"America's national debt has now surpassed $40 trillion, and the warning signs are everywhere. In this video, I break down why Elon Musk says the debt crisis is becoming impossible to ignore, how rising interest payments are consuming the federal budget, and why higher wages, inflation, and government spending could make everyday life even more expensive. We also discuss manufacturing slowdowns, energy costs, gas prices, and why many economists believe we're heading toward a financial breaking point. We'll also cover the push for $30-per-hour wages, the possibility of Universal Basic Income, the future of consumer spending, Roku's reported changes, new 911 technology, AI customer service frustrations, and what all of this means for the average American. If you're concerned about inflation, debt, the economy, personal finance, retirement, or where the country is headed next, this is a discussion you won't want to miss."
Nationwide Network Of Warrantless Pedestrian-Tracking Cameras"
by Tyler Durden
"Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based private surveillance firm, insists its cameras are not tracking people. Yet its own systems, training materials, and expanding product line tell a different story -one of a rapidly growing, warrantless mass surveillance infrastructure that logs vehicle movements, follows pedestrians with AI, and feeds data-hungry police departments across the country.
A new investigative report highlights how Flock’s network – now encompassing tens of thousands of cameras – enables police to reconstruct months of travel history for any vehicle with a few clicks, no warrant required. Security researchers and activists are pushing back, mapping the devices and exposing security lapses that leave feeds openly accessible online
DeFlock and the Scale of the Panopticon: In Boulder, Colorado, activist Will Freeman operates DeFlock.org, which has mapped over 88,000 Flock cameras nationwide. The app reveals camera locations and orientations, underscoring how pervasive the network has become in public spaces. Flock’s license plate readers snap time-stamped photos of every passing vehicle, allowing historical queries spanning up to 30 days.
As security researcher Benn Jordan noted, plotting that data on a map effectively places a month-long GPS tracker on your car. Jordan, who previously discovered dozens of Flock cameras streaming publicly, described AI-driven features that zoom in and follow individuals – whether persons of interest or random passersby, Atlanta News First reports.
As we’ve previously reported on the battle brewing between mass surveillance tech and individual liberty, tools sold for “public safety” quietly erode Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
Company Denials vs. Training Videos and Hardware Reality: Flock’s Chief Communications Officer Josh Thomas claims the company aids in solving around 700,000 crimes annually. He disputes “tracking” characterizations, arguing the system captures discrete points in time rather than continuous monitoring. However, Flock’s own webinars contradict this “The example of tracking that vehicle from location to location to location,” a Flock webinar instructor said. “And you’re able to track your suspect’s movements,” another webinar showed. In one training video, a police officer described using Flock cameras to follow a suspect across state lines: “And we were able to track him all the way over to another state, in Kentucky.”
Flock’s Condor cameras go further: These pan-tilt-zoom units use AI to detect and automatically follow human movement. When confronted, Thomas maintained the company does not track people, attributing features like “Guardian Mode” to mere object detection rather than persistent tracking. Yet demonstrations show the cameras panning and tilting in real-time to keep subjects in frame. Critics like Jordan suggest the pedestrian-tracking hardware emerged conveniently after earlier denials that Flock only captured license plates.
Security Nightmares and Misuse: Jordan and collaborators found over 70 Condor cameras streaming openly online without passwords. He published the video on YouTube along with 404 Media. “I watched a man leave his house in the morning. I watched a woman jogging alone on a forest trail in Georgia,” Jordan said. Thomas said the exposure was an accident caused by Verizon sending the wrong SIM cards with public IP addresses on roughly 60-70 devices, which were fixed once discovered. Verizon did not respond to requests for comment.
Full screen recommended.
Police officers nationwide have been arrested for using Flock cameras to stalk former partners and love interests. Freeman and Jordan warn that human nature makes such misuse inevitable in a system logging everyone’s movements by default. Thomas pointed to audit logs and accountability measures, but activists argue the architecture itself invites overreach.
The “Safety” Trade-Off and Pushback: Flock touts its role in preventing mass violence and solving crimes, with Thomas positioning the company on the side of those “fighting to stop” such threats. Yet more than two dozen cities, including Denver, have canceled contracts amid privacy concerns and questions over data access.
