Full screen recommended.
Yanni, “One Man’s Dream”,
Live At The Acropolis, 1993
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Sunday, July 26, 2026
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Have you contemplated your home galaxy lately? If your sky looked like this, perhaps you'd contemplate it more often! The featured picture is actually a composite of two images taken from the same location in south Brazil and with the same camera - but a few hours apart. The person in the image - also the astrophotographer - has much to see in the Milky Way Galaxy above.
The central band of our home Galaxy stretches diagonally up from the lower left. This band is dotted with spectacular sights including dark nebular filaments, bright blue stars, and red nebulas. Millions of fainter and redder stars fill in the deep Galactic background. To the lower right of the Milky Way are the colorful gas and dust clouds of Rho Ophiuchi, featuring the bright orange star Antares. On this night, just above and to the right of Antares was the bright planet Jupiter. The sky is so old and so familiar that humanity has formulated many stories about it, some of which inspired this very picture."
"Still Walking Beside You…"; "The Remaining Years"
Full screen recommended.
"Still Walking Beside You…"
"There's something nobody tells you about a long love. It doesn't live in the moments you planned for. Not the anniversaries, not the milestones. It lives in the walk you took without thinking about it. The hand reached for in the dark. The silence on a long drive that needed no words at all. A whole life together can look quiet from the outside. That's usually when it's everything. I hope this finds you on a day when you can still reach over. And I hope you do."
o
Full screen recommended.
"The Remaining Time, 60 Years of Love in 5 Minutes.
They Chose Each Other Every Single Day"
"What happens when the hourglass of life begins to run thin,
but every grain of sand is made of gold?
Hope this song reminds you to hold your loved ones a little closer today."
"Live Your Life and Forget Your Age"
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"Live Your Life and Forget Your Age"
"Don’t count the candles… count the sunsets, the laughter, and the miles you’ve lived. “Live Your Life and Forget Your Age” is an uplifting, feel-good Delta King’s Blues tune about embracing every season of life, finding joy in the little things, and refusing to let a number define your spirit. A warm, easy-flowing acoustic guitar carries the melody like an old friend inviting you to sit on the porch and enjoy the evening breeze. The harmonica sings with gentle optimism, weaving hopeful notes through memories, smiles, and second chances. The groove rolls slow and comforting, built for folks who know the best years aren’t always the youngest - they’re the ones fully lived. This is blues for living in the moment. For those who’ve learned that happiness has nothing to do with age and everything to do with how you spend your days. Your age is just a number… your stories are what make you timeless."
Native Elder, "Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid of Your Final Years"
Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid of Your Final Years"
"What Happens When You Die? Physics Has an Answer. The Truth About Reality, Death & the Self"
Prof. Richard Feynman,
"What Happens When You Die? Physics Has an Answer.
The Truth About Reality, Death & the Self"
"You think you’re a solid object. A fixed thing. A permanent “someone.” You’re not. You are not a noun. You are a process. You are an event unfolding in space-time. In this mind-expanding masterclass inspired by the teachings of Richard Feynman, we dismantle one of the deepest illusions of human existence: the idea that you are made of “stuff.” Every atom in your body is replaced. Every molecule cycles. Every particle moves. And yet somehow… you remain you. How? We explore the physics behind identity, entropy, and death - not as mystical ideas, but as consequences of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and space-time.
• If your atoms constantly change, what stays the same?
• If life is order, what exactly is death?
• If entropy always increases, why does life exist at all? Through powerful physical metaphors:
A wave that persists while its water constantly changes. A deck of cards briefly forming a rare, ordered pattern. A loaf of salami - where your life is a permanent slice of space-time. You’ll see death not as annihilation, but as a statistical shift. Not as disappearance - but as the natural relaxation of structure back into the cosmic shuffle. And here’s the twist: The pattern may dissolve. But the fact that it happened is eternal.
From the block universe of relativity to the irreversible arrow of time, this video connects Feynman’s physics with the ultimate human question: What are you? You are stardust. You are energy in motion. You are a temporary island of order in a sea of entropy. And you are forever embedded in the fabric of space-time."
Comments here:
"Know What's Weird?"
"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,
but pretty soon... everything's different."
- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"
"Are You Not Entertained?"
"Are You Not Entertained?"
by Mark Manson
"In David Foster Wallace’s classic novel, "Infinite Jest", there’s a movie that is so entertaining that anyone who views even a small portion of it will give up all desire to do anything else in life in order to keep watching. Throughout the book, characters who see it give up family, friends, careers, even eating and sleeping, just to continue watching the film.
The overarching theme of "Infinite Jest" is that it’s possible, both as an individual and as a society, to be too entertained. And much of the book’s 1000+ pages are about the absurdity of such a society. Wallace wrote Infinite Jest in the early 1990s, a time when televisions were just starting to get dozens of channels, news was being broadcast 24 hours per day, video games were taking over the minds of young kids, and blockbuster movies were earning unheard of amounts of cash at the box office each summer.
At the time, Wallace had just gone through a recovery program for alcohol and drug abuse. Yet, despite getting clean for the first time in his adult life, he noticed something strange: he couldn’t stop watching television.
Wallace seemed to understand that as media multiplies, so does competition for attention. And as competition for our attention multiplies, content is no longer optimized for beauty or art or even enjoyment - but rather for its addictive qualities. When there are two TV channels, the channel doesn’t really have to worry about you clicking away, they just make the best show they can. But when there are 200 channels, suddenly that channel must do everything it can to keep you watching as long as possible. Wallace saw this problem coming decades in advance, and with his personal understanding of addiction based on his recovery experience, he seemed to grasp the addict culture we’d all soon be a part of.
