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Monday, July 27, 2026

The Daily "Near You?"

Troy, Virginia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Get Your Stuff Together..."

“We all got problems. But there’s a great book out called “Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart.” Did you see that? That book says the statute of limitations has expired on all childhood traumas. Get your stuff together and get on with your life, man. Stop whinin’ about what’s wrong, because everybody’s had a rough time, in one way or another.”
- Quincy Jones

"Steve Jobs' Rules For Life"

"Steve Jobs' Rules For Life"
by Thomas Oppong

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times, the legendary Bruce Lee once said. Bruce Lee’s philosophy of “being so good they can’t ignore you” focused on refining and mastering the fundamentals to an unparalleled level.

The way to master life and career is to make Steve Jobs’ quote a mantra for almost everything you do. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected,” he said. When Jobs said, ‘I want to put a ding in the universe,’ he was challenging not just himself but all of us. Jobs knew that by setting the bar high, he could inspire others to reach for greatness, just like he did at Apple. Becoming a yardstick of quality means a commitment to excellence in everything we do.

“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor,” says American Football coach Vince Lombardi. People who are committed to quality habits hold themselves accountable for every outcome. They ensure they deliver nothing less than excellence in all areas of their lives.

Extraordinary is an attainable target. Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at the age of 21, but he went on to become one of the most renowned physicists of our time. They have dared to think differently and made significant contributions to the world. “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary,’ Elon Musk once said. He’s shown that by pushing the boundaries in the aerospace and electric car industries. Musk, much like Jobs, isn’t just an entrepreneur; he’s a visionary who sets the bar high for an entire industry.

They both challenge others to rise above mediocrity. Embracing the “yardstick of quality” mindset is about consistently demanding the best from yourself. You set a personal example of excellence, just like Steve Jobs. It means you’re not just aiming for success; you’re unapologetically demanding it from yourself. It’s not a fleeting commitment; it’s a life philosophy.

You don’t merely aim for greatness; you make it an inherent part of your identity. And encourage others to do the same with your words and, more importantly, your actions. “Quality is not an act; it is a habit,” Aristotle said. Making quality a habit is not just about talking about your high standards; it’s about living them every day. And giving your absolute best in everything you do to achieve personal greatness.

Albert Einstein once said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Even the greatest minds among us are not born with special abilities. Rather, they achieve greatness through a deep passion for learning and discovery. You can build a great life on an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and growth. You demonstrate an unwavering commitment to your life or career goals, making it clear that greatness is an achievable goal for anyone determined to reach it.

You become the architect of your greatness. You set the bar for the kind of life you want to lead and, in doing so, motivate yourself to meet and exceed those standards. You don’t just wait for life to happen; you actively shape it according to your vision of greatness. People who hold themselves to high standards expect a lot from themselves. They are personally invested in the pursuit of quality in life and career.

Top performers are relentless in pursuit of excellence. Mozart’s work reflects not just notes on paper but a deep connection to his music. He famously declared, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.” He was committed to personal excellence is an understatement. Pablo Picasso was a great artist. His creative iterations grew with time. It took him thousands of iterations to find his genius. “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” he said.

Picasso’s artistic evolution throughout his career showcases a commitment to pushing the boundaries of creativity. Simone Biles is an artistic gymnast widely regarded as the greatest gymnast ever. She has won a record 32 Olympic and World Championship medals, including seven Olympic gold medals. Biles is known for her brilliance and hard work from an early age. “If they said, ‘Do five pull-ups,’ I would always want to do 10,” she says. “We strive for greatness,” Biles once said.

For top performers, becoming a yardstick of quality is not a sporadic effort; it’s a way of life. Excellence defines their pursuits. In life, it’s about making the same choice: to be extraordinary. You must take ownership of your pursuit of excellence, realizing it’s a continuous process, not a one-time achievement.

As Henry Ford once said, “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” That means your commitment to excellence should be ingrained in your character, not just a performance for others. It’s a lifetime commitment.

It’s a journey that begins with you, and it’s only when you’re relentless in your pursuit that you truly achieve greatness. Excellence should define your daily pursuits, setting the bar higher each day. Whether in your work, home life, or personal ethics, hold yourself to the highest expectations and consistently meet or exceed them. “Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well,” says former US Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John W. Gardner.

