"When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair."
- Blaise Pascal
Ahh, but it does...
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“When the pain of leaving behind what we know outweighs the pain of embracing it, or when the power we face is overwhelming and neither flight nor fight will save us, there may be salvation in sitting still. And if salvation is impossible, then at least before perishing we may gain a clearer vision of where we are. By sitting still I do not mean the paralysis of dread, like that of a rabbit frozen beneath the dive of a hawk. I mean something like reverence, a respectful waiting, a deep attentiveness to forces much greater than our own.”
- Scott Russell Sanders
Folks, I fear our time for such reverence is rapidly approaching.
"Russian Regional Supermarket 8 Months After Sanctions"
"Take a look inside a Russian regional Supermarket in Moscow, Russia. What can you buy in a Russian supermarket in almost every town in Russia? Pyaterochka is the most popular supermarket in Russia with over 14,000 locations. What will we find, what kind of prices can were expect on food inside?" (For comparison purposes, as of Oct. 29 one Russian Ruble is worth 0.0163 Dollars.)
Fascinating. Look at the scene, the cars, buildings, what people look like and are wearing, and then the market. Do they, does it all, seem so different from you? What are your impressions? And how's it going for you in your life and area, Good American? Stores well stocked and open? Food readily available and affordable? Comment below...
"After what happened this morning food prices are about to explode, I've just been advised from a distributor that major price increases are on the horizon. "
"The end of the "growth" road is upon us, though the consensus continues to hold fast to the endearing fantasy of infinite expansion of consumption. This fantasy has been supported for decades by the financial expansion of debt, which enabled more spending which pushed consumption, earnings, taxes, etc. higher. All the financial games are fun but "growth" boils down to an expansion of material consumption: more copper mined and turned into wire which is turned into new wind turbines, housing, vehicles, appliances, etc. There are three problems with the infinite expansion of consumption "growth" paradigm…
Planned Obsolescence:
1. Everyone in developed economies already has everything. The "solution" is planned obsolescence and the obsessive worship of marketing, which seeks to manipulate "consumers" into buying stuff of marginal utility that they don't actually need with credit. This is sold as "fashion."
The reality is many consumer goods are of far lower quality than previous generations of products and services. Some of this can be attributed to lower quality control and the relentless pressure of globalization to lower costs, but it's also a systemic expansion of planned obsolescence:
Product cycles, low-quality components, designs intended to be unrepairable, etc. have all been optimized for the Landfill Economy where products that once lasted for decades are now dumped in the landfill after a few years of service. (As for recycling all the broken stuff - that's another endearing fantasy.).
The purchase of "fashionable" replacements and marketing gimmicks are the only real driver of "growth" in developed economies. Life is not being enhanced with better quality or utility; it's supposedly being enhanced by "new" stuff, the only benefit of which is that's it's "new." The claimed benefits are marginal.
Financial Magic Won’t Cut It:
2. Those who could actually use more stuff don't have any money. China's unprecedented development enabled 500 million people who previously didn't have the earnings or credit to buy vehicles, high-rise flats, etc. and gain the income and credit to buy all the middle-class goodies. This immense expansion of the global middle class boosted the global economy for 30 years.
But the rest of the developing world has a harder time duplicating the staggering flood of capital into China that funded its transition into "the workshop of the world." Global corporations might be able to sell snacks and soda and cheap mobile phones to developing economies, but vehicles and high-rise flats - those require expansions of earnings, capital flows and credit that cannot be generated by financial magic.
3. The easy-to-get materials needed to build another billion vehicles, high-rise flats, etc. have been extracted. While the faithful await new technological miracles that will keep the "growth" system expanding forever, those tasked with actually building the new techno-wonders are looking at real-world limits and costs.
Look at copper. Existing mines have been heavily depleted, with supply growth expected to peak by around 2024, according to industry sources. There hasn’t been enough investment in new mines, and there are few new projects. It generally takes at least 10 years to develop a new mine, so we’re looking at a long-term shortage of one of the world’s most important resources.