Today, we regularly mistake this addictive media for entertainment. There’s some psychological function deep in our brains that tells us, “Well, I just spent six hours watching this show, I must like it a lot.” When, no, its script is actually a mediocre piece of hot trash and you’re being manipulated by cliffhangers and bad writing for hours on end to keep watching. The same way you get hijacked into scrolling through social media way more than you’d actually like to, your brain gets hijacked to watch “just one more episode” to find out if so-and-so really died or not.
In social media, this “it’s addictive, but I also kinda don’t like it” phenomenon has been recognized and discussed to death. But in other areas of media and entertainment, we haven’t caught on yet.
Streaming services and Hollywood are the obvious culprits here. How many more mediocre Marvel Universe movies do we need to prove this point? How many more bad Star Wars spin-offs? How many bad Netflix shows with every episode ending in a cliffhanger? Everyone complains about how Hollywood doesn’t have any new ideas anymore. Well, there’s a reason nothing new is getting made: endlessly adding content to the same well-worn storylines keeps people hooked. Constantly playing to people’s sense of nostalgia and remixing classic genres is a risk-free way of guaranteeing viewership.
Music is in a similar place. For a while now, market research on music streaming services has found that people spend more time listening to old music instead of new music and the trend on this is in the wrong direction. Music lovers are voting with their mouse buttons and those mouse buttons are going back in time, not forward.
Veteran music producer Rick Beato has made a number of videos lately talking about how popular music the past few years has gotten simplified to the point where it’s one or two chords and a single melody, repeated over and over for two or three minutes. No chorus. No bridge. No variation. No build-up or release. Just an endless hodgepodge of catchy sounds repeated, one after another.
Part of this is because the economics of music streaming is such that artists have incentive to not create the best songs or albums possible, but rather to create as many small, simple songs that prevent you from clicking away as possible. It’s created an artistic environment where it’s better to have 200 decent, listenable songs rather than 20 brilliant songs.
A similar problem plagues YouTube, where the biggest creators rack up millions of views doing inane things like opening a thousand Amazon boxes or giving away cars to their friends, over and over and over again. On the one hand, it’s not that interesting. On the other, you find yourself mindlessly clicking on the next video, and the next, and the next, and the next.
When everything is measured in terms of engagement, content will be optimized for addictiveness. Not entertainment or artistic merit. Not intellectual substance or creativity. Pure, plain addictiveness. That means we, the consumers, get a higher quantity of more predictable, less innovative, less interesting art in our lives.
In the realm of art and music and film and television, this is really annoying and frustrating. It requires each of us to sift longer and harder to find something new and great. But where this optimization for addictiveness gets dangerous is another part of culture that I want to talk about… *takes a deep breath*... politics.
I’ve written before about how most people in the United States agree about most things, yet somehow our political parties and government continually find ways to do things most people don’t like. Many pundits have attributed this inconsistency between the public’s desires and the government’s actions with theories about the primary system or entrenched special interests or polarizing social media.
But what about this? Politicians - like Hollywood executives, pop stars, and YouTube creators - are incentivized to generate more engagement. Not great results. Just more engagement, all the time. Therefore, their actions are not optimized to produce smart policy or common sense bills or a shrewd compromise, but instead to grab and hold our attention as long as humanly possible.
David Foster Wallace saw this coming too. The president of the United States in "Infinite Jest" is a former pop singer who obsesses over his television ratings, thinks policy discussions are too boring and considers war with Canada based on how good his photo ops would be in military camo fatigues. In the book, terrorist groups run rampant, as the battlefield is not for territory or resources, but for eyeballs and headlines.
Ultimately, nobody can manage our attention but ourselves. We can get mad at Netflix or Spotify or the Senate. But ultimately, these systems are loose reflections of our own attention habits shining back at us. Change our attention, change the systems. There’s an old saying that people “vote with their feet.” Well, today you need to vote with your eyeballs and mouse clicks. Don’t watch the next episode of that poorly written piece of garbage that keeps teasing you with characters almost dying. Don’t listen to the next half-assed album with 27 different two-minute tracks. Don’t click on clickbait. Don’t mindlessly scroll through TikTok and YouTube, rewarding people for attention-grabbing stunts. And don’t watch or respond to politicians and pundits who try to blather on and on about pet issues but never actually get anything done.
In the chaotic, entertaining mess of "Infinite Jest", there is the story of Don Gately, a recovered alcoholic who would literally rather die than relapse into his substance abuse. When I first read the book years ago, Gately’s storyline seemed out of place. Amid all this futuristic mayhem of short attention spans and insanely addictive entertainment and neurotic teenagers, Gately’s narrative seemed like an oddly conventional story of personal triumph over one’s demons and an ability to sacrifice oneself for others.
What I realize now is that Wallace wrote the character of Don Gately as an example of what we would all need to aspire to become: recovered addicts. People who can cut themselves off cold turkey, who can turn off the drug. People who can manage their own attention and not fall victim to endless streams of mindless engagement. People who can step above the fray of political addiction and demand substance over bluster. And not just for our own sake. For everyone else’s as well."
○
Deeply concerned Americans, always fully aware and truthfully
informed by their never-lying government and Main Stream
Media about current economic, political and social issues, react as expected...