Freeman, demonstrating DeFlock’s route-planning feature that avoids camera-dense paths (turning a quick 1.7-mile trip into a 14-minute detour), argues the default of logging all citizens – not just suspects – is the core problem. He plans to keep “tracking the trackers” in the absence of oversight.
This saga fits a familiar pattern of privatized surveillance creep: Companies like Flock build the infrastructure, police query it with minimal friction, and civil liberties erode under the banner of security. As similar systems proliferate, the question remains whether Americans are willing to accept a perpetual digital dragnet in exchange for promised safety."
"This video breaks down how modern surveillance networks - powered by automated license plate reader systems like Flock Safety and high-powered analytics platforms like Palantir - are quietly tracking millions of Americans’ movements, raising deep privacy and civil-liberties concerns. We explain how the technology works, why critics warn it’s a dragnet, and what residents and civil-rights groups are pushing back against."
"Flock Safety quietly rolled out a feature that turns their gunshot detection microphones into something far more invasive - they can now listen for human voices. These high-powered microphones are installed in over 6,000 American cities, and most people have no idea they’re being recorded."
Youghal, Ireland - "AI...AI...ai yi yi! In the Financial Times there appeared a well-meaning piece of nonsense. “AI will do 80% of the economically viable work that humans do today, for 80% of all jobs, faster than most people believe,” writes Vinod Khosla, who claims to have spent decades brooding over the manner in which innovations upset the human animal. Brace yourselves for “mass underemployment,” he warns. And then he settles down to the true vocation of world-improvers everywhere - angling for a cut of the action. We require a “policy framework,” says he.
Why? Cannot the people work out for themselves how, and whether, to make use of the thing? Apparently not. They want busybodies of the Khosla stripe to arrange it all on their behalf, to rob the liquor store and then share out the gin. So, at least, Mr. Khosla believes.
More precisely, he would have the federal government seize a fat slice of the profits and the ownership of the AI industry - on the cheerful supposition that the casta politica will prove a wiser steward of the new marvel than the men who have poured billions of dollars and their whole careers into conjuring it up.
How likely is that? AI is run, at present, by some of the keenest minds on the planet - and even they have yet to show that it can turn a profit. Hand it over to the political hacks and you very nearly guarantee its ruin. Under Biden, the chief of the program might have been a diversity hire; under Trump, one of the family cronies. Either way, the odds of success grow slimmer by the hour.
The whole performance is the usual political smash-and-grab, dressed up in the time-honored uniform of problem-and-solution. Khosla holds that AI is a monstrous problem, since it will fling ordinary folk out of work while “juicing” the returns of the capitalists. We must, therefore, overhaul the tax code. And here the poor fellow betrays a truly remarkable poverty of imagination. Did the unemployed teamsters “juice” the earnings of the canal companies? Did the automobile makers fatten their books by putting the manure collectors out of business? Did the clothiers swell their returns by rendering the bobbin boys redundant? Of course not. No man “juices” his profits by throwing his customers out of work. Where would the juice come from?
So we begin by observing - modestly - that the dread now being peddled by these earnest soothsayers is misplaced. Only Washington and Las Vegas prosper by impoverishing their customers. The rest of capitalism, whatever its sins, makes the proletariat richer along with itself. Henry Ford doubled the wages on his assembly lines and made Detroit the best-paid city in the Republic. Today the highest wages are paid in Silicon Valley - again, very nearly double those of other towns. Even with AI hard at its labors - and here we speak with our fullest confidence - people will go on wanting things, and go on finding things to do to earn the money to buy them.
This is not to say the contraption arrives without its warning labels. No great innovation ever came to market without its risks. Every last one of them is, in the fullness of time, turned to the defrauding of men - or the killing of them. The first controlled flight took place at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Less than ten years on, Captain Carlo Piazza was dropping bombs on Turkish troops from his Blériot monoplane. America made the first successful test of an atom bomb in July of 1945; four weeks later it dropped one on the civilians of Japan.
The real danger of AI is that it will do something wicked - by design, or by accident. But that plane, dear reader, is already aloft - and at the controls sit the very people upon whom Mr. Khosla would bestow his “policy framework.” They are using AI to drop bombs and steer drones across the Middle East at this moment. And those same worthies have already ordered a ban on Claude 5, on grounds of “national security.” If anyone is going to bend the technology to scamming people, killing them, or robbing them blind, in short - it is going to be us.