“Renewable Energy”: What about so-called ‘renewable energy” like solar? Well, as natural resources expert B.F. Randall explains, "Obviously there’s nothing more natural and renewable than daily solar radiation. The planet is awash in free photons. But to convert free photons into electricity requires, among other things, Polysilicon. And polysilicon is anything but renewable. It's not even recyclable. Polysilicon manufacturing requires three inputs:
1. High-purity silica from quartzite rock.
2. High-purity coking coal.
3. Lots of dispatchable (fossil) electric energy.
Yet none of these is, in any sense of the label, "renewable.”
Can You Call It Progress? Meanwhile, the logic of "growth" is to consume more materials, not less. Consider the premier consumer product globally, the automobile. We're constantly told the value of advancements in safety and comfort are the drivers of higher vehicle prices, but the reality is the advances that mattered occurred in the 1970s. Since then, vehicles have become much larger and heavier, consuming more resources for marginal gains.
My 1977 Honda Accord (built 45 years ago) was a considerably different vehicle from the 1962 Dodge Dart my Mom drove. It had far better fuel efficiency and far more power per cubic inch of engine displacement and was far safer and more comfortable. The same can be said for the modest-sized four-cylinder Toyota pickups we drove for work.
The modern versions of this car and truck are far larger and heavier and consume far more resources than previous models. If we scrape away the marketing mind tricks we would conclude the 45-year-old vehicles were far more environmentally sound than the bloated modern versions, and the supposed advances (rear cameras, Bluetooth sound systems, etc.) are either marginal or annoyances.
Worse, Not Better: I looked through a Toyota Prius manual a few years ago. The majority of the thick book addressed the convoluted, complex sound system. Issues such as why the starter battery went dead if the car wasn't used constantly were unaddressed.
Electric vehicles and hybrids use far more of the planet's resources than simple ICE (internal-combustion engines) vehicles, and they don't last as long as their heavy, costly batteries must be replaced long before the basic ICE vehicle reaches the end of its useful life. Only an inconsequential percentage of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, and regardless of rah-rah marketing claims to the contrary, this isn't going to change.
The environmentally sound approach would be to make vehicles that were radically lighter, less powerful, more efficient and slower, vehicles that would get the equivalent of 200 miles per gallon of fuel (or electrical charge) and last 20 years without major overhauls, battery replacements, etc.
But the logic of marketing and debt expansion demands bigger, heavier, more complex and more costly everything, and the replacement of everything sooner rather than later. Only if we consume and squander more real-world resources can we continue running the marketing/ planned obsolescence/expanding debt machine toward the goal of infinite "growth."
The End of the "Growth" Road: Marketing and debt are not substitutes for real-world limits. A great many people are enamored of techno-promises of limitless energy, etc., but they don't look at the vast material consumption needed to build and maintain it all
I’m talking about techno-wonders such as fusion reactors (incomprehensibly complex), nuclear reactors (huge, complex plants that take years to build) or the mining operations needed to dig up and process all the copper, uranium, bauxite, etc. that all these techno-wonders require in the real world.
We've reached the end of the "growth" road in which the expansion of marketing and debt magically increase the materials we can consume. Debt and marketing have their own limits, and our reliance on them has generated second-order effects few understand. The road ends, and the trail beyond is narrow, rough and unmarked. Those who are deaf to marketing and debt and attuned to self-reliance will do just fine.
Everyone caught by surprise that the infinite road actually has an end will face a bewildering transition. In Jim Rickards’ book "The Road to Ruin", he used this equation to predict the end of the financial world:
P2 = P1 x r x (1- p1)
Jim even went so far as to say the next financial crash would be like: “A nuclear chain reaction, which starts with just a single atom being split, and soon it splits so many atoms that energy release would be enormous.” Well, insert one massive stock market bubble and a global pandemic later… And it looks like the day this market goes “nuclear” has finally arrived. And soon - much sooner than most people think - millions of Americans are going to be feeling the pain."
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, and are noticing massive price increases! How can people afford this? We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
"The retail death march persists. Retail businesses of all sizes in America have been facing an unprecedented crisis for more than a decade. The past couple of years have accelerated the demise of many companies, pushing them into bankruptcy, while others, with no hope for rehabilitation, just went out of business abruptly. But the storm that is brewing all across the sector right now may be unlike anything we've ever seen. A flood of bankruptcies is expected within six months. And according to data provided by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, almost half, or 47%, of U.S. retailers may not be able to survive another recession.
