Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 8/28/26
"Alert! Russian Submarine Off East Coast!
5 Doomsday Planes Airborne!"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Friday, August 28, 2026
Musical Interlude: 2002, “Challenge From Heaven”
Full screen mode recommended.
2002, “Challenge From Heaven”
"A Very Deep Look to the Heavens"
"The Hubble Deep Field:
The Most Important Image Ever Taken"
"In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope took the image of a millenium, an image that shows our place in the universe. Anyone who understands what this image represents, is forever changed by it."- YouTube/NASA
Full screen recommended.
Full screen recommended.
"It helps to put things in perspective here on our frenetic little planet with a look at this extraordinarily powerful and moving video of the Hubble Space Telescope mapping of the Universe, whose known size is 78 billion light years across. The video of the images is the equivalent of using a "time machine" to look into the past to witness the early formation of galaxies, perhaps less than one billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang.
The video includes mankind's deepest, most detailed optical view of the universe called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). One of the stunning images was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) for ten consecutive days. Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime located 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.
Most of the galaxies are so faint (nearly 30th magnitude or about four-billion times fainter than can be seen by the human eye) they have never before been seen by even the largest telescopes. Some fraction of the galaxies in this menagerie probably date back to nearly the beginning of the universe. "The variety of galaxies we see is amazing. In time these Hubble data could turn out to be the double helix of galaxy formation. We are clearly seeing some of the galaxies as they were more than ten billion years ago, in the process of formation," said Robert Williams, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute Baltimore, Maryland. "As the images have come up on our screens, we have not been able to keep from wondering if we might somehow be seeing our own origins in all of this."
- http://www.dailygalaxy.com/
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"A Universe of 2 Trillion Galaxies"
"In 2016, a study published in The Astrophysical Journal and led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham using 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope concluded that there are more than two trillion galaxies in the observable universe."
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"In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three billion Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, 2 trillion galaxies like this. And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us."
- "Dr. Leonard McCoy"
"Fate. Luck. Chance”
“That is life, isn’t it? Fate. Luck. Chance. A long series of what-if’s that lead from one moment to the next, time never pausing for you to catch your breath, to make sense of the cards that have been handed to you. And all you can do is play your cards and hope for the best, because in the end, it all comes back to those three basics. Fate. Luck. Chance.”
- Kelseyleigh Reber
“Unless, of course, there’s no such thing as chance… in which case, we should either - optimistically - get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might - as pessimists - give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought-decision-action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?”
- Salman Rushdie
Delta King's Blues, "The Weight of Unspoken Words"
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"The Weight of Unspoken Words"
"Some things don’t haunt you because they happened. They haunt you because they never did. “The Weight of Unspoken Words” is a deep Delta blues reflection on silence, pride, missed conversations, and the emotional weight carried by the things we never say out loud. Some words don’t disappear. They stay."Native Elder, "5 Signs Your Soul Needs Cleansing and How the Old Ones Did It"
Native Elder,
"5 Signs Your Soul Needs
Cleansing and How the Old Ones Did It"
"You Must Understand..."
"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it.
That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies,
that is why you must sing and dance,
and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti, "The Book of Life "
Freely download "The Book of Life " and many other works
by Jiddu Krishnamurti, here:
Jeremiah Babe, "Markets Get Bad News From Jackson Hole"
Jeremiah Babe, 8/28/26
"Markets Get Bad News From Jackson Hole"
Comments here:
Douglas Macgregor, "It's About To Get MUCH Worse"
Douglas Macgregor,
"It's About To Get MUCH Worse"
"In this new interview, Colonel Douglas Macgregor warns that the most dangerous possibility in the current conflict is the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. He argues that a weapon in the 5 to 10 kiloton range would not necessarily end a war, especially because Iran is not defeated and continues receiving support from Russia and China. Macgregor also warns that the United States is approaching a severe financial crisis, pointing to a national debt that has now surpassed $40 trillion and annual interest costs of roughly $1 trillion. The 30-year Treasury yield recently reached about 5.34%, its highest level since 2007, while the Treasury announced that long-end bond buybacks would increase from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation beginning September 9.
