The Universe

“There are no accidents. If it's appeared on your life radar, this is why: to teach you that dreams come true; to reveal that you have the power to fix what's broken and heal what hurts; to catapult you beyond seeing with just your physical senses; and to lift the veils that have kept you from seeing that you're already the person you dreamed you'd become. There are no accidents. And believe me, that was one heck of a dream.”

“Tallyho,”

The Universe

“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”

- www.tut.com

"The Poet: David Wagoner, "Getting There"

 

"Getting There"

"You take a final step and, look, suddenly

You're there. You've arrived

At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:

This common ground

Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.

What did you want to be?

You'll remember soon.

You feel like tinder under a burning glass,

A luminous point of change.

The sky is pulsing against the cracked horizon,

Holding it firm till the arrival of stars

In time with your heartbeats.

Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression

On the self you were,

By having come all this way through all this welter

Under your own power,

Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising

Meandering lifeline.

What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,

Telling it haltingly like a dream,

That lost traveler's dream under the last hill

Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind

To unburden yourself

Of elements along elementary paths

By the break of morning.

You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight

Called Here and Now.

Now, what you make of it means everything,

Means starting over:

The life in your hands is neither here nor there

But getting there,

So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another

Journey without regret

Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,

The end of endings."

~ David Wagoner

“The Myth of Human Progress”

Full screen recommended.

“The Myth of Human Progress”

By Chris Hedges

“Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth – intellectually and emotionally – and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury – as well as unrivaled military and economic power – for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada.

“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today – about 2 billion – is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.

If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

Wright explained this further on our call. “The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. 

We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”

As Wright told me: “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable – the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun – would disappear.

We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we let oil and gas exploration rip when we knew that expanding the carbon economy was suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.

If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”

- https://www.planetaryphilosophy.com/

"That's Why..."

"That's why crazy people are so dangerous.

You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage."

- Michael Buckley

The Daily "Near You?"

Brighton, Colorado, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Consequences Of Our Choices"

“Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.”

- Richard Bach, “Running From Safety”

"The Great Stagger"

"The Great Stagger"

by The Zman

"One of the curious things about the Roman Empire is how it managed to stagger on for so long after the second century. The third century is actually called The Crisis of the Third Century, because the empire was in chaos. Yet, the empire managed to get through that period and carry on for roughly two more centuries. In time, Historians will probably puzzle over the same question regarding America. How is it that it staggers on despite the obvious problems?

A popular theme in science fiction is one where the human explorers stumble upon alien technology and they are baffled as to what it does. It’s not that they know the purpose but cannot figure out how to make it work. It’s that they don’t understand the purpose of the technology. The implication is that the aliens were so advanced that they were creating tools to solve problems humans have yet to contemplate. The gap between the aliens and humans is so great that it cannot be bridged.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind when thinking about the modern world. The evidence is pretty good that Western man is dumber than his ancestors. We have more overall knowledge than our ancestors, but our ability to add to it is in sharp decline along with our ability to use it. The people in charge now struggle to do the basics of government, like maintain order and the infrastructure. In America, streets are crumbling and there are regular power failures in parts of the country.

A good small-scale example is the city of Baltimore. All of the machinery that was put in place back when it was an important city is still in place. The people running that machinery today are not doing so well. They clearly lack the intellectual firepower to operate that machinery. Baltimore is one of the most dangerous cities in the world and it is suffering from a steady population decline. The political class is so incompetent they can’t even run the graft system properly.

This was all true before the Covid panic. One thing that kept Baltimore afloat was the tourist and sports industry. In the summer, tourists would come to the well-guarded inner harbor. People from the surrounding areas would come in for sports games and the surrounding restaurants. All of that was shuttered by the panic, which means the tens of millions in tax dollars never arrived. Then there is the cost of the Covid panic itself, which has further crippled the city administration.

When you look at many American cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Newark and so on, the question is not “How did they get to this point?” The question is, “How have they not collapsed by now?” Part of it, of course, is the surrounding infrastructure that keeps them propped up. In the case of Baltimore, the rest of the state is taxed to keep Baltimore City government going. Federal dollars pour in to keep the cops on the streets and the schools open for business.

That’s fine for cities, but that cannot work for the country as a whole. Like those cities, the national government is increasing incompetent. Both official political parties are in such steep decline that the next election will offer a choice between another carny barker and a certified dementia patient. The sober minded will always feels as if the current age sits on the shoulder’s of giants, but the gap between the best we have today and just a few generations ago is breathtaking.