Khosla’s economic menace is largely a fiction. His remedy is a fraud besides. And here, again, our confidence runs high - for the simple reason that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have signed on to it. Sanders would nationalize the AI companies outright, that the common citizen might share in the spoils. And Trump throws in his two cents: ‘I’m going to have meetings with the top 12 or 15 executives very shortly, and we’re talking about giving back something to the public, and if we do that, the public will become very rich.’
Yes - they are counting the money already. Khosla and his fellow dreamers fancy that a blend of AI-linked taxes and an ownership stake in “public” hands will haul in “an estimated $150 - $200 billion within five years.” In ten years, it will be such a triumph as to furnish a “trillion-dollar annual kitty” to fritter away however we please.
Oh, how it carries us back. We recall a callow youth, ready to swallow very nearly anything. In 1969 we turned twenty-one, and Americans set foot on the moon. Surely it was only a matter of time before we kept a permanent colony up there - and pressed on to Mars. Fifty-seven years have since rolled by. There is still no permanent station on the moon. But Elon Musk pledges to plant a colony on Mars. And now the President himself assures us that Americans shall grow “very rich” - because the feds propose to poke their long noses into the AI business. How likely is that? Tune in tomorrow..."
"In today's vlog, we are at Walmart and are noticing some outrageous price increases on groceries! This is not good as grocery prices have already reached an all-time high! It's getting rough out here as more and more families struggle to put food on the table!"
"The Strait of Hormuz is Open for Iranian Business…
Oil is Moving and Iran is Getting Paid"
by Larry C. Johnson
"Let’s give Donald Trump credit for one thing… He kept his word and lifted the US blockade on Iranian ships and Iran is going to town with its oil tankers moving in and out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. The picture above shows ships - marked red and green - moving as of 22:55 hours Eastern time on 15 June 2026.
This does not mean that the MOU with Iran, which is supposed to be signed in Geneva on Friday, will hold, but it is a step in the direction of de-escalation. So the question we ought to ask is why did Donald Trump blink and accept the proposal that Iran proffered way back in April?
I think there are several reasons, but the principal one is that the US is running out of oil, which means Trump will not be able to artificially suppress the price of gasoline. US strategic oil reserves have fallen to their lowest level since 1983, reports CNN. The decline comes amid continued drawdowns to mitigate the impact of the conflict with Iran. Reserves have dropped to 340.3 million barrels, last seen during the Reagan administration, which was still building the stockpile. US daily consumption is 20 to 21 million barrels in 2026, which means the reserve can supply 17 days of gasoline, which falls on July 1st.
Donald Trump may be in mental decline, but he still retains enough smarts to understand that an oil shortage and soaring prices of gasoline in July is politically untenable. Another factor is that US installations and aircraft in the Persian Gulf took a helluva beating last week. The US attacks on Iranian installations in the Strait of Hormuz on June 9 and 10 provoked a fierce Iranian response that hit targets in Iraq (CIA-bases supporting the Kurds), Kuwait (the Ali Al Salem airbase, Camp Buehring in northeastern Kuwait, as well as a makeshift operations center near the civilian port of Shuaiba), the Prince Saud Airbase adjacent to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the Mowaffaq Al Salti Airbase in Jordan. The attacks were devastating and reportedly employed some new Chinese missiles supplied to Iran.
Then there is the pressure from Gulf Arabs to end the attacks on Iran. Iran, backed by China, Russia and Pakistan, engaged in intense diplomacy with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The UAE, who has been a thorn in the side of Iran and Saudi Arabia and has been identified as an ally of Israel, sent a delegation to Iran on 9 June. Reuters reported that the UAE had agreed to release billions of dollars for Iran - two regional sources put the figure at $10 billion (including more than $3 billion already delivered), while two other sources put it at $20 billion, with the funds agreed in exchange for Iran halting attacks on the UAE. However, the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs categorically denied those reports, stating the allegations were “entirely false and unfounded” and that no frozen Iranian funds had been released, transferred, or facilitated through the UAE. What is undisputed is that the UAE sent a high-level delegation to talk to the Iranian government.