At this point, thousands of celebrated American brands are saddled with massive debt loads, depressed profit margins, falling sales and declining foot traffic, and before we notice, many of them can close their doors forever. Dollar-store chain 99 Cents Only is slowly dying before our eyes. It still operated about 350 stores across four states, but it’s been accumulating distressed loans since 2017. The pile of troubled debt outstanding expanded by about $12.6 billion as record inflation takes a toll on the chain. According to Bloomberg, the discount retailer’s presence in the industry is endangered by a competitive disadvantage compared to larger chains as well as a series of operational and execution issues. Given that net profits plunged by 88%, don’t be surprised if the company starts announcing layoffs and store closures in the near future.
New-York based cosmetics retailer Revlon is one of many in the industry that has faced reduced demand even before the pandemic kept most Americans confined to their homes. Revlon has been struggling with declining revenue and a $575 million debt that ultimately led the company to file for bankruptcy in July. With sales falling 21%, supply chain disruptions, and rising operational costs, as well as the rise of influencer cosmetic brands, Revlon is facing major challenges to adapt to today’s market. And while rising interest rates continue to tighten borrowing conditions, the future of the company is remains uncertain, with lenders still evaluating whether the 89-year-old company deserves more than half a billion dollars to restructure itself.
A potentially lackluster holiday shopping season can wreak havoc on the balance sheets of many struggling retailers and push them off a financial cliff. “I think many of these companies will file for bankruptcy, and it’s not going to be a handful. It’s will be a scary number,” said Stifel managing director Michael Kollender, who leads the consumer and retail investment banking group, Stifel. “It’s far more than we have seen over the last several years combined,” he predicts.
Given the fact that many of these businesses are reporting worsening financial problems for many years, we are likely to see major chains and big household names go away and not come back. Consumers are being squeezed on each and every front, and right now, there aren’t many reasons to be optimistic about the state of our economy.
The death of retail represents the death of our middle-class and the collapse of our purchasing power. These downward trends will continue to gain force as our financial conditions keep getting weaker. This winter is going to bring unprecedented challenges for all of us. And by 2023, our economic landscape may be much emptier than anyone could’ve imagined. That’s why today, we compiled a list of 20 companies that may vanish during the downturn that is intensifying all over the country."
"There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller
"Collectively, investors in Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta watched $700 billion in market cap evaporate between Tuesday and the open today. By contrast, Tesla gained about a percent on trading today. Elon Musk invited his team of Tesla coders to the Twitter headquarters to oversee the outgoing gang given Musk’s successful completion of the deal we wrote about yesterday. And in the many daily missives before.
What’s grabbing our attention today however is the impending diesel shortage in the U.S. Diesel, as you may know, is a “dirty” fuel that gets pumped into cars and big trucks, and is used for heat and manufacturing. And basically powers the dirty part of the economy. For some reason, the president just noticed on October 19 that we’re running low on the stuff.
According to another Orwellian titled government agency, The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said earlier this week on October 21, “stockpiles” of diesel and “other distillate fuel oils” are at the lowest for this time of year since 1982. Other estimates put it as low as last seen in 1954 – the lowest level since records started getting niggled in 1945, right after World War II.
Why do low stockpiles of diesel matter? Well, for folks who drive diesel cars, like one of our colleagues here at the Wiggin Session, the price per gallon has leapt to $5.69. Luckily, we mostly have a post-pandemic work from home ethic.
The other reason is inflation… the bugaboo Jay Powell, chairman at the Federal Reserve, thinks he can tame by raising interest rates. “The problem now,” however, our friend Sean Ring at the Rude Awakening pointed out some six weeks ago, “is that inflation expectations are embedded in the supply chain. And expectations don’t turn on and off like a light switch.” Mr. Ring continues.
Fuel oil, better known as diesel, is still up 75% over last year. Sure, you may feel happy, temporarily, that gasoline is cheaper at the pump. The problem is that taking your car to pick up supplies is the last link in a chain where all other links are connected with diesel. Some still think the situation is salvageable without creating too much mess.