Of course, no one can really know what is happening. The media told us over 50 million people were thrown out of work due to the panic. The empty streets seem to confirm it, but they also tell us unemployment is below 10%. The stock market has returned to the levels it was at before the panic. The media also tells us that the riots we saw were a figment of our imagination. How can anything work when no one can be sure of anything being told to them by the rulers?

Like Rome for close to three centuries, America staggers on, despite the problems and the decline of the ruling class. In the case of Rome, there was no organized force capable of toppling her. In the case of America, the global order assumes America will be the pivot point, the fulcrum on which order balances. As long as people are being fed and have shelter, they will not rise up to challenge the rulers. Like Rome, the great stagger will continue until the corpse of the empire collapses."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

The GOP’s Debt Ceiling Demands

The GOP’s Debt Ceiling Demands

 by Martin Armstrong

"The Republicans and Democrats are refusing to agree on the debt ceiling crisis. The government will be unable to pay its bills and the US will default if an agreement is not reached. Yellen has reached out to every media outlet and large corporation in the US to warn of the “catastrophic” consequences. Of course, they’ve always managed to increase the limit in the past as America cannot afford to default on its debt obligations. The Democrats insist on spending with no end in sight, while the Republicans are demanding some sort of budget. Biden and McCarthy met on Monday to discuss, but neither side will budge.

Biden said the GOP is taking an “extreme position,” but what are they demanding? The GOP wants to set discretionary federal spending at $1.47 trillion for the next fiscal year, with an increase of only 1% in future years. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said this would reduce the deficit by $4.8 trillion in the next decade.

The promise Biden made to students must be repealed for the Republicans to accept the ceiling. Biden implemented this policy to buy young votes and had no fiscal plan in place to finance such a lofty goal. The GOP believes student loan payments are being unfairly subsidized by millions of American taxpayers, many who already paid off their own student debt. Biden’s plan also does nothing to address continually rising tuition costs. The CBO believes this cut will save taxpayers about $460 billion over the next decade.

Biden’s IRS Army must also be defunded. The GOP wants to rescind the $71 billion that the Biden Administration used to hire 87,000 new IRS agents. We never had a need for so many agents in the past, and it is unlikely that they will shakedown $71 billion from average American families.

The Republicans also want to take back unobligated COVID relief money. Six separate bills were passed between 2020 and 2022 and the government is still shelling out money for a pandemic that has ended. The CBO stated this would save the US $30 billion in spending over the next 10 years.

The climate change agenda is costly. Republicans are demanding that Biden eliminate some of the tax breaks his administration provides to green-friendly companies. They’re negotiating exactly how to position some of the perks for biofuel. In general, the CBO believes this will save the US $570 billion over the next 10 years.

Increasing America’s ability to become energy dependent is crucial. Biden ripped away America’s ability to function without energy exports on his first day in office. The country needs coal, natural gas, and oil to function and energy inflation remains a serious problem. The energy bill, labeled HR1 as it is of top importance, would also boost production of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other minerals.

The Republicans would also like to limit social programs and government handouts. Able-bodied adults under the age of 50, without dependents, must work a minimum of 20 hours a week or they may lose their SNAP and food stamp benefits. Those who are unemployed but on Medicaid and able-bodied will also be required to work a part-time job. The CBO stated 15 million Medicaid recipients would be required to work part-time, and 1.5 million could risk losing federal funding.

Unsurprising since the neocons are on both sides, no one has asked Biden to end the blank checks to Ukraine. America has sent hundreds of millions to Ukraine and is receiving nothing in return. Our own border is overrun and yet we just pledged another $300 million of American taxpayers’ money to secure Ukraine’s border. The funding for this war will create unprecedented inflation and cripple our economy."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.

"How It Really Is"

  

"Artificial Debt Ceilings"

"Artificial Debt Ceilings"

And genuine human incompetence.

by Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman

Youghal, Ireland - "The subject is AI. But the discussion takes place against a backdrop of financial crisis. Or, at least a faux financial crisis – the debt ceiling. You probably know more about Artificial Intelligence than we do. But since it is supposed to change life on planet earth – for the better – we thought we should get acquainted with it. We don’t want to be surprised by a sudden increase in our well-being. It might be unsettling.