A high-level Qatari delegation arrived in Tehran on Wednesday, June 10, to hold talks on bilateral relations, regional developments, and diplomatic efforts to end the conflict between Iran and the United States. The delegation arrived at midday and the visit came after Trump accused Iran of stalling and said Tehran must now “pay the price.” AFP, citing an informed diplomat, reported the Qatari negotiating team had traveled to Tehran following consultations with American officials to help narrow remaining differences between the two sides.
A senior Pakistani source with access to information about Pakistan’s role in mediating the talks between the US and Iran, reported that Pakistan, with the encouragement of China and Russia, was making progress in its talks with the Saudis and the Qataris to stop hosting US military bases in their respective countries. These talks coincided with Saudi Arabia denying the US the use of its airspace to attack Iranian targets during Project Freedom.
Will the deal be signed on Friday? I remain skeptical simply because of the enormous Zionist backlash being visited on Donald Trump by angry Israeli officials and US politicians beholden to AIPAC. However, as I write this Monday night, the deal appears intact.
Why hasn’t Donald Trump released the text of the MOU? Two possible explanations (and I’ll be interested in what you think is the most plausible): 1) There are still areas of disagreement between Iran and the US and they are still trying to work out a compromise, 2) Trump does not want to provide the details beforehand fearing that the Zionist backlash could derail the Friday signing ceremony in Geneva. The diplomatic roller coaster is running full blast… It will be a wild ride until Friday."
"The U.S. and Iran have reportedly agreed to an “immediate and permanent” end to military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, theoretically putting an end to three and a half months of on again, off again hostilities. While the details remain sketchy, Iran will reportedly agree not to develop nuclear weapons, will be allowed to retain its large missile arsenal, and will have billions in frozen assets returned to the country, though it’s not clear in what form.
This is making the American neocons and Israel-firsters in furious, as they wanted Trump to keep fighting Iran for as long as it takes to dislodge the regime and install an American-Israeli puppet government in Tehran. Watching them all turn on Trump, who until now was viewed as their messianic savior who could do no wrong, is amusing to say the least. Folks like Mark Levin at Fox News anointed Trump “the first Jewish President” of the United States for his loyalty to Israel.
Trump spent $75 billion and tanked the U.S. economy for Israel, launching a war that drove up energy and food prices, caused shortages of fertilizer that could result in famine, and cost America 13 lives, with upwards of 250 wounded. All for Israel.
As long as he was attacking Israel’s enemy Iran, Trump was seen as a popular war hero and they would defend anything he did, including some pretty nefarious moves in the realm of advancing the U.S. technocracy with 6G and thousands of AI data surveillance centers being built across America. But now that he’s showed he wants to halt the bombing of Iran, they hate him. They have once again proven that the term “Israel first,” is not hyperbole. It’s what they stand for. These people and their leaders in Congress are not pro-American in any sense.
President Trump hailed his “deal” saying the Strait of Hormuz would open immediately and “oil would begin to flow.” The oil markets immediately reacted, with the price per barrel dropping by $4 a gallon Monday to the lowest point since the war began on Feb. 28. The stock market soared.
A “memorandum of understanding” is scheduled to be signed Friday in Switzerland. There’s just one problem. One of the three parties to the war is having none of it. Government leaders in the state of Israel, which partnered with the U.S. to launch an unprovoked war against Iran based on decades-old rumors that it was “weeks away” from developing a nuclear weapon, have said they are not going to sign Trump’s peace deal.
Israeli far-right Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Monday delivered his first public reaction to the peace deal between Washington and Tehran. News Channel 24 in Israel reported that Ben-Gvir denounced the U.S.-Iran agreement to end the war, including in Lebanon: “Trump’s agreement does not bind us… It does not safeguard our security,” he said on his Telegram channel, in what marked the first response from an Israeli official to the agreement. In case anyone was confused, Ben-Gvir addressed the Lebanon issue in his statement, saying, “My position is clear: We are not partners to this agreement that does not ensure our security, and it does not bind us in any way.”
It’s possible that the Israelis are putting forth a hardline for the press in their own country while quietly agreeing to at least tone down the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. But it’s more likely that they are unhappy with Trump for stopping the war in the absence of a regime change in Iran, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly and unapologetically stated was his goal for the war. If it’s the latter case, then this peace deal has no chance of success. Israel will blow it up at a time of its choosing.
