Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/28/25
"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern:
Weekly Wrap"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Friday, February 28, 2025
"Trump Lashes Zelensky As Ukraine President Argues; 'You're Not Strong But Look Because...'"
A must view!
Times Of India, 2/28/25
"Trump Lashes Zelensky As Ukraine President Argues;
'You're Not Strong But Look Because...'"
"During a tense exchange, U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming that Ukraine was not strong on its own and attributing its strength to U.S. military support. Trump pointed out that Zelensky’s position was largely due to the U.S. providing military equipment, implying that Ukraine’s resilience was dependent on American aid. Zelensky, visibly frustrated, rolled his eyes in response to the comment. The interaction highlights ongoing tensions between the two leaders over the nature of U.S. support for Ukraine amidst the ongoing conflict with Russia."
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Redacted, 2/28/25
"Holy SH*T, Trump Just DESTROYED Zelensky Right To His Face"
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1 MILLION Ukrainian soldiers killed...
100,000 Russian troops dead...
$350 BILLION American dollars...
WHY?! FOR WHAT?!
Cui bono?
"Dan, I Allegedly, 'Recession Is HERE - How Much Worse Can It Get?'"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 2/28/25
"Recession Is HERE -
How Much Worse Can It Get?"
"Recession is here, and they’re not telling you the full story. In this video, I’m breaking down why the economy is unraveling and what this means for you. From Home Depot’s shocking earnings call to the warning signs coming from JP Morgan and CNN, it’s clear that the average American is struggling with skyrocketing costs, high-interest rates, and a recession that’s already impacting everything from housing to dining out. The middle-class dream is slipping away, businesses are folding, and even the wealthy are feeling the pinch - shopping at Walmart, can you believe it?"
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Canadian Prepper, "Alert! UK Troops, Warplanes For WW3! Trump Flips On Ukraine!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/28/25
"Alert! UK Troops, Warplanes For WW3!
Trump Flips On Ukraine!"
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"Russian Typical (Regional) Supermarket: Would You Shop There?"
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell, 2/28/25
"Russian Typical (Regional) Supermarket:
Would You Shop There?"
"Join me for a walk-through of Lenta, one of the many Russian-owned chain supermarkets in Russia. Lenta is as typical as they get in terms of a Russian supermarket."
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"Slash The Fat: Nine US Government Agencies To Cut By 50%" (Excerpt)
"Slash The Fat:
Nine US Government Agencies To Cut By 50%"
by David Stockman
Editor Note: Bill Bonner is away today. In his stead, we present Part Two of the excerpt from David Stockman’s new book, which you can find here. David was kind enough to allow us to run what may be the most important chapter in the book. You’ll find it below. And if you like it, you have our permission to share it widely. You can also find more of David’s work at his website.
Excerpt: "As we have indicated, the 16 agencies slated for elimination do comprise a kind of Litmus Test of fiscal resolve. If these Federal bureaucrats and agencies can’t be eliminated, the prospect for reining in America’s unfolding fiscal calamity is dim indeed.
Yet the 71,000 headcount reductions and $11 billion of savings constitute hardly a nick out of the Federal payroll. In fact, on a government-wide basis including the uniformed forces, the total payroll numbers nearly 3.83 million civilian and military employees and costs nearly $600 billion per year. So the agency reductions outlined so far amount to just 1.8% of the total.
For this reason, we have identified a second layer of nine agencies where we believe the headcount could be cut by 50% and existing missions sharply curtailed. This would result in a further Federal staff reduction of 93,000 jobs and nearly $15 billion in direct compensation cost savings."
Full, lengthy and highly recommended article is here:
Jim Kunstler, "The Dog Probably Ate It"
"The Dog Probably Ate It"
by Jim Kunstler
"It may be time the FBI's New York field office gets paid
a visit in the style it's very well accustomed to doling out."