Here is the executive summary: If you are counting on AI to make you rich…or save the US from decline…you will probably be disappointed. In particular, buying into the speculative frenzy surrounding AI is likely to be costly. Don’t buy NVIDIA. Sell it. Returning to the financial crisis, illustrating the ‘faux’ part is The Economist:

The nightmare scenario: What happens if America defaults on its debt? An unimaginable eventuality becomes all too imaginable The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency in the White House, estimates that in the first few months of a breach, the stock market would fall by 45%. Moody’s reckons it would fall by about 20%, and that unemployment would shoot up by five percentage points, which would mean somewhere in the region of 8m Americans losing their jobs. The government, constrained by the debt ceiling, would be unable to respond to the downturn with fiscal stimulus, making for a deeper recession. ‘All too imaginable!’ Oh my. The sky is really falling this time.

It doesn’t take artificial intelligence to see that the debt ceiling crisis is a fraud. The government has plenty of money to pay for essential services – and to service the interest on its debt. As Ms. Yellen explained on TV on Sunday, it can “prioritize” its debts, paying those that are essential…and letting the others slide. No need for a ‘government shutdown’…no need for a ‘default.’ The ‘crisis’ is a swindle. Nothing more.

From former budget director (under Reagan), David Stockman, we get the figures. Every month the feds receive about $450 billion in tax receipts. The net interest payments on the debt are just over $60 billion per month. Social Security is $128 billion. That leaves $262 billion available for whatever foolish thing the feds want to spend it on. In fact, it leaves plenty to run the entire government in the style to which it became accustomed in 2019, which was no mean and lean year.

The debt ceiling fight is pure politics. The Democrats don’t want to make the hard choices that real budgets require. And the Republicans want to show that the Democrats are spendthrifts. Neither party really wants an actual limit on spending.

A.I. Says… But all the jabbering by the toady press suggests that terrible things will happen if the feds can’t get their act together and increase the national debt. This is where just a little intelligence – artificial or otherwise – might come in handy. We know of no business, family or government that ever got out of a debt trap by continuing to borrow money. Instead, the extra debt causes awful things to happen; it doesn’t prevent them.

Ultimately, all we have is time and resources. And ultimately, all the money spent by the feds must come from us. Allowing the Treasury to borrow more – with no national emergency – is just a way for them to get more of your money without raising taxes. So, let’s go to AI. Can we count on artificial intelligence to give it to us straight…without the blithering and blabbering of the mainstream media?

Do we need a debt ceiling, we asked? ChatGPT: "The question of whether the United States needs a debt ceiling is a matter of ongoing debate among economists, policymakers, and experts. The debt ceiling is a statutory limit on the amount of debt that the U.S. government can issue to finance its operations and meet its obligations.

Advocates of the debt ceiling argue that it serves as a crucial mechanism to promote fiscal discipline and ensure that the government does not accumulate excessive levels of debt. They believe that the debt ceiling encourages policymakers to make responsible spending decisions and helps control the growth of government borrowing.

On the other hand, critics of the debt ceiling contend that it is an arbitrary and unnecessary constraint that can create economic and financial instability. They argue that the debt ceiling does not prevent the government from spending money it has already committed to, and reaching the limit can lead to potential default, disrupting financial markets and undermining the country's creditworthiness.

In practice, the debt ceiling has been raised numerous times in the past to avoid default and allow the government to continue borrowing. The ceiling is often viewed as a political tool that can be used by lawmakers to negotiate and shape fiscal policies.

Ultimately, whether the U.S. needs a debt ceiling is a complex question without a definitive answer. It involves weighing the potential benefits of fiscal discipline against the risks of economic disruption. Different policymakers and economists may have varying opinions on the matter, and the decision on whether to maintain or eliminate the debt ceiling ultimately lies with Congress and the political process."

Not wrong. Not bad. Blah-blah. Suitable for a 9th grade civics class. But something is missing…

Government Misinformation: The internet promised to bring humanity to a new, higher level. We’d all have all the info, all the time. That was in the late ‘90s. But more information did not really make us better off. It turned out that information is only useful if it is pertinent to your situation…and connected, closely, to things you understand and can verify. Those YouTube videos that show you how to install a new bathroom sink, for example, can be extremely useful, but only if you’re replacing your bathroom sink. Otherwise, information is a distraction…and keeps you from replacing the sink.

And ‘information’ is easily distorted and contrived. Remember when the media was telling us that Presidential candidate Donald Trump engaged in mutual urination with a Russian prostitute? The story, though backed by mainstream celebrities, was apparently, completely untrue. Or remember being told – by 51 CIA ‘experts – that the Hunter Biden laptop brouhaha was “Russian misinformation?” Also, untrue. And who can forget when Donald Trump’s band of misfits invaded the Capitol building? For hours and hours, we saw the hapless mob milling around – with neither a plan nor a clue – and we were told they were bent on ‘a democracy-ending coup d’etat.’ Completely absurd.