Netanyahu also denounced Trump’s deal and rejected a Lebanon-related provision included in it, saying Israel will not withdraw from Lebanon and does not consider itself bound by the clause, according to Israeli media reports. The reports also suggest that Netanyahu has sought an urgent meeting with Trump, as the Israeli leader wants to “clarify and communicate Israel’s positions in the negotiations” during the proposed meeting.
President Trump seems to really want to end to this war, which never went according to the rosy predictions given to him by Netanyahu and the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. They told Trump in a Feb. 11 White House meeting that Iran’s Islamic regime was weak, that it was ripe for a fall and could be easily toppled with a few days or weeks of bombing strikes. That turned out to be bad advice and Trump got in over his head. Bombing raids alone cannot topple a firmly entrenched government with a large military like Iran. It would require a full-scale ground invasion, which Trump was apparently never in favor of launching because even that could not guarantee victory.
The truth is that Iran never needed a nuclear weapon to be a power in the Middle East. It has an economic nuclear bomb in the Strait of Hormuz, which it proved it could keep closed for a very long time while absorbing any bombing attacks and economic sanctions the U.S. and Israel heaped upon it.
Yet, Netanyahu is unlikely to give up his dream of regime change in Tehran. He will continue to act like the petulant schoolboy who doesn’t get his way, trying his best to continue stoking tensions and instigating a renewed war effort from his partners in Washington. He talks tough about Israel being able to take its security measures into its own hands if Washington refuses to help, but that’s all bluster. Netanyahu knows he cannot win a war with Iran without U.S. participation. The Washington Times also reported: “Israel signaled Monday it has no intentions of stopping combat operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, despite the U.S.-Iran deal promising a ceasefire on all fronts.”
The question going forward is, will Trump end up bending to the will of Netanyahu and restarting the war, or will Netanyahu be reined in by Trump? Knowing where the Trump-Vance team gets its financial support, I would bet that Trump will blink first, and renew his attacks on Iran before his term in office ends. And any peace deal that gets signed will be temporary at best. Whether it’s a few weeks, a few months, or another year, this war will restart after both sides have regrouped and rearmed.
There is also the question of the Epstein files being reopened if Trump doesn’t capitulate to the Israel lobby. Trump really finds himself backed into a corner, and he has no one to blame but himself because he shouldn’t have agreed in the first place to attack a sovereign country that posed no threat to the United States. On his own admission, he chose to launch the war for the benefit of Israel and the U.S.’s Arab allies in the Gulf region. It’s never a good policy to go to war for another country’s interests.
In order for peace to take hold, you need willing peace partners. Neither Israel nor Iran are going to bury the hatchet of hate they have for each other anytime soon. That makes peace in the Middle East virtually impossible, but U.S. involvement makes the possibility greater for an even more devastating war that if it just stayed out of it and let these two nations solve their own differences.
I do hope Trump is able to wiggle out of this situation, redeam his presidency and regain American sovereignty for American interests, but I can’t say I’m optimistic that will happen. If it did, he could put this war behind him and actually concentrate on fixing America’s many internal problems."
"The American Dream is cracking under the cost of living, and the people in this video are done pretending everything is fine. You'll hear from gig workers making $34 in eight hours, renters paying $900 for a studio with no bedroom door, parents spending thousands on childcare, and young people who can't picture working a 9-to-5 until they die. Real voices, real budgets, and a hard look at what middle-class life actually costs in America right now."
"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.
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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."
“I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here I can pretend... I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come and Gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...”
“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of Infinity. Life is Eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in Eternity.”
"Are you tired of living the same life you say you hate - yet somehow keep choosing it every day? This video dives deep into the truth behind self-sabotage, comfort zones, and the unconscious choices that keep us stuck in cycles of unhappiness. Until you stop repeating the patterns that drain your spirit and limit your potential, happiness will always feel out of reach. In this transformative message, we’ll explore how to break free from mental loops, emotional traps, and fear-based decisions that hold you back. You’ll learn how to consciously choose yourself, your peace, and your growth - instead of settling for the version of life that keeps you small. If you’re ready to stop surviving and start living, this is your wake-up call."
"And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you’re a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.”
"Some of us spend a lifetime behind small windows, waiting for a day that keeps not coming. This is the story of a family who finally stopped waiting. There is no rush. There is no late."
