaos starts rocking our nation. Sadly, most of our fellow citizens are completely and utterly unprepared for what is happening. But if you think that we’ve already seen the worst of these crises, just wait, because the truth is that what we have experienced so far is just the start."
Canadian Prepper, "This Video Will Lose Me Subs (I Upload Anyways)"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 9/5/22:
"This Video Will Lose Me Subs (I Upload Anyways)"
This is part two of the talk with Dr. Guy McPherson.
Make sure you watch part 1 here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Bright clusters and nebulae abound in the ancient northern constellation of Auriga. The region includes the open star cluster M38, emission nebula IC 410 with Tadpoles, Auriga’s own Flaming Star Nebula IC 405, and this interesting pair IC 417 (lower left) and NGC 1931. An imaginative eye toward the expansive IC 417 and diminutive NGC 1931 suggests a cosmic spider and fly.
About 10,000 light-years distant, both represent young, open star clusters formed in interstellar clouds and still embedded in glowing hydrogen gas. For scale, the more compact NGC 1931 is about 10 light-years across.”
“Sigmund Wollman’s Reality Test”
“Sigmund Wollman’s Reality Test”
by
Robert Fulghum
“In the summer of 1959, at the Feather River Inn near the town of Blairsden in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. A resort environment. And I, just out of college, have a job that combines being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping out with the horse-wrangling at the stables. The owner/manager is Italian-Swiss, with European notions about conditions of employment. He and I do not get along. I think he’s a fascist who wants pleasant employees who know their place, and he thinks I’m a good example of how democracy can be carried too far. I’m twenty-two and pretty free with my opinions, and he’s fifty-two and has a few opinions of his own. One week the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every single day. Two wieners, a mound of sauerkraut, and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury, the cost of meals was deducted from our check.
I was outraged.
On Friday night of that awful week, I was at my desk job around 11:00 P.M., and the night auditor had just come on duty. I went into the kitchen to get a bite to eat and saw notes to the chef to the effect that wieners and sauerkraut are on the employee menu for two more days.
That tears it. I quit! For lack of a better audience, I unloaded on the night auditor, Sigmund Wollman.
I declared that I have had it up to here; that I am going to get a plate of wieners and sauerkraut and go and wake up the owner and throw it on him. I am sick and tired of this crap and insulted and nobody is going to make me eat wieners and sauerkraut for a whole week and make me pay for it and who does he think he is anyhow and how can life be sustained on wieners and sauerkraut and this is un-American and I don’t like wieners and sauerkraut enough to eat it one day for God’s sake and the whole hotel stinks anyhow and the horses are all nags and the guests are all idiots and I’m packing my bags and heading for Montana where they never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut and wouldn’t feed that stuff to the pigs. Something like that. I’m still mad about it.
I raved on this way for twenty minutes, and needn’t repeat it all here. You get the drift. My monologue was delivered at the top of my lungs, punctuated by blows on the front desk with a fly-swatter, the kicking of chairs, and much profanity. A call to arms, freedom, unions, uprisings, and the breaking of chains for the working masses.
As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman, the night auditor, sat quietly on his stool, smoking a cigarette, watching me with sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He’s got good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin, coughed a lot. He liked being alone at the night job – gave him intellectual space, gave him peace and quiet, and, even more, he could go into the kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to – all the wieners and sauerkraut he wanted. To him, a feast. More than that, there’s nobody around at night to tell him what to do. In Auschwitz he dreamed of such a time. The only person he sees at work is me, the nightly disturber of his dream. Our shifts overlap for an hour. And here I am again. A one-man war party at full cry.
“Fulchum, are you finished?”
“No. Why?”
Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know what’s wrong with you? It’s not wieners and kraut and it’s not the boss and it’s not the chef and it’s not this job.”
“So what’s wrong with me?”
“Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don’t know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night.” In a gesture combining dismissal and blessing, he waved me off to bed.
Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes with a truth so hard. Years later I heard a Japanese Zen Buddhist priest describe what the moment of enlightenment was like and I knew exactly what he meant. There in that late-night darkness of the Feather River Inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked my butt and opened a window in my mind.
For thirty years now, in times of stress and strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I’m ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks: “Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?”
I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference. Good night, Sig.”
"So We All Ran Around..."
“So we all ran around in mad, mindless, meaningless circles, as if we were in a cotton-candy eating contest where the grand prize was getting kicked in the face. We were oblivious to everything around us that no truly sane person would ever tolerate. And we needed someone else to tell us to stop it.”
- Edward M. Wolfe
The Poet: Mary Oliver, "Lead"
"Lead"
"Here is a story to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter the loons came to our harbor and died,
one by one, of nothing we could see.