And remember how the Covid virus was a threat to us all? We followed ‘the science’ and locked down much of the entire US economy. If only we had had AI back then! It might have told us – it wasn’t true.

‘Information’ on the internet was remarkably promiscuous. Loose. Untethered to reality. It merely amplified and certified the kind of loose talk you might hear from barroom big mouths. But at least it was ‘free.’ Or so we thought, until the ‘gatekeepers’ at Facebook, Google and Twitter began colluding with the feds to shut the gates to keep out ideas and opinions the feds didn’t like.

More A.I. Blah-Blah: And now, we have AI. It offers to clean up the mess on the worldwide web. It will sort, verify and organize the chatter you find in the press, in academia, in research reports and other stores of knowledge. Got a question? Just ask ChatGPT, Bard or some other AI-enhanced know-it-all.

When will the AI investment bubble blow up, we wanted to know? ChatGPT replies: "As an AI language model, I don't have access to real-time financial data or the ability to predict future events with certainty. The rise and fall of investment bubbles are influenced by various factors, including market conditions, investor sentiment, technological advancements, and regulatory changes. While AI has experienced significant growth and investment in recent years, it is challenging to determine precisely when or if an investment bubble will occur.

It's worth noting that AI continues to be an area of intense research and development, with numerous applications across industries. As with any investment, it's essential for individuals and organizations to conduct thorough research, consider the risks involved, and make informed decisions based on their specific circumstances.

If you have concerns or are considering investing in AI-related ventures, it's advisable to consult with financial professionals who can provide personalized advice based on your individual needs and goals."

Well, that’s helpful! More blah-blah. As you can see, AI is smart…it can use big words. But it is smart in the way a lot of people appear to be smart – by repeating what other people say. The artificial part is easy to see. Where’s the real intelligence? Stay tuned..."

Joel’s Note: According to the deluge of fear-mongering stories you’re about to be inundated with from now through Friday, the US Treasury is down to its last $57 billion dollars. One estimate we saw reckons that, if spending continues at the current rate, the balance will be negative $18 billion by Friday. Hmm...

Ten billion here... a couple of trillion there... gosh golly it’s hard for us non-artificial intelligences to wrap our merely mammalian brains around such large numbers. So here it is, broken down in terms we can cerebrally digest...Having $57 billion in the kitty while owing $31 trillion is like the average punter at the casino having ten $100 chips left on the table... while being in hock to the house for $545,000. Oh, wait. That does sound like a terrible position. What to do, then? Extend the poor sap’s line of credit? Or call gamblers anonymous?"

- https://bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/

o

"Velocity And Money Supply – Inflation’s Dance Partners"

"US Debt Ceiling: How a Default Could Affect You"

Firstpost, 5/24/23

"US Debt Ceiling: 

How a Default Could Affect You"

"The US government could start to run out of money if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling by the end of the month. What would this mean for the world and especially your personal finances?"

Video and comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Till Debt Do Us Part"

Dan, I Allegedly 5/24/23

"Till Debt Do Us Part"

"People are going out and borrowing more than ever right now.

 They don’t seem to care that they are going deeper and deeper into debt"

Video and comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once. They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford. They are saying, less obviously, that their present wants are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty. But in making that bargain they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they’ll figure it out. They don’t always do that.” 

– Michael Lewis, “Boomerang”

"What's Going On With Sam's Club? Empty Shelves Everywhere!"

               

Adventures With Danno, 5/24/23

"What's Going On With Sam's Club?

 Empty Shelves Everywhere!"

"In today's vlog, we are at Sam's Club and are noticing a lot of empty shelves! This is not good as prices on groceries also continue to skyrocket."

Video and comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Americans Dumpster Diving To Survive; Running Out Of Cash; Losing The Inflation Fight"

Jeremiah Babe, 5/23/23

"Americans Dumpster Diving To Survive;

 Running Out Of Cash; Losing The Inflation Fight"

Video and comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"The Biggest Car Market Crash Of Our Lifetime Has Begun And Auto Prices Are Set To Plummet 88%"

"The Biggest Car Market Crash Of Our Lifetime 

Has Begun And Auto Prices Are Set To Plummet 88%"

By Epic Economist

"Over the past three years, we’ve seen the development biggest car price bubble in history, and now we’re about to witness the biggest car price crash in our lifetime, according to the experts. With a flood of supply hitting the market at a time consumer demand is rapidly cooling off, elevated prices are unsustainable, and that is true for both new and used cars. The collapse has already begun. In fact, today, we listed some models that have already faced massive price declines so far in 2023 and compiled some revealing data and some brutally honest forecasts about the auto market crisis that is now unfolding all around us.

