Category: Around The Blogosphere

Friday Afternoon With Martin Armstrong

Armstrong Economics- Mainstream News is Committing Suicide

This chart shows the results of Gallup Polls, and the trust in American media is down well below 40%. Our models warn that when confidence in government falls below 40%, governments begin to collapse. That magic number applies to the media as well.

Armstrong Economics- TikTok Ban – WAR on Free Speech

Congress cannot agree on anything other than dismantling the First Amendment. There is no greater threat to the establishment than the uncensored sharing of ideas. This week, 353 members of Congress voted to ban TikTok to “protect our data.” Unlike any major issue facing the country, it took Congress a mere eight days to implement this ban, with an astounding 81% in favor of removing the platform.

Armstrong Economics- Would You Feed Bugs to Your Pet?

Armstrong Economics- Canada to Incorporate Social Scores in Banking

“It’s about having that fairer, more inclusive, more open society,” said Helen Child, founder of Open Banking Excellence. Open Society, well, that does sound familiar. Why is there a need for inclusivity and fairness in banking when it should come down to numbers? “It drives financial inclusion,” she added, “It’s democratizing data.”

Canada is one of many nations hoping to use unofficial social scores to control the masses. All of these actions are setting the stage for how CBDC will operate, a collective network containing everyone’s personal data and accounts. Governments have already begun debanking individuals and these steps will make it increasingly easier to force the masses to bow down and relinquish all control to the almighty government.

Bending Over Backwards

A Midwestern Doctor- The Many Dangers of Spinal Surgery

In the case of neck and back pain, I feel the primary issue is that limited knowledge exists regarding what causes pain there. This is important because many of the existing “treatments” for back pain actually worsen the underlying causes of that pain. For example, ligamentous laxity underlies many chronic spinal pain conditions, but one of the primary treatments for spinal pain (injected steroids) directly weakens the affected ligaments, creating a situation where therapies which are good for business but bad for patients frequently end up being chosen.

ClownWorld U.S.A.

Gold, Goats and Guns- Indicting Trump is the End of US Politics

And that’s what’s at the heart of this Trump indictment. Trump is the distillation of everything they need to tear down to validate their envy. He’s white, male, politically connected, a little corrupt, very cheesy and the antithesis of what middle-class bicoastal midwits believe they should be.

Successful.

They hate Trump not because he’s successful but because our society allowed for him to become successful.

Postcard From Africa

Ken Opalo- Three Billion Africans, How demographics will shape African states’ economic and political futures

For much of history the continent of Africa has been largely underpopulated. For example, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the entire region’s population surpassed Europe’s (see below). Now the region is in the middle of a demographic boom that will see its population double over the next 50 years to more than 3 billion. By 2100 half all humans being born will be African. It is not an overstatement to claim that the world’s demographic future is in Africa.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ DEF Fluid

What’s everyone seeing out there?

Sensing Online-  Get ready for the catastrophic DEF shortage

Unless the nation’s truckers can refill with Diesel Exhaust Fluid, the trucks will stop. Literally. DEF production and imports are about to crater and the country’s largest truck-fueling company, Flying J, has been directed by Union Pacific railroad to decrease its DEF-receiving shipments by 50 percent or be 100 percent embargoed. Unless resolved, this demand may cause countless thousands of 18-wheelers to be force-parked very soon, perhaps starting this month. That would be a very, very terrible event, because according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the trucking industry transports almost three-quarter of all goods shipped in the country.

There is no wand to be waved to make the DEF shortage simply disappear. But doing nothing is both reprehensible and indefensible.

Instapundit- UPDATE: A Knoxville friend writes:

“Ha, Rural King literally had pallets of 2.5 gallon DEF containers in their stores. $6.99, then $9.99. Now none. Same at Walmart. Tractor Supply etc. All of the newer ag equipment, tractor’s, combines etc require DEF. Talk about food shortages!”

We just need a hack so it’ll run without it. But EPA will probably block this. I liked it better when Atlas Shrugged was just a novel.

It’s too bad nobody warned us about this potential problem.

“Shipping Crisis”

I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End

Think of going to the port as going to WalMart on Black Friday, but imagine only ONE cashier for thousands of customers. Think about the lines. Except at a port, there are at least THREE lines to get a container in or out. The first line is the ‘in’ gate, where hundreds of trucks daily have to pass through 5–10 available gates. The second line is waiting to pick up your container. The third line is for waiting to get out. For each of these lines the wait time is a minimum of an hour, and I’ve waited up to 8 hours in the first line just to get into the port.

I Blame Rock’n Roll

Excellent essay from Tim Moen: Healthcare Scarcity: Who’s To Blame?

It’s not hard to see why there’s so much venom directed at the unvaccinated. Hyperbolic rhetoric from elected officials like Justin Trudeau and public health communicators continually paint the unvaccinated as a threat to others even though it’s a clear fact that only people infected with COVID-19 (vaccinated or not) are a threat to others and they’re only really a threat to fragile unvaccinated people who have exposed themselves to risk. It certainly serves the ruling classes to keep people divided and focused on fighting each other.