"Did right by people… kept my word… just ran outta energy along the way. “I’m a Good Man, But I’m Tired” is a heartfelt, slow-burning Delta King’s Blues tune about responsibility, quiet sacrifice, and the kind of exhaustion that comes from living right for too long. A deep, steady acoustic guitar carries the weight of long days and longer years. The harmonica breathes low and weary, like a man finally sitting down after carrying too much. The groove moves slow and grounded, built for late nights when the truth comes out softer than usual. This is blues for the ones who never quit - just got tired. For people who showed up, held it together, and kept going… even when no one noticed. Being good don’t make life easy… it just makes you strong enough to carry it."
“One of the great things about ancient Greek Mythology is that the stories all teach a lesson. They don’t end with – and the moral of the story is – though. They leave it to the reader to figure them out. So in addition to being just plain fun to read they are wonderful teachers about life. Perhaps the best thing about this one is that we still use the expression it contains exactly the same way that the ancient Greeks intended it almost 3,000 years ago. That almost never happens. Language is fluid and the meanings of words and expressions changes from one generation to another, but this one is an exception. The everyday expression it contains is one that we often refer to without really knowing where it came from.
This is one of the tales of Odysseus who was the heroic king of Ithaca and of whose ten-year journey back to Greece after the Trojan War was immortalized in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. There was a point in his journey when his ship had to enter a narrow straight. It was a passage so narrow that it could only be made under special conditions. They had to have both the wind at their backs and the current in their direction. However, once committed it was impossible to turn back.
Unknown to the sailors the straight was guarded by two deadly perils. On the one side, it was guarded by Scylla. Scylla was a six-headed monster that disguised itself as a rock. On the other side, it was guarded by Charybdis, a terrible deadly whirlpool born of the sea god Poseidon.
In olden times, it was common to refer to any place that a ship came to rest on land as being in a hard place. It didn’t matter if it was blown on shore by a storm, grounded on a reef or brought up intentionally for repair. If it was on shore, it was on a hard place as opposed to the soft place – water.
It also applied to a ship that had foundered. A ship that sinks will eventually rest on the bottom. The land at the bottom of the ocean is therefore called a hard place. It used to be a common term, but it has since pretty much fallen out of practice in common language today. A deadly whirlpool such as Charybdis could take a ship and send it straight to the bottom – a hard place.
So, now as we return to the story of Odysseus we see that their ship had entered a narrow straight and that straight was guarded by two evil perils with hardly enough room for a ship to pass between them. They were forced to choose between the six headed monster ‘Scylla’ disguised as a rock or the dreaded whirlpool ‘Charybdis’ that would surely send them to a hard place and they could not turn back.
There is a Latin proverb from this story, “Incidit in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim” which translates to, “He runs on Scylla, wishing to avoid Charybdis.” In modern day English, we simply say, “They were between a rock and a hard place”. And now you know…”
The latest US war – for Israel, as admitted by Trump, Rubio and Hegseth – has truly changed the Middle East, but not in the way Israel intended, nor the United States. The national security states in both the US and Israel no doubt had different expectations. For Israel, accelerating its ongoing genocide in Gaza, further fracturing the West Bank, and expand the northern “border” to the Litani River, seizing a fifth of Lebanon’s territory and permanently displacing a quarter of the Lebanese population, were among them. For the United States, perhaps the fundamental objective was nothing more than please let this be the last time we have to fight a war for Israel
On the surface, this latest episode of Bomb Iran! served Israel’s territorial ambition more than Washington’s. The US lost as many as 14 bases in the Gulf region, located and funded by former allies Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. As these bases were heavily targeted and damaged by Iranian counterfire, the real damage was done to US credibility among her heavily cultivated Arab financiers and hosts, who were unceremoniously reminded on February 28th and beyond exactly how much the United States government holds them in contempt.
Our military footprint in the Gulf and the region has contracted; this will continue. What we just watched over the past 100 days was an unusually vivid moment in the long slow collapse of the US military and financial empire.
Conversely, tiny Israel saw its fluid borders expand in all four directions. The cover of this war coincided with new bases in Somaliland, new gas fields through occupation of southern Lebanon and Gaza, massive Israeli expansion through land and political purchase in Greece, Cyprus, and Albania, and the exponential erasure of Gazans, Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians.