In such an environment where buyers are being priced out of the market en masse, a crash is due, the question is merely when, analysts warned. We can already notice that a significant correction has started to unfold. But we’re being told that the collapse that is ahead will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen – even worse than what happened during the auto market crisis of 2008.

Easing supply chain pressures are helping to rebalance supply. But the thing is that we’re moving from a situation of no supply at all to a flood of inventory. That means the values of many vehicles are plummeting faster than anyone anticipated. A recent report from UBS estimates that global car production will exceed sales by 6% this year, leaving an excess of 5 million vehicles that will require price cuts to get sold off of lots, Yahoo Finance reported. The biggest example of this is Tesla’s latest price cuts for its new cars. The Model X lost over $14,000, or 23% of its value since the beginning of the year. The brand’s used car prices are falling too. For instance, used Model 3s seem to be taking the brunt of the ongoing downward trend, with their average price falling by $11,275 from $51,251 to $39,976 last month, according to iSeeCars.com.

Similarly, in 2022, the average price of a used Infiniti QX80 came in at $52,874. One year later, however, the big Infiniti SUV's average price on the used car market is down nearly $12,000 to a reported average of $41,094 in April, a 22.3% plunge. Other popular models that are about to experience major reductions in price include the new Nissan Frontier, which now costs around $39,833 and is expected to drop to $27,146 by the end of 2023. Volatility will be even higher in the used car market. Researchers forecast that a three-year-old Toyota Camry that is selling today for $27,404 is going to cost $16,548 before year’s end.

For all the people who bought one of these used models in recent months, the outlook going forward won’t bring them any relief. While the corrections that occurred up until now are quite remarkable, it’s important to note that used vehicle values increased by a whopping 88% since 2020, so they should brace for some pretty brutal declines in car values in the coming months.

All asset bubbles are bursting, with stocks and housing leading the downward march. Now, signs of a car market crash continue to emerge while unpredictable volatile outside factors threaten to make things even uglier, especially if we fall even deeper into a recession. The safe bet would be to continue to protect ourselves during the storm, and let the tsunami pass before proceeding."

Video and comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com

Gerald Celente, Trends Journal 5/23/23

Gerald Celente, Trends Journal 5/23/23

"The Greatest Recession Has Begun, Prepare For The Worst"

"Gerald Celente, renowned trend forecaster, is back with an in-depth analysis of today's trends in the news. From the inefficacy of mainstream media's coverage to insights into a looming recession, Gerald is providing unfiltered truth in this 25 minute video. Get a sneak peek into the new Trends Journal issue, learn how to discern valuable information in a sea of irrelevant headlines, and understand why Gerald says, "Thinking for yourself is the best trend to follow." The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Find out more here: https://trendsjournal.com

Video and comments here:

Strong language alert!

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex.

About five light-years "tall", the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100513.html

Chet Raymo, “A Sense Of Place”

“A Sense Of Place”

by Chet Raymo

“It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together. As far as I know, that never happened. But let’s imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty’s essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944) and from Abbey’s essay “The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them.

“This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.”

“This desert, all deserts, any deserts.”

“On the shady stream banks hang lady’s eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging.”

“Oily growths like the poison ivy – oh yes, indeed – that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.”

“All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats.”

“Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.”

“Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias.”

“Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.”

“The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place.”

“In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don’t. In the Mojave Desert, it’s Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise…”

“The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned – they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood.”

“…the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers.”

“Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people’s faces are good.”

“Californicating.”

“To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee.”

“Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?”

“I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen.”

“Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.”

“Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking.”

“In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving.”

“There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.”

“A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see – only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.”

“Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.”

“In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable…”

“New life will be built upon these things.”

“…an unrequited and excessive love.”

“It is this.”

“That’s why.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"In Human Society..."

"When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair."

- Nadezhda Mandelstam

"Sometime In Your Life..."

"Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even."