Freely download, "Infinite Jest", by David Foster Wallace, here:
"22 Photos That Show How Selfish and Entitled People Have Become in 2026"
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 7/26/26
"22 Photos That Show How Selfish and
Entitled People Have Become in 2026"
Comments here:
"America Isn't Ready for What's Coming Next"
Prof. Richard Wolff, 7/26/26
"America Isn't Ready for What's Coming Next"
"Richard Wolff argues that the conflict with Iran could be exposing a much bigger shift in global power. In this discussion, he examines U.S. sanctions, economic pressure, China and Russia’s growing role, and why he believes America may be entering a difficult new geopolitical era. From energy and trade disruptions to the changing balance between major powers, Wolff explains what he believes is already happening - and what it could mean for the U.S. economy and the global order."
Comments here:
"Iran Is Dominating the Battlefield - U.S. and Allies Take Heavy Losses"
Full screen recommended.
Prof. John Mearsheimer, 7/26/26
"Iran Is Dominating the Battlefield -
U.S. and Allies Take Heavy Losses"
Comments here:
"Jeffrey Sachs: US-Iran War Inevitable, Trump's WW3 for Israel Just Blew Up"
Full screen recommended.
Danny Haiphong, 7/26/26
"Jeffrey Sachs: US-Iran War Inevitable,
Trump's WW3 for Israel Just Blew Up"
Comments here:
o
"Alastair Crooke: US Faces Strategic Defeat & National Humiliation in Iran War"
Daniel Davis/Deep Dive, 7/26/26
"Alastair Crooke:
US Faces Strategic Defeat & National Humiliation in Iran War"
Comments here:
"Col. Doug Macgregor: Iran War - The Worst Reality in the History of Mankind"
Full screen recommended.
Daniel Davis/Deep Dive, 7/26/26
"Col. Doug Macgregor: Iran War -
The Worst Reality in the History of Mankind"
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno, 'I Visited 2 Dollar Trees! This Is What I Found!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/26/26
'I Visited 2 Dollar Trees! This Is What I Found!"
Comments here:
"America's Restaurant Chains Are Dying In The Dark - Watch Them Vanish"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 7/25/26
"America's Restaurant Chains Are
Dying In The Dark - Watch Them Vanish"
"America's restaurant chains are closing at a pace few people notice, and this video shows what that collapse looks like from behind the counter. You'll hear from workers standing in buildings with no air conditioning for months, servers running triple sections, and diners saying goodbye to places their families loved for decades. By the end of 2020, more than 110,000 eating and drinking places had closed, roughly one in six in the country. This is the story underneath that number. What this video covers:
• Workers describing broken air conditioning and shrinking portions on the job.
• How buyout firms load chains with debt and cut labor and ingredients.
• Servers pushed to work doubles alone while covering every table.
• Longtime family diners and mom-and-pop spots closing for good.
• A look back at the details that made older chains feel special.
• Why rising food and labor costs pushed budget diners away.
If this video made you think about the restaurants you grew up with, drop a comment about a place in your neighborhood that closed and what it meant to you. Subscribe if you want more videos that connect real worker stories to the bigger forces reshaping the food industry, and share this with someone who still remembers the old version. This video looks at restaurant closings, private equity in food service, fast food working conditions, shrinking portions, tipped server wages, mom-and-pop restaurants shutting down, and the rising food and labor costs squeezing the sector one shift at a time."
Comments here:
"Did Trump TACO Again on Iran? Why?"
Al Udeid Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC)
"Did Trump TACO Again on Iran? Why?"
by Larry C. Johnson
"I spoke with Scott Horton on Friday (I’ll post the video when its available) and told him I fully expected that Trump would deliver on his vow to open the Gates of Hell on Iran. All the warning indicators were flashing red: i.e., Europeans were closing their embassies in Tehran and evacuating staff, major surge in US aircraft into Israel, cancellation of some civilian flights in and out of the Persian Gulf, a flight of several P-8 Poseidon ISR aircraft over the Persian Gulf and Israel opened its bomb shelters. But I failed to consider that Trump was hosting a second try of the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner on Friday night. I heard from a trusted source that Trump called off the attack planned for Friday in order not to distract from his speech at the WHCA shindig.
OK. That means Saturday would be the big day. But early on Saturday I received a note from a source that the two key military components - CENTCOM and AFCENT - were not performing the operations prep and planning that would normally occur if a major attack was imminent. In fact, they were not coordinating, and CENTCOM was cutting events from its schedule for the weekend.
Let me explain the acronyms…CENTCOM is the supported Commander for Operation Epic Fury. It is responsible for US military operations, security cooperation, and contingency planning across a 20-nation area of responsibility that spans the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia. AFCENT (officially Ninth Air Force / Air Forces Central) serves as CENTCOM’s dedicated air component. It plans, coordinates, and executes all air operations (unilaterally or with coalition partners) in support of CENTCOM’s objectives.
Although AFCENT’s official headquarters is Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, Al Udeid has functioned as AFCENT’s primary forward operating location and forward headquarters in the CENTCOM area of responsibility for many years. Al Udeid hosted the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), which provided command and control of airpower across the CENTCOM region, as well as other key CENTCOM-related elements (including a forward headquarters for CENTCOM itself).
