Durand, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, September 8, 2023
"The War Against Will"
"The War Against Will"
by Paul Rosenberg
"The modern world will allow you to join any of a thousand collectives, but it will punish you for standing on your own, as a self-willed entity. People who commit this crime understand that they are outlaws in the present world. And if at first they don’t understand that, the world makes sure they know.
The world as it is, then, is the enemy of will. This is nothing new, of course, governments have been at war against will since they began: How else can you get people to blindly obey you, to hand over half their income, and to thank you for it? People who possess a full and active will must be convinced to do things, and governments couldn’t function if they had to do that.
The present world is built around the restraint of will, and not just on the government level. Advertising, for example, is more or less devoted to implanting subconscious desires and subverting the will with them. In dysfunctional families, manipulating one another – whether by guilt, ridicule, being left out of Papa’s will or whatever – is the currency of the realm.
And so obedience, consumption and acquiescence have become cardinal virtues, and the avoidance of immediate pain the prime directive. As we might paraphrase an old apostle, this world’s God is the belly.
The Willful, For Whom Heaven And Earth Were Created: All human creativity functions on individual will. Everyone interested in creativity knows this, and here are just a couple of passages to make the point:
"Everything that is really great and inspiring is
created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
- Albert Einstein
"This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the
individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."
- John Steinbeck
It is the active will of individuals that has created everything good in this world. Really, life comes down to a choice between creativity and entropy:
• The world (the realm of officialdom, acquiescence and so on) is an incarnation of entropy, winding down and collapsing once the fuel left to it by creative men and women of the past is burned out.
• The creatives, who are willing to take blows in defense of their willfulness, and who bless the world in myriad ways
The willful, then, are creativity incarnate; the universe is and ought to be dedicated to beings of their type. It should also be populated by beings of their type, and I think someday shall be.
This is not to say that entropic people can’t make their way out of entropy and join the creatives; in fact they can, and do, on a daily basis. Still, it is a gulf that must be crossed, and the only way across is to act on one’s own will, alone, and for purely self-generated reasons. That is the price.
The Automated War On Will: The great threat of the modern world is a system I call Descartes’ Demon, the Big Data/AI personalized manipulation system that is already in daily use. I held back talking about this for years, seeing that it was too much for people to bear, but the beast has progressed so far that I can’t see holding back any further.
The Matrix, as it turns out, was all too true, and its world is now the world of Facebook, Twitter and especially Google. The real-life version of The Matrix is functional, right now. (See here for explanation, or here for illustration.) What personalized manipulation is really all about is the subversion of individual will. And if you don’t think it’s happening, pull up YouTube on your smart phone, then ask your friend to pull it up on his or hers: You’re already receiving personalized pages. The world is deeply committed to passing this off as trivial and ridiculing those that don’t. But it isn’t trivial; it’s a present and actual war against free will.
We Are Inherently Creative: Humans are inherently creative beings. We cannot create matter out of nothing, but we can mold it to an infinite number and variety of uses. We are the fountains of new and beneficial action in the universe. And we ought to function that way.
I’ll leave you with a few words from Albert Schweitzer: "Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it… It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals." This is what we need… and we need it now."
•
"They Live"
"There Are Simply No Answers..."
“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
- Barry Lopez
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 9/8/23"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 9/8/23"
More Ukraine War, Trump Trashes CV19 Vax, Economic Mad Max
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
Secretary of State Tony Blinken made a surprise visit to Ukraine to announce another US aid package, so the deadly Ukraine war can continue. Blinken promised another fresh $1 billion on the heals of the announcement that the Ukraine Army lost 66,000 soldiers in the past three months alone. Add that to the at least 300,000 Ukraine casualties, and it’s hard to understand why Blinken and others in the D.C. swamp constantly say this is the “most profitable investment.” My question: Is Blinken nuts or simply corrupt, cruel and demonic. Why are there no peace talks with this kind of defeat and carnage for Ukraine and NATO? Do they want nuclear war?
Donald Trump is finally waking up to the disaster of the CV19 bioweapon/vax and is now trashing it. Trump is asking Big Pharma to address all the adverse events and calls on the vax makers release the safety data. The CV19 bioweapon/vax deaths and disabilities are increasing and there is no end in sight. Expect Donald Trump to talk about the contract he signed with Pfizer that required the vax maker to produce a safe and effective vaccine and it did neither. (Pfizer had 63% of the CV19 vax market globally.) Now, even the CDC is admitting that the vaxed are more likely to get an infection from the new CV19 variant than the unvaxed. (You cannot make this up.) With 676 million CV19 injections in America alone, this will get far worse before it gets better.
For those of you that think the economy is getting better, or, is at least in good shape—wake up!!!! Two big BRICS nations just dumped $114 billion in U.S. debt. Interest rates are not going to be cut anytime soon because you don’t cut interest rates when your bonds are being dumped by your biggest creditors. Michael Snyder predicts “Mad Max Conditions are coming” and points to record credit card debt, record retail theft and a record amount of people living paycheck to paycheck.