- Daniel Berrigan

"The Graveyard of Empires" (Excerpt)

"The Graveyard of Empires: 

The Top Investments as the World Order Collapses"

by Nick Giambruno

Excerpt: “You have the watches, but we have the time.” The Taliban often referred to this old Afghan saying when discussing their fight against the Americans. Ultimately, they were proven correct. After almost two decades of conflict, an insurgent army from one of the world’s poorest nations inflicted a decisive military defeat on the US, the global superpower that upholds the unipolar world order. The US government’s total failure in Afghanistan - the longest war in American history - signifies a crucial moment and turning point in world history.

The Soviet Union collapsed about two years after the Red Army was defeated and withdrew from Afghanistan. As we approach the second anniversary of the American retreat, could a similar fate be in store for the US? While nobody knows the future, there is an excellent chance that the colossal failure in Afghanistan could accelerate the unraveling of the geopolitical power of the US and the shift to a multipolar world order.

Afghanistan’s strategic position has always made it a coveted prize in the Eurasian landscape. As shown in the image below, Afghanistan is situated in the center of Eurasia, at the crossroads of China, Iran, and Russia - the three primary challengers to the US-led world order.

This central location is why Afghanistan has enormous geopolitical importance and why the US desired a strategic military presence there.

The US military’s presence in Afghanistan was a strategic roadblock to Russia, China, and Iran’s goal of creating a powerful geopolitical group in Eurasia that could challenge the US-led world order. However, with the Taliban forcing the US military out of Afghanistan, the door to a more coherent geopolitical alliance in Eurasia is now wide open. In short, failure in Afghanistan is a geopolitical disaster for the US.

For at least the past decade, China, Russia, and Iran have been working on an impressive plan to connect Eurasia - even while the US military was in Afghanistan. This trend will likely speed up now that the US military is no longer physically in their way. Here’s what they have been working on…

China, Russia, and Iran are constructing a vast network of land-based transportation infrastructure, making the US Navy’s control of the oceans less significant.

China’s New Silk Road project is central to this new system. It aims to bypass the US financial system and the US Navy’s control of sea routes. The project, planned to be operational by 2025, includes high-speed railways, highways, fiber optic cables, energy pipelines, seaports, and airports.

These Eurasian powers are also establishing alternative international organizations for financial, political, and security cooperation, separate from those central to the US-led world order, institutions like NATO, the World Bank, SWIFT, and the IMF. Some notable examples include the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), launched by China in 2014 and is an alternative to the IMF and World Bank.

The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), a Russian-led trading bloc created in 2015, allows for the free movement of goods, services, capital, and people among its member countries. Lastly, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) focuses on military and security collaboration between its members.

If current trends continue, it will result in greater economic, political, and security collaboration among the three main Eurasian nations—China, Russia, and Iran—at the expense of US geopolitical interests. This scenario is exactly what Zbigniew Brzezinski worried would make the US “geopolitically peripheral.” It spells the end of the unipolar world order. In short, we are on the path to the emergence of an alliance of powerful Eurasian countries and a multipolar world order.

As the world order changes, I think there are two prominent outcomes we can bet on.

The US Dollar Will Lose Its Privileged Position. The decline of America’s geopolitical influence is another enormous headwind for the US dollar. Suppose the world thinks the US military is the ultimate backstop of the US dollar. What does it mean for the US dollar’s credibility when a ragtag group of insurgents from one of the poorest countries can defeat the military which backs it? If the mighty US military couldn’t secure its partners in Afghanistan, how can it protect its other allies?

Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Western European countries, and the Gulf Arab states are likely pondering this. It wouldn’t be surprising to see them make security arrangements with US adversaries - such as China, Russia, and Iran - that exclude the Americans. In fact, this has already happened with Saudi Arabia, a crucial player in the US-led world order. Saudi Arabia is the linchpin of the petrodollar system, which has underpinned the US dollar since Nixon removed its last links to gold in 1971.

In a matter of weeks, Saudi Arabia has:

Restored relations with Iran.

Restored relations with Syria and welcomed it back to Arab League.

Supported multiple OPEC+ oil production cuts against American wishes.

Announced an end to the war in Yemen.

Agreed to sell oil in other currencies.

Decided to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The US recently sent its CIA director to Riyadh to tell the Saudis the Americans feel “blindsided” amid these seismic shifts in Saudi foreign policy. In short, a paradigm shift in Saudi policies signifies a paradigm shift in the US dollar because of the petrodollar system.