Prior to the start of Operation Epic Fury, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine, the CAOC was relocated to Shaw AFB because CENTCOM correctly anticipated that Iran would target the facility. All US personnel were transferred away from Al Udeid before 28 February. The CAOC building on Al Udeid was decimated. The actual planning for the air campaign took place at Shaw AFB.
The fact that the CAOC at Shaw AFB is not currently engaged in furious operational planning for a massive strike is the clearest indicator that an attack is not imminent… At least not this weekend.
The New York Times published a piece by Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan that offers one explanation for Trump’s latest TACO. They write: "President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East.
The threat to interceptor stockpiles is one of many considerations that has made a return to major combat operations a hugely risky endeavor, administration officials say. Mr. Trump and his top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies who are vulnerable to Iranian attack, a global economic crunch, and growing energy and refugee crises."
But there may be another consideration - one that does not exclude the reasons offered by the NY Times reporters - that involves the US fuel supplies. An economic brief prepared by Karl Miller investigates how the US military’s covert fuel procurement and export operations are depleting the nation’s diesel and jet fuel reserves, particularly during a period when domestic stocks are already critically low. The report details that from May to July, nearly 161 million barrels of distillate and jet fuel were exported, with the East Coast’s buffer falling to less than half its pre-pandemic norm. Much of this fuel is routed through opaque channels, such as the Rotterdam transshipment hub, where the final military or foreign allocation is not publicly reconciled, leaving the American economy exposed to shortage risks while military and foreign operations receive priority access.
A central finding is that the US government operates a parallel, largely unauditable military allocation system that siphons fuel from the civilian market. Public data merges commercial and military fuel categories, and certain military shipments are exempt from standard export reporting, making it impossible to track the true end-use of exported fuel. The report highlights that US taxpayers are subsidizing foreign military fuel needs, notably for Israel, through both direct and likely indirect channels, while the government does not disclose the full extent or funding split of these deliveries. Meanwhile, critical sectors like trucking, agriculture, and civil aviation are left with a diminished safety margin and increased disruption risk.
Miller concludes that the crisis is not due to a collapse in refinery output or a fabricated inventory, but rather a combination of structurally low inventories, high ongoing exports, and fragmented public reporting that obscures the military’s draw on national fuel supplies. The evidence supports the view that Rotterdam acts as a shadow endpoint for US fuel, facilitating onward distribution to US/NATO bases, Israel, and other theaters, but the lack of transparent, reconciled accounting prevents the public from knowing the true allocation. The report calls for a unified, detailed ledger to clarify how much fuel is being diverted from domestic resilience to military and foreign operations.
I am assuming that Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Burgham know this and briefed Trump on it. Stripping the US civilian sector of diesel and jet fuel surpluses at a time when the global supply is still severely constrained by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the Houthi blockade of Saudi oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz increases the risk of damaging the US domestic economy. Did this fact also convince President Trump that a massive attack on Iran at this time would be ill-advised? Worth considering.
So, I give up on predicting when or if Trump will really open the Gates of Hell on Iran. I am convinced that the shortage of precision guided missiles and the potential for major economic damage if the air war continues are genuine risks that should not be ignored."
Pepe and I did an emergency Transition Protocol on Saturday
to discuss the latest developments in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea:
Saturday, July 25, 2026
"Iran Struck Large Secret CIA Base in Kuwait, 50 Agents Killed – Trump Lies Fall Apart"
Joe Kent, 7/25/26
"Iran Struck Large Secret CIA Base in Kuwait,
50 Agents Killed – Trump Lies Fall Apart"
"Joe Kent is an American former Green Beret, CIA paramilitary officer, Republican political figure and former director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center. Kent served approximately 20 years in the US Army, including with the 75th Ranger Regiment and Army Special Forces. He completed 11 combat deployments, principally in Iraq but also in Yemen and North Africa, eventually retiring as a chief warrant officer. He subsequently worked in the CIA’s paramilitary branch. Kent resigned from the counterterrorism position on 17 March 2026 over the US war against Iran. He said the available intelligence did not demonstrate that Iran presented an imminent threat to the United States and argued that entering another major Middle Eastern war contradicted the non-interventionist foreign policy Trump had previously promised."
Comments here:
"Alert! Saudi Aramco Hit! Ukraine Strikes Iran (Yes Iran!) Israel Preps Bunkers!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 7/25/26
"Alert! Saudi Aramco Hit! Ukraine Strikes
Iran (Yes Iran!) Israel Preps Bunkers!"
Comments here:
"Mike Adams Explains Why Trump's Iran War Is Going To Cause Famine And Mass Migration Into The U.S., Canada and Europe"
"Mike Adams Explains Why Trump's Iran War Is Going To
Cause Famine And Mass Migration Into The U.S., Canada and Europe"
by Leo Hohmann
“This war is a war against humanity.”
"Mike Adams has put together one of the better explanations I’ve seen for why Trump’s war against Iran is going to cause a global economic meltdown the likes of which we have never seen in our lifetimes. Adams, who owns the Brighteon.com news site and is a published food scientist, says 2027 and 2028 will be marked by widespread famine and starvation, especially in the Global South. He says at least 400 million people are at risk of starvation, about 5 percent of the total human population of 8 billion people.
In the U.S., food prices will skyrocket and more people will go hungry but we won’t see widespread famine. The bad news is, we will have tens of millions of starving migrants trying to get into the U.S. and other countries such as Canada and Europe that are seen as wealthy and more likely to have food.