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he talks about
these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 9/8/23:
"Parsing the Telescreen, Slouching into the Gulag"
"Parsing the Telescreen, Slouching into the Gulag"
by Fred Reed
"Sez I, we are barreling into a world of mixed unreality and invited surveillance, not quite noticed but at warp speed. The unreality? We can now do politicians in video software and make them convincingly say things more reprehensible then they would themselves. The surveillance creeps in like a barely noticed smell. It creeps and will creep. Consider:
Several years ago Vi and I bought a sixty-five inch LG screen that we use for watching YouTube and Netflix. It has search-by-voice. Thus by pressing a button on the remote to wake it up, we can say, “Tianjian automated Chinese seaport,” and it will find the relevant sites on the web. Of course we have no way of knowing whether it is listening the rest of the time. Since it is convenient, we are not important, and we don’t say anything criminal or probably even very interesting, we use it.
The screen also has control-by-gesture. It doesn’t work very well, and I would feel like an idiot waving my arms and gesturing at a television, so I have never learned it. However, we have no way of knowing whether and when it is watching us. Just in case, we confine human sacrifice and orgiastic sex with farm animals to the garage so, if it is watching, we will be boring.
We also have two Alexa boxes, one in the kitchen and one in my office. These are marvels. The speakers aren’t bad for the price and Alexa is good at providing on voice command any music ever written. This is very nice indeed, though I suspect that most of us are so used to such things as not to notice how nice they are. Violeta uses this greatly while cooking.
Alexa’s hearing is eerie. If Vi says, “Alexa, play Lohengrin” while in the kitchen, often Alexa’s sister in my office will respond as well. The the kitchen and the office are in rooms separated by two plate-glass walls and a long hall with a right angle. This is astonishing acuity. Since Alexa in my office will sometimes get the music wrong, the two aren’t communicating electronically. Again, we find the convenience more appealing that the surveillance threatening. Besides, no one would bother listening to us, unless of course we were writing unflattering columns about that unevolved truculence in the White House.
I am writing this in my-office using text-to-speech software. Every time Alexa hears her name, she asks what I want.
I have just read that there is a video game called 'Call of Duty', which apparently millions of the young use to lower their IQs and avoid doing anything useful as they struggle with each other electronically. The parent company, Activision, is now incorporating AI software that listens to the martial shouts of remote and disembodied warriors to check for inappropriate language. This of course includes anything racial, uninclusive, offensive, triggering, sexist, and so on. This is said in today’s awkward English to have as purpose the improving of the gaming experience and the protection of women, though it probably means girls.
Saith the article, one in ten of distaff gamers has been driven to “suicidal thoughts” by insults during her hours as an online Boadicea. This is interesting. In the age of the 'Pride and Prejudice' sort of novel, women were always fainting on any provocation and dashing for the swooning couch, and they had to carry umbrellas in sunny weather so as not to damage their delicate skins. This strikes me as fraud as in my appalling number of years on the planet I have never seen a woman faint or even look as if she were considering it. They were too busy running marathons and scuba diving and wearing bikinis at high noon, to the great betterment of mankind.
But now it seems that they will take poison if insulted by tiresome twerps while killing enemy soldiers online – instead of saying, for example, “Grow up.” It appears that we are going to have moral uplift as pretext for surveillance of conversation. This electro-linguistic mommyism can easily be extended to high school bathrooms, locker rooms, or indeed any place thought proper to be monitored for acceptable values by government, which is to anywhere at all. There is no technical reason why it can’t be extended to Alexa boxes.
We should be grateful that we don’t live in a surveillance state like China.
OK, AI and language. Computers today can understand spoken language, or at least come close enough to be dangerous. For example, if I say to my iPhone, “Hey Siri, in Spanish how do you say “If I had more money, I would buy myself a bright red Corvette,” she gets it exactly right, subjunctive, reflexive, conditional. That’s not mechanical replacement. A lot of syntax lives in that short sentence. People with time on their hands can argue about whether machines are conscious and whether they “really understand,” but if what they do is indistinguishable from understanding, that’s close enough for jazz.
That’s not quite understanding because the translation software probably couldn’t answer the question, “What would Fred do if he had the money?” But you can have a real conversation with Chat GPT. Which is real understanding.
If I mistake not, this means that Alexa boxes can, or shortly will be able to, monitor what people are talking about wherever it is practical to put a microphone, which is pretty much everywhere. We are now used to ubiquitous cameras. We pay no attention to them. We would – will? – quickly get used to microphones in public places, and are already comfortable with cameras and microphones in our homes (the Alexa boxes) and in our pockets, iPhones. Any device activated by voice command must be listening for that command, and thus potentially everything we say. Where, if anywhere, other conversation goes is an open question..