Our friend, Bill Bonner elaborated, in our last Wiggin Session. I’d asked him what he expects to be our next biggest challenge as investors would be. Bill’s response: "I expect an energy crisis. But energy crises have a way of leaking out into other kinds of crises. Our whole economy in the United States runs on diesel fuel. Trucks deliver stuff, and trucks run on diesel fuel. Trucks run on diesel fuel to deliver bread and milk, everything else that we eat. If there were a big crisis in diesel fuel, the shortages, all of a sudden. We've seen how shortages can happen.
Then there could be other shortages such as compounds and electricity goes out and you can't pump the diesel fuel. So anyway, I'm just warning people that it's dangerous for government bureaucrats to interfere in critical industries like this. They've been handing out money, wasting money, doing stupid wars for a long, long time. But this is the first time they have interfered with the very thing that makes it possible for eight billion people to live on Planet Earth. That thing is energy. And these guys don't know anything about energy, except they don't like it. They want it to come from windmills. Well, good luck on that."
In the banter following the president’s awakening that diesel shortages have run down a 25 day supply, there have been several suggestions for banning exports of diesel or fixing the price. When was the last time price fixing worked? Oh yeah, during the Nixon administration following the collapse of Bretton Woods… ha, ha, ha. I’m being unnecessarily sarcastic. Nixon and successive president Ford’s attempts to “Whip Inflation Now” included price fixing schemes. They didn’t work.
“Banning or limiting the export of refined products,” reads a joint report released by the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers sent in October, “would likely decrease inventory levels, reduce domestic refining capacity, put upward pressure on consumer fuel prices and alienate U.S. allies during a time of war.”
Talking their book? Sure. That’s what they get paid to do. But what if they’re right? It’ll be interesting to see what a shortage of dirty fuel does. To me, this is the underbelly of the cultural change to a utopia of climate safe energy... we don’t really know how people are going to react when their houses are cold, food’s expensive and the lights flicker."
"Breaking news: BASF has announced they are partially shuttering operations in Germany and moving capacity to China.
Today is the pivot point. Europe dies from here forward, and it doesn't recover for generations. It's done. Almost nobody realizes this yet, but the dominoes are already falling. Europe is rapidly plunging into a continent on a collision course with total collapse: no industry, no supply chains, no energy, no metals, no fertilizer and no food. The "first world" status of Europe will be a distant memory after just 2-3 winters without food and energy, and once Europe's industrial infrastructure is shuttered, there's no easy way to bring it back online.
This is going to end in mass civil unrest, famine, pandemics and WAR. It will also see revolutions and the toppling of governments, currencies and entire economies. The house of cards is coming down."
Get the full details - plus an emergency interview with an expert on this - in today's feature article and podcast here:
“The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (top right).
Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself is about 40 light-years across and a mere 300,000 years old. That makes it one of the youngest star forming regions in our sky, with newborn and embryonic stars embedded in its natal dust and gas clouds. Estimates of the distance to open star cluster M21 are similar to M20's, but though they share this gorgeous telescopic skyscape there is no apparent connection between the two. In fact, M21's stars are much older, about 8 million years old.”
“How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.”
“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” – Roger Waters
“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.”
– Dresden James
“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill
"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.
The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.
But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.
SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”
Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.
Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”
Postman ended his book by writing: “what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
"Violent crime and drug abuse in Philadelphia as a whole is a major problem. The city’s violent crime rate is higher than the national average and other similarly sized metropolitan areas. Also alarming is Philadelphia’s drug overdose rate. The number of drug overdose deaths in the city increased by 50% from 2013 to 2015, with more than twice as many deaths from drug overdoses as deaths from homicides in 2015. A big part of Philadelphia’s problems stem from the crime rate and drug abuse in Kensington.
Because of the high number of drugs in Kensington, the neighborhood has a drug crime rate of 3.57, the third-highest rate by neighborhood in Philadelphia. Like a lot of the country, a big part of this issue is a result of the opioid epidemic. Opioid abuse has skyrocketed over the last two decades in the United States and Philadelphia is no exception. Along with having a high rate of drug overdose deaths, 80% percent of Philadelphia’s overdose deaths involved opioids and Kensington is a big contributor to this number. This Philly neighborhood is purportedly the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast with many neighboring residents flocking to the area for heroin and other opioids. With such a high number of drugs in Kensington, many state and local officials have zoned in on this area to try and tackle Philadelphia’s problem."