A friend told me of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one just where that is.
The next morning this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world."
- Mary Oliver
"He Cannot Help Doubting..."
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet ‘for sale’, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence – briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing – cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity.”
- Erich Fromm
"Even Amazon is Worried About the Economy - Prepare Now"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 9/5/22:
"Even Amazon is Worried About the Economy - Prepare Now"
"All the signs are in front of us. The global economy is not doing well. High energy prices are affecting everything from aluminum to steel production. Even Amazon is not going to complete dozens of fulfillment centers."
Comments here:
"12 Numbers That Show That We Are Getting Dangerously Close To An Economic Crash As The Fall Of 2022 Approaches"
"12 Numbers That Show That We Are Getting Dangerously
Close To An Economic Crash As The Fall Of 2022 Approaches"
by Michael Snyder
"You have heard me say it over and over again. What we are witnessing right now reminds me so much of 2008, and we all remember what happened in the fall of 2008. That doesn’t mean that this new crisis will unfold exactly the same way that the last one did. Ultimately, every economic downturn is unique. But the fact that we are seeing so many parallels between what is transpiring now and what transpired 14 years ago should deeply alarm all of us. We appear to be on the precipice of another economic crash, and all of the “solutions” that our leaders give us just seem to make things even worse.
Hopefully someone out there can find a way to pull a miracle out of a hat and a worst case scenario can be averted. But I wouldn’t count on that happening. The following are 12 numbers that show that we are getting dangerously close to an economic crash as the fall of 2022 approaches…
#1 The government is telling us that the unemployment rate only went up to 3.7 percent in August.
#2 According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were being used the real rate of unemployment in the United States would be over 24 percent.
#3 About half of all U.S. companies say that they will be eliminating jobs within the next 12 months.
#4 The government is telling us that the inflation rate in the United States is only 8.5 percent.
#5 According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the real rate of inflation would be somewhere around 17 percent right now. That is worse than anything that we experienced during the Jimmy Carter era.
#6 At one company, the number of Americans taking out short-term loans for groceries has nearly doubled this year.
#7 One out of every five home sellers in the United States dropped their asking price last month. This is more evidence that home prices are starting to rapidly move in a downward direction.
#8 Sales of previously-owned homes were about 20 percent lower this July than they were last July.
#9 One recent survey found that 3.8 million Americans believe that they could be evicted from their homes within the next two months.
#10 According to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, approximately 20 million U.S. households are currently behind on their utility bills.
#11 The Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen for three weeks in a row. We also witnessed this sort of a gradual slide just prior to the big crash of 2008.
#12 In August, a whopping 2,150 corporate executives sold off shares in their companies. Are they trying to cash in while they still can?
Gustavo Arnal was one of the corporate executives that recently sold off large amounts of stock. Now he is dead…"The man who jumped to his death from the 18th floor of the famous ‘Jenga’ tower in lower Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood Friday has been identified as a Bed Bath & Beyond executive.
Gustavo Arnal, 52, was the Chief Financial Officer of Bed Bath & Beyond, a company that has been going through struggles of late due to high inflation and a sagging economy. The company announced plans to close 150 stores, of its roughly 900, and lay off 20 percent of staff just two days before Arnal’s death. He reportedly sold over 42,000 shares in the company, oft-identified as a ‘meme stock’, for $1million just over two weeks ago, according to MarketBeat.com."
It appears that Arnal was involved in a “pump and dump” scheme, and he may have decided that he didn’t want to spend much of the rest of his life locked away in prison…"The executive vice president and chief financial officer of Bed Bath & Beyond who plunged to his death from the 18th floor of a New York City skyscraper on Friday was the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging that he and majority shareholder, GameStop Chairman Ryan Cohen, had artificially inflated the company’s value in a “pump and dump” scheme. Gustavo Arnal, 52, and Cohen, are listed as defendants in the class-action lawsuit filed last month in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia."
Sadly, I think that we will see quite a few more people jumping off of buildings before this whole thing is over. Of course most Americans would never do such a thing. Most Americans will just suffer through whatever comes even as their standard of living is being systematically destroyed. For example, CNN recently interviewed one young mother that couldn’t even afford to buy a backpack for her preschooler…"As Sarah Longmore finished her back-to-school shopping, the mother of five looked at a $25 backpack for her preschooler. Soaring inflation had crunched the family’s budget, and she decided her daughter could make do with a hand-me-down. She put the backpack back."
Unfortunately, she is not alone. In fact, one recent poll found that only 36 percent of all parents will “be able to pay for everything their kids need this school year”…"Just 36% of parents said they would be able to pay for everything their kids need this school year, according to Morning Consult’s annual back-to-school shopping report. That’s down sharply from 52% in 2021, when inflation was lower and stimulus checks plus advance child tax credit payments helped some families."