Finally, Macgregor warns that the nuclear threshold itself may be moving as Washington examines more limited tactical nuclear options. Pentagon policy official Elbridge Colby has publicly discussed creating more credible regional nuclear options, while Macgregor invokes Colin Powell's warning that once nuclear weapons are used, there is no guarantee escalation remains limited. The interview also examines de-dollarization, the BRICS bloc, rare-earth refining dependence on China, and the possibility of a broader financial and geopolitical realignment."
Comments here:
"Fast Food Chains Are In Big Trouble And It’s Not What You Think"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 8/28/26
"Fast Food Chains Are In Big Trouble
And It’s Not What You Think"
"Fast food used to be the easiest choice. It was quick, affordable, and reliable. Something you didn’t have to think too much about after a long day. But lately, a lot of people are starting to notice that something feels different. Prices are higher, portions feel smaller, and the overall experience just doesn’t hit the same way it used to. In this video, we take a closer look at what’s really going on behind the scenes and why so many people are questioning whether fast food is even worth it anymore. Across the country, people are sharing their experiences with rising prices at places that were once known for being budget friendly. Meals that used to cost just a few dollars are now creeping into the range of full sit down restaurant prices. And it’s not just one chain or one location. This is happening almost everywhere.
At the same time, many major fast food brands are quietly closing locations, filing for bankruptcy, or scaling back operations. It raises an important question about whether the industry is starting to feel the pressure from both sides. There’s also a growing conversation around value. People aren’t just reacting to higher prices. They’re questioning what they’re getting in return. When quality feels inconsistent or portions seem smaller, it becomes harder to justify spending that kind of money. For many, fast food no longer feels like the convenient and affordable option it once was. Instead, it feels like something you have to think twice about. At the same time, grocery prices are rising as well, which adds another layer to the situation. Even cooking at home has become more expensive, and that leaves people in a difficult position. When both fast food and groceries feel costly, it changes how people approach everyday decisions about food. You can feel that shift in the way people talk about their experiences. There’s more frustration, more hesitation, and more awareness of where their money is going. This video is about the bigger picture of how everyday life is changing and how people are adapting to it. It’s about value, priorities, and the small decisions that start to add up over time. If you’ve noticed these changes too, you’re definitely not alone."
Comments here:
"Revenge of the Real World"
"Revenge of the Real World"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"Rather than stare at empty shelves, you have two options for distraction: you can don a virtual-reality headset and cavort with dolphins in the metaverse, or you can trade various forms of phantom wealth that always go up (happy happy!) because the Fed. Neither distraction actually solves any real-world problems, a reality we can call the Revenge of the Real World We've entered a peculiar phase in American history in which illusions of wealth and control are the favored distractions from the unraveling of the real world economy and social order.
Printing trillions of currency units can't restore the global supply chain or social cohesion, Rather, jacking phantom wealth to the moon is only accelerating the collapse of the social order and the economy even as it accomplishes absolutely nothing in terms of solving real-world problems. Let's start with the core economic realities of the 21st century:
1. The number of high-consumption ("middle class") people doubled from 1 billion to 2 billion. The human populace has expanded to 8.1 billion individuals, but poor people who don't have enough money to consume large quantities of energy, goods and services delivered by the global supply chain don't have much of an impact on global consumption of energy and resources. It's the number of people jetting around the world playing their part in the landfill economy (toss the old one, buy a new one) who drive "growth" (i.e. waste is growth).
Strangely enough, there are actual physical limits to resources being transformed into junk being dumped in the landfills. Humanity's rapacious appetite for stuff has extracted all the cheap-to-extract resources and now all that's left are the increasingly expensive-to-extract resources.
2. Corporate America offshored most of the production of essentials to exploit the low labor and energy costs, minimal environmental standards and currency arbitrage of overseas production. The net result has been an astounding increase in corporate profits. But a funny thing happened on the way to Corporate Profit Nirvana: America became dependent on foreign supply chains. In essence we traded national security for corporate profits. Now the real-world costs of that myopic greed are becoming apparent.
3. Global supply chains have been optimized for cheap energy and cheap credit. This optimization stripped away all the buffers as a means of maximizing profits. Once the system veered outside the narrow band of optimization, the entire system lost coherence and unraveled.