- Mike Benz
"Turns out new Attorney General Pam Bondi was a little off the mark earlier this week when she said the Jeffrey Epstein files were sitting on her desk. Actually, it was a six-hundred-pound tar-smeared hairball with a gift tag that read: “To Pamela Jo from her Friends in Blobville, good luck untangling this!” Well, she did tell Fox News host Jesse Waters that the thing sitting on her desk was “disgusting.”
As promised, those Epstein files were released on Thursday - a measly two-hundred pages - to much chagrin and embarrassment for all, since the material turned out to be the same old lists and flight logs that every blogger and his uncle has already put out on the Web for years - say, what . . .?
But then the plot thickened later in the day when AG Bondi said a whistleblower informed her that the New York office of the FBI and their counterparts in the Southern District of NY (Manhattan) DOJ offices were hiding “thousands and thousands” of pages evidence and other stuff (videos? photos?) they had been sitting on for years.
AG Bondi quickly fired off a letter to brand-new FBI Director Kash Patel demanding that the New York FBI office deliver all that stuff to Washington by eight o’clock in the morning today (Friday). If you were Mr. Patel, rather than waiting until morning, wouldn’t you just take a twilight ride up the Jersey Turnpike from Blobville to the Big Apple with an FBI swat team and bust into both the FBI and DOJ offices there... and maybe frog-march a few federal employees onto the street like so many grannies caught praying in front of an abortion mill?
Of course, I am writing this a few hours before the Friday morning deadline. So, for now there are only the ancillary considerations in this fast-developing denouement to the longest and slowest-running case of trans-national fuckery in world history. Some little details do stick in one’s craw. For example, Maurene (spelled that way) Comey, daughter of fired FBI director James Comey has been a lead US attorney out of the SDNY in the case against Ghislaine Maxwell and the more recent case against Sean (“Diddy”) Combs - both cases revolving around grand-scale sexual depravity among world-class celebrities. Note, too, that the SDNY was the origin point of more recent janky cases brought against Mr. Trump in the 2024 runup to the election.
And, as independent investigator Mike Benz points out, Bill Barr was USAG in 2019 when Jeffrey Epstein was finally busted, stuffed into the Manhattan federal lockup, and promptly (shall we say, conveniently) turned up dead a few days later (putting aside the known irregularities involving the disposal of his body and the pathology reports about the cause-of-death). Did you notice that no one was ever disciplined for that? Not the two guards on the floor that night who claimed they fell asleep. Not the warden of the jail who failed to check whether the security cameras were working (they weren’t) on his most important prisoner’s cell?
Nor did Bill Barr ever answer for that, or for some other capers - such as sitting on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the fall of 2019 when Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee held preliminary hearings to consider impeaching President Donald Trump over his inquiring phone call to V. Zelenskyy in Ukraine. The laptop, you surely know, was stuffed with deal memos and emails about the Biden family’s ex-officio financial shenanigans in Ukraine that surely would have amounted to exculpatory evidence and was withheld from Mr. Trump’s lawyers through the entire psychodrama of the impeachment and trial in the Senate.
Then there is the peculiar history of Bill Barr’s dad, Donald Barr, present at the founding of the CIA (as an OSS officer in WWII), who groomed young Jeffrey Epstein into a job teaching math at New York’s Dalton prep school in 1974 on the basis of fake college credentials (Stanford). Epstein was soon transformed into a Wall Street go-getter and most probably an agent for Mossad, Israeli intel. Epstein’s rise in high finance and international spookery led him to crypto-British media mogul and Mossad agent Robert Maxwell and Maxwell’s sex-crazed daughter Ghislaine...and the Epstein underage sex operation proceeded from there.
Coincidentally, Donald Barr’s son, Bill Barr’s rise in Blobville neatly parallel’s Epstein’s rise. Barr signed on with the CIA in 1973, worked as an “analyst,” quit to go to law school in 1977, landed in the Reagan White House, than the Bush One White House where he performed clean-up operations on the lingering Iran-Contra mess, eventually becoming US Attorney General in 1991. Between 1994 and 2019, he racked up a personal fortune in blob-centric law, becoming Attorney General a second time in 2019, under Mr. Trump, whom he sedulously stabbed in the back, butt, and liver during his tenure.