If war is politics by other means, the US and Israel both lost because their military forces – an all-draft army of rapists and racists with the help of an all-volunteer combatant force of increasingly discombobulated airmen, seaman, soldiers, Marines and Guardians – proved intermittently hapless, brutal, and deceitful. Despite self-serving agitprop of “most moral army” and “the best in everything,” the whole world – and the average Israeli and American citizen – now sees and admits something very different.
Politically speaking, the US spent twenty years of warfare and over $3 trillion, to jump-start the Taliban-eliminated Afghan opium trade and then replace the Taliban with the Taliban. Historians of the future will explain that a Zionist White House desperate to appear better than the previous Zionist administration had a “hold my beer” moment, after which they initiated an illegal unpopular war on Iran, leaving the latter with increased nuclear enrichment capability, and more motivation than ever to join the nuclear arms race. The US will restore seized and long-frozen assets to Iran, and Washington discovered to its dismay that narrow straits may be legally subject to anti-imperial sovereignty. The whole world now cheers Iran, in a zero sum game that leaves all the ridicule and all the disrespect for the US-Israel duopoly.
From this fiasco, paradigmatic and strategic changes to America’s parasitic national security state are coming. These changes are buoyed by a deep negative societal reaction to this latest war for Israel, and propelled by $40 trillion federal debt growing at 6% annually, with more and more Americans dependent on federal checks, and fewer and fewer global buyers of US debt. A truly defensive military and intelligence apparatus, at a fifth or even a tenth of what we spend today, as well as a structural jettisoning of special alliances that animate the current defense budget and focus, including but not limited to Israel, are now within reach for the US, in part because of what happened over the past 100 days. The empire will oppose any changes in this direction, but our dry shell of an empire has few choices.
In a strange way Trump will bring the troops home, and end US wars of choice, and like the captain of the Titanic, he will ride the ship, damaged by arrogance and overreach, into the deep.
But before the empire fades, it retrenches, and global war-mongering becomes totalitarianism at home, national intelligence becomes domestic surveillance, AI looks inward to identify potential enemies of the state, and maps their communities for decimation or economic lockdown. Critics of government policies, as we saw in Lincoln’s time, in Wilson’s time, and in our time, are labeled traitors. Natural rights are openly ignored by the state, any Constitution shredded and past assumptions of citizen roles and state duties cast aside.
US imperial retrenchment has been happening under our very noses, slowly at first with our devalued currency and never-ending wars, but the pace is quickening. Notably in this 250th year after the Declaration of Independence, every American needs to be prepared for war at home."
"The Globe and Mail: “If the American Empire comes to an end, that end will likely have been inflicted by America itself.” The Asia Times: “The erosion has not been imposed by enemies. It has been self-inflicted.” Ray Dalio: “The system is broken and arithmetically cannot be corrected.” It’s not China. It’s a $4.5 trillion healthcare system producing a population that dies younger. A political system captured by $4.1 billion in lobbying. An $8 trillion war machine that destroyed countries abroad while bridges collapsed at home. An education system ranked 41st in math that sent the bill to the students. An addiction economy that profits from your destruction. And a loneliness epidemic that dissolved the one thing that could’ve stopped all of it. None of it was done by China. All of it was done by America. To itself."
"Perhaps you have noticed – if you have any idea who I am or give a damn – that I have slowed down my political analyses of our current situation. It’s gotten tiresome since little changes despite all the spilled ink.
What I am going to say is not uplifting, so you can rip up this letter now if you want encouragement. The people whom I thought I knew never changed. They continue to believe the false premises that keep them smiling despite decades of facts to the contrary. Smiling’s important, I guess, and they prefer false hope to none and feel much safer on the other side of desolation row. They keep shouting at me silently, as Dylan put it long ago in “Desolation Row”: “Which side are you on?” But I don’t answer such lame questions while they keep not thinking too much about desolation row for fear of going there.
A example from 2021. The Orange Man was out and the Comatose Man was in the White House. In and out, back and forth they go, coming forth to carry us home. If the sounds you’re hearing these days sound familiar, well, they are.
In 2021 in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the corporate mainstream and so-called alternative media were replete with articles analyzing the consequences of 9/11 that resulted in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its alleged withdrawal after two decades of war.