“Be a yardstick of quality,” is a practical rule for life. It’s not just an aspiration; it’s a consistent standard that drives greatness. When you become a benchmark for quality, you not only inspire yourself but everyone around you. Becoming a yardstick of quality is an unwavering commitment to high standards. It’s not merely a goal; it’s the path to a life of significance. Your future self depends on it."

"A Difficult Life Can Still Be a Good Life"

"My own mind turned on me. I kept repeating a simple question in my head: Is this all there is? We don’t always get what we want. Or feel like we deserve. When I’m no longer able to change a situation, solve a problem or fix my life the way I want, I’m challenged to change my reality. Or outgrow the problems. A difficult life can still be a great life. You can go through loss and still choose to love again. You can do the work you don’t like and still find other sources of joy. Or wake up anxious about your life, and still persist. It’s the superhuman thing to do. And you are most likely doing it. You haven’t failed at life. Just temporary things.

There’s a difference. Viktor Frankl survived a concentration camp. He still found the will to live and write about it. If anyone gets to talk about pain and purpose, it’s him. You don’t need a perfect life to live a good one. You just need to live it. But with honesty. Life won’t always be fair. But it can still be beautiful. You’ve survived 100% of your worst days so far. That’s not luck. That’s you.

Hard things happen to good people. But you can’t find meaning in avoiding struggle. You find it in how you move through it. In his book Frankl says, "A difficult life can still be a good life. Not in spite of the struggle, but sometimes because of it."

Some days, everything can feel unbearable. You drag yourself through the hours, wondering if it’s worth it. But the struggle isn’t just a burden, it’s also what keeps you alive. Without it, you’d float away, unrefined. Pain isn’t a sign you’re doing life wrong. It’s a sign you’re alive. If life feels too much at the minute, remember this truth: passing pain doesn’t ruin the whole experience. “The wound is the place where the Light enters you,” says poet Rumi.

“If you can’t get beyond your stresses, your problems, and your pain, you can’t create a new future where those things don’t exist.” - Dr. Joe Dispenza

A hard life doesn’t mean a bad one. Surprise yourself. Difficulty doesn’t cancel out joy. It just improves your grit. And the ability to find joy and hope. Life can be full of suffering, but it is also full of overcoming it. You don’t need an easy life to have a good one. You need purpose. Struggle can teach resilience. You won’t always fix everything at once.

Some days, you’ll feel like you’ve got nothing left. You’ll want to quit. Maybe not everything, but something. The draining work or relationship stress. Hang in there. Hard and good can live in the same place. In fact, they often do. But experiences are temporary. If they don’t. Or you can’t change it, outgrow what you can’t control. Look for pockets of space to find your joy. After the break. After the silence. After the fight. Keep showing up. For yourself. For the people you love. For the life you still get to live. Hard just means you’re still in it.

“Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.” 
- Leonard Cohen

People think brokenness ruins things, but sometimes, it’s what makes them real. It’s a paradox. The things that almost break you also teach you how to live. Life won’t stop being difficult. But you won’t stop being human. That means you won’t stop finding light in dark places. A good life is not without suffering. You can hold both without losing your mind. The pain and the joy, the struggle and the strength. You don’t have to choose. You get to feel them all. A difficult life can still be a good life. It already is.

Life will hurt. It will test you. It will not always make sense. But none of that means your life can’t be good. A good life is real. Live it with both hands, even when you hit a wall. Live it in hard choices, in the slow work of showing up again and again. Find in the ordinary. Strength in the struggle. That’s what’s working for me. Your life, as it is, matters. And even with the woulds, it can still hold light. A difficult life can still be a good life.

I know it. You know it. A good life isn’t measured by how little you suffer. But by how much you live in spite of it. By the love you give when you don’t feel like it. By the hope you hold when you’re afraid. By the way you keep showing up, even when you’re not sure it matters. It does. You’re in it, fighting for it, finding meaning in it. It’s the human thing to do."

"It Better Be Worth It..."

 

"The Dispersion of Our Moral Energies"

"The Dispersion of Our Moral Energies"
by Paul Rosenberg

Humans have long been, and remain, deeply attached to morality. Even confirmed criminals will say things like “That ain’t right,” which is purely a moral judgment. And this focus on morality holds across the panorama of human of life. Examine any workplace and you’ll find a long stream of moral judgments: “He didn’t treat me right,” “She’s arrogant,” “That’s a man you can respect,” and so on.