Now that the entire global supply chain has been optimized to maximize profits as the expense of buffers, the buffers are too thin to save the system from collapse. (see chart) The entire dependency chain depends on cheap energy (all those cheap seats on wide-body aircraft were subsidizing the air cargo beneath the passengers' feet) and cheap credit, as consumers can't buy enough with earnings to keep the machine well-oiled. And firms in the dependency chain need ample cheap credit to function, as many have receivables that stretch out over 90 days. Without cheap credit, these firms would have to close down.
The status quo response would be amusing if the consequences weren't so dire: we don't need no stinking buffers! The supply chain for the landfill economy will be back up to full speed any day now, or maybe next year, but don't you worry, the conveyor belt from China to big-box store to the landfill will be fully restored.
In the meantime, cavort with dolphins in the metaverse and trade tokens of phantom wealth to amuse yourself. We're counting on magic to put it all right, and if that doesn't work, then the real world's revenge will be something to behold."
"Relax..."
"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to
TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing. "
- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"
A Timely Repost: “The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease”
“The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions
Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease”
by Maria Popova
"I had lived thirty good years before enduring my first food poisoning - odds quite fortunate in the grand scheme of things, but miserably unfortunate in the immediate experience of it. I found myself completely incapacitated to erect the pillars of my daily life - too cognitively foggy to read and write, too physically weak to work out or even meditate. The temporary disability soon elevated the assault on my mind and body to a new height of anguish: an intense experience of stress. Even as I consoled myself with Nabokov’s exceptionally florid account of food poisoning, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming malaise that had engulfed me - somehow, a physical illness had completely colored my psychoemotional reality.
This experience, of course, is far from uncommon. Long before scientists began shedding light on how our minds and bodies actually affect one another, an intuitive understanding of this dialogue between the body and the emotions, or feelings, emerged and permeated our very language: We use “feeling sick” as a grab-bag term for both the sensory symptoms - fever, fatigue, nausea - and the psychological malaise, woven of emotions like sadness and apathy.
Pre-modern medicine, in fact, has recognized this link between disease and emotion for millennia. Ancient Greek, Roman, and Indian Ayurvedic physicians all enlisted the theory of the four humors - blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm - in their healing practices, believing that imbalances in these four visible secretions of the body caused disease and were themselves often caused by the emotions. These beliefs are fossilized in our present language - melancholy comes from the Latin words for “black” (melan) and “bitter bile” (choler), and we think of a melancholic person as gloomy or embittered; a phlegmatic person is languid and impassive, for phlegm makes one lethargic.
And then French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes came along in the seventeenth century, taking it upon himself to eradicate the superstitions that fueled the religious wars of the era by planting the seed of rationalism. But the very tenets that laid the foundation of modern science - the idea that truth comes only from what can be visibly ascertained and proven beyond doubt - severed this link between the physical body and the emotions; those mysterious and fleeting forces, the biological basis of which the tools of modern neuroscience are only just beginning to understand, seemed to exist entirely outside the realm of what could be examined with the tools of rationalism.
For nearly three centuries, the idea that our emotions could impact our physical health remained scientific taboo - setting out to fight one type of dogma, Descartes had inadvertently created another, which we’re only just beginning to shake off. It was only in the 1950s that Austrian-Canadian physician and physiologist Hans Selye pioneered the notion of stress as we now know it today, drawing the scientific community’s attention to the effects of stress on physical health and popularizing the concept around the world. (In addition to his scientific dedication, Selye also understood the branding component of any successful movement and worked tirelessly to include the word itself in dictionaries around the world; today, “stress” is perhaps the word pronounced most similarly in the greatest number of major languages.)
But no researcher has done more to illuminate the invisible threads that weave mind and body together than Dr. Esther Sternberg. Her groundbreaking work on the link between the central nervous system and the immune system, exploring how immune molecules made in the blood can trigger brain function that profoundly affects our emotions, has revolutionized our understanding of the integrated being we call a human self. In the immeasurably revelatory "The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions" (public library), Sternberg examines the interplay of our emotions and our physical health, mediated by that seemingly nebulous yet, it turns out, remarkably concrete experience called stress.
