Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 7/31/23
"Your Credit Card Is In Danger; Banks Say No More Loans;
Extreme Economic Pain Here To Stay"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, July 31, 2023
"A Look to the Heavens"
“This colorful skyscape features the dusty, reddish glow of Sharpless catalog emission region Sh2-155, the Cave Nebula. About 2,400 light-years away, the scene lies along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus.
Astronomical explorations of the region reveal that it has formed at the boundary of the massive Cepheus B molecular cloud and the hot, young, blue stars of the Cepheus OB 3 association. The bright rim of ionized hydrogen gas is energized by the radiation from the hot stars, dominated by the bright blue O-type star above picture center. Radiation driven ionization fronts are likely triggering collapsing cores and new star formation within. Appropriately sized for a stellar nursery, the cosmic cave is over 10 light-years across.”
The Poet: Ella Wheeler Wilcox, "Solitude"
"Solitude"
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.
Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go;
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all, -
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life’s gall.
Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain. ”
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"It Is Best..."
“You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment. The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door - they will all come. Soon enough arrive the treacherous villain and the unfair trial and the smoke and the flames of the suspicious fires to burn everything away. In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.”
- Lemony Snicket, "Shouldn't You Be in School?"
Robert Gore, "The Alliance"
"The Alliance"
Banging one’s head against the wall is not a wise strategy.
by Robert Gore
"Russia and China head an alliance that poses the first direct challenge to the American empire since its inception at the end of World War II. Their strategy has been to follow Napoleon’s advice - not interrupting the U.S. government while it makes mistake after mistake - and to pursue the opposite of its hapless policies. Their power waxes; American power wanes.
August 29, 1949, the day the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon, was the beginning of the end of the American empire. The U.S. government’s unrivaled power lasted four years and 23 days, from when it dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Soviet bomb gave the world a counterweight to an American nuclear monopoly.
It is unclear if the Cold War was anything but a giant psyop on the part of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. By 1960 they had enough bombs between them to wipe out the planet, John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap” notwithstanding. This left a world where sane people believed that military conflicts had to be nonnuclear.
The U.S. became the national security, or warfare, state with which the nation is burdened today. In dollars and cents, it’s the second largest grift in history, surpassed only by the U.S. welfare state. The U.S. populace is always threatened by some megalomaniacal and evil power somewhere. Even conflict far from U.S. shores threatens the U.S. because of falling dominoes or because it’s better to fight them there than here.
Or because U.S. “interests” are at risk. This has become the go-to justification: “interests” are anything the war lobby says they are. The U.S. is fighting Russia via Ukraine to push NATO to Russia’s doorstep. Beyond the specious rhetoric of saving democracy and freedom in a police state riddled with neo-Nazis, it has to do with taking Ukraine’s natural and agricultural resources, hiding U.S. bioweapons labs, preventing disclosure of U.S. politicians’ links to Ukrainian corruption, and effecting regime change in Russia.
Someday there will be general recognition of Putin’s adroit conduct of the Ukraine-Russia war and the strategic masterstroke that is the Russia-China alliance. Losers on a roll require a hard, painful landing before they begin to wise up, if they wise up at all. The losers running the U.S. and its vassals are in for some hard, painful landings. When they look up from the gutter, drunks soaked in their own vomit, they’re going to see Putin and Xi Jinping, staring down at them with nothing but contempt.
It is well-earned. The U.S.’s annually spends three times what China and ten times what Russia spend and gets inferior weapons and a bloated, politically correct military. The waste of blood and treasure on imperial misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine has been incalculable. Wasted treasure funds rampant corruption and has helped shove the U.S. into an abyss of debt. American self-confidence and justifiable pride in its history and culture have been thrown over in favor of nonsense. The U.S. government is the world’s most hated institution. If Ukraine doesn’t end its imperial misadventures Taiwan will, and there will no longer be an American empire.
The Russian military doesn’t do shock and awe. It does grind, advance...and win. Contrary to Western propaganda, it is well on its way to achieving its objectives in Ukraine....