These critiques ranged from mild to harsh, and covered issues from the loss of civil liberties due to The Patriot Act and government spying through all the wars “on terror” in so many countries with their disastrous consequences and killing fields. Many of these articles emphasized how, as a result of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, the U.S. had lost its footing and brought on the demise of the U.S. empire and its standing in the world. Some writers celebrated this and others bemoaned it. Most seemed to consider this inevitable, but not the verbiage about the Titanic going down, which continues to resound in 2026.
This flood of articles was authored by writers from across the political spectrum from the left through the center to the right. All were outraged in their own ways, as such dramatic events typically manage to elicit much spilled ink informed by the writers’ various ideological positions in a media world where the categories of left and right have become meaningless, yet those of Republican and Democrat still hold the titanic power of pipe dreams.
Here’s the rub. The authors of all these 2021 articles – with a few worthy exceptions – about the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and invasion of Afghanistan were based on a false premise.
A false premise. This is the way minds are shaped in the era of mass propaganda and servile journalism. Assume (or make believe) something is true or false despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and build from there. Slip in this premise or background assumption as if it were truer than true. Most readers will never notice because they fear going to desolation row by thinking too deeply.
The false premise is this: That 9/11 was a terror attack carried out by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as blow-back for U.S. wars against Muslims, and this terror attack on the U.S. led to the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
The evidence is overwhelming that this premise is false. The invasion was planned well before September. In fact, the evidence makes clear that 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks were inside jobs, false flag attacks, carried out by sinister forces within the government of the United States with a little help from certain foreign junior partners to justify its subsequent war crimes across the globe. I will not explore here the ample evidence concerning 9/11, for it is readily available to readers who have the will to look, but doing so will take you straight to desolation row. Even the use of the shorthand – 9/11 for the events of September 11, 2001 – that I have used here for brevity’s sake, is a crucial part of the linguistic propaganda used to frighten the public and to conjure up thoughts of an ongoing national emergency, as I have written elsewhere.
One is not supposed to say, or even intimate, that the mass murders of September 11, 2001 were a false flag attack, for it touches a realty that is so disturbing in its consequences that all the hand wringing post mortems must deny: That nearly three thousand innocent people in the U.S.A. had first to be murdered as a pretext for killing millions around the world. It is a lesson in radical evil that is very difficult to swallow, and so must be hidden in a vast tapestry of lies and safe logic. Innocence can survive the disclosures of U.S. atrocities overseas because the deaths of foreigners have never meant much to Americans, but to bring it all back home is anathema. Then, of course, there was the CIA assassination of President John Kennedy, but no one sees a thing there or cares to draw a string from then to now.
Most journalists know where the official Stop signs are, and so many lack a sense of history and the long-term strategies of those who own the country. But they do know where their bread is buttered, and contrary to Thoreau’s advice in “Life Without Principle” – “Do not ask how your bread is buttered, it will make you sick, if you do.” – they no doubt suffer from little dyspepsia on the way to the bank.
As I’ve said, there are rare exceptions, but they have been forced out of the corporate media and write for good independent sites that few read. The witty German writer Karl Kraus nailed the rest a century ago: “No ideas and the ability to express them – that’s a journalist.”
Let me end by asking: What is the key false premise hidden in today’s analyses of Trump’s criminal activities in his second term? It is obvious that he does not fit the mold of past presidents. He is someone even Mark Twain might have trouble creating. He is beyond blatantly outrageous in his actions, statements, and self-glorification – his criminal wars and use of the national treasury to enrich himself and his extended family, etc.
Kraus: “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are as clever as he.”
Is Trump an actor like his counterpart Zelensky in Ukraine? If so, who is his director or is he just freelancing? Is he stupid, crazy, just evil, etc.? These are important questions. But while all these are bandied about by various writers and news analysts, it is generally assumed that Trump was not chosen and supported by those who control the country’s long-term strategic planning and goals; that his weirdness is a front that conceals the fact that he serves the same interests as his predecessors. That this is impossible is the false premise hidden in plain sight.
Having written about these things too many times before, you may start to grasp why I am now permanently residing on desolation row. Repetition gets exhausting. So I’m just sitting back and looking out from Desolation Row as the two sides “fight in the captain’s tower/While Calypso singers laugh at them.”
Forget about answering this letter. I can’t remember my address."
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