He said the only reason the world can sustain its current population of 8 billion is the advent of synthetic fertilizers, which were developed by German scientists in the first half of the 20th century. Without those fertilizers, a global population of only about 2 to 4 billion people could be sustained longterm.
“All of humanity is at some level of risk. Trump and Hegseth need to leave the region (of the Middle East) now, before we lose tens of millions of people,” Adams said in a July 25 interview with Lt. Col. Daniel Davis of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive podcast.
I have reported similar concerns about how the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab El Mandeb Strait and other vital trade choke points are going to cause major famine starting in 2027. Those choke points were all open before Trump started the war with Iran on Feb. 28. The longer they stay closed, the worse the situation gets.
Last night the Houthis bombed the Saudi Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. That’s not a good sign of where things are heading.
And while Trump may want to find a way out of the war he started, that’s going to be easier said than done. Thanks to Trump, Iran has been made stronger now, having discovered that it’s not that difficult to close down the Strait of Hormuz and keep it closed, disrupting the flow of 20 percent of the world’s oil and around 30 percent of the world’s fertilizers. As long as Trump is punishing them with bombs, they will punish the world by choking off the major trade route.
This economic catastrophe and food insecurity, as I reported in my July 23 article, is going to blamed on America and its ally Israel. These two countries will be hated even more than they already are once people can’t get food for their children. There is no stronger motivating force than human hunger and we are going to start seeing the global blowback against Trump and America by spring of 2027, so prepare accordingly. World War III is only going to intensify."
Adams breaks it all down and what it means for Americans and the world going forward in an interview with Lt. Col. Daniel Davis (retired):
"Your Shadow Knows the Truth"
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues, "Your Shadow Knows the Truth"
"A reputation is what people think about you. Character is what follows you home. "Your Shadow Knows the Truth" is an original Delta blues song about integrity, quiet character, and the simple truth that no amount of praise can silence your own conscience. Led by warm resonator guitar, soulful harmonica, and the seasoned voice of Delta Blues Brother, this song reminds us that the hardest person to deceive is ourselves. This is the blues of character. "You can fool the whole wide world... not the person you meet each day."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on the sky. Each of these fuzzy blobs is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. The cluster is seen through a foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy.
Near the cluster center, roughly 250 million light-years away, is the cluster's dominant galaxy NGC 1275, seen above as a large galaxy on the image left. A prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission, NGC 1275 accretes matter as gas and galaxies fall into it. The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies, also cataloged as Abell 426, is part of the Pisces-Perseus supercluster spanning over 15 degrees and containing over 1,000 galaxies. At the distance of NGC 1275, this view covers about 15 million light-years.”
Chet Raymo, “At Home In An Infinite Universe”
“At Home In An Infinite Universe”
by Chet Raymo
“They are questions that bedeviled thinkers for thousands of years: Is the universe infinite or finite, eternal or of a finite age? It is certainly hard to imagine a universe that extends without limit in every direction, or a universe without a beginning or end. It is equally difficult to imagine a finite universe; what is beyond the edge? Or a beginning or end in time; how can something come from nothing? How can what is cease to be?
The problems are so intractable philosophically that their resolution has generally been left to the theologians, which from a philosophical (or scientific) perspective offers no solution at all. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for proposing a philosophical resolution (an infinite universe) that offended theology.
An escape from befuddlement is provided by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which- for example- can describe a finite universe without a boundary, as the "two-dimensional" surface of a sphere is finite and without an edge. Unfortunately, multi-dimensional curved space-time is so counterintuitive that it is difficult to get one's head around it without mastery of the mathematics. Given a choice between the ancient myths of your local preacher and the obtuse mathematics of the physics professor, it's not hard to guess what most folks will opt for.
Meanwhile, I'm reading a meditation on infinity by physics professor Anthony Aguirre, in a collection of essays called "Future Science." He discusses contemporary cosmological theories based on general relativity, and in particular the rehabilitation of the idea of an infinite and eternal universe, or, more precisely, that our universe might be just one of an infinity of infinite universes. He writes in conclusion: “What seems clear, however, is that infinity can no longer be safely ignored; beautifully constructed, empirically supported, self-consistent theories have brought infinity from idle curiosity to central player in contemporary cosmology. And if correct, the worldview these theories represent constitutes a perspective shift unlike any other: in comparison to the universe, we would be not just small but strictly zero. Well, I can't imagine many folks racing to embrace that conclusion.
Oh, but wait. Aguirre adds one final sentence: "Yet here we are, contemplating - if not quite understanding - it all.”
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
"The Philosopher and the Physicist"
"The Philosopher and the Physicist"
by Joel Bowman
“Everybody knows Wells’s Time Machine, which enabled its possessor to travel backwards or forwards in time, and see for himself what the past was like and what the future will be. But people do not always realize that a great deal of the advantages of Wells’s device can be secured by traveling about the world at the present day.”
~ From "Skeptical Essays", by Bertrand Russell (1928)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "On a clear, afternoon, much like today’s, a voluntary exile opened a relic of the past (known to old timers as a “physical book”) at a quaint café in Buenos Aires and began to read. The well-thumbed collection, from which the above quote is borrowed, brims with a lifetime of zany insights from the eccentric British philosopher and polymath, Bertrand Russell. Meditating on Wells’s fictional machine and the words at hand, the reader began to wonder whether he was, relative to his fellow café-goers around the world and throughout history, occupying a seat in the past or a place in the future, and whether the present really existed at all. “Otro cortado, por favor,” he called for another coffee “cut” with milk and began scribbling the following notes...