Russia has mostly achieved its military objectives in Ukraine. Putin has been criticized for the slow grind, but Russia has annexed the Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine and secured land access and the water supply to Russian-speaking Crimea, already annexed. Russia has minimized its loss of life and destruction of weaponry and maximized Ukraine’s. An open question is whether Russian mounts an offensive against Odessa in southwestern Ukraine, completely cutting off its access to the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s president Zelensky talks of taking back captured territory. Such deluded bravado lends credence to the claims he’s a cocaine addict. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has been a dismal failure, floundering on Russia’s defensive strategy. Ukraine has seldom been able to advance past Russia’s buffer zones, much less penetrate its complex multi-layer defenses. Estimates vary, but casualty ratios of seven- to ten-to-one against Ukraine are probably in the right ball park. Men and machinery have been fed into a Russian meat grinder, leaving Ukraine woefully unprepared for a Russian counteroffensive should the Russians decide to mount one.
Ukraine has an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 killed, including the cream of its military. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country, and Russia now controls most of its best farmland and mineral wealth. If it cuts off Black Sea access Ukraine will be a carcass state with little to offer to Western financial vultures.
Early on in the war Russia and Ukraine had a tentative peace deal, which the U.S. and Great Britain nixed. You only get one chance to accept a Russian deal, and then the offers get progressively worse. The nixed deal would have been far more favorable to Ukraine and NATO than the terms Russia will eventually impose. The meme-fodder picture of a forlorn Zelensky standing by himself at a NATO reception starkly illustrates that his “allies” are backing away.
So, what did the Ukrainians do to raise the ire of the Pentagon so suddenly, and as a direct consequence, fall into disfavor with NATO? In short, the Ukrainians demonstrated that NATO’s weapons are crap. Evidence of this built up slowly over time. First, it turned out that various bits of US-made shoulder-fired junk - anti-aircraft Stingers, anti-tank Javelins, etc - are rather worse than useless in modern combat. Next, it turned out that the M777 howitzer and the HIMARS rocket complex are rather fragile and aren’t field-maintainable.
The next wonder-weapon thrown at the Ukrainian problem was the Patriot missile battery. It was deployed near Kiev and the Russians quickly made a joke of it. They attacked it with their super-cheap Geranium 2 “flying moped” drones, causing it to turn on its active radar, thereby unmasking its position, and then fire off its entire load of rockets - a million dollars’ worth! - after which point it just sat there, unmasked and defenseless, and was taken out by a single Russian precision rocket strike.
This was sure to have seriously pissed off US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, whose major personal cash cow happens to be Raytheon, the maker of the Patriot...“The Incredible Shrinking Nato,” Dmitry Orlov, July 15, 2023
Not only does a country that spends a tenth of what the US does have superior weaponry, it has superior production capabilities. Wagner PMC head Eugene Prigozhin’s complaints notwithstanding, the Russian military seems to have what it’s needed to decimate Ukraine. Meanwhile, arsenals are running low in the U.S. and Europe and they’re resorting to desperation weapons—cluster munitions and depleted uranium shells—which will render parts of Ukraine toxic for decades.
Just as humiliating for the West has been its economic sanctions. They were designed to devastate the ruble, stop foreign trade, and bring Russia’s economy to its knees. They’ve done none of the above and the Russian economy is growing.
Cutting off cheap Russian natural gas and replacing it with expensive American liquified natural gas hasn’t had a salutary effect on European economies. Western economic statistics are a division of Propaganda Central, but it appears that recession either looms or has arrived for much of Europe. Cheap Russian oil and natural gas isn’t coming back. If Seymour Hersh is to be believed, the U.S. blew up the European-Russian Nord Stream pipeline. Further proof of the old adage that you’re better off being America’s enemy than its friend.
For decades, America’s foreign policy doyens have counseled against doing anything that would bring Russia and China together. That wisdom is out the window. While international diplomacy has no matches made in heaven, the Russian-Chinese alliance is about as close as it gets. Marry Russian natural resources to the Chinese industrial machine and maintain joint control of what’s been considered the center of the world since Halford MacKinder’s seminal paper back in 1904, and you’ve got one of history’s most formidable alliances.
It is deftly incorporating much of the non-Western world, what Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko calls the “Global Globe.” Trade arrangements, infrastructure financing and construction, and new transport, communications, and computer links are the face of an emerging, assertive multipolarity. Initially centered in Eurasia, this complex web of political and commercial agreements is extending to the Middle East, South America, and Africa.