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"The 3200 block of Shelbourne St in Kensington is CRAZY. Dealers/lookouts on both ends of the block. You can hear the lookout shout to announce our presence."
"Happy Halloween. The origins of Halloween are older and murkier than what can be teased out of history. Is it a Christian holiday tossed over the top of an old pagan one? Is it a purely Christian holiday? Is it a floor wax? Is it a dessert topping? Why not all of the above?
The shorter cycles are changed, as well. A typical day had time when we were fully engaged at work, and time when we weren’t. Now? Technology has made it so we’re partially engaged at work, and partially engaged with family. At least we don’t have to be engaged with Madonna.
But the year, that’s something that technology can only partially mess with. We can be warm in winter, and cool in summer, but unless we stay inside all year sealed in Tupperware™ (like Madonna) we are exposed to the changing lights and temperatures of the season.
That is good. We are humans. Or at least I assume we’re all humans, since we all enjoy ingesting nutrients and drinking fluids that hydrate us while listening to sounds of non-random frequencies arranged in a mathematical progression juxtaposed with potentially emotionally triggering lyrics about mildly iconoclastic behavior. Correct?
But all of that aside, I love that we’re still connected to the world via the changing of the seasons. I’m not particularly a fan of summer. But I love the other nine months. And October is the sign that another damn summer is gone. And Halloween is when the weather turns, and in October there is one particular day when I can know that every day for the next five months will be colder than that day. And I love that.
October is also the month when the harvest is done. The time has come when the cycle is done. Planting in spring, growing in summer, harvesting in fall. Winter then comes, and the season has a pause. This is the time humans need for reflection, for learning, for being together, for planning. In short, none of the things that Madonna™ does.
For this cycle, at least, technology hasn’t stopped us entirely from getting to our roots. Autumn is when the die is cast: we have either done what we need to do to make it through the winter, or we haven’t. I think that’s why horror movies are part of the season – harvest reminds us that we’re mortal, and for this part of the year we also, historically, had time to reflect on life and death and the cycle.
So, thinking about death is natural – it is certainly part of the cycle. And that’s my guess as to why horror movies seem to fit so well with Halloween. And I like horror movies.
Many countries do horror movies really, really badly.
The Germans, for instance, make horror movies that are these weird psychological horror movies that probably only make sense if you wear rubber suits to go to the bank.
The Italian horror movies are nearly incomprehensible as German horror films, but the people in the movies look absolutely fantastic and change sides halfway through the movie.
English horror movies are generally as scary as the discussion of tax rates in the House of Commons. I guess that might be scary if you make enough money.
The three or four horror movies I’ve seen from Spain look like shoddy copies of Italian horror movies, but starring some American star like John Saxon. Why John Saxon? Why not – he can fight green goo as well as anyone else.
Japanese horror films started as clumsy metaphors for being bombed with nuclear weapons, but then morphed into clumsy metaphors for being overworked by evil corporations after being bombed by nuclear weapons.
Nope, for me? It’s American horror films. I think we do this particularly well. My favorites are (in no particular order):
The Thing.
Alien.
In the Mouth of Madness.
Reanimator.
From Beyond.
Salem’s Lot.
Scanners.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973 only).
Event Horizon.
Night of the Living Dead.
Ravenous.
The Exorcist.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Phantasm.
Prince of Darkness.
I didn’t rank this list on purpose. If you’ve seen some of these, you’ll know right from the start if this matches up with what you like. But I’ll add this part, too. A horror movie doesn’t have emotional impact in a vacuum. "Night of the Living Dead?" To me, it was scary only because I saw it when I was five. Watching it now, it might be one of the tamest movies on the list, so, your mileage may vary.
With minor exceptions on the list, most of those have a fairly intense paranormal component. I think that’s scarier than just people, otherwise numerous other classic movies like "Silence of the Lambs" would have been on the list. Sadly, their newest movie on the list was done before the year 2000. Have there been scary movies made since then?
Yeah. And I’ve seen bushel baskets of them. They’re just not nearly as good as what came before. Except for that one horror star. She’s scary. Oh, wait. That’s Madonna."
"The death of the faithless state is as natural and lovely as a
melting snowflake…All the broken things will start to be fixed.
And all the crazy things will go away, immediately."