With an eye to modern medicine’s advances in cellular and molecular biology, which have made it possible to measure how our nervous system and our hormones affect our susceptibility to diseases as varied as depression, arthritis, AIDS, and chronic fatigue syndrome, Sternberg writes: "By parsing these chemical intermediaries, we can begin to understand the biological underpinnings of how emotions affect diseases… The same parts of the brain that control the stress response play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also play a role in depression, we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives.
Rather than seeing the psyche as the source of such illnesses, we are discovering that while feelings don’t directly cause or cure disease, the biological mechanisms underlying them may cause or contribute to disease. Thus, many of the nerve pathways and molecules underlying both psychological responses and inflammatory disease are the same, making predisposition to one set of illnesses likely to go along with predisposition to the other. The questions need to be rephrased, therefore, to ask which of the many components that work together to create emotions also affect that other constellation of biological events, immune responses, which come together to fight or to cause disease. Rather than asking if depressing thoughts can cause an illness of the body, we need to ask what the molecules and nerve pathways are that cause depressing thoughts. And then we need to ask whether these affect the cells and molecules that cause disease.
We are even beginning to sort out how emotional memories reach the parts of the brain that control the hormonal stress response, and how such emotions can ultimately affect the workings of the immune system and thus affect illnesses as disparate as arthritis and cancer. We are also beginning to piece together how signals from the immune system can affect the brain and the emotional and physical responses it controls: the molecular basis of feeling sick. In all this, the boundaries between mind and body are beginning to blur."
Indeed, the relationship between memory, emotion, and stress is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Sternberg’s work. She considers how we deal with the constant swirl of inputs and outputs as we move through the world, barraged by a stream of stimuli and sensations: "Every minute of the day and night we feel thousands of sensations that might trigger a positive emotion such as happiness, or a negative emotion such as sadness, or no emotion at all: a trace of perfume, a light touch, a fleeting shadow, a strain of music. And there are thousands of physiological responses, such as palpitations or sweating, that can equally accompany positive emotions such as love, or negative emotions such as fear, or can happen without any emotional tinge at all. What makes these sensory inputs and physiological outputs emotions is the charge that gets added to them somehow, somewhere in our brains. Emotions in their fullest sense comprise all of these components. Each can lead into the black box and produce an emotional experience, or something in the black box can lead out to an emotional response that seems to come from nowhere."
Memory, it turns out, is one of the major factors mediating the dialogue between sensation and emotional experience. Our memories of past experience become encoded into triggers that act as switchers on the rail of psychoemotional response, directing the incoming train of present experience in the direction of one emotional destination or another.
Sternberg writes: "Mood is not homogeneous like cream soup. It is more like Swiss cheese, filled with holes. The triggers are highly specific, tripped by sudden trails of memory: a faint fragrance, a few bars of a tune, a vague silhouette that tapped into a sad memory buried deep, but not completely erased. These sensory inputs from the moment float through layers of time in the parts of the brain that control memory, and they pull out with them not only reminders of sense but also trails of the emotions that were first connected to the memory. These memories become connected to emotions, which are processed in other parts of the brain: the amygdala for fear, the nucleus accumbens for pleasure - those same parts that the anatomists had named for their shapes. And these emotional brain centers are linked by nerve pathways to the sensory parts of the brain and to the frontal lobe and hippocampus - the coordinating centers of thought and memory."
The same sensory input can trigger a negative emotion or a positive one, depending on the memories associated with it. This is where stress comes in - much like memory mediates how we interpret and respond to various experiences, a complex set of biological and psychological factors determine how we respond to stress. Some types of stress can be stimulating and invigorating, mobilizing us into action and creative potency; others can be draining and incapacitating, leaving us frustrated and hopeless. This dichotomy of good vs. bad stress, Sternberg notes, is determined by the biology undergirding our feelings - by the dose and duration of the stress hormones secreted by the body in response to the stressful stimulus. She explains the neurobiological machinery behind this response:
"As soon as the stressful event occurs, it triggers the release of the cascade of hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal hormones - the brain’s stress response. It also triggers the adrenal glands to release epinephrine, or adrenaline, and the sympathetic nerves to squirt out the adrenaline-like chemical norepinephrine all over the body: nerves that wire the heart, and gut, and skin. So, the heart is driven to beat faster, the fine hairs of your skin stand up, you sweat, you may feel nausea or the urge to defecate. But your attention is focused, your vision becomes crystal clear, a surge of power helps you run - these same chemicals released from nerves make blood flow to your muscles, preparing you to sprint.