Now, it is well-known that Donald Trump consorted with Jeffrey Epstein at various points in his life. Mr. Trump, in his role as New York real estate mogul, was but another celebrity butterfly in Epstein’s vast collection. He admits flying on the notorious Epstein airplane, though, he has said only to catch a ride somewhere. Mr. Trump later clashed with Epstein, as far, even, as blackballing him from the Mar-a-Lago club. (Epstein’s role as a high-toned pimp was becoming known in the early 2000s, though his legal culpability was neatly minimized by Barack Obama’s DOJ.)
In light of all this, it appears that Mr. Trump has no reservations these days about disclosing whatever lurks in the blob files about these skeezy matters. Of course, it is a little hard to believe that blob agents did not dispose of the evidence well in advance of January 20. Other whistleblowers say that FBI agents have been “working night and day” to destroy files on “stand-alone” FBI servers in the days preceding Kash Patel’s arrival on the premises.
As I wind up today’s post at 8:02 in the morning, something new should have landed on Pam Bondi’s desk in place of that six-hundred-pound hairball. Not a whisper of news yet. No perp-walks out of SDNY or the New York FBI office. And, of course, The New York Times barely mentioned Kash on yesterday’s Epstein doings. There’s a long work-day ahead. Stand by."
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Jeremiah Babe, "No More Food Stamps For Illegals? Middle Class Chaos; Doom Spending"
Jeremiah Babe, 2/27/25
"No More Food Stamps For Illegals?
Middle Class Chaos; Doom Spending"
Comments here:
o
A Venezuelan migrant left her receipt at the grocery store:
EBT Food Stamp balance: $13,401.82
EBT Cash balance: $4,498.85
And how are YOU doing, Good Citizen?
"Panic Buying Frenzy Push Egg Prices To Stratospheric Levels"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 2/27/25
"Panic Buying Frenzy Push Egg Prices To Stratospheric Levels"
"Eggs are a high commodity in the United States right now, and keeping them in stock is getting incredibly difficult and extremely expensive. Prices have exploded since November, and especially over the last few weeks. And that's after rising more than 40% between 2020 and 2022. Shortages are becoming a major concern amongst retailers and authorities becausemillions of Americans are currently scrambling with limited availability at stores and record-breaking prices for eggs and food products made with this staple. Several news reports detail that major grocers are keeping egg prices at record prices to slow consumer demand as hen depopulation continues to ramp up due to the growth of bird flu cases in the nation.
In December, the average cost of a dozen large eggs was $4.15, up from $3.65 in November, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024. Now, a carton of a dozen eggs is selling for anywhere between $6.00 and $8.00 in some regions of the U.S., and many consumers are seeing even higher prices. The Bureau also expects prices of meat and poultry to rise as the threat of avian flu continues to cut production targets."
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Gerald Celente, "Markets Down, Dot-Com Bust, Gold Correction, What's Next?"
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 2/27/25
"Markets Down, Dot-Com Bust, Gold Correction, What's Next?"
"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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Musical Interlude: Yanni, “Standing in Motion”
Full screen recommended.
Yanni, “Standing in Motion”,
Live At The Acropolis
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Where did this big ball of stars come from? Palomar 6 is one of about 200 globular clusters of stars that survive in our Milky Way Galaxy. These spherical star-balls are older than our Sun as well as older than most stars that orbit in our galaxy's disk. Palomar 6 itself is estimated to be about 12.5 billion years old, so old that it is close to - and so constrains - the age of the entire universe.