- Curtis Yarvin
"Can our country begin to get its head screwed back on with the midterm election? The cynicism ‘out there’ is monumental. Even if the perfidious Party of Chaos gets thrashed unto near death at the polls, awful pitfalls and frightful quandaries await whatever regime coalesces into a legislative majority of the center and right.
And there remains in place the ghastly figure of “Joe Biden,” the waxwork “president” fronting the coterie of Jacobin crazies still aiming to drag Western Civ into the dumpster of history. One thing a congressional committee might probe posthaste: who exactly has been running the executive branch for two years? My guess would be Barack Obama by way of Susan Rice, Director of the Domestic Policy Council (office in the White House) whose activities are never, ever discussed in the news media. In fact, her mere presence is unacknowledged. I doubt that one-in-a-thousand people in Times Square could tell you who she is and what she does. How many times a day is Ms. Rice on-the-horn with the Gentleman of Kalorama? Are there logs of her calls? Does she use an endless supply of cheap untraceable burner phones? Or does she limo across town regularly to get orders in person?
Is there some penalty for running a shadow government, perhaps something in the sedition or treason folders of federal law? The degree of malign policy coordination throughout Western Civ also suggests that outside actors exert some heavy influence on our affairs. Is Mr. Obama running “Joe Biden” according to a WEF playbook, as appears to be the case with WEFfer implants Justin Trudeau of Canada and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand? It would help explain how so many measures and actions outside our national interest have played out lately - the Gestapo-ization of the FBI, the overt censorship, the wide-open border, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, the drag queen shindigs, the foolish effort to “weaken” Russia in Ukraine, the climate change hysteria, the fiscal idiocy, and everything about-and-around Covid-19.
Of course, the rule-of-law has become a pitifully squishy thing in our time. Nobody is accountable for anything these days. The federal agencies can act however they like in the way of persecuting their political opponents, or inflicting immense harm on the public - like the CDC, FDA, and other public health agencies insanely pushing deadly mRNA vaccines on the public, despite massive evidence that the shots have killed and disabled hundreds of thousands. It’s likely that we will see aggressive hearings into all sorts or government misconduct come January, and it is important to determine who did what to drive America so badly off the rails, but that won’t mitigate the pitfalls and quandaries ahead.
There is a re-set underway for sure with every teeter of industrial civilization, but it doesn’t have to resolve on the side of high-tech tyranny and super-centralized global governance by elitist maniacs. In fact, it can’t. The bottlenecks of resources - energy, commodities, metals, all material things - plus the growing scarcity of real capital (as in representations of genuine wealth), guarantee that nothing organized at the gigantic scale will be able to continue - certainly not any global political administration. The WEF is a fantasy factory; all it can really produce is chaos and misery.
Many national governments may not survive the great discontinuities ahead. Everything we do has to get finer, smaller in scale, and more local. Many, maybe most, of our high-tech systems will be crippled by energy shortages and supply line breakdowns. The business models for everything - from the oil industry to commercial aviation to running mega-cities - no longer pencils out, And as economist Herb Stein observed years ago: things that can’t go on, stop.
Every attempt to maintain the status quo of our withering globalist arrangements will be an act of futility, including the wars that our elites seem to be yearning for. If we squander our remaining resources on kinetic conflict, that will only drag out the journey to new arrangements, destroy more lives, and break more things that still have value.
In theory, a new Congress could get rid of both “Joe Biden” and Kamala Harris via established procedure (impeachment) and install the next Speaker of the House as president - but it would require the most extreme degree of bipartisan cooperation imaginable to get convictions in the Senate.
Perhaps “JB” and the Veep could both be induced to resign. It’s certain that the Biden Family’s crimes of global bribery will be laid out in every sordid detail which, on top of his obvious incompetence, would ensure “JB’s” removal. Ms. Harris can answer for the border crisis. She was so lax and mindless in office that she didn’t even bother passing the buck on the responsibility she’d accepted for managing the border. She never even went down there to look around.
If the election actually happens - the cynical doubt it - it’ll be gratifying for sure to see a loathsome cast of characters swept away in the chem-trail of history. But the winners will have to get the country’s head screwed back on to face the tremendous task of making new arrangements for the continuation of daily life under harsh and alarming conditions. Or else the election may be the last thing we do as the country that we were."