All this occurs quickly. If you were to measure the stress hormones in your blood or saliva, they would already be increased within three minutes of the event. In experimental psychology tests, playing a fast-paced video game will make salivary cortisol increase and norepinephrine spill over into venous blood almost as soon as the virtual battle begins. But if you prolong the stress, by being unable to control it or by making it too potent or long-lived, and these hormones and chemicals still continue to pump out from nerves and glands, then the same molecules that mobilized you for the short haul now debilitate you."
These effects of stress exist on a bell curve - that is, some is good, but too much becomes bad: As the nervous system secretes more and more stress hormones, performance increases, but up to a point; after that tipping point, performance begins to suffer as the hormones continue to flow. What makes stress “bad” - that is, what makes it render us more pervious to disease - is the disparity between the nervous system and immune system’s respective pace.
Sternberg explains: "The nervous system and the hormonal stress response react to a stimulus in milliseconds, seconds, or minutes. The immune system takes parts of hours or days. It takes much longer than two minutes for immune cells to mobilize and respond to an invader, so it is unlikely that a single, even powerful, short-lived stress on the order of moments could have much of an effect on immune responses. However, when the stress turns chronic, immune defenses begin to be impaired. As the stressful stimulus hammers on, stress hormones and chemicals continue to pump out. Immune cells floating in this milieu in blood, or passing through the spleen, or growing up in thymic nurseries never have a chance to recover from the unabated rush of cortisol. Since cortisol shuts down immune cells’ responses, shifting them to a muted form, less able to react to foreign triggers, in the context of continued stress we are less able to defend and fight when faced with new invaders. And so, if you are exposed to, say, a flu or common cold virus when you are chronically stressed out, your immune system is less able to react and you become more susceptible to that infection."
Extended exposure to stress, especially to a variety of stressors at the same time - any combination from the vast existential menu of life-events like moving, divorce, a demanding job, the loss of a loved one, and even ongoing childcare - adds up a state of extreme exhaustion that leads to what we call burnout.
Sternberg writes: "Members of certain professions are more prone to burnout than others - nurses and teachers, for example, are among those at highest risk. These professionals are faced daily with caregiving situations in their work lives, often with inadequate pay, inadequate help in their jobs, and with too many patients or students in their charge. Some studies are beginning to show that burnt-out patients may have not only psychological burnout, but also physiological burnout: a flattened cortisol response and inability to respond to any stress with even a slight burst of cortisol. In other words, chronic unrelenting stress can change the stress response itself. And it can change other hormone systems in the body as well."
One of the most profound such changes affects the reproductive system - extended periods of stress can shut down the secretion of reproductive hormones in both men and women, resulting in lower fertility. But the effects are especially perilous for women - recurring and extended episodes of depression result in permanent changes in bone structure, increasing the risk of osteoporosis. In other words, we register stress literally in our bones.
But stress isn’t a direct causal function of the circumstances we’re in - what either amplifies or ameliorates our experience of stress is, once again, memory. Sternberg writes: Our perception of stress, and therefore our response to it, is an ever-changing thing that depends a great deal on the circumstances and settings in which we find ourselves. It depends on previous experience and knowledge, as well as on the actual event that has occurred. And it depends on memory, too.
The most acute manifestation of how memory modulates stress is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. For striking evidence of how memory encodes past experience into triggers, which then catalyze present experience, Sternberg points to research by psychologist Rachel Yehuda, who found both Holocaust survivors and their first-degree relatives - that is, children and siblings - exhibited a similar hormonal stress response.