Time and Space: What is this space in time (Buenos Aires, July 2026) to a Japanese geisha, pouring tea and dispensing wisdom in coquettish flourishes to Tokugawa shoguns, gathered around the hearth tatami? Or to the Golden Age of the grand Viennese cafés, Schwarzenberg, Parsifal, Rebhuhn and Central, in whose abiding embrace huddled rabbis and intellectuals, librettists and rakish raconteurs, conscientious objectors and those who conscripted Horace’s hoary ode, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”?
What say those who filled their cups from Nicolas’s copper samovar, poured China’s best from Queen Charlotte’s earthen Wedgwood, or sought longevity (āyus,) and knowledge (veda) from the clove-spiced chai, flowing in Indian abodes for five-thousand years and more?
Gazing around Café Tabac, a point in space at the intersection of Avenidas Libertador y Coronel Diaz, the reader absorbs the liminal afternoon light as it is refracted through floor to ceiling windows. An amorphous liquid, he knows the glass itself is moving through space and over time. And yet, even the sun’s incomparable heat energy, so diffused during the 8 and 1/3 minutes (approx.) it takes to reach earth through the cold indifference of space, is insufficient to excite the structure’s atoms such that their movement is visible to the human eye. Indeed, mathematical models, standing themselves outside the constraints of the physical world, have shown it would take longer than the universe (and by extension, time itself) has existed for medieval cathedral glass to melt at today’s tepid temperature.
Bound by reality (temporal, spatial) and his merely mammalian brain (biological), and having duly lost count of his cortados, the reader cannot comprehend what this means. Instead, he contemplates the receding afternoon, the daily bombardment of heat and light fading from the Coronel’s corner, his thoughts pouring back over the event horizon of consciousness itself.
The present is a moment that reaches back into the past, set in motion long before Nicolas thwarted Konstantin’s Decembrist Revolt... before General José de San Martín liberated the peoples of Argentina, Chile and Perú... before Britain’s longest serving queen consort bore King George his fifteen children... before even Horace mobilized the latin for Wilfred Owen’s epic poem, two millennia prior...
“Time and space are modes by which we think,” observed Albert Einstein, “and not conditions in which we live.” This from a man who knew a thing or two about time and space, relatively speaking of course. Light pouring through the slow melting glass, the reader’s trembling thumb turns another page in Russell’s century-old meditation...
“A European who goes to New York or Chicago sees the future, the future to which Europe is likely to come if it escapes economic disaster. On the other hand, when he goes to Asia he sees the past. In India, I am told, he can see the Middle Ages; in China he can see the eighteenth century.”
~ Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical Essays"
And if he ventured to South America, considered the world from upside down, what past, what present, what future would the man behold? Were the British philosopher seated here, in Café Tabac, one-hundred years ago, smoking his pipe under the gilt mirror over by the door, he might have encountered Herr Einstein, who was then touring the Paris of the South (and staying at the Australian Embassy, a short carriage ride up Avenida Libertador). The reader pictured the scene…
“What then of Wells’s device?” said the philosopher to the physicist, a plume of purple smoke infusing the atmosphere with an hazy glow. “A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘universe,’” replied the latter behind a wry and knowing smile, “a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and his feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.” Placing Russell’s essays on the table, the reader considers the two men as they pass him by, backlit against the fading afternoon light, time and space forgotten..."
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"The One Spinoza Rule For Life I Try to Live By"
"The One Spinoza Rule For Life I Try to Live By"
by Thomas Oppong
"I’ll save you the suspense: You’re trying too hard. Many self-help books and productivity gurus argue a good life is a math problem: input effort, output glory. But that equation doesn’t work for everyone. The blasphemy no one tells you is that the grind is not noble. It drains your soul. The more you hustle your way through existence, the less you live.
17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza notes, “The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure….you are above everything distressing.” People have been gaslit into believing they need a 5-year plan. They don’t.
Spinoza could not be more right: “Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing.” Want to pivot careers at 45? Do it. Want to start something new without a one-year plan? Go ahead. Use what goes wrong as wisdom for your next action. Certainty is where dreams go to die. Even if you get it, it’s temporary. A job you thought was “it” suddenly isn’t. A relationship changes over. You evolve. People change. You’ll never be sure of anything.
When you’re always pursuing certainty, the perfect career plan, the 5-year roadmap, the “this-is-my-purpose” epiphany, you miss what’s right in front of you. You’re so busy building the life you think you’re supposed to have that you forget to actually live the one you’ve got. You don’t need to know how chapter ten ends before you write chapter one. Certainty is a comfort blanket for the scared parts of your brain. I’ve micromanaged plans until they died in my notebook. I won’t go to that life anymore. I stopped trying to prove I knew exactly what I was doing.
The uncertainty won’t kill you. But the endless need for certainty? That just might waste your life. Stumbling is the path. The only thing you must be sure of is that you’re listening to your soul. The one that says yes or no without a PowerPoint deck. Your need for control is the very thing stealing your joy. You keep waiting for a sign, a guarantee, a cosmic permission.
Clarity doesn’t precede action. Action precedes clarity. The most alive people you know are not the ones with the bulletproof plans. They’re the ones who said “screw it” and stepped into the fog. Hesitation is not wisdom. The artist who waits for inspiration dies with a blank canvas. The lover who needs proof they won’t get hurt ends up alone with a spreadsheet of pros and cons. “You are above everything distressing.”The moment you stop resisting the uncertainty of being human, you realise the weight was never yours to carry.