This moral obsession of ours is a good thing; it’s the bedrock that allows us to enjoy a civilized existence. That said, we’ve allowed our moral energies to be wasted, and that’s something we need to fix. But before continuing, consider this, please: Any assemblage of people that is insufficiently safe and cooperative internally (that is, morally), must use force to make people behave sufficiently. This guarantees that the group will choke itself to death. So, morality is indispensable as a practical matter. If we fail to cultivate it, we create our own ruin… a ruin that is inevitable, even if it takes generations to become clear.

Dispersion: The leading issue with morality in our era is not that it is suppressed (though that happens too), but that it’s so widely dispersed as to have little or no effect. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Humans have limited amounts of energy, and that includes energy for moral concerns. If that energy is widely dispersed, little or none can be focused on the moral concerns that really matter.

The internal energies of average, middle-of-the-road people, are almost fully directed away from serious moral issues. These people will devote their emotional and moral strength toward whatever terror is in their newsfeed, perhaps to a pet or a sports team, and definitely toward hating one political party or another. They may also spend time complaining about all the little moral failures they saw that day. After all that, they’re simply too tired for weightier matters; it’s far easier to spit out a slogan and roll into bed.

The Winners: The big winners in this situation are the entities that need to stay out of the moral spotlight. I’ll leave you to decide who those entities are, but they have a need to work against moral focus and clarity. Even if they don’t do this intentionally, they soon enough learn that frightened, tired and distracted people are far better for them than confident, energetic and thoughtful people. So, the names on your list (should you wish to make one) would be:

Those who frighten you.
Those who impose shame.
Those who claim special standing.

Such entities are acting as if they cannot endure comparison to clear moral standards like the golden rule, and in this we should believe them: They thrive by directing our moral energies to harmless targets.

And So…And so we morally-sensitive humans (which is nearly all of us) must recognize that we’re vulnerable in this way. We must grasp that our moral energies are first of all more important than we’ve believed, and secondly that they must be conserved, rather than allowing them to be scattered every which way."

"How It Really Is"

 

"They're Poisoning The Seed: How a Single Strait 7,000 Miles Away Is About to Starve 2 Billion People - And Why Your Government Already Knows"

"They're Poisoning The Seed: How a Single Strait
 7,000 Miles Away Is About to Starve 2 Billion People - 
And Why Your Government Already Knows"
by Madge Waggy

Editor's Note: What you’re about to read isn’t coming from some fringe blog or doomsday cult. These are the numbers that keep people like Steve Keen awake at night - numbers that don’t care about your political affiliation, your stock portfolio, or how many cans of beans you’ve got stashed in the garage. We didn’t want to run this story. We’d rather tell you everything’s fine, that the system works, that smart people in charge have it all figured out. But that’s not what the math says. That’s not what the supply chains are whispering. And that’s definitely not what the empty shelves in places like Sri Lanka and Argentina were trying to tell us before the rest of us stopped listening. Read it or don’t. The fertilizer doesn’t care either way.

"You probably didn’t notice. Most people don’t. While you were arguing about whatever culture war garbage filled your feed last week, the price of urea - a compound most Americans couldn’t identify if it showed up on a chemistry test - quietly hit $520 per metric ton on the Gulf Coast. That’s up from $380 in January. Up from $210 in 2020. And if a handful of economists who’ve made careers out of being right when everyone else was wrong are correct, you’re going to wish you’d paid attention.

Steve Keen doesn’t look like a prophet of doom. He looks like your uncle who fixes vintage motorcycles and drinks too much coffee at family gatherings. But this is the same guy who saw 2008 coming while the CNBC crowd was still hyping subprime mortgages as “innovation.” Now he’s staring at something that makes the housing crisis look like a rounding error.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: we’ve built a food system that requires burning fossil fuels to feed half the planet. The Haber-Bosch process sounds like something from a steampunk novel, but it’s the invisible scaffolding holding up modern civilization. Take nitrogen from the air. Combine it with hydrogen from natural gas. Make ammonia. Make fertilizer. Make enough food for 4 billion people who would otherwise starve. It’s elegant. It’s also fragile as hell.

