Home » Posts tagged 'cassandra'
Tag Archives: cassandra
You’re Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence.
You’re Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence.
Some of us are cursed to hear the future.
You’ve probably heard about Helen of Troy. She’s blamed for starting the Trojan War. Not many people remember Cassandra.
She predicted it.
In Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon, you get Cassandra’s full story. In some ways, the Trojan War is really about a bunch of dudes who don’t listen to a woman, and it leads straight to the collapse of their civilization.
In later retellings, they ignore her twice.
Surprised?
Cassandra doesn’t exactly ask for the gift of prophecy. The Greek god Apollo falls in love with her. He puts her under a spell in one of his temples. Then he tells his pet snakes to go lick her ears. When she wakes up, she can hear the future. Apollo tries to seduce Cassandra, but she’s just not that into him. He has a meltdown. Zeus tells him no backsies on divine gifts, so he finds a loophole.
He curses her.
Now when Cassandra hears the future, nobody believes it. If you want to drive someone insane, that’s a good start.
Now get this:
Not only does Cassandra predict the Trojan war, but she also scoops everyone on the Trojan horse. She tries to warn the city that a bunch of Greek soldiers are hiding inside it, waiting to sneak out and unlock the gates after they go to bed. Once again, nobody listens to her. They start calling her names. She tries to smash the horse open with an axe and gets dragged away screaming. A giant wooden horse full of our enemies? What nonsense!
You know the rest.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
The Latest (and Dumbest) Central Bank Fraud
The Latest (and Dumbest) Central Bank Fraud
A Financial Reckoning
You go for a nice picnic on the slopes of Vesuvius… You spread out your tablecloth. You open your picnic hamper. You prepare for a relaxing afternoon in the warm October sun.
And then someone comes running down the mountain, warning that the volcano is going to blow up. You pack up your sausages and put a cork in the wine bottle… and rush to the car and drive away. Better to be safe than sorry. And then? Nothing happens.
When these ominous columns of smoke become visible, it may be time to make tracks. Or not. This image shows Mt. Ontake in Japan, which tends to erupt occasionally …
Photo credit:
Most of the time, you can safely ignore the nervous nellies and prophetic Cassandras. (According to legend, Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy. When she refused him, he spat into her mouth so she would never be believed.) But sometimes the worrywarts are right…
For the last 16 years, we’ve been writing a daily e-letter – first the Daily Reckoning and now the Diary. We saw the collapse of the dot-com bubble coming and warned readers. Most didn’t want to hear it; they were making good money in the stock market. It was a “new era.” And they didn’t want it to end.
But the Nasdaq collapsed in 2000… and didn’t recover until 15 years later. We believed at the time that the U.S. economy would follow Japan into a long, slow slump. With Addison Wiggin, we wrote a book about it, Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century.
The Nasdaq’s bubble round-trip between the late 1990s and early 2000ds. No-one wanted to hear any warnings at the top (we still remember people buying profit-less wonder stocks for 100ds of dollars that don’t even exist anymore today) – click to enlarge.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