If I may throw in a somewhat-related thought, of course all of our credit-card transactions, bank dealings, and their times and places, and phone records, are recorded, this thought harmless because only commercial entities, not the government, have access to them. Read Ed Snowden’s book, 'Permanent Record.' The social media know more about us than we know about ourselves. To all of which, government has access. If you believe otherwise, you should have a second lobotomy.
Onward and upward."
- https://fredoneverything.org/
o
Bill Bonner, "What Kind of Morons are We? Part Duh"
"What Kind of Morons are We? Part Duh"
Prices, productivity, preferences...
and getting where you really want to go.
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "A dear reader wrote to tell us, in effect, how dumb we are. He writes: 'The most ridiculous, crazy, imbecilic thing I’ve ever read of yours is the so-called ‘comparison’ between the cost of an early 1970s pickup and a 2020 pick-up.' He must be a new reader. Surely, over the years, we must have written things much stupider than that.
The gist of it was that working people get their income from selling their time. So, what really matters is how much they get per hour. In 1948, when the Ford F series began, each hour of his time, at an average wage of 40 cents/hour, bought him 1/3000th of the truck.
Yesterday, when we looked up the median hourly wage in 2023, we got $11. Today, we get – from the ListFoundation – $16 and change. The average wage is another thing, it includes the salaries of Wall Street executives and sports stars. It’s over $28 per hour. But it is irrelevant. The median actually measures what most people get…so let’s stick with that.
Goin’ Nowhere: At $16 an hour, a guy can buy – guess what – 1/2,937th of a new Ford F-150. Almost exactly the same as 75 years ago. And while new tech improved the truck, it should have improved the making of it at the same pace. Automated assembly lines, plastics, robots – all should have made the truck cheaper to produce. And it should have made him more productive…and raised his wages, too. But other studies show the same thing. Wages, adjusted for inflation, have not gone up in more than half a century.
Inflation-Adjusted Weekly Earnings of Full Time Male Workers, 1979 to 2023
We also got a response from George Gilder and Gayle Pooley – two of the leading proponents of the “time price” concept (the idea that prices are actually “tokenized time”). They agree with our Dear Reader, maintaining that our numbers are all wrong…and that today’s F-150 is far superior to the truck from 1948.
Losing: How come all this ‘tech’ and credit didn’t lift him up? More scientists. More capital. More Ph.Ds. Eight trillion in ‘stimulus’ from the Fed. More economists. More technology. More accumulated ‘knowledge’…available on our laptops. We don’t even have to think for ourselves anymore; we have AI. And who hasn’t read Jack Welch’s classic “Winning?” Jack laid it out for us. All we had to do was to borrow a lot of money, buy businesses, and hire some hotshots to run them.
It sounded so simple. And yet…it didn’t even work for Welch. His empire expanded…and then, overburdened by debt and dysfunction…it contracted. Today, the stock sells for about the same as it did in the mid-90s, nearly 30 years ago. Jack’s idea seemed new…but there was nothing new about it. Stripped of its trendy jargon, it proved only what we already knew, that credit only works when it is used to increase efficiency and output. Just buying things – whether consumer items or businesses – doesn’t help.
That is obvious in the national accounts too. The Fed, with its spiffy gold-free dollar, could provide credit. Welch, ahead of his time, used it to build a tottery business empire. Consumers used it to buy big screen TVs and granite countertops. The Feds used it to pay for, among other things, a 20-year war against nobody-in-particular, for no particular reason.
And now, credit is becoming more expensive…the screw turns…and the credit cycle (getting rid of bad debt) becomes painful, especially for the proletariat that depends on it. You can pump up an economy – temporarily – with credit. People think it is real ‘money’. They think their wages are rising…their stocks are going up…sales are increasing. Later, they discover that the boom was a fraud. It was a roundtrip to nowhere.
What if the same were true for “technology?” What if it were mostly a distraction…a diversion…an idle entertainment? Dot.coms…cryptos…the internet…TikTok…AI – the Fed’s EZ credit has juiced them up, one after another. But like Welch’s GE, the Feds’ wars, or Wall Street’s buybacks…what if they don’t really add to our wealth…but subtract from it, by absorbing time and resources that might be better used elsewhere?
The new Ford F-150 is said to have 1,000 silicon chips in it. What if none of them takes you where you really want to go? Stay tuned..."
Jim Kunstler, "A Theory of the Game"
"A Theory of the Game"
by Jim Kunstler
“…a system that has been hollowed out by a string of cascading failures runs into one more crisis than it can tolerate, and implodes under the weight of its own absurdities. We are much closer to such scenes in North America and Western Europe right now than I think most people realize.” - John Michael Greer
"Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss was a bigger shock to the Washington DC deep state Blob than Donald Trump’s victory. But the dynamics of this trauma operated at many levels. At the most superficial level was the hysterical response of Democratic Party rank-and-file women who regarded Donald Trump as the most extreme and horrifying embodiment of an archetypal “bad daddy.” This was all sheer psychodrama of course, but women are engrossed with psychodrama - generating it and relishing it - which men often fail to appreciate.