However, Saudi Arabia is not the only US ally hedging its geopolitical bets recently. France, India, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, and others are making moves to cozy up to the Eurasian geopolitical block. The big question is, how long will the world continue to hold the paper liabilities of a bankrupt and declining government?

While the US dollar is the leading global currency, it was already on a path of inevitable debasement and eventual collapse - even before considering the compounding effects of a multipolar world order.

The only reason the US government has managed to avoid severe consequences from its monetary policies is the US dollar’s status as the world’s premiere reserve currency, thanks to Washington’s military and economic dominance that has prevailed since the end of World War II. However, as this dominance wanes, so will the dollar’s purchasing power. The US government’s ability to hide the effects of its rampant money printing by offloading trillions of dollars to foreigners is nearing its end. That’s terrible news for the US dollar.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m excited about the Chinese fiat currency - or whatever new monetary concoction the Eurasian block comes up with. Ultimately it will be nothing more than the liability of a new grouping of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats."

Full article here:

- https://internationalman.com/

"Does A 1904 Geopolitical Theory Explain The War In Ukraine?"

"Does A 1904 Geopolitical Theory

 Explain The War In Ukraine?"

by John Wilder

"When I look at the war in Ukraine and other world events, I see evidence of Sir Halford John Mackinder. It would have been cool if he was the frontman for a 1910s version of Judas Priest, but no. Mackinder was a guy who thought long and hard about mountains, deserts, oceans, steppes, and wars. You could tell Mackinder was going to be good at geography, what with that latitude. The result of all this pondering was what he called the Heartland Theory, which was the founding moment for geopolitics.

What’s geopolitics? It’s the idea that one of the biggest influencers in human history (besides being human) was the geography we inhabit. Mackinder’s first version wasn’t very helpful, since he just ended up with “Indonesia” and the rest of the world, which he called “Outdonesia”.

Mackinder focused mainly on the Eurasian continent. Flat land with no obstacles meant, in Mackinder’s mind, that the land would be eventually ruled by a single power. Jungles and swamps could be a barrier, but eventually he thought that technology would solve that. Mountains? Mountains were obstacles that stopped invasions, and allowed cultures to develop independently. Even better than a mountain? An island.

There’s even a theory (not Mackinder’s) that the independent focus on freedom flourished in England because the local farmers weren’t (after the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Mormons, and Vikings were done pillaging) subject to invasion and were able to develop a culture based on a government with limited powers, along with rights invested in every man.

Mackinder went further, though. He saw the combination of Eurasia and Africa as something he called the World Island. If the World Island came under the domination of a single power, he thought, it would eventually rule the rest of the world – it would have overwhelming resources and population, and it would have the ability to outproduce (both economically and militarily) everything else. “Pivot Area” is what Mackinder first called the Heartland.

Mackinder, being English, had seen the Great Game in the 1900s, which in many cases was a fight to keep Russia landlocked. The rest of Europe feared a Russia that had access to the sea. Conversely, Russia itself was the Heartland of the Mackinder’s World Island. Russia was separated and protected on most of its borders by mountains and deserts. On the north, Russia was protected by the Arctic Ocean, which is generally more inaccessible than most of Joe Biden’s recent memories.

Russia is still essentially landlocked. The Soviet Navy had some nice submarines, but outside of that, the Russians have never been a naval power, and the times Russia attempted to make a navy have been so tragically inept that well, let me give an example: The sea Battle of Tsushima between the Japanese and Russians in 1905 was a Japanese victory. The Japanese lost 117 dead, 583 wounded, and lost 3 torpedo boats. The Russians? They lost 5,045 dead, 803 injured, 6,016 captured, 6 battleships sunk, 2 battleships captured. The Russians sank 450 ton of the Japanese Navy. The Japanese sunk 126,792 tons of the Russian fleet. Yup. This was more lopsided than a fight between a poodle and a porkchop.

Mackinder noted that the Heartland (Russia) was built on land power. The Rimlands (or, on the map “Inner Crescent”) were built on sea power. In the end, almost all of the twentieth century was built on keeping Russia away from the ocean, and fighting over Eastern Europe. Why? In Mackinder’s mind, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland (Russia); Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” In one sense, it’s true.

Mackinder finally in 1943 came up with another idea, his first idea being lonely. I think he could see the way World War II was going to end, so he came up with the idea that if the United States were to team up with Western Europe, they could still command the Rimlands and contain the Soviet Union to the Heartland.