Containing about 500,000 stars, Palomar 6 lies about 25,000 light years away, but not very far from our galaxy's center. At that distance, this sharp image from the Hubble Space Telescope spans about 15 light-years. After much study including images from Hubble, a leading origin hypothesis is that Palomar 6 was created - and survives today - in the central bulge of stars that surround the Milky Way's center, not in the distant galactic halo where most other globular clusters are now found."
Chet Raymo, “The Sadist Next Door”
“The Sadist Next Door”
by Chet Raymo
“The TLS (“Times Literary Supplement”) had an absorbing review of American Historian Joel Harrington's book on the manuscript diary of a 16th-century German executioner, Franz Schmidt of Nuremberg. Remarkably, Schmidt kept a full record of the criminals he executed, the crimes they perpetrated, and the gruesome ways they met their fate. It is a tale that would chill most 21st-century readers.
"Any Man..."
"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous
by letting the government take care of him,
better take a closer look at the American Indian."
- Henry Ford
"This Is The Motive..."
Full screen recommended.
"All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves."
- Blaise Pascal
The Poet: Robert Service, "Prelude"
"Prelude"
"In youth I gnawed life's bitter rind
And shared the rugged lot
Of fellows rude and unrefined,
Frustrated and forgot;
And now alas! it is too late
My sorry ways to mend,
So sadly I accept my fate,
A Roughneck to the end.
Profanity is in my voice
And slag is in my rhyme,
For I have mucked with men who curse
And grovel in the grime;
My fingers were not formed, I fear,
To frame a pretty pen,
So please forgive me if I veer
From Virtue now and then.
For I would be the living voice,
Though raucous is its tone,
Of men who rarely may rejoice,
Yet barely ever moan:
The rovers of the raw-ribbed lands,
The lads of lowly worth,
The scallywags with scaley hands
Who weld the ends of earth."
- Robert Service
"The Sociopath Next Door"
"The Sociopath Next Door"
by Martha Stout
"Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.
Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition. In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered. How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)? The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.
Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking or international development, or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual moral or legal encumbrances. When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom that results from having no conscience whatsoever.
You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful. Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all. If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 6 percent of the population.
The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 6 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system. We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.
Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish. Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person. Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender. What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference between an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions."
o
"Don't Wonder..."
"Don't wonder why people go crazy. Wonder why they don't.
In the face of what we can lose in a day, in an instant,
wonder what the hell it is that makes us hold it together."
- "Grey's Anatomy"
"U.S. Caught in Death Trap"
"U.S. Caught in Death Trap"
by Brian Maher
"Imagine a fellow…This is a wastrel sunk impossibly in debt - credit card debt. Spiraling interest payments begin to swamp him. He must take on an additional credit card in order to satisfy interest payments on the original. Yet he must soon take on another credit card… to service the interest on the card he previously took on… which he took on to service the interest on the first. That is, he must borrow money to service previously borrowed money. Reduce the thing to its essentials and you will find: The money he borrows is dead money. It lacks all productive purpose. He is merely shoveling it into a roaring fire. Yet Pelion goes heaping upon Ossa. That is, his situation deteriorates further yet…
Rising Interest Rates: To his fantastic alarm, interest rates begin to gallop on him. That means he must pay more and more money to service his debt. Before he knows what has struck him… he is undone… bankrupt. Well friend, here you have the government of the United States.
It is the reckless and improvident fellow just described - who opens new credit cards to service the interest on existing ones - who is the slave of nonproductive debt. Projected interest payments on the nation’s debt presently exceed $1 trillion annually. And the cost to service that debt has doubled in the past 19 months alone - doubled! The nation is far along the ruinous path. How far down the ruinous path has the United States wandered?