This, Sternberg points out, could be a combination of nature and nurture - the survivors, as young parents for whom the trauma was still fresh, may well have subconsciously taught their children a common style of stress-responsiveness; but it’s also possible that these automatic hormonal stress responses permanently changed the parents’ biology and were transmitted via DNA to their children. Once again, memory encodes stress into our very bodies. Sternberg considers the broader implications: "Stress need not be on the order of war, rape, or the Holocaust to trigger at least some elements of PTSD. Common stresses that we all experience can trigger the emotional memory of a stressful circumstance - and all its accompanying physiological responses. Prolonged stress - such as divorce, a hostile workplace, the end of a relationship, or the death of a loved one - can all trigger elements of PTSD."
Among the major stressors - which include life-events expected to be on the list, such as divorce and the death of a loved one - is also one somewhat unexpected situation, at least to those who haven’t undergone it: moving. Sternberg considers the commonalities between something as devastating as death and something as mundane as moving: One is certainly loss - the loss of someone or something familiar. Another is novelty - finding oneself in a new and unfamiliar place because of the loss. Together these amount to change: moving away from something one knows and toward something one doesn’t. An unfamiliar environment is a universal stressor to nearly all species, no matter how developed or undeveloped.
In the remainder of the thoroughly illuminating "The Balance Within", Sternberg goes on to explore the role of interpersonal relationships in both contributing to stress and shielding us from it, how the immune system changes our moods, and what we can do to harness these neurobiological insights in alleviating our experience of the stressors with which every human life is strewn.”
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Related:
"Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song
"Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song
Reduces Anxiety by Up to 65 Percent"
By Melanie Curtin
By Melanie Curtin
Full screen recommended.
"Weightless," by Marconi Union
"Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves. So here's a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth. Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one's health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.
Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck. The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.
According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date. In fact, listening to that one song- "Weightless"- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates. That is remarkable.
Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created "Weightless", Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener's heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn't be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer's, or influenza.
In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you've got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.
Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, "'Weightless' was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous." So don't drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:
10. "We Can Fly," by Rue du Soleil (Café Del Mar)
9. "Canzonetta Sull'aria," by Mozart
8. "Someone Like You," by Adele
7. "Pure Shores," by All Saints
6. "Please Don't Go," by Barcelona
5. "Strawberry Swing," by Coldplay
4. "Watermark," by Enya
3. "Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix)," by DJ Shah
2. "Electra," by Airstream
1. "Weightless," by Marconi Union
I made a public playlist of all of them on Spotify that runs about 50 minutes (it's also downloadable)."
"In Ordinary Times..."
"In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves."
- Dorothy L. Sayers
These are not ordinary times...
"In The Souls Of The People..."
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"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success."
“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”
“...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
- John Steinbeck, "The Grapes Of Wrath"
Freely Download "The Grapes Of Wrath", by John Steinbeck, here:
"The Great Depression, Realtime Colorizing Photos"
Full screen recommended.
"The Great Depression, Realtime Colorizing Photos"
Comments here:
"Americans Hate Flock Cameras! So Why Is The Left So Silent About How They Are Being Used To Violate Our Constitutional Rights?"
by Michael Snyder
"There is a growing national outcry to ban Flock cameras. We do not give up our constitutional rights when we get into our vehicles, and we do not want authoritarian control freaks watching us, monitoring us and tracking us everywhere that we go. This is an issue that is uniting people all over the country, and so you would think that politicians from both parties would be getting on board. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. Many top Republicans are coming out against Flock cameras very strongly, but the silence from the left has been deafening. Yes, there are a few voices on the far left that appear to be concerned about our civil liberties, but most prominent Democrats have been eerily silent about Flock cameras. Why is that?
If you want cameras to watch you everywhere that you go, move to China. Seriously. We don’t want to live in a surveillance state, and our Constitution is supposed to protect us from that. To me, it is exceedingly clear that these cameras are violating our constitutional rights, and there are some politicians that are taking action.
In fact, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley just initiated a major investigation… Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, has launched an investigation into Flock Safety’s national surveillance network and is demanding to know who has access to the personal data of Americans captured on Flock cameras.
Hawley wrote in a letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley that the company has “assembled an unprecedented national surveillance network” of more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states that conducts 20 billion vehicle scans every month.
“The overwhelming majority of Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong. Instead of serving discrete local investigations, as contemplated by our constitutional processes and safeguards, these camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search,” he wrote.