In cases of madness, there is often a dark, sordid secret behind the weird behavior that presents outwardly. In the group madness provoked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, the dirty secret was that she had actually bought the Democratic National Committee in 2016, meaning the machinery that runs the party. She used lavish contributions to the Clinton Foundation to accomplish that. And Hillary along with her foundation - and husband Bill, who had been reduced by late career misadventure to a kind of political fashion accessory - had committed any number of grave crimes against our country over the years, especially during her service as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Think: Skolkovo… Uranium One…. In 2016 Hillary used her ownership of the DNC to underhandly de-rail the likely Democratic primary winner, Bernie Sanders, from being nominated.
The initial act of madness by the “Resistance” on Mr. Trump’s inauguration day was the women’s march of pink pussy-hats, so called, a symbolic exhibition of fleering female genitalia in Mr. Trump’s face, so to speak, as an act of defiance against the new national daddy figure (and his millions of deplorable supporters watching the ceremonies on TV). This proved to be a mere overture to the more extreme sexual acting-out that evolved in the years to follow, overall a campaign to horrify people of normal appetites, beliefs, and moral codes, culminating in the drag queen story hours aimed at maximally inducing outrage among people organized as families.
All of that psychodrama was hijacked, of course, by the serious neo-Marxists lurking among the Left, who used it in the usual neo-Marxian way: to overthrow everything in the established social order. And who were these? The circle around Barack Obama. And who was Barack Obama exactly? Good question. This mysterious figure who rose so swiftly from being, briefly, a mere state senator in Illinois, then to the US Senate - for only a few years, accomplishing next to nothing there - then to being nominated for president, and actually winning the 2008 election!
Since we’re speaking in terms of psychodrama, Mr. Obama was liberalism’s wish-fulfillment: a half-century after the Civil Rights movement, America elects the first black president (half-black, anyway)! Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection, and especially to set an example for how to live for all those gun-loving, bible-thumping, meth-smoking, opiate-scarfing, racist, rapist flyover rubes who would dare to vote for such misogynistic vermin as the TV-clown Donald J. Trump.
It was known, at the time, that Mr. Obama was a close associate (probably an apostle of) Chicagoan Bill Ayers, a former leader of the 1960s domestic terrorism group called The Weathermen. But by 2008, Mr. Ayers had managed to rehabilitate himself into professor of education at the U of Illinois Chicago campus, and hitched himself to Chicago school czar Arne Duncan, who would be appointed Secretary of Education by Mr. Obama, opening the doors for a neo-Marxist coup in the public schools - now on display in the battles raging over race-and-gender-Marxism installed in the Common Core State Standard Initiative.
To what degree was Mr. Obama a tool of other forces lurking in the deep background of world politics, and what are these forces? Many of the non-Left will say they are a loose consortium of corporate and financial actors desperate to keep in motion a set of rackets that magically stabilize business-as-usual, which asset-strips the remaining wealth of the middle classes and transfers it to the already super-wealthy.
I’m not so sure about that, though the role of Davos remains persistently murky. Why, after all, would the super-rich invite as front-man a crypto-Marxist, as Mr. Obama is alleged to be, dedicated to destroying the existing social order that is the very ecosystem of the super-rich? Is it possible that Mr. Obama is fronting for nothing more than Mr. Obama now, desperately, as they say, weaponizing the “Joe Biden” government against its own people just to save Barack Obama from discovery, infamy, and loss of power?
Mr. Trump proved to be easily controllable in office with the Blob and all its primary agencies marshalled against him, systematically disabled and humiliated by serial Blob hoaxes during his tenure, culminating in the bizarrely successful criminal plot to launch Covid-19 as an election-rigging device. Mr. Trump was thereby neatly disposed of in 2020. Of course, RussiaGate, The Mueller business, Impeachment No. 1, and Covid-19 were all essentially acts of treason and perfidy - that is, high crimes committed by the Democratic Party.
“Joe Biden” was Mr. Obama’s device for wresting control of the DNC from Hillary Clinton’s gang. But now “Joe Biden” has criminal problems of his own that threaten to take down not only his own presidency, but of everything connected to it, namely his controller, Mr. Obama & Company, and the Democratic Liberal order itself driven insane by its own criminality. Meanwhile, his nemesis, Donald Trump has proven to be extraordinarily resilient in the remorseless war against him. And now that has culminated in the (so far) four cockamamie criminal cases cooked up by Obama/“Biden” as the final line of defense against the Golden Golem of Greatness - who obviously has no intention of surrendering.
It looks like Mr. Obama is now in the process of being “outed” as something other than the suave performer he was for two terms in the White House. The Tucker Carlson interview with one Larry Sinclair, a gay cruiser and druggie who claims to have frolicked with Mr. Obama before he was a celebrity, was met with ominous silence in the mainstream media. They didn’t even dare denounce it to avoid drawing more attention to it. And the mysterious “drowning” of the Obama family’s chef, Tafari Campbell, paddleboarding at night in the shallow bay off the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, remains woefully under-investigated. Will Barack Obama and “Joe Biden” end up sinking each other and the Democratic Party with them? And then, will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be called in to rescue the darn thing while driving all the demons out of it?"