The Day of Reckoning Is in Sight: Mr. Alasdair Macleod, economist: "The day of reckoning for unproductive credit is in sight… Malinvestments of the last 50 years are being exposed by the rise in interest rates, increases which are driven by a combination of declining faith in the value of major currencies and contracting bank credit. The rise in interest rates is becoming unstoppable…
The interest bill is already growing exponentially. We can see that the funding requirement for new debt will be $2 trillion in excess spending, plus at least another $1.3 trillion of interest (allowing for the $7.6 trillion of debt to be refinanced), totaling over $3.3 trillion in total. Clearly, it won’t take much more of a credit squeeze and the increasing likelihood of a buyers’ strike to push the interest bill to over $1.5 trillion…
Irrespective of central bank policy, the shortage of credit is driving borrowing rates higher, and the cost of novating maturing debt is rising, if the credit is actually available - which increasingly is rarely the case. It is an old-fashioned credit crunch, not really seen since the 1970s. And it has only just started… The big picture is of an asset bubble which has come to an end. And by any standards, this one was the largest in recorded history."
It is our sincere hope that you are wrong. It is our profound fear that you are correct. Yet cannot the Federal Reserve and its brother central banks reach into the deep trick bag into which they reached last decade - interest rate suppression, quantitative easing and the rest? Will not these magic tricks prove adequate next time? No says Mr. Macleod…
The Black Hole of Extinction: Thus we are informed: "The era of interest rate suppression is over. G7 central banks are all deeply in negative equity, in other words technically bankrupt, a situation which can only be addressed by issuing yet more unproductive credit. These are the institutions tasked with ensuring the integrity of the entire system of bank credit. This is not a good background for a dollar-based global credit system that is staring into the black hole of its own extinction."
Just so. Yet with the highest respect, sir, we have heard this “doom and gloom” before. In fact, we have heard it issue from an orifice upon our very face, the one directly beneath the nasal bas. For three decades - at least - these cries have come issuing. And for three decades it has been a cry of wolf.
In each instance the financial system has been knocked horizontal… it has shortly regained the vertical. Whether under its own steam or assistance from the financial authorities, it has gotten up. Why should next time prove different?
Why This Time Is Different: Here Mr. Macleod inform us why “this time is different”: "This time, the Global South, the nations standing to one side of all this but finding their currencies badly damaged by unfavorable comparisons with a failing dollar, a dollar forced into higher interest rates in a world that knows of nowhere else to go - this non-financial world is on the edge of abandoning American hegemony for a new model emerging from Asia."
The Global South’s rise is different you say. Do you care to elaborate, sir? "That the U.S. government is ensnared in a debt trap and is being forced to borrow exponentially increasing amounts just to pay the interest on its mountainous debt is not the fault of other nations. But many of them in turn are being forced to pay even higher interest rates, irrespective of their budgetary positions, and irrespective of their balance of trade. Yet their currencies continue to weaken even against a declining dollar."
A conundrum! They are chained to the dollar. It is a liability. They are prisoner to it. What can they do? The Global South, which is the new name for those either in the Asian hegemons’ camp or considering joining it will need to find an alternative… The pressure for a whole new monetary system for the emerging nations is increasing… There is only one answer, and that is to abandon the dollar. Perhaps the potential BRICS currency of which Jim Rickards so often speaks represents an omen - a straw swaying in the wind.
The Wages of Sin: Thus the United States confronts the wages of its monetary and fiscal sins. It has cast all restraint to the scattering winds. It has sacrificed the morrow upon the altar of the present. And it has made its dollar headache the world’s migraine.
A private concern would confront bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of United States Bankruptcy Code. The United States government will not confront bankruptcy proceedings of course. It does - after all - maintain access to a press that prints money. It can make all its shortages good… in nominal terms at least. The debtees will get their money. In reality they will get sawdust…
The Wicked: “I borrowed $100 from you, good sir? Well, here is your $100 back, as promised. I hereby discharge my fiduciary responsibility to you. I have fulfilled my contractual obligations.” “But the $100 I loaned you is now only worth $22.08, because of the vicious inflation you caused” comes the bitter reply. “You’ve robbed me blind! You’re a goddarned crook, that’s what you are.” “Your problem, not my problem,” answers the deadbeat.