Good for him. This is the sort of thing that our elected officials are supposed to do. Flock cameras are being abused by law enforcement officers over and over again. For example, a deputy in Richmond County, Virginia used the Flock system to track a woman that he was romantically involved with 1,639 times… In one especially shocking incident, Former Deputy Jaquarius Yarbrough of Richmond County, Virginia, allegedly used the license plate tracking system to stalk a woman he was having an affair with 1,639 times over several months. “What we’re talking about are cameras that are documenting everywhere your car goes,” Maass said. “There are databases where police can type in your license plate and see everywhere you’ve gone… The government shouldn’t be creating databases of movement.”
Sadly, that is not an isolated incident. A police officer in Kentucky was recently arrested for using the system to track his ex-girlfriend more than 2,000 times… A Kentucky police officer was arrested after authorities said he used the Flock Safety license plate reader camera system to track his ex-girlfriend over 2,000 times, marking the latest in a string of recent law enforcement officer resignations or arrests for alleged abuses of the controversial technology.
Things got so bad that the ex-girlfriend was eventually forced to file for an order of protection…Investigators found Zahir had conducted 2,048 Flock searches from January into May to track two vehicles registered to the victim, his child’s mother, in Kentucky and Indiana, court records show. During the period he conducted those searches, Zahir harassed the victim and made threatening comments, prompting her to file an order of protection against him, according to the court records.
This just keeps happening again and again. According to CNN, throughout the country there have been “at least 47 instances of officers being disciplined in some way for alleged abuse of the Flock system for stalking romantic interests”… The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm that has filed lawsuits against Flock on Fourth Amendment grounds, has tracked at least 47 instances of officers being disciplined in some way for alleged abuse of the Flock system for stalking romantic interests.
Of even greater concern is the fact that Flock cameras often create false positives that flag citizens that are completely innocent. One police department in California actually discovered that a whopping 71 percent of its Flock alerts were errors… Hawley said the surveillance notifications have also resulted in mistaken arrests, such as that of a Florida woman who spent 13 days in jail and faced multiple felony counts after investigators mistakenly arrested her based on a search of Flock’s network. “Errors and false positives add insult to injury,” Hawley wrote.
He cited one California police department that found that 71 percent of its Flock alerts “were wrong” and noted the Los Angeles Police Department ended its Flock contract after an audit showed its officers had stopped 161 vehicles incorrectly flagged as stolen.
Do you want police officers coming to your door because some stupid Flock camera mistakenly flagged you? But even if Flock cameras worked perfectly, they would still be violating our constitutional rights. This is a point that Senator Hawley just made very aptly… “Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church,” Hawley wrote. “The Supreme Court has recognized that a comprehensive, retrospective record of a person’s movements is different in kind from ordinary observation in public.”
He is right on target. We don’t give up our constitutional rights when we leave our homes. But the CEO of Flock is telling us that Americans must “compromise” on their constitutional rights in order to feel more secure…
No way. Even if Flock cameras could make us 100 percent safe, there is no way that I would ever be willing to give up my constitutional rights.
Many respected Republican leaders are choosing to take a stand, but there has been silence from many prominent Democrats. What is wrong with them? Why won’t they stand up for the constitutional rights of the American people?
The good news is that we are winning. In communities all over America, Flock cameras are being turned off. One of the cities that just pulled the trigger on such a move is Tempe, Arizona…
Of course Tempe is far from alone. This month, a bunch of other municipalities have also said goodbye to Flock cameras…Cave Creek, also in Arizona; Bellingham, Massachusetts; and several Texas counties are among the other municipalities that said this month they’re ending their use of Flock cameras.
Bellingham Police Chief Kenneth Fitzgerald said in a statement that during a recent criminal investigation, officials learned that a Flock feature called Free Form, an artificial intelligence-powered tool that can search video information using plain language, was available through the cameras. “Those features go beyond what most people would think of as a traditional license plate reader,” he said. “That concerned me because I had previously told the public, based on our understanding of the system, that our Flock technology was a license plate reader only.”