Surrender to your own self. Your chief task in life isn’t to wrestle life into submission. Your job is to stop arguing with what’s true for you. Hate your corporate job but terrified to freelance? That dread is real. Ignoring it is what’s fake. “Surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure,” notes Spinoza. Your gut isn’t just smarter than your brain. It’s faster. Stop asking for permission from the wrong people. And stop negotiating with yourself. When you stop holding onto outcomes, you’re no longer a hostage to hope. You’re free.
You are the antidote to your own misery. The minute you stop treating life like an opponent, it stops fighting back. Distress isn’t fate, it’s friction. You’ll be “above everything distressing” when you stop confusing pain with purpose. Remember the last time you felt truly alive. I bet it wasn’t when you were “hustling.” It was when you forgot to measure, judge, or optimize. When you were just in it. For the experience. That’s the secret. Stop trying to live “correctly.” Start letting life happen through you.
The minute you “arrive” is the minute you start dying inside. Remember that one vacation where you planned every minute? Color-coded itinerary, timed breaks from experiences? Yeah. By day two, you were cranky and Googling “fun things to do near me” like you hadn’t spent three weeks researching. Life works like that. The more you try to control it, the less time to have to actually live it.
“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.” - Spinoza
Every time you start spiraling over a decision, get back to these questions. Am I forcing this, or flowing with it? Is this fear… or freedom in disguise? Then, do the wisest thing possible, first: Nothing. Let the answer rise like heat off pavement. Because the truth isn’t out there. It’s in the parts of you that already know how to live, if you’d just get out of the way.
Life is weirdly beautiful when you stop forcing answers and just let it flow. Spinoza’s genius wasn’t in his logic; it was in his freedom. He proved what you already sense but refuse to accept. The struggle isn’t inevitable. It’s optional. Cancel your imaginary deadlines. The universe doesn’t care about your 5-year plan. Follow the unreasonable joy. What makes you grin for no reason? Do it badly.
Trust your gut. It already knows the way. What should I be doing with my life? It’s the wrong question. “What feels true right now?” Live from that. The rest, distress, uncertainty, and other people’s expectations, will still be there. You’ll just be above it. And when you finally stop wrestling the river, you realize it’s been carrying you the whole damn time. Stop trying to “win” at life. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You never will. “Surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure…you are above everything distressing.”
"16 U.S Marines Walk Blindly Into IRGC Trap in Iran as War Enters Dangerous New Phase"
Full screen recommended.
Prof. Sayed Marandi, 7/25/26
"16 U.S Marines Walk Blindly Into IRGC Trap
in Iran as War Enters Dangerous New Phase"
Comments here:
"Yemen Heats Up… A New Threat to the Global Oil Supply"
Jazan Oil Refinery
"Yemen Heats Up…
A New Threat to the Global Oil Supply"
by Larry C. Johnson
"We are seeing a major escalation in the Red Sea in the undeclared war between AnsarAllah and Saudi Arabia and this may spill over to the war the US is waging on Iran. As I write this the Houthis have retaliated to a Saudi attack on the Houthi-held port of Hodeidah. So let’s go through this week’s events.
On Wednesday July 22, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree claimed an attack on two Saudi oil tankers, the Encelia and the Layla, transiting the Red Sea, using drones and missiles. The stated justification was that the vessels violated the Houthis’ maritime blockade. Saudi Arabia’s own Saudi Press Agency, citing an official at the Transport General Authority, confirmed the Encelia was hit, reporting a fire at the bow and all crew safe. UKMTO logged a master reporting his tanker struck by an unknown projectile with an onboard fire the crew were fighting. So the Encelia is confirmed by the flag state; the Layla is so far Houthi-claim-only — SPA didn’t provide details on it.
After the Encelia attack (Wednesday) and a further strike Friday on the Saudi vessel NCC MASA (minor hull damage, continued to destination per SPA), the Saudi-led coalition struck Houthi-held Hodeidah late Friday July 24. Al-Maliki framed it as a “proportionate military response against legitimate military targets” - sites used to threaten commercial shipping - and pointedly insisted the port itself wasn’t hit and remains open. The Houthis see it differently: Al Masirah says the strikes hit state telecommunications facilities in Hodeidah city and Kamaran Island (one woman injured there), with explosions reported at the port by Reuters. The Houthi Foreign Ministry warned Riyadh has made “escalation for escalation” the defining feature of the coming phase and that the strike “will prove costly.”
And sure enough, within hours, the Houthis launched 5 ballistic missiles launched at the ARAMCO oil terminal at Jazan Port, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Aramco facilities in Jazan (also spelled Jizan) represent one of the company’s most ambitious and technologically advanced downstream projects - a fully integrated refinery, petrochemical complex, and power generation hub located in the far southwest of the Kingdom, on the Red Sea coast. The refinery is a full-conversion refinery, meaning it can process heavy crude into high-value light products rather than simply separating crude into fractions. Jazan is the largest gasification-based power facility in the world.
The Jazan complex is not merely a refinery - it is a fully integrated energy ecosystem that converts crude oil into refined products, petrochemicals, electricity, hydrogen, and industrial metals, all while minimizing waste and emissions. It represents Saudi Aramco’s vision of a smarter, lower-carbon downstream future and serves as the economic anchor for one of the Kingdom’s most ambitious regional development initiatives. In other words, the Houthis hit an extremely important Saudi Arabian energy asset.