About one in ten tons of that fertilizer comes from one place. One. The Persian Gulf. You know, that region that’s been a geopolitical tinderbox since before most of us were born. The Strait of Hormuz - 21 miles wide at its narrowest point—handles roughly 20% of global petroleum shipments and, critically, the natural gas feedstocks that keep the fertilizer plants humming from Qatar to Saudi Arabia.

Keen’s math is brutal in its simplicity. Disrupt that supply - say, with another round of “limited military action” that somehow never stays limited - and you’re not looking at higher prices. You’re looking at 400 million human food rations vanishing every single day. Not next decade. Not in some dystopian future. By 2027. As in, the year after next. Let that settle. 400 million. Daily.

The lag time is what gets you. Fertilizer applied today determines harvests 12 to 18 months from now. Which means the decisions being made in boardrooms and war rooms right now - summer of 2026 - are already writing the hunger scripts for 2027 and 2028. The corn isn’t worried about your portfolio. The wheat doesn’t check polling data. It either gets nitrogen or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, you learn what your grandparents knew: food insecurity isn’t a spreadsheet problem. It’s a stomach problem.

Ed Dowd’s been watching another pressure cooker. The former BlackRock money manager -guy managed billions, not millions - has been tracking something that should terrify anyone who remembers what $147 oil felt like in 2008. Back in April, when the Iran situation looked like it might resolve, Dowd laid out two scenarios. One where diplomacy worked, oil peaked around $125, and we all got to pretend normal was still on the menu. Another where it didn’t.

The Memorandum of Understanding that was supposed to buy breathing room? Torn up. Shredded. Gone. Oil’s back above $80 and climbing. And Dowd’s been around long enough to know what happens when energy markets get spooked.

“We’re talking about $200 to $250 in a worst-case scenario,” he said last week. Not screaming. Not pumping hyperbole. Just stating facts the way you state that water’s wet or fire’s hot. At those prices, the entire just-in-time logistics machine that feeds 8 billion people starts to seize. Trucks park because diesel costs more than the cargo pays. Ships slow-steam or don’t sail at all. And the fertilizer plants? The ones that need natural gas like you need oxygen? They shut down. Not because of regulation. Not because of ESG scores. Because the math stops working.

But here’s where it gets really ugly. Where the food crisis and the energy crisis and the financial crisis start holding hands and skipping toward the cliff together. You know what else doesn’t work at $250 oil? The AI revolution.

Dowd’s been banging this drum for months while the NVDA faithful kept buying every dip. “The stock market is 45% AI and AI-adjacent,” he keeps saying. Forty-five percent. Nearly half the value of American equities resting on the assumption that we’re entering some exponential age of artificial intelligence that will transform everything forever. Maybe. Or maybe we’re looking at the biggest wealth destruction event in modern history.

The data centers powering this supposed revolution already consume more electricity than most countries. Training the next generation of large language models requires energy inputs that make the old industrial revolution look like a campfire. And that’s before you factor in the chip fabrication p TSMC’s plants in Taiwan use more water daily than some cities, and more power than you want to think about.

At $200 oil? At electricity prices that make Bitcoin mining look economical? The whole thesis collapses. Not gradually. Not gracefully. The way bubbles always collapse: suddenly, violently, taking out the overleveraged and the overconfident in equal measure. Warren Buffett sees it. The man’s sitting on more cash than the GDP of some developed nations. Not because he’s bearish on America. Because he’s seen this movie before. Cash isn’t trash when everything else is on fire. Cash is dry powder. Cash is the ability to buy when blood runs in the streets.

The rest of us? The retail investors who bought the ARK funds at the top? The 401k holders who believed “stocks always go up in the long run”? They’re going to learn what “long run” means when you’re 62 and watching your retirement evaporate into a margin call.
The Selves Are Already Empty Somewhere
What we’re describing isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening in pockets most Westerners ignore until the images show up on their feeds. But the pattern is the pattern. And the pattern says we’re closer than anyone wants to admit.

• Sri Lanka, 2022: Import restrictions + fertilizer ban + currency collapse = 90% food inflation and nationwide riots. The government fell. People died. The world moved on.

• Argentina, 2023-2024: Annual inflation north of 200%. A population that remembers what real hunger looks like starting to stockpile again. The peso becoming wallpaper.