That is Uncle Samuel for you. “The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again,” Psalms informs us. This uncle of ours is a cad. He is a bounder. He is a scoundrel. He is wicked…"
"17 Signs That America’s Long Economic Slide Threatens To Become An Economic Avalanche"
"17 Signs That America’s Long Economic
Slide Threatens To Become An Economic Avalanche"
by Michael Snyder
"Are you better off than you were four years ago? If you are, you should consider yourself to be extremely fortunate, because the vast majority of the population is not. The U.S. economy has been sliding the wrong direction for a very long time, and now our economic momentum in the wrong direction is accelerating. Retail sales are slowing down, the housing market is in a depressed state, mass layoffs are happening all over the nation, stores are closing at a staggering pace, the cost of living has become extremely painful, and debt levels have soared to unprecedented heights. Four years of deteriorating economic conditions have brought us to a breaking point, and now we are witnessing quite a bit of shaking in the financial markets. Even though many in the mainstream media are still trying to deny it, the truth is that we are in an enormous amount of trouble. The following are 17 signs that America’s long economic slide threatens to become an economic avalanche…
#1 The Conference Board’s index of consumer confidence just experienced the largest drop that we have seen since August 2021…"Consumers grew more pessimistic about the economic outlook in February as worries brewed about a slowing economy and rising inflation, the Conference Board reported Tuesday. The board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down 7 points and below the Dow Jones forecast for 102.3. This was the lowest reading since June 2024 and the largest monthly drop since August 2021."
#2 The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index just fell to the lowest level that we have seen since November 2023…"The University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers on Friday released its consumer sentiment index which dropped from 71.7 in January to 64.7 in February. That’s the lowest reading since November 2023 and was weaker than the preliminary reading of 67.8, which was the consensus expectation among economists polled by Reuters."
#3 Retail sales in the United States just fell “by the most in nearly two years”…"U.S. retail sales dropped by the most in nearly two years in January, likely weighed down by frigid temperatures, wildfires and motor vehicle shortages, suggesting a sharp slowdown in economic growth early in the first quarter."
#4 Walmart is warning us that it will experience a year-over-year drop in quarterly profit for the first time in 3 years…"Shares of Walmart Inc. were hit hard Thursday after the retail behemoth provided a disappointing earnings outlook, including a warning for the first year-over-year decline in quarterly profit in three years."
#5 Last month, sales of previously-owned homes dropped 4.9 percent…"The U.S. housing market continues to weaken, as potential buyers face stubbornly high mortgage rates, elevated prices and limited supply of listings. Sales of previously owned homes fell 4.9% in January from the prior month to 4.08 million units on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis, according to the National Association of Realtors. Analysts were expecting a 2.6% decline."
#6 The cost of living is absolutely crushing most Americans. At this stage, almost 70 percent of all single adults “struggle to afford their regular rent or mortgage payments”…"Nearly 70% of single, divorced or separated people struggle to afford their regular rent or mortgage payments, compared to just over half (52%) of married people, according to a recent Redfin-commissioned survey. More than three-quarters (76%) of respondents who live with their partner but aren’t married struggle with housing payments, making them the group most likely to struggle."
#7 Starbucks is telling us that they will be laying off more than 1,000 corporate employees…"Starbucks has announced plans to lay off 1,100 corporate employees as it looks to restructure its operations. CEO Brian Niccol sent out a letter on Monday revealing employees who have been laid off will be notified on Tuesday. Niccol stated, “Our intent is to operate more efficiently, increase accountability, reduce complexity, and drive better integration.”
#8 Southwest Airlines is giving the axe to more than 1,700 corporate employees…"Southwest Airlines said Monday that it is cutting about 15% of corporate jobs, or about 1,750 people, a move its CEO called “unprecedented” as the company scrambles to cut costs. The company said it expects savings from the cuts of $210 million this year and about $300 million in 2026. The layoffs will be mostly done by the end of the second quarter and include some senior leadership roles, CEO Bob Jordan said in a staff note, which was seen by CNBC."