The U.S. call for universal mobilization against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was met with indifference outside the West. The Global Globe has grown weary of the U.S.’s rules-based international order, which amounts to acceptance of U.S. diktat...or else. The U.S. government follows or disregards its own rules at its convenience.
Not only are the Russians and Chinese offering better terms, but their carefully crafted rhetoric is that of partnerships, equality, and multipolarity. The American empire’s subjugation and hypocrisy are sandpaper on billions of open wounds. Only Americans are surprised by the seething resentment. It’s not going away anytime soon.
The alliance has another ace up its sleeve. The ideas that fiat emissions are money and that something can be had for nothing have left Western governments with mountains of debt and unfunded obligations that will never be paid. Debt has reached its hamster-wheel inflection point: more spending leads to more debt leads to higher interest costs leads to more spending.
Gold is money; everything else is credit, and fiat debt and currencies are barbarous relics. Shifting the Global Globe away from fiat towards gold is going to be a monumental task, but indications are that gold-rich Russia and China are undertaking it. If they eventually adopt a currency or currencies that can be freely exchanged for gold, the dollar’s days as the global reserve currency will be over. Good as gold beats barbarous fiat every time.
Feeble and corrupt Joe Biden is America’s nominal leader. His camarilla is made up of nonentities who would require substantial upgrades to hit either mediocre or amoral. The rest of the West’s so-called leadership is no better. This state of affairs must strike Putin and Xi Jinping as fortuitous. They have to worry about global reverberations of Western economic collapse and the possibility that Western leaders, desperate from their Ukrainian military failure, might take it nuclear. However, nothing is quite as satisfying as watching your adversaries checkmate themselves.
Russia and China are winning the global chess match. That’s not to say they’ll always win. Both governments are the usual top-down, repressive, organized crime that carries the seeds of its own destruction. However, the U.S. government is banging its head against a wall trying to impose its brand of imperialism on the two. Reality, the ultimate wall, always wins. Only after the tidal wave of consequences breaks will the U.S.—or parts of it—have a chance to recover.
Recovery will lie in the rediscovery of enduring truths. The game of thrones is a game of fools. A nation’s greatness is the liberty of its citizens to live their lives and pursue their happiness. The best foreign police is peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Anything the government gives you it took away from someone else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have. Like fire, government is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A is A."
Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.
"Is NATO Nuts? Putin Warns Of Nuclear Response As NATO Readies Forces"
Full screen recommended.
Redacted 7/31/23
"Is NATO Nuts? Putin Warns Of Nuclear
Response As NATO Readies Forces"
"Zelensky says the war is now coming to Russia and NATO is striking at the heart of Moscow via Ukrainian drones. Russia has called this a terrorist attack and the West is saying that it could push Russia to the brink of a nuclear war. Is that what they want? Can we have cooler heads prevail here please for the sake of us all?"
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 7/31/23
"Ukraine War Moving into Russia w/ Ray McGovern fmr CIA"
Comments here:
Russians never bluff...
Dan, I Allegedly, "Is Your Bank the Next to Fail?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 7/31/23
"Is Your Bank the Next to Fail?"
"We keep seeing these bank failures happen on Friday nights. Is your bank safe? There’s a really easy way to put your mind at ease. I have got all the FDIC information for you. Plus, commercial real estate is absolutely going to destroy everything around us. Get ready."
Comments here:
"How It Really Is"
Fastest going straight to Hell...and here it is.
Full screen recommended.
Drones R Eagles, 7/31/23
"Kensington Ave.,
The Crisis Is Real In Philadelphia!"
There but for the grace of God... for now.
"Teamsters Notified That Trucking Giant Yellow Ceases Operations"
"Teamsters Notified That Trucking Giant
Yellow Ceases Operations"
by Todd Maiden of FreightWaves
"Less-than-truckload carrier Yellow Corp. ceased all operations at 12 p.m. Sunday, according to a notice on the gates at its terminals. Separate internal documents showed the procedures for closing the facilities as well as “talking points” to be used when informing union employees not to show up for their shifts. The documents indicated the company plans to issue a public statement Monday updating “the state of the company and the operation.”