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Numbers Don’t Lie"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly AM 9/8/23
"The Numbers Don’t Lie"
"You can’t argue with the numbers that we are getting about the economy. Bankruptcies are at a 12 year high. Houses are dropping in value. Mortgage demand is at its lowest level since 2012. There is not one economic indicator that is up right now."
Comments here:
"Adventures with Danno, 9/8/23"
Adventures with Danno, 9/8/23
"10 Grocery Items At Aldi That Are
Great Quality For A Great Price!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Aldi and are showing the top 10 items that have
gotten thousands of good reviews of being a Great Value, and great quality!"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 9/8/23
"A Tsunami Of Food Shortages
Is Coming To America"
"Food prices in the US soared to record heights last year. Global food prices also posted a 20.7% increase compared to last year. Highest prices we've seen since probably for the last ten years. The entire supply chain is behind. It has been reported on how over 60 container ships are just waiting off the coast of Long Beach to unload their product. Everything has been slowed down by the increase in demand coupled with not enough available employees."
Comments here:
Thursday, September 7, 2023
Canadian Prepper, "I've Been Warned: 'Global Scale' Collapse is Imminent"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 9/7/23
"I've Been Warned:
'Global Scale' Collapse is Imminent"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.
Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”
○
"Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in
heaven where the love of our lost ones pours
through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy."
~ Eskimo saying
Chet Raymo, “To Sleep, Perchance To Dream”
“To Sleep, Perchance To Dream”
by Chet Raymo
“What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
What is more soothing than a pretty hummer
That stays one moment in an open flower,
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?
What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing
In a green island, far from all men's knowing?
More healthful than the leafiness of dales?
More secret than a nest of nightingales?”
What indeed? The poet Keats answers his own questions: Sleep. Soft closer of our eyes. I've reached an age when I find myself occasionally nodding off in the middle of the day, an open book flopped on my chest. Also, more lying awake in the dark hours of the night, re-running the tapes of the day. And, in the fragile moments of nighttime unconsciousness, dreaming dreams that reach all the way back to my childhood.
I've read the books about sleep and dreaming. There has been lots of research, but not much consensus about why we sleep or dream. Sleep seems to be pretty universal among animals. Who knows whether animals dream. Do we sleep to restore the soma? To knit the raveled sleeve of care? Process memories? Find safety from predators? After 50 years of work, the sleep researcher William Dement opined: "As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy."
The Latin poet Martial supposed that sleep "makes darkness brief," a worry-free way to get through the scary hours of the night when wolves howl at the mouth of the cave (and goblins stir under the bed). That hardly explains my dropping off after lunch into a dreamless stupor that I neither desire nor welcome.
“Low murmurer of tender lullabies!
Light hoverer around our happy pillows!
Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows!”
Not quite! There are the nightmares too. The tossing and turning. The hoo-has. But enough of this idle speculation. I'm getting sleepy...”
"A Perpetual Illusion..."
"Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart."
- Blaise Pascal
"Walk With The Dreamers..."
"Walk with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground. Let their spirit ignite a fire within you to leave this world better than when you found it..."
- Wilferd Peterson
"Store Food While You Still Can, Because The New Global Famine Is Staring To Accelerate"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 9/7/23
"Store Food While You Still Can,
Because The New Global Famine Is Staring To Accelerate"
"It’s time to start taking food stockpiling more seriously because a series of new reports are alerting us about systemic failures in the food system. Right now, U.S. farmers are losing large chunks of their produce, and that is leaving retailers increasingly reliant on exports to restock store shelves. However, global food supplies are shrinking, and hunger is already hitting extreme levels in many nations. As economists repeatedly warned in the past, the primary way a food crisis starts to materialize in a wealthy country is through higher food prices, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing. Even dollar stores are now changing their prices to $3, $4, $5, and even the most basic of staples are getting insanely overpriced. The harsh reality we’re all facing is that food prices are not going back down to where they once were. Crazy-high grocery prices are here to stay, and everyone is going to suffer as a result.
Something most people don’t realize is that this situation is worsening all over the planet. And at some point, there will be too few producers to meet the entire global demand. Researcher and columnist at The Guardian, Geoge Monbiot, explains that we’re on the verge of experiencing a food shortage and famine of planetary proportions.
With extreme weather events impacting several important food producers in the north hemisphere, such as The United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, India, and East Asia, all at the same time, and millions of farmers losing their harvests simultaneously, global food supplies are in serious danger. Now that crop losses are happening at various places all at once, we’re exposed to what the researcher calls “systemic risk”.