I love to see this. Overall, more than 100 cities and counties have officially deactivated, canceled, or rejected contracts with Flock Safety. I think that an official in Hood County, Texas said it very well when he stated that “permanent, warrantless tracking doesn’t belong in a free society”…John Shirley, constable of a precinct in Hood County, Texas, said that after county commissioners voted to remove the cameras, he would be covering them until they could be removed. “These cameras were constantly scanning and recording regular folks just going about their day. That kind of permanent, warrantless tracking doesn’t belong in a free society,” Shirley said in an Aug. 15 post on Facebook. “By unplugging and covering them, we’re making it clear: privacy isn’t optional, and mass surveillance isn’t how we do things here.”
Yes, if we get rid of all the Flock cameras it may be a little bit more difficult to catch criminals. But freedom always comes with a cost. I would much rather live in a free society than a surveillance society like China where virtually everything that people do is watched, monitored and tracked by the government. I am for an immediate nationwide ban on all Flock cameras and any other devices that perform similar functions. What about you?"
"U.S. Retail Is Collapsing Fast as Major Retailers Face Boycotts - And Americans Are Furious"
Full screen recommended.
Global Discovery Documentary, 8/28/26
"U.S. Retail Is Collapsing Fast as Major
Retailers Face Boycotts - And Americans Are Furious"
"Something is changing across U.S. Retail in 2026. American shoppers are becoming more selective, major retailers are under pressure, and boycott campaigns are adding another layer of uncertainty. But is there really a Retail Crisis, or is the Retail Industry going through a deeper transformation? In this documentary, we examine what is happening across Retail Stores in America, from Walmart and Target to other major chains navigating changing Consumer Spending, higher household expenses, shifting shopping habits, and growing Consumer Boycott movements. The story is more complicated than a single headline. Recent Retail News shows consumers are still spending, but where and how they spend is changing. The Cost of Living is forcing many households to prioritize value, while Americans Shopping are becoming increasingly selective about price, convenience, quality, and brand loyalty. We also examine Retail Store Closures, the Retail Boycott conversation, and what these trends could mean for American Retail. Rather than blaming retailers or consumers, this analysis looks at the economic pressures, business decisions, and behavioral changes reshaping U.S. Retail. Is Retail 2026 really heading toward a breaking point - or are we watching the beginning of a new retail era? From Walmart and Target to the wider Retail Industry, this documentary separates measurable trends from speculation and explores how retailers and consumers can adapt."
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"Global Food Crisis Could Be Coming in 2027 - Here’s Why"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 8/28/26A
"Global Food Crisis Could Be Coming in 2027 -
Here’s Why"
"JPMorgan and Oxford Economics warn a global food crisis could hit in early 2027 - with food prices rising 12% by end of 2026 and another 5% in 2027. A third of the world's fertilizer is trapped by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Europe's harvests are already damaged by heat waves, and a historic El Nino could leave 49 million more people hungry. In this video I break down why the U.S. will NOT be spared - even if you don't get fertilizer from the Middle East - and what it means for your grocery bill. From the collapsing U.S. phosphate production (down from 10M tons in 2000 to 5M today) to the new $450M phosphate plant in Louisiana, this is the perfect storm hitting farmers from every side. Food will be on shelves - but will you be able to afford $8 bread or $24 eggs? Here's how to prepare for the next 12-24 months."
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Dan, I Allegedly, "The Layoffs Are Just Getting Started"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 8/28/26
"The Layoffs Are Just Getting Started"
"Layoff season is here, and 2026 has already delivered hundreds of thousands of job cuts across major industries. In this video, Dan breaks down why the WARN notices being filed now could signal another major wave of layoffs in September and beyond. We look at layoffs and closures affecting technology, manufacturing, retail, transportation, aviation, logistics, restaurants, food suppliers and major corporations, including the growing impact on workers and consumers. But this isn't just about losing a job. It's about what happens to the economy when people stop spending, businesses cut costs, restaurants and retailers struggle, and families have to change the way they manage their money. Dan also discusses ways consumers can prepare for a possible job loss, reduce expenses, protect their finances, save money on household costs, and prepare for tougher economic conditions. If you're worried about your job, your income, inflation, debt, or the economy, this is a warning you don't want to ignore."
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