On Friday, Yellow laid off most of its nonunion employees in areas like customer service, information technology and sales. The company stopped making pickups earlier in the week and has been delivering the remaining freight in its network ahead of what appears to be a permanent closure.
After months of negotiations with its Teamsters workforce, the carrier has been unable to reach terms over proposed operational changes it has said were required for its survival. In a breach of contract lawsuit filed last month regarding the matter, the company said it could be out of cash as soon as mid-July.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters said late Sunday that it had been notified that less-than-truckload carrier Yellow Corp. has ceased operations and will file for bankruptcy. “Today’s news is unfortunate but not surprising,” stated Sean O’Brien, Teamsters general president. “Yellow has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government. This is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry.”
The company maintained all along that the Teamsters’ refusal to approve the change of operations would eventually lead to its closure. Most are expecting Yellow to announce it will file for bankruptcy Monday. The bankruptcy leaves 30,000 Yellow employees, including 22,000 Teamsters, without jobs."
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Jim Kunstler, "Blobulation"
"Blobulation"
by Jim Kunstler
“Biden has restored the integrity of the Department of Justice.”
- Dan Goldman, Congressman from New York
"Surely Merrick Garland is not running the Department of Justice, but which gloopy pseudopod of the Blob is? My guess would be some Intel Community politburo made up mostly of people you’ve never heard of. The trouble is these geniuses confuse political fuckery with the operations of law.
So, Saturday night when the lights were supposedly off at the DOJ, and much of America was tuned out - getting new tattoos, arguing with the re-po man, watching the Orioles - the Blob told a lawyer from the Southern District of New York, one Damian Williams, to send a letter to Federal Judge Ronnie Abrams asking her to set a date for one Devon Archer to report to prison on a bond fraud conviction that Mr. Archer is appealing on the grounds of DOJ sentencing misconduct. Like, can you hurry that up, please?
Devon Archer, you recall, was the college room-mate and later close business associate of R. Hunter Biden, First Son, who is in a bit of trouble for laundering money from foreign companies and governments through a score of shell companies that then made large payouts to Biden family members, including the so-called Big Guy currently living in the White House. Mr. Archer, who has been in hiding (wonder why?) is scheduled to be deposed by the House Oversight Committee today. It is believed that he knows a thing or two about the Biden family business doings, enough, say, to corroborate the shit-ton of documentary evidence already in the Committee’s possession that lays out a pretty stark template of bribery with adumbrations of treason.
Sounds serious, a little bit, especially since it’s become ever more obvious that the whole federal law enforcement apparatus has been aware of the Biden family’s activities since well before “Joe Biden” was selected to be elected president. Of course, Mr. Archer’s testimony would only be the cherry on a well-baked cake. Chairman James Comer (R-KY) of the Oversight Committee says his investigators have rooted out new banking shenanigans on top of the over one hundred suspicious activity reports already in their files, despite obstruction and obfuscation from the Blob’s IRS and FBI arms. He seems determined to press forward and I daresay the Blob will find it very difficult to stop him.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared last week that all this roguery was “rising to the level of an impeachment inquiry.” D’ya think? What I wonder is: would such an inquiry begin to unravel the secret of who has been running “Joe Biden” lo these many months of face-plants, preposterous utterances, morning “lids,” and other indications that the commander-in-chief of the USA is not much more than a media apparition? One might also ask: was this really the best that Blob could come up with? Really? Him? This ghastly load of damaged goods?
Five House members: Matt Gaetz, Mike Johnson, Chip Roy, Harriet Hageman, and Dan Bishop, are calling for an emergency return from the August recess to get the impeachment process rolling. Let the case be made in an orderly and comprehensive process. See if The New York Times and its allies in the captive Blob media can ignore the proceeding. It will probably shock their readers-and-watchers to learn that the Biden family bribery and racketeering scandal actually exists. Will any of them ask: how come we never heard about this?
Behind all these blobulations looms the specter of Mr. Trump’s attempted return to power. What would he do in the remote case that he escapes the Blob’s mendacious prosecutions? Chop the Blob into a million gelatinous fragments, expose it to enough heat to vaporize it all, and recalibrate a US government back to the task of operating the few things it might arguably be competent at. Such a program would obviate the Blob’s drive to destroy everything worth operating in the human project of remaining civilized.