#9 Blue Origin has decided to fire nearly 14,000 workers…"Blue Origin announced layoffs late last week. Almost 14,000 people work at the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, according to Reuters."
#10 Chevron has announced that it will be reducing the size of their workforce by about 15 to 20 percent…"Chevron Corp. Vice Chair Mark Nelson said it will lay off 15-20% of its workers in a bid to “simplify our organizational structure, [execute] faster and more efficiently, and position the company for stronger long-term competitiveness.”
#11 Estée Lauder is telling thousands of employees that it is time to hit the bricks…"Estee Lauder’s job cuts will impact a net of 5,800 to 7,000 roles. They came as part of an updated “profit recovery and growth plan” and restructuring program that the cosmetics company detailed Feb. 4 along with other measures meant to “further transform the Company’s operating model to fund a return to sales growth and restore a solid double-digit adjusted operating margin over the next few years.”
#12 So many federal workers are being fired that initial claims for unemployment benefits in Washington D.C. went up by 36 percent in just one week…"Since Trump has taken office, nearly 4,000 workers in the city have filed for unemployment insurance as part of a surge that began at the start of the new year, according to Labor Department figures not adjusted for seasonal factors. In all, just shy of 7,000 claims have been filed in the six weeks of the new year, or about 55% more than in the prior six-week period. Filings rose to 1,780 for the week ending Feb. 8, a 36% increase from the prior week and more than four times around the same period in 2024.
#13 Forever 21 has announced that it will be closing another 200 stores…"A clothing chain that was once a fixture in every mall across America is to close 200 more stores as it prepares for second bankruptcy in five years. Amid mounting debt, Forever 21’s US operator could file for Chapter 11 protection as soon as next month, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.
#14 Joann Inc. has decided to close all of their stores in the United States… Joann Inc., which has supplied crafty Americans with art supplies and fabrics for decades, recently announced that it plans to close all of its U.S. stores, just a month after filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In a statement obtained by Reuters on Sunday, the 82-year-old company announced its plans to sell all assets to a buyer group. Joann executives originally hoped that a buyer would continue its business, but the highest bidder is slated to start going-out-of-business sales at all locations.
#15 Overall, Coresight Research is projecting that an all-time record 15,000 stores will be permanently closed in the United States in 2025.
#16 Household debt in the United States has now crossed the 18 trillion dollar mark "Americans’ household debt — including credit cards, mortgages, auto loans and student loans — is at a new all-time high of $18.04 trillion, according to a report released Thursday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
#17 More than 26 trillion dollars has been added to the U.S. national debt since the start of 2009, and now we are shelling out more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest payments…
And the punchline is that no matter what Musk does, the USS Titanic is now more or less on autopilot because while a few billions in discretionary spending can be cut, interest on the debt can not be – without a default (it can however be inflated away… and it will be) – and in January, gross interest on the Federal debt hit a record $1.167 trillion in the past twelve months thanks to another $83.6 billion in interest spending.
The meltdown that so many of us warned about is happening right in front of our eyes. We piled up trillions of dollars in new debt in recent years, and that bought us some time. But now a day of reckoning has arrived. For those that haven’t figured it out yet, an extreme amount of pain is ahead of us. You can cheat the laws of economics for a while, but economic reality always catches up with you eventually."
Gregory Mannarino, "A Mushroom Cloud Economy, People Are Not Prepared For This"
Gregory Mannarino, 2/27/25
"A Mushroom Cloud Economy,
People Are Not Prepared For This"
Comments here:
Canadian Prepper, "Trump Leaks Plan, US Will Enter Ukraine! WW3 Reboot!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/27/25
"Trump Leaks Plan, US Will Enter Ukraine!