In recent months, U.S. farmers have seen their crops being absolutely devastated by natural disasters and bizarre weather patterns. For instance, in many areas of Vermont, flooding caused hundreds of family farms to lose their entire crops. In the middle of the country, a crippling drought has hit grain crops the hardest this summer. From June until August, record-breaking heat and drought have baked much of the farmland across the U.S. Even more concerning, breadbasket states in the Midwest are still struggling to manage a drought that’s affecting key areas for a second year in a row.
At the same time, the outlook for exports isn’t any better. Some of our biggest trade partners are facing the same issues. In India, widespread tomato crop failures pushed tomato prices up by 400 percent in a single week. In central Canada, some farmers are saying that they haven’t had a single good crop in almost seven years due to a seemingly endless drought that has plagued Saskatchewan. Conditions are going to get even more difficult for farmers around the globe in the years ahead. And that is going to be reflected on store shelves sooner than most people think. That’s why we encourage you to stock up while you still can.
The food system is falling apart in plain sight. A “return to normal” is simply not in the cards. We are extremely close to a major tipping point, and from this moment forward we really are going to see things that would be normally considered unimaginable happening all over the globe."
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Gerald Celente, "Markets Down, Economies Down, It's All Going Down"
Very strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, Trends Journal 9/7/23
"Markets Down, Economies Down, It's All Going Down"
"In this week's 'Trends in The News' Gerald Celente discusses China's downfall, Netanyahu's escalations in the Middle East and more of the colossal fallout of the COVID War. The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."
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Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/7/23
Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/7/23
"FDIC Admits 'Banks Are In Trouble.' Get Your Cash Out!"
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"Russia - Ukraine War Update 9/7/23"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 9/7/23
"In Ukraine - Will Russia Begin Their Offensive? w/Scott Ritter"
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Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Straight Calls
"This Counter-offensive Is A Complete Utter Failure"
Analysis of breaking news and in-depth discussion of current
geopolitical events in the United States of America and the world.
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400,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers... yeah, that's a failure.
o
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 9/7/23
"Ukraine War History -
Why it was a Predictable Bloodbath w/Jeffrey Sachs"
"Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. Prior to joining Columbia, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard."
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Col. Douglas Macgregor, 9/7/23
"400,000 Dead Ukrainian Soldiers -
Delivering a Truly Severe Blow to Russia?"
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o
"To The Last Ukrainian"
The war is a disaster in every sense...
By Katya Sedgwick
Excerpt: "It was Vladimir Putin who initially noted that the West is willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. Well, it looks like it’s finally happening - we’ve run out of Ukrainians, or at least we ran out of the ones willing to die for their country. Ukraine is running short of the young, fertile, and productive.
When Russia launched its invasion of its neighbor in February, 2022, the media lit up with stories of bumbling, murdering Russkies and heroic Ukrainians. The legend of the Ghost of Kyiv, the mystery pilot destroying legions of Russian fighter planes - eventually debunked as propaganda - raised expectations of a quick triumph of the underdog.
Many Ukrainians volunteered in these early days of war. Out of 6.1 million living abroad, some returned to defend their country. Martial law was swiftly imposed, barring able-bodied military age men from crossing the border. In the the rapidly aging post-Soviet nation, military age was defined as 18 to 60.
In a piece I wrote last year for The American Conservative, I collected draft-dodging stories from the back pages of Ukrainian media. I took care to avoid Russian sources that could be dismissed as propaganda. I also found what was then a very unusual New York Times item that described popular Telegram channels that alert subscribers of real time locations of conscription officers issuing summons on the streets of Ukrainian cities."
Full article here:
Greg Hunter, "Deflation & Barter Economy Coming"
"Deflation & Barter Economy Coming"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Analyst, financial writer and professional trader Rick Ackerman is forecasting a “deflationary end” to our debt-bloated financial system. Ackerman contends, “I think everybody agrees we have more debt than we can ever repay. So, it’s going to have to be repaid one way or another. The debt has to be discharged. Every penny of every debt has to be paid, if not by the borrower, by the lender. Hyperinflation would let borrowers skip free. The powers that be are not going to go for that. The lenders are going to be in charge. This is why I said all of the mortgage contracts will come to resemble leases. This is so the lenders don’t wind up evicting 110 million Americans from their homes. Things have gotten far crazier than I could have imagined a decade ago when I was forecasting a deflationary end.”
What is the big deflationary downward spiral going to look like for John Q Public? Ackerman predicts, “On the scale I believe it has to happen, it looks like a barter economy. We are talking about kind of a Stone Age. There are a lot of jobs in the economy where you would be hard pressed to say what these people do. Most people would not be able to tell you why they are worth what they are being paid. This would be true for 98% of the people who work for Twitter. A lot of those jobs will disappear. Imagine what you have when you have that kind of disposable cash taken out of the economy. It has more than a ripple effect. It has a tsunami effect. Everything downstream collapses too.