Alas, Blobism has become the religion of the deranged intellectual/managerial class in America. The chief concern of this crypto-gnostic religion is summoning demons to harass those it regards as heretics to Blobism. Thus, it is well within the historic tradition of fanatical/ hysterical paroxysms that shake ordinary human doings and end up needlessly and wrongfully killing a lot of people.
No doubt Blobism is a product of the Intel Community run by that mysterious politburo, with assists from partners in foreign lands such as the WEF, the WHO, the CCP, and a coterie of essentially stateless super-rich guys with axes to grind. It was designed to derange the people who do most of its on-the-ground dirty work. They already have a lot of blood on their hands with the Covid-19 trip laid on the world, the pointless war in Ukraine, which it started deliberately, and now the forced de-industrialization of the West with a crusade against farming on the side, to make sure that those who don’t die of vaccine-related immune system disorders just starve to death.
Beginning a process to expel “Joe Biden” would be like cutting the head off a chicken. The head doesn’t have much going on inside of it except the eat-and-sleep-scratch-and-cackle algorithm, but without that head, the rest of the chicken just staggers around in circles for a minute before it drops dead. Our government needs to go through that for the country to become itself again. And remember: the government is not our country."
Bill Bonner, "Fictional 'Facts'"
"Fictional 'Facts'"
Plus real wars, dead bodies,
shuttered economies and wishful thinking...
by Bill Bonner
"Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.”
~ US official quoted by Seymour Hersh
Poitou, France - "We’re spending the summer in France, as we always do. We are in the ‘France profonde’…the deep countryside, with few tourists or tourist attractions. Our grandson, 15, is with us. He is bright and alert. But he gets his information mostly from the internet. The result: his mind is like his bedroom. There is a lot of stuff in there…but it needs to be tidied up. As it is, he gives equal weight to a sighting of a UFO over Nevada in 1957…as to the arrival of the Allied armada off the coast of Normandy in 1944.
“Grandad, did you know that a man has invented a robot that can do anything? It has AI so it’s smarter than we are. It’s supposed to take over and do all our jobs. And in the future…these robots will be our soldiers. Wars will be fought between robots. Did you see that in the news?”
“No…I didn’t. And I don’t believe it.”
“No kidding…it was in the news. It’s a fact.”
“You can’t believe everything you read. I don’t believe any fact unless I make it up myself.”
“Strategic Windfall”: Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues…a war fought by real people. Approximately 380,000 of them have been killed since Putin invaded. That is a ‘fact.’ More or less verifiable. It is probably more or less true.
As near as we can tell, the result of the war so far was to move the border of the Russian Federation a few miles south and west, to encompass the Russian-speaking areas of the Ukraine. That is the current status. Most likely, that is where it will remain. Was it worth it? Did the dead men and women give Putin what he wanted? Or did they give the US a “strategic windfall” as Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius claims? What would the ghosts have to say about it? And why do America’s elites care so much about the border between Russia and the Ukraine?
Of course, there’s a lot of money at stake. The US Empire costs $1.5 trillion per year, according to Winslow Wheeler. That money doesn’t all sink into the earth like a corpse. Most of it ends up with living Ukrainians or Americans. And there, it whispers from its Northern Virginia mansions and Swiss bank accounts – ‘keep the war going as long as possible.’
Money can be persuasive. It convinces many people that a fact (a few hundred thousand stiffs) is a small price to pay for an idea (making the world safe for democracy, protecting the sovereignty of the Ukraine…delivering a ‘strategic windfall’ to NATO, etc.).
Thinking Tanks: But there’s more to the story, isn’t there? If money were the motivation behind the war in Ukraine, what drove the Covid Hysteria? Yes, a few pharmaceutical companies reaped billions in profits, but was that enough to shut down much of the world economy, at a loss of some $16 trillion in lost output and related costs? And how about the campaign to dispense with fossil fuels? How does money explain that?
Practically the Entire Elite Establishment – the great and the good…the think tanks…the press…the universities, all are lined up in favor of the Green Agenda. It is, after all, just an idea…not a fact. But it is an alarming one, AlterNet: "Meteorologist: Humanity has reached 'a point we cannot return from' as ocean temperatures soar." "Emmy-Award-winning veteran NBC Miami meteorologist Steve MacLaughlin sounded his loudest-ever alarm on Saturday about the state of Earth's oceans amid record temperatures that were recorded off of Florida's coast this past week. "This is the first time that I have been overly concerned that we have reached a point we cannot return from, and that's because of those 101-degree ocean temperatures," MacLaughlin said. "…right here in South Florida."