And this is exactly what is happening now in relation to healthcare scarcity. People that carry the power and responsibility to ensure a functioning healthcare system are passing the buck and distracting us by fomenting fighting and division. I’ve never seen such a concerted effort by our leaders to gaslight us into resenting the very patients we signed up to care for. We are blaming the wrong people for our crumbling healthcare system and contributing to the forces that are causing its collapse in the process.

There’s also some really good information in there as to who is winding up in the hospitals and ICU’s and why. Read the Whole thing.

Dream vs Reality

I’m a Teacher. I’m About to Quit.

The MAGA students are getting worse. They’ve always complained about safe spaces. The classroom is supposed to be one. They don’t like that.

They’ve turned classrooms into one of the most dangerous places in the world. Imagine a bunch of people with different views and experiences, all randomly thrown together in a room and asked to talk to each other while learning how to debate topics like abortion and global warming. Now let some of those students have guns, and add a deadly virus.I’ve got a handful of straight up MAGA assholes in my classes this year. They’re anti-masking, anti-vaxxing conspiracy theorists.

How bad are they?

A Eulogy for Kathy

Kathy Shaidle was the most honest person I’ve ever known. If she was around to be honest with us today I’m sure she’d say that she really didn’t want to see us here, almost as much as she’d say that she’d really rather not be here, herself.

Kathy was never afraid of candour or controversy or hurt feelings. She was tough and, at a time when the word is thrown around far too often, truly brave. Kathy set a standard for public behaviour and personal loyalty that we, the people she left behind, are forced to live up to in her absence.

Like many of us, I first met Kathy online, but I was lucky enough to transfer that friendship to the real world, where I came to rely on Kathy for her unerring ability to cut through clouds of error and confusion, starting with her own. Kathy had no patience for Pontius Pilate’s “What is truth?” She knew the truth was out there, and that even when it was hard to find, there was no excuse to settle for flattering lies.

Kathy made enemies, but what she talked about less was how she made friends, often at a distance of hundreds or even thousands of miles. That was her superpower – with little more than her words she let you know who you were dealing with, and her honesty and heedless candour became a magnet that pulled us into her orbit.

Once there you knew you’d been chosen as part of an exclusive club – the people Kathy could tolerate. In some ways I think she preferred online friendships to real world ones; as a basically shy person, she had no pressure to make her tiny frame mutate and grow to fill out the fierceness she projected with her words.

This was something we talked about all the time, when she still worked in an actual office, or when she was called upon to embody her opinions on television, to put a face to the voice. This was when things could go very wrong – when the honesty wasn’t appreciated, or when the person asking the questions for the camera got much more of an answer than they expected. We’d go over the experience and share a running joke that went on for years: That’s what you get for leaving the house.

Leaving the house – embodying her opinions in person, to audiences of strangers – was part of the price Kathy paid for weaponizing her outspokenness. I’m not sure she ever thought it was worth it. And it might be a bit late to be saying this but Kathy – nobody thought you looked like Hilary Clinton.

Once you were part of Kathy’s circle of friends you’d find yourself receiving the gift of her immense sympathy, support and generosity – traits she did nothing to advertise or celebrate. Raising a family and undergoing an apparently ongoing career crisis, my wife and I were beneficiaries of Kathy and Arnie’s generosity so often – gifts and support that would arrive at crucial, unexpected times.

Kathy’s voice was such a strong, indelible thing that even off a screen at the end of a long transmission it commanded your attention with its force, like when she told you that the Who was better than whatever crappy band you liked, or explained the angry, vulnerable depths of a Bette Davis performance. (I’ve spent the summer writing Kathy’s old movie column, and every time I’ve contemplated a Bette Davis movie I’ve had to avert my eyes and move on, so thoroughly did Kathy stake out a claim on that actress and her persona.)

I hear her voice whenever some hot bit of news bursts out of the feed like a hissing lava rock. I can hear Kathy telling us to hold back and wait before we say anything out loud, because the truth of the story – if there’s any in it at all – will only reveal itself after a day or more, and that our eagerness to let it confirm our fantasies and prejudices will only end in embarrassment.

It’s been eight months now without that voice, and if I’m honest it’s been as horrible as we imagined. And it would have been even if every day wasn’t such a target-rich environment, demanding Kathy’s excoriating response, an Agent Orange of mockery and dismay, stripping the landscape bare and exposing bad actors and their dissembling for what it is.

As someone afflicted by an illness early in life, Kathy thought – and wrote – about death, a lot. My favorite meditation on her mortality was in God Rides A Yamaha, where she wonders if Heaven was – like her parents told her during a thunderstorm – “God’s bowling alley” and “if so, do we have to rent shoes?”

She recalls how people who’ve had near-death experiences talk about traveling down a tunnel towards a light, where they’re greeted by deceased friends and relatives. Worried that she doesn’t have enough of either on the other side, and by her own stubbornness, she imagines that she’d need someone really persuasive to meet her – someone like Robert F. Kennedy, one of her earliest heartthrobs.

It’s here that Kathy said she planned to cheat death, and that the first thing she’d do when she was met by RFK was to “scream my head clean off.”