So, I really see a state of barter. Full disclosure, I said we were close to a collapse 10 years ago, but I really think we are close this time. I think we are not further away than a stock market implosion. This inflated stock market is a crazed animal right now that does not relate to reality, earnings or anything. It’s always in danger of collapsing tomorrow. As far as a precipitous deflation, it will be simultaneously with the collapse of the stock market. We are at a much higher threshold than the past. The edifice is much more fragile and precarious than it has ever been. All we need is for the inevitable bear market to begin, and then it is game over.”
Ackerman also predicts the dollar will get stronger in the short to medium term, and its strength will be another sign of deflation. Ackerman predicts very hard times for commercial real estate that has already started and predicts a 70% fall in residential real estate prices. Ackerman also talks about the value of having cash. He also recommends gold and silver as a core investment, along with food and survival strategies. Yes, it’s going to get that bad.
Ackerman points out, “The financial mess today is so much worse than America faced in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Ackerman says count on big deflation, and this will include how you get medical care too. Ackerman says, “Deflation is all encompassing.” There is much more in the 44-minute interview.
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with
analyst Rick Ackerman, who is a professional trader famous for “Ricks Picks”.
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Bill Bonner, "A Race of Morons"
"A Race of Morons"
Oblivious to the rising tide of debt, deficits and defaults,
mankind stumbles toward disaster..
by Bill Bonner
"A man who takes what is’n his’n.
Gives it back or goes to pris’n."
~ Daniel Drew
Poitou, France - "We have an old friend. One of the smartest men we’ve ever met. But he’s very down on his luck. His businesses failed. His marriages failed. His investments failed. And now, his health is failing too. “How did it come to this,” he wonders. “How could I be such a moron?” Today, we wonder for the whole nation.
This just in from Business Insider: "US households are on the brink with excess savings likely to be depleted by month-end, San Francisco Fed says Savings built up by American households during the pandemic are all but gone, the San Francisco Fed says. US household savings have fallen from a record $2.1 trillion in 2021 to around $190 billion as of June, per their data. It may indicate a wider squeeze for Americans – who must contend with the highest interest rates in 22 years."
Dot… to Dot… to Dot… And then, this little item came in from Fortune: "Nearly two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, study finds. Research from LendingClub finds that 61% of adults were living paycheck to paycheck as of July 2023, a two-point increase from the previous year. That comes even as inflation rates have dropped from 9.1% last July to 3.2% this year. The breakdown of people living paycheck to paycheck was fairly evenly spread. Low-income consumers - those earning less than $50,000 annually - saw the biggest increases, rising from 74% in July 2022 to 78% in July 2023.
What happened? How did it come to this? Is this just the nature of things…that the middle classes are always “on the brink” of ruin? Or is it a feature of public policies? Here’s another dot to connect: "The Fed's balance sheet reductions have hit $1 trillion… Where once the Fed's portfolio held around $8.4 trillion in assets, the institution's System Open Market Account now shows that this has fallen to just under $7.4 trillion. These balance sheet reduction efforts are more commonly known as quantitative tightening, and are a strategy deployed by the central bank to drain excess liquidity from markets."
Giveth…and Taketh: The Fed giveth and the people are happy. The Fed taketh away and the people hurteth. But what is it that it gives and takes? The Fed does not print ‘money.’ And when it ‘reduces its balance sheet,’ it does not take back the money it didn’t give out in the first place. Money is a stand-in, like a claim ticket from a parking garage. It represents real wealth. The Fed has no pink Cadillac…no black Mariah…no silver Ford F-150. It comes onto the lot with nothing. And then, it prints up a claim ticket, giving the holder the right to take any car on the lot.
How could anyone ever think that was going to work out? The Fed offers credit, not money. Money is a claim on real wealth, already in existence. Credit is all “on the come.” It claims wealth that may or may not come into being…and draws on it in the present. The poor borrower drives off in a newish Mercedes. But it is not his car. And sooner or later, he’ll have to return it.
This is not just a theoretical matter. A man who spends all his savings is broke. Busted. He has nothing. Too bad. So sad. But the man who borrows…spends…and can’t pay back is not only a disappointment to himself, but like a soldier who loses his nerve on the battlefield, he’s a danger to the whole army.
Debtors have creditors. The creditors have creditors of their own…and bills to be paid…and holidays planned months in advance…and, if they are banks, federal regulators who will shut them down if their accounts are out of order. Apparently, US households are down to their last dime. And here comes the Repo Man. The Washington Post: "More Americans are falling behind on their car loan and credit card payments than at any time in more than a decade, a troubling signal of consumer stress as higher prices and rising borrowing costs are squeezing household budgets.
Self-Inflicted Wounds: How could that be? As we saw yesterday, the typical working man (and woman) is actually making less per hour than he did in 1966. Basic commodities are cheaper (in terms of hours of work needed to buy them). But finished products – those that he actually buys…those that should benefit from more technology – are much more expensive. And GDP growth rates have come down…decade after decade…from the ‘60s. We used to expect growth rates of 3% to 5%. In 1966, US GDP rose more than 6%. In 1984, it went up by more than 7%. Now, we’re lucky if we get 2%. For the last 10 years, GDP growth has averaged only about 1.5%.