Now, there’s an idea!
Facts vs Fiction: Still, in order to favor the ‘Energy Transition,’ you have to believe a number of things…that temperatures are rising (and will continue to rise)...that our use of fossil fuel is to blame…that lower temperatures are better than higher ones…that if we stop using fossil fuel, disaster will be avoided…that we can replace fossil fuel with other forms of energy, conservation and doing without…that we can afford the cost of the transition and that it will be managed successfully…that we don’t have better uses for the money…that it is not too late; that we can return from whatever point Mr. MacLaughlin thinks we’ve reached…and that the world will be a better place if we make the effort.
None of these things are facts! Dead bodies are facts. ‘Lebensraum’ and the ‘ubermensch’ were just ideas…liberating the Holy Land from the infidel…witch trials…Prohibition…making steel in backyard furnaces…the ‘domino theory’…the ‘axis of evil’…protecting the sovereignty of the Ukraine…the ideas always sound pleasantly appealing. But the facts stink.
More tomorrow…on why the elites have turned against traditional fuels."
"Ukraine/Russia War Update 7/31/23"
Scott Ritter, 7/31/23
"Russia to Launch a Decisive Attack"
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o
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Straight Calls, 7/31/23
"The Russians Have Hit An Enormous Nail On The Head"
Analysis of breaking news and in-depth discussion of current
geopolitical events in the United States of America and the world.
Comments here:
"6 Items To go Up In Price This Fall/Winter! This Is Inevitable! What's Next?"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/31/23
"6 Items To go Up In Price This Fall/Winter!
This Is Inevitable! What's Next?"
"In today's vlog, we are going over 6 major price increases that are coming in Fall of 2023 and into 2024. We explain how if these items disappear, it will be absolutely devastating all around the world. We are facing more shortages than ever, and must prepare ourselves!"
Comments here:
"Economic Market Snapshot 7/31/23"
"Economic Market Snapshot 7/31/23"
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Job cuts and much more.
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
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And now... The End Game...
o
Sunday, July 30, 2023
"Business Owner Tells Me Things Are Slowing; Short Term Rentals Plunge; Historic Trucking Bailout?"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 7/30/23
"Business Owner Tells Me Things Are Slowing;
Short Term Rentals Plunge; Historic Trucking Bailout?"
Comments here:
"Gas Prices Will Skyrocket In August As Supply Faces Massive Drop"
Full screen recommended.
"Gas Prices Will Skyrocket In August
As Supply Faces Massive Drop"
by Epic Economist
Have you seen how fast gas prices rose last week? New reports reveal that fuel stockpiles have dropped globally, and the problem is likely to get even worse over the next few weeks and months as demand continues to outstrip supplies amid OPEC+ production cuts. Americans are now paying the highest prices for a gallon of gas in at least eight months. And, according to industry experts, they should brace for even more pain at the pump in August, with refineries closing for maintenance and domestic supplies drying up in many states. From now on, filling up your tank will be far more expensive, and there are many reasons contributing to that.
Now, a perfect storm has begun. Last week, prices at the pump jumped again overnight, and the outlook for the coming weeks and months doesn’t bring any relief for American drivers. On Saturday, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline surged to $3.75, according to the American Automobile Association. That marked the biggest one-day increase in a year and the highest average in about eight months.
The price of a gallon of gasoline is now 30 cents more expensive than in June, and that’s still a timid uptick compared to experts’ estimates of $5 per gallon by the fall, The shift is happening quickly. For instance, the more fuel-efficient premium gas has surged to nearly $4.50 — also a 30-cent increase from June. Gas prices are on track to reach levels last seen during the inflation peak of 2022, says the association’s spokesperson Daniel Armbruster. Both domestic and international producers are slashing production, but demand remains strong.