Are things really this bad already? If so, what will conditions look like six months or a year from now? 2023 is less than four months away, and the stage has been set for an economic implosion of absolutely epic proportions. Do you remember the extreme pain that our nation went through in 2008 and 2009?
Many believe that what is ahead will be even worse. The greatest debt bubble in the history of the world is starting to burst, and central banks all over the globe are starting to panic. If you always wanted to live in “interesting” times, you are going to get your wish. But for most people, the times that we are moving into will not be fun at all."
"Big Companies Are Predatory, Big Governments Do Dumb Things"
"Big Companies Are Predatory,
Big Governments Do Dumb Things"
by Bruce Wilds
"Mankind faces a toxic mix when it comes to protecting our freedom. Big companies are predatory, big governments are stupid. The thing they have in common is they both want more control and power. China is a good example of trying to combine both, this experiment however seems to be crumbling before our eyes. Yes, where the powerful forces of global companies and big governments meet is at the intersection of Globalization and the World Economic Forum's vision of the future.
The whole concept of people power or that the masses have at any time the ability to just say no is constructed around the rather utopian or optimistic view that people can agree on what is in their self-interest. In truth when you push away the emotional high garnered from the vision of a quick clean non-violent rebellion, we are the underdog in this ongoing struggle for control of our lives. History shows the so-called masses are seldom able to come together on anything.
Keeping us divided and docile is a tool used to prevent unrest from boiling over and those in charge use it well. When people do rise up, achieving reform is more difficult to accomplish than simply promising it. The head may change but it often inherits the same old body of government workers that are resistant to change. True improvement tends to flow from evolution rather than revelation. The reason rebellions fail is often because those rebelling generally replace one bad government with another.
The idea that a large government hanging above us to regulate our lives will solve our problems has proven to be a fallacy. It could be argued the larger governments become the less responsive they become. Government bureaucracies tend to get bogged down in their mission to serve the people. They also have a huge problem balancing their mission to serve with their natural inclination to extend control over just about everything including our lives. This is often done under the claim it is for the "greater good."
Mega global companies and big government are the two largest threats to our freedom. Throughout history, monopolies of any kind have demonstrated a natural propensity to abuse the people, and governments have exhibited the ability to do dumb things that benefit the few rather than the masses. We see this in their inclination to rush to war and how they rapidly include cronies in anything they do which corrupts the fruit of their efforts.
Big Companies Tend To Be Predatory
For years many economists have discounted how the greed of these companies has created and added to the many problems the world faces. For example, the main reason we have the military-industrial complex and companies rushing to make bombs is that by doing so, they gain power and add to their profits. This train of thought brings front and center the question of whether mega-global companies are working in the direction of taking over the world and even dominating governments and countries. This is in some ways an extension of the New World Order with CEOs pulling the strings. The power these companies wield is often masked behind the facade of a figurehead leader but it is very real.
Developments over the last several decades portend a shift in power from country to corporations. The argument can be made that corporations are well on their way to supplanting the state as the world's dominant organizational structure in the future. Knowledge is power and this means power is flowing to large conglomerates and internet companies. Those that are most prominent control the communication networks collecting and storing data on all of us. They are now in a position to manipulate us in every way.
Over the years, this has resulted in a blurring of the lines between business and state. It has also shaped the world as we know it. By weaponizing the data they have collected as propaganda in a battle for our hearts and minds technology companies may hold an advantage over national governments in persuading individuals to align with their interests. This translates into enormous persuasive power and could be the key to providing corporations with a path to ultimately control populations, governments, and even nations. As they have gained power it seems these powerful global entities often lead governments around by the nose placing and have taken to placing people in a position of servitude.
Biden's Recent Speech Was About Control
The idea that a world controlled by mega companies will be benevolent and kind ignores the greed and ambitions of those who control them and how little regard they can have for those ranked below them. In his novels, Orwell depicted how governments could take on a life of their own and criticized totalitarianism throughout his writings. Totalitarianism, the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism is a political concept that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life.
As an added bonus for these behemoths they can hide behind the governments they control sucking the blood from them while remaining aloof and shielded from the evil they inflict. It is difficult to deny that in our modern world many large companies already have more power than most nations and their power continues to grow at an alarming rate. The bottom line here is the power of the people is at a strong disadvantage when it comes to reforming society. The reality of sustained "power to the people" is as rare as a unicorn in your backyard. When all is said and done, in their effort to control us, the ugly forces of monopolistic conglomerates and governments continue to turn people into pawns."
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