There are several reasons that the United States has responded with such an amazing amount of aid to Ukraine. $120 billion dollars? Some people don’t work a whole year and get that much money. No, the idea is to bleed Putin as deeply and completely as they can. Why? If they’re following Mackinder, this keeps Russia vulnerable. It keeps Eastern Europe from being under Russia’s control – if you count the number of “Battles of Kiev” or “Battles of Kharkov” you can see that it’s statistically more likely to rain artillery in Kiev than rain water.

This might be the major driver for Russia, too. A Russian-aligned (or at least neutral) Ukraine nicely plugs the Russian southern flank. And this is nearly the last year that Russia can make this attempt – the younger generation isn’t very big, and the older generation that built and can run all of the cool Soviet tech? They’re dying off. Soon all their engineers with relevant weapons manufacturing experience will be...dead. If Russia is going to attempt to secure the south, this is their only shot. Depending on how vulnerable the Russians think they are, the harder they’ll fight. NATO nations tossing in weapons isn’t helping the famous Russian paranoia.

I think that the United States, in getting cozy with China in the 1970s, was following along with Mackinder’s theory – I believe Mackinder himself said that a Chinese-Russian alliance could effectively control the Heartland and split the Rimland, given China’s access to the oceans. And that’s what China is doing now, with the Belt and Road Initiative. Remember Mackinder’s World Island? Here’s a map of the countries participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative:

Spoiler alert: It’s the world island."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

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Full screen recommended.

"Halford Mackinder, Heartland Theory and Geographical Pivot 1"

by Geopoliticus

"In this presentation we discuss the theory for Geographic Causation in Universal History proposed by Sir Halford Mackinder in his paper - "The Geographic Pivot of History" delivered as a lecture in 1904. The theoretical propositions in the paper regarding how natural geography controls the flow of history of civilizations - with nature acting as a stage for man to act upon - was the most relevant contribution of Halford Mackinder towards developing a philosophic synthesis between geography, history and statesmanship, leading to the development of modern geopolitics.

In this part we see how he proposes the beginning of a new era in the international system from the 1900s, predicts (in a way) the break out of the First World War, and builds a unified model based on Geo-history for understanding the emergence and evolution of European civilization."

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Full screen recommended.

"Halford Mackinder, Heartland Theory and Geographical Pivot 2"

by Geopoliticus

"In this presentation we view Mackinder’s historical analysts by looking at the interactions between different Geographic zones, seeing how the Mongols used land power to unify the core of the World Island and how Europeans circumvented nomadic heartland power by investing in sea power. The core idea of Halford Mackinder’s Thesis was that in the beginning of the 20th century, geographers needed to develop a philosophical synthesis of geographical conditions and historical trajectories of nations over long ranges of time.

He attempted to do this for the history of Eurasia, which he called, the World Island. According to his theoretical model, there was a link between geographical conditions and the nature of geopolitical order, for one, but for further depth in understanding historical trajectories we need to do a wider scale analysis of interactions between different geographically influenced political orders by building a model of Heartland-Rimland interactions across history."

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Freely download "The Geographical Pivot of History", 

by HJ Mackinder, April 1904, here:

- https://www.iwp.edu/

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Why is this important? Consider history, from which we learn nothing...

"The earliest evidence of prehistoric warfare is a Mesolithic cemetery in Jebel Sahaba, which has been determined to be approximately 14,000 years old. About forty-five percent of the skeletons there displayed signs of violent death. Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe. The advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare. According to Conway W. Henderson, "One source claims that 14,500 wars have taken place between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, costing 3.5 billion lives, leaving only 300 years of peace." An unfavorable review of this estimate  mentions the following regarding one of the proponents of this estimate: "In addition, perhaps feeling that the war casualties figure was improbably high, he changed 'approximately 3,640,000,000 human beings have been killed by war or the diseases produced by war' to 'approximately 1,240,000,000 human beings.'" 

The lower figure is more plausible, but could still be on the high side considering that the 100 deadliest acts of mass violence between 480 BC and 2002 AD (wars and other man-made disasters with at least 300,000 and up to 66 million victims) claimed about 455 million human lives in total. Primitive warfare is estimated to have accounted for 15.1% of deaths and claimed 400 million victims. Added to the aforementioned figure of 1,240 million between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, this would mean a total of 1,640,000,000 people killed by war (including deaths from famine and disease caused by war) throughout the history and pre-history of mankind. For comparison, an estimated 1,680,000,000 people died from infectious diseases in the 20th century."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War

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"It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human 

race proved to be nothing more than the story of an 

ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump."

- David Ormsby-Gore