“Screaming in Heaven will, I believe, constitute a big enough breach of celestial etiquette to get me kicked out of there faster than you can say ‘Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.’”

“In this way, I could bounce back and forth between life and death forever, but I really don’t want to. God and I are still ironing out our ‘heaven issues,’ but I have extracted a promise that there’ll be a not-too-smelly pair of size fives waiting at the shoe rental counter when I get there.”

I’ve been waiting to hear Kathy’s scream for eight months now, and I intend to keep waiting, since the alternative is silence, and that’s unbearable. I miss my friend, and I miss her voice, and the world without it is so terribly diminished.

I asked Kathy’s old friend and fellow poet Lynn Crosbie to share some of her memories of our friend, and I thought I’d end with what she wrote:

Kathy and I came up together as poets. We were competitive, very much so. She would come speak to my U of T students many years later—we were studying her brilliant collection, Lobotomy Magnificat—and tell a story about publishing her first poems in a magazine only to find me on the cover. “The cover!” she said, loudly: they laughed, Kathy was so very funny and a great story-teller, and I wondered at her ability to make our then-serious feud so light, as she went on to praise me. And make me a real poet to students utterly underwhelmed by me. How did she know I needed this?

Like the time she told me, out of nowhere, some time after, “Stop writing for free.” How did she know that?! It was a benediction. The next time a well-to-do editor met me for coffee, holding stacks of moist magazines he wanted me to review FOR FREE, I said no. He was quite angry, but rock star poet girls are to be heeded.

In an interview in our early days, she said she’d only ever repeat high school if she could “Look like Debbie Harry and carry a gun.”

She looked like a cross between Harry and Tanya Hearst: blonde and dangerous, yet somehow, terribly sweet.

She believed in God when no one cool would admit such a thing, and she believed a number of startling, absolutely hilariously phrased, things that caused her a great deal of trouble.

At least in the art world she had left behind for a while.

I praised her collection of essays, Confessions of a Failed Slut and she thanked me, so much. “But do be warned,” she said. “Publicly supporting me can invite vicious blowback. If you need to retreat, I’ll understand.”

Blowback. Meh. Kathy’s _titles alone_ merited prizes, including her first book, Gas Stations of the Cross.

She once posted pieces she and I had written, very different takes, both aggressive! And said that look, disagreements don’t matter, not if there is love and respect.

She never failed to check up on me, especially over these last ten, very rough years. She prayed for my sick father, helped me look for work and always made me smile.
I asked her to send me new poems.

These are about Mia Farrow, whom I had always dismissed as creepy, but Kathy’s immense heart led her to Farrow’s lonely childhood, where she lay, interminably, sick with polio.

But I was also obsessed with Farrow. I like creepy and read her memoir as camp.
Kathy saw what only pure eyes can see. The frightened girl in her.
The frightened girl in me, so often ousted and muttered about because I’m mean and hideous.

Kathy was a girlish girl in many ways, with an ancient crush on Mick Jones who cried whenever she heard Maggie Helwig’s poem about the Montreal Massacre that names each young woman.

A political firebrand, of course.
A staunch Catholic, who could make fun of her Church too, lightly.
An incisive editor and essayist.
A dreamy, inspired film critic.

And a beautiful lyrical poet, whose love for women unloved in this world always rang more true than mine, and I’m sorry for our long ago feud, my “funny duchess,” as Anne Sexton called Sylvia Plath.

And I’m glad we moved forward.

Your life always impressed and often humbled me.

I wish I could have helped when you were sick. The last time we spoke was on LinkedIn.

I asked and you didn’t answer.
I left the site you detested.
I imagine you wanted to spend all your time with the husband who put stars in your eyes.

Kathy was the friend you could talk to for hours about art and culture, who would turn around and help you move a horrible accumulation of junk from one crummy apartment to the next.

Who was scary and tough, just like a woman.

She never broke, but that little girl was there somewhere.

Asking to be loved, acting like it didn’t matter.

I loved her. I will always love her, and the poems and stories and electrical words she leaves behind.

In each one, the woman transcends her tragic conditions, including mortality.
As Kathy surely has: I feel her, as a rare ally: I feel her hand glance my shoulder.
Get on with it, she says, not unkindly.

I look back on this poem, written when you were just a kid—

A SUMMER THUNDERSTORM CONSIDERED AS THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY
Kathy Shaidle
From: Lobotomy Magnificat. Oberon Press, 1997.
after Ballard

Skin’s prayed wet rosaries all day.
Finally thunder turns the corner—a memory trigger.

Can’t close the window in time.
Trees wave by the roadside.
A motorcade of clouds.
Then the quality of mercy backfires.
A speeding car blasts a puddle skyward.

The predicted drop in temperature.

Sidewalk and rain—concrete veronica.

—It’s as good if not better than Ezra Pound’s “In a Station in a Metro” and I’d be jealous but I would rather thank God for you, and let go.

Amen

Written by Rick McGinnis and Lynn Crosbie. Delivered by Rick McGinnis on the occasion of Kathy’s funeral.

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