AAA analyst Robert Sinclair also came forward last week to inform the public that so far this year, global markets have lost almost 4 million barrels per day due to OPEC’s decision. Exports also cut into our supply at home. “We are exporting about two cargoes of gasoline (mostly from the Gulf Coast) for every cargo we import,” the expert added. “We are the supplier of choice for Latin America, which has no additional refining capacity coming up this year.”
The effect of this imbalance between supply and demand is going to be disastrous for U.S. motorists. As for the next couple of weeks, the experts noted that it’s possible Americans could be in for another 25-cent increase. From now on, gasoline price increases are expected to happen faster, and lower supplies indicate that there’s no relief in sight – at least until the end of 2023.
By the winter, the scenario could be far more chaotic as supply systems face increased vulnerability. Just as it happened before, we’re woefully unprepared for any sort of emergency or supply disruptions, and probably just a single extreme weather event away from seeing gas stations experience massive outages again. At this point, we can only hope for the best, but prepare for the worst because this is shaping up to be the worst oil crisis of modern times, and the consequences of it will be catastrophic."
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Musical Interlude: Moby, "Love Of Strings"
Full screen recommended.
Moby, "Love Of Strings"
Life... magnificent Life...
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.
Many young stars from this cloud are visible in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121211.html
"Troubles..."
"I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead and some come from behind.
But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready, you see.
Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!"
- Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel
"The Donkey and the Meaning of Eternity" (Excerpt)
"The Donkey and the Meaning of Eternity: Nobel-Winning
Spanish Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Love Letter to Life"
by Maria Popova
Excerpt: "Beneath our anxious quickenings, beneath our fanged fears, beneath the rusted armors of conviction, tenderness is what we long for - tenderness to salve our bruising contact with reality, to warm us awake from the frozen stupor of near-living. Tenderness is what permeates Platero and I (public library) by the Nobel-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (December 23, 1881–May 29, 1958) - part love letter to his beloved donkey, part journal of ecstatic delight in nature and humanity, part fairy tale for the lonely.
Living in his birthplace of Moguer - a small town in rural Andalusia - Jiménez began composing this uncommon posy of prose poems in 1907. Although it spans less than a year in his life with Platero, it took him a decade to publish it. At its heart is a simple truth: What and whom we love is a lens to focus our love of life itself.
The tenderness with which Jiménez regards Platero - whom he addresses by name over and over, like an incantation of love - is the tenderness of living with wonder and fragility. He celebrates Platero’s “big gleaming eyes, of a gentle firmness, in which the sun shines”; he reverences him as “friend to the old man and the child, to the stream and the butterfly, to the sun and the dog, to the flower and the moon, patient and pensive, melancholy and lovable, the Marcus Aurelius of the meadows.” He beckons him: “Come with me. I’ll teach you the flowers and the stars.”
And so he does: "Look, Platero, so many roses are falling everywhere: blue, pink, white, colorless roses… You’d think the sky was crumbling into roses… You’d think that from the seven galleries of Paradise roses were being thrown onto the earth… Platero, it seems, while the Angelus is ringing, that this life of ours is losing its everyday strength, and that a different strength from within, loftier, more constant, and purer, is causing everything, as if in fountain jets of grace… Your eyes, which you can’t see, Platero, and which you are mildly raising skyward, are two beautiful roses."
Together, poet and donkey traverse the Andalusian countryside in a state of rapturous harmony with each other and the living world: "Through the low-lying roads of summer, draped with tender honeysuckle, how sweetly we go! I read, or sing, or recite poetry to the sky. Platero nibbles the sparse grass of the shady banks, the dusty blossoms of the mallows, the yellow sorrel. He halts more than he walks. I let him.
[…]
Every so often Platero stops eating and looks at me. Every so often I stop reading and look at Platero."
There are echoes of Whitman in Jiménez’s exultations: "Before us are the fields, already green. Facing the immense, clear sky, of a blazing indigo, my eyes - so far from my ears! - open nobly, welcoming in its calm that indescribable placidity, that harmonious, divine serenity which dwells in the limitlessness of the horizon."
This longing for the infinite accompanies the young man and the old donkey as they cross the hills and valleys on their daily pilgrimages: "The evening extends beyond its normal limits, and the hour, infected with eternity, is infinite, peaceful, unfathomable."