The numbers are always a little slimy and slippery. But for the purpose of today’s cogitation, let us imagine that we are right: 90% of the population has gotten poorer, not richer, over the last half a century. They owe $12 trillion on their houses. Another trillion on their credit cards. And now, it’s time to return the Mercedes. And let us set up our wondering for tomorrow: what kind of morons would do such a thing?"
Dan, I Allegedly, "They’re Outta Here"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 9/7/23
"They’re Outta Here"
People are relocating out of expensive areas. We just heard that Boeing is moving another 250 employees out of the state of California. People are miserable at work. Worker satisfaction is at an all time low right now.
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"Adventures with Danno, AM/PM 9/7/23"
Adventures with Danno, AM 9/7/23
"Outrageous Prices At Kroger!
It's Getting Worse! What's Coming?"
In today's vlog, we are discussing the Kroger
sales and how outrageous the prices are getting!
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o
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, PM 9/7/23
"Grocery Prices Are Surging All Across The US,
This Is Getting Ugly! Get Ready!"
Groceries are soaring in price, and we are exposing the truth on this matter and why this is leading to multiple food shortages all around the world!
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o
Meanwhile, elsewhere...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell , 9/7/23
"Russian Typical Supermarket Tour:
O'KEY Supermarket"
"Discover with me what does a Russian typical Supermarket look like in Moscow, Russia. O'key Supermarket is a popular supermarket chain in Russia. Walk with me as i show you the prices of the top 20 socially important food items everyone needs in their kitchen in 2023."
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(1 ruble = 0.010 US dollar)
Wednesday, September 6, 2023
Canadian Prepper, 9/6/23, "WW3"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 9/6/23
"Romania Article 4; USA Nuke Fired;
Moscow Air Alert; Latvia Mines; B-2 Bombers; WW3"
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Adventures with Danno, "Food Shortage Report 2023"
Adventures with Danno, PM 9/6/23
"Food Shortage Report 2023!
What's Here & What's Coming?"
"We are exposing the truth on the food shortage crisis and what to expect in the fall and winter of 2023! It's getting rough out here as many families are struggling to even put food on the table!"
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"Visa And Mastercard Report That The Credit Card Crisis Nobody Thought Possible Is Already Upon Us"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 9/6/23
"Visa And Mastercard Report That The Credit Card
Crisis Nobody Thought Possible Is Already Upon Us"
"Two of the world’s biggest credit card issuers, Visa and Mastercard, are warning about an impending credit card crisis, and consumers should be on high alert because fee hikes will start being introduced over the next 30 days. Both payment technology companies said they also intend to raise credit card fees paid by merchants every time they accept credit card purchases from their customers. A report published by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the fee increase will occur in October, right ahead of the hottest shopping season of the year. The timing of Visa and Mastercard’s decision is certainly going to impact the buying plans of many U.S. households during the holidays.
Experts with the Journal predict that a significant portion of the credit card fee hikes faced by retailers will likely be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. In 2022, U.S. retailers paid nearly $94 billion to Visa and Mastercard in credit card fees. This figure almost tripled over the past decade, up from $33 billion in 2012. All of this comes at a very bad time for Americans, who have seen the cost of living in America shoot up in the past three years. In fact, in August, the number of Americans rolling their credit card debt from month to month became higher than the portion who pay their bill in full for the first time since this data started being tracked, according to a new survey by J.D. Power.
The global data and analytics firm found that 51% of credit card holders in the United States can’t pay off their entire balance each month. Right now, shoppers are using their cards for a lot of everyday purchases. Grocery shopping is the top purchase type that consumers say they are making with their credit cards. This is happening at a period when credit card interest rates are at 40-year highs. In the past few years, Americans have racked up a record-high amount of credit card debt, according to data released by the Federal Reserve.
"We've seen a huge increase in credit-card delinquencies," said Balbinder Singh Gill, assistant professor of finance at the Stevens Institute of Technology's School of Business in Hoboken, N.J. The professor says that with a 24% annual percentage rate on credit cards, becoming delinquent on credit card debt could push millions of low-income families into bankruptcy. "It's a very dangerous situation currently, especially for low-wage workers," Gill stressed.
Another red flag is that shoppers are turning to buy now, pay later services to be able to make ends meet. Usage surged 40% in the first two quarters of 2023, according to data from Adobe Analytics. In addition to soaring interest rates and student loan repayments, consumers are likely to rack up even more debt due to higher energy and electricity bills in the fall and winter as the cold weather kicks in and the cost of heating homes ratchets up.
At the end of the day, the credit card crisis is symptomatic of the tough decisions that struggling American households are having to make in 2023. People are having to choose between paying their credit card bills, their rent or buying groceries. And the fee hikes that will come into effect less than four weeks from now are going to financially hurt many families out there."
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