WW3 Reboot!"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Car Companies are Doing U-Turn - Bumpy Road Ahead"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 2/27/25
"Car Companies are Doing U-Turn -
Bumpy Road Ahead"
"Big news from the automotive world – Mercedes and Porsche are rethinking their EV strategies, and in this video, I’ll explain why! With slumping EV sales, layoffs, and a shift back toward gas-powered vehicles, these industry giants are making bold moves to adapt. Plus, I’ll dive into the ripple effects on the car industry, Tesla’s latest recall, and what this all means for the future of electric vehicles. We’re also talking about the real estate market – from falling home prices to builders offering wild incentives. What’s happening in places like Las Vegas and beyond? I’ve got all the details. Add to that a discussion about staying prepared in uncertain times, and there’s a lot to unpack here today."
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno, "Stocking Up At Kroger"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 2/27/25
"Stocking Up At Kroger"
Comments here:
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Jeremiah Babe, "Prepare To Lose Your Job"
Jeremiah Babe, 2/26/25
"Prepare To Lose Your Job"
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Market Gains, 2/26/25
"Everyone Is Getting Laid Off and Nobody Is Hiring"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“This shock wave plows through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Moving toward to bottom of this beautifully detailed color composite, the thin, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge on. Cataloged as NGC 2736, its narrow appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula.
About 5 light-years long and a mere 800 light-years away, the Pencil Nebula is only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. The Vela remnant itself is around 100 light-years in diameter and is the expanding debris cloud of a star that was seen to explode about 11,000 years ago. Initially, the shock wave was moving at millions of kilometers per hour but has slowed considerably, sweeping up surrounding interstellar gas.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120924.html
Paulo Coelho, "Killing Our Dreams"
"Killing Our Dreams"
by Paulo Coelho
"The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams is the lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the Good Fight.
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
"I think you will find, when your death takes its toll,
all the money you made will never buy back your soul."
- Bob Dylan
- Bob Dylan
The Poet: Rod McKuen, "A Cat Named Sllopy"
“A Cat Named Sloopy”
“For awhile
the only earth that Sloopy knew
was in her sandbox.
Two rooms were her domain.
Every night she’d sit in the window
among the avocado plants
waiting for me to come home,
my arms full of canned liver and love.
We’d talk into the night then,
contented,
but missing something.
She the earth she never knew,
me the hills I ran
while growing bent.
Sloopy should have been a cowboy’s cat,
with prairies to run,
not linoleum,
and real-live catnip mice,
no one to depend on but herself.
I never told her,
but in my mind
I was a midnight cowboy even then.
Riding my imaginary horse
down Forty-second street,
going off with strangers
to live an hour-long cowboy’s life.
But always coming home to Sloopy,
who loved me best.
For a dozen summers
we lived against the world.
An island on an island.
She’d comfort me with purring,
I’d fatten her with smiles.
We grew rich on trust,
needing not the beach or butterflies.
I had a friend named Ben
Who painted buildings like Roualt men.
He went away.
My laughter tired Lillian
after a time,
she found a man who only smiled.
But Sloopy stayed and stayed.
Winter,
Nineteen fifty-nine,
Old men walk their dogs.
Some are walked so often
that their feet leave
little pink tracks
in the soft snow.
Women, fur on fur,
elegant and easy,
only slightly pure,
hailing cabs to take them
round the block and back.
Who is not a love seeker
when December comes?
Even children pray to Santa Claus.
I had my own love safe at home,
and yet I stayed out all one night,
the next day too.
They must have thought me crazy
screaming SLOOPY!
SLOOPY!
as the snow came falling
down around me.
I was a madman
to have stayed away
one minute more
than the appointed hour.
I’d like to think a golden cowboy
snatched her from the window sill,
and safely saddlebagged
she rode to Arizona.
She’s stalking lizards
in the cactus now perhaps,
bitter, but free.
I’m bitter too,
and not a free man anymore.
But once upon a time,
In New York’s jungle in a tree,
before I went into the world
in search of other kinds of love,
nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.
Looking back,
perhaps she’s been
the only human thing
that ever gave back love to me.”
- Rod McKuen
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