The ball is now in the Saudi court. Will they escalate and attack the port facilities at Hodeidah or will they decide to call a halt to military operations and seek a diplomatic resolution? The smart move will be to go the diplomatic route. If they choose to strike more targets in Houthi-held territory then the Houthis’ next logical target would be the oil terminals at Yanbu. There are two main crude oil export terminals at Yanbu, Saudi Arabia. These two Saudi Aramco-operated terminals handle the bulk of crude oil exports from the Red Sea port (connected via the East-West Pipeline). Together they have a nominal combined loading capacity of roughly 4.5 million barrels per day (about 1.5 million bpd at North and 3 million bpd at South). An attack that damages or destroys these terminals would add to the global oil shortage. This makes for an interesting weekend, to say the least."
While Iran continued to blast Kuwait and Bahrain, the US was uncommonly quiet on the military front… Nima and I discussed it:
"China, Russia Target Thousands of Hypersonic Missiles After Iran War"
Click image for larger size.
"China, Russia Target Thousands of
Hypersonic Missiles After Iran War"
by Madge Waggy
Excerpt: "The conflict that shook the Middle East may have quietly ignited the world’s next military race. The explosions that echoed across the skies of the Middle East have faded from television screens, but they have not disappeared from the minds of the people who plan wars for a living. As diplomats rushed to negotiate ceasefires and governments counted the political cost of the Israel-Iran conflict, another process had already begun behind closed doors - one that may prove far more consequential than the fighting itself.
Inside intelligence agencies and military headquarters from Washington to Beijing and Moscow, analysts began reconstructing the conflict frame by frame. Satellite imagery was reviewed alongside radar recordings, missile trajectories were compared against interception data, and every second of the engagement was examined with extraordinary attention. To outside observers, the war looked like another dangerous regional crisis. To defense planners, it became something entirely different: one of the largest real-world laboratories for modern missile warfare ever witnessed.
History has a habit of hiding its most important turning points in plain sight. The tank did not transform warfare the day it first crossed a battlefield; its true significance became clear only years later. Radar, aircraft carriers, stealth aircraft and armed drones followed a similar path. Each appeared first in conflict, was studied by rivals, refined through years of development, and eventually reshaped the balance of military power. A growing number of defense analysts now believe the Israel-Iran war could occupy a similar place in history - not because of its political outcome, but because of the military lessons it delivered to countries that never fired a single shot.
Those lessons arrive at a particularly sensitive moment. China has spent years expanding its missile industry while investing heavily in hypersonic technologies capable of flying at speeds exceeding Mach 5. Russia has already integrated several hypersonic systems into its strategic arsenal and continues to present them as a cornerstone of its long-term military doctrine. Neither country needed to participate directly in the conflict to benefit from it. The battlefield itself produced the information. Every interception, every successful strike, every electronic countermeasure and every logistical challenge became evidence that engineers and military planners can study for years.
That process matters because modern wars are no longer judged solely by who wins territory or secures diplomatic leverage. Increasingly, they are judged by what they reveal about the strengths - and limitations - of advanced military technology. Simulations can estimate how missile-defense systems might perform under pressure. Exercises can train personnel to respond quickly. Yet neither can fully reproduce the uncertainty of combat, where hundreds of variables unfold simultaneously and decisions measured in seconds determine the outcome. Real conflicts expose realities that no laboratory can replicate.
Among those realities, one observation appears to have drawn particular attention. Israel’s multilayered air-defense network performed with remarkable effectiveness, intercepting the overwhelming majority of incoming missiles and drones with support from the United States and regional allies. That achievement reinforced confidence in modern defensive technology. At the same time, however, it highlighted another fact that military professionals have understood for decades but rarely see demonstrated on such a scale: even the most sophisticated defensive systems operate within physical and logistical limits. Interceptors must be manufactured before they can be launched. Radar stations can monitor only a finite number of targets at any given moment. Command centers process enormous quantities of information under extreme time pressure, while replacement missiles, spare parts and trained personnel all depend on industrial capacity far from the battlefield itself.
None of this suggests that air-defense systems failed. On the contrary, their performance was widely regarded as a major success. The concern emerging inside defense circles lies elsewhere. Military planners are increasingly interested in understanding what happens when the number of incoming threats continues to grow - not from dozens, but potentially from hundreds arriving in coordinated waves over an extended period. That is a fundamentally different question, and one that reaches far beyond the Middle East."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
"How It Horribly Really Is"
And how about you, Good Citizen? How's that job going? Current with all the bills? Health insurance affordable, keeping you well? If you're in Appalachia I hope you're wisely spending that $750 they gave you to replace losing your home and everything you owned, if you could even apply... But of course your own food stamp balance and available cash balances look like this, right? Right?
10 MILLION illegals in 2024 alone automatically got $5,000 pre-paid debit cards, free phones, and free transportation wherever they liked? Free health care and housing? While 700,000 Americans are homeless, including 60,000 veterans, 22 of whom commit suicide EVERY day?! Hungry children, elderly can't afford life-saving medicines,150,000 drug overdoses in the last year! $380 BILLION for Ukraine, God knows how many BILLIONS to Israel, and you, Good Citizen, what do they do for YOU?!
WTF, and I repeat WTF is wrong with this country?!
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