Again and again, Platero’s presence magnifies the poet’s relishing of beauty, deepens his contact with the eternal: "I remain in ecstasy before the twilight. Platero, his black eyes scarlet with sunset, walks gently to a puddle of crimson, pink, and violet waters; he softly immerses his lips into the mirrors, which seem to liquefy as he touches them."
Punctuating these ecstasies are the inevitable spells of melancholy stemming from the fact that the price of being awake to life is being also awake to mortality. Aware that this enchanted life with his beloved Platero is only for the time being, Jiménez reaches into the sorrow of the future to consecrate it with joy: "Platero. I shall bury you at the foot of the large, round pine in the orchard at La Piña, which you like so much. You will remain alongside cheerful, serene life. The little boys will play and the little girls will sew beside you on their little low chairs. You will get to hear the verses that the solitude will inspire in me. You’ll hear the older girls singing when they wash clothes in the orange grove, and the sound of the waterwheel will be a joy and a solace to your eternal peace. And all year long the goldfinches, greenfinches, and vireos, in the perennial freshness of the treetop, will create for you a small musical ceiling between your tranquil slumber and Moguer’s infinite, ever-blue sky."
Full, wonderful article is here:
"Pets, It Turns Out, Also Have Last Wishes Before They Die"
I found this on the "nextdoor" community group I belong to, and it made me cry remembering the boys I loved and who loved me over the years. Life is precious, and love never dies...
"Pets, It Turns Out, Also Have Last Wishes Before They Die"
Posted by Jamie W.
"Pets, it turns out, also have last wishes before they die, but only known by veterinarians who put old and sick animals to sleep. Twitter user Jesse Dietrich asked a vet what was the most difficult part of his job.
The specialist answered without hesitation that it was the hardest for him to see how old or sick animals look for their owners with the eyes of their owners before going to sleep.
The fact is that 90% of owners don't want to be in a room with a dying animal. People leave so that they don't see their pet leave. But they don't realize that it's in these last moments of life that their pet needs them most. Veterinarians ask the owners to be close to the animals until the very end.
It's inevitable that they die before you. Don't forget that you were the center of their life. Maybe they were just a part of you. But they are also your family. No matter how hard it is, don't leave them.
Dont let them die in a room with a stranger in a place they dont like. It is very painful for veterinarians to see how pets cannot find their owner during the last minutes of their life. They dont understand why the owner left them. After all, they needed their owner's consolation.
Veterinarians do everything possible to ensure that animals are not so scared, but they are completely strangers to them. Don't be a coward because it's too painful for you. Think about the pet. Endure this pain for the sake of their sake.
Be with them until the end.🐾🐾🐾"
[Shared from a post I saw]
The comments here are especially touching.
o
"The Russian Forces Have Broken Through In Great Strength"
Col. Douglas Macgregor, 7/30/23
"The Russian Forces Have Broken Through In Great Strength"
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Dan, I Allegedly 7/30/23: "Hey! Look Over Here!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 7/30/23
"Hey! Look Over Here!"
"It seems that everything in the economy is a diversion right now. We’re not supposed to look at the fact that prices are sky high, and that real estate is taking forever to sell. People don’t want to look at the high price of mortgages, property taxes and insurance right now. This is only getting worse."
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"Burger King Is Closing Hundreds Of Stores, More Fast Food Chain Bankruptcies!"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 7/30/23
"Burger King Is Closing Hundreds Of Stores,
More Fast Food Chain Bankruptcies!"
"Burger King finds itself falling behind major fast food rivals. Revenue is shrinking, and the popularity of its restaurants among consumers is declining. The numbers indicate that the company's problems are intensifying in 2023. In fact, three major Burger King operators have already filed for bankruptcy this year, with franchisees in Ohio, Utah, and Michigan reporting severe cash flow problems and declining sales. As a result, approximately 400 locations will be closing their doors for good."
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"Shrinkflation Everywhere At Dollar Tree! This Is Crazy! Paying More And Getting Less!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/30/23
"Shrinkflation Everywhere At Dollar Tree!
This Is Crazy! Paying More And Getting Less!"
I"n today's vlog, we are at Dollar Tree and are seeing a lot of grocery items that have shrunk in size. We also notice they are adding a lot of higher priced items, which I'm not sure if they will do well here. We are now paying more and getting less for a lot of items at Dollar Tree!"
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