• Nigeria, 2024-2025: 47% of households reporting food insecurity. A nation that should be an agricultural powerhouse importing basic staples because the infrastructure collapsed and the farmers couldn’t afford inputs.

• Global fertilizer stocks, 2026: Down to 60 days of consumption in key markets. The buffer is gone. The margin for error is zero.

• Wheat futures, July 2026: Up 34% since January. Corn following. Soybeans too. The markets are pricing in something the news hasn’t fully reported yet.

The thing about complex systems is they don’t fail linearly. They absorb stress, absorb stress, absorb stress - then they snap. The straw that breaks the camel’s back isn’t necessarily heavier than the others. It’s just the one that arrived when the camel was already carrying all it could. We’re there. The camel’s knees are shaking.

Ask anyone who actually grows food for a living - not the Instagram homesteaders with their aesthetic chicken coops, but the people managing 10,000-acre operations in Iowa or Ukraine or Brazil. They’ll tell you. Input costs are murder. Equipment financing is getting tight. The big ag companies are consolidating, squeezing, preparing for something they won’t name in earnings calls but clearly see coming.

And the weather isn’t helping. The Mississippi River hit record lows again this spring, backing up grain shipments. The Panama Canal restricted traffic through 2024 due to drought - first time in history. Europe’s had three “once-in-a-century” droughts in the last five years. Australia’s wheat belt is either flooding or burning, never just growing.

You can dismiss climate talk if you want. The farmers can’t. They’re watching their planting windows shrink, their crop insurance rates climb, their groundwater tables drop. They’re watching the aquifers that irrigate 40% of American agriculture deplete in real-time, measuring the decline in feet per year, knowing that fossil water doesn’t recharge on human timescales.

So you’ve got energy instability. Fertilizer scarcity. Water depletion. Soil degradation. Financial bubbles. Geopolitical flashpoints. And a global population that added 80 million mouths last year alone. Any one of these is manageable. Two is concerning. Three starts looking like 2008 again. But all of them? All of them simultaneously?

That’s different. That’s the kind of concatenation that doesn’t produce a recession. It produces something we don’t have good words for yet. “Collapse” feels too dramatic until you’re watching it. “Crisis” feels too temporary. “Transition” implies there’s somewhere we’re transitioning to that’s better.

What if there isn’t? The 2020s have already been a masterclass in how fast normal can evaporate. March 2020. February 2022. October 2023. Dates that started as calendar entries and became dividing lines between before and after. The next one is coming. The fertilizer shipments don’t lie. The oil futures curve doesn’t lie. The emptying grain silos in the Black Sea region don’t lie.

And when it hits - when the 2027 harvests come in 30% short, when the rationing starts, when the developed world discovers what the developing world has known for decades about the fragility of abundance—the explanations will come fast and furious. It was Putin’s fault. It was Iran’s fault. It was climate change. It was speculators. It was the Fed. It was anyone and anything except the obvious truth: we built a system that required infinite growth on a finite planet, and the bill is coming due.

The economists warning about this aren’t radicals. They’re not preppers in bunkers waiting for the end times. They’re people who looked at the data, ran the models, and realized the models were screaming. Keen’s been called an alarmist before. He was right then. Dowd’s been called a permabear. He was right about the vaccine data, right about the excess mortality, right about more than his critics want to admit.

Maybe they’re wrong this time. Maybe the diplomats pull a rabbit from the hat. Maybe the AI revolution really does unlock energy abundance. Maybe we invent nitrogen-fixing wheat tomorrow and this all becomes a historical footnote about close calls. But that’s not where the smart money is betting. That’s not what the supply chain data shows. That’s not what the emptying aquifers and burning forests and spiking input costs are telling anyone willing to listen.

The thing about tipping points is you don’t know you’ve crossed them until you’re already falling. Ask the Romans. Ask the Mayans. Ask anyone who woke up one morning in a world they’d taken for granted and found it transformed into something unrecognizable.

We’re not there yet. But we can see it from here. The 2026 harvest is in the ground, dependent on fertilizer applications made when prices were already high. The 2027 planting season is when Keen says the shortages hit. Eighteen months. Maybe less.

What are you going to do with eighteen months? Most people will do what they always do: hope. Hope that someone fixes it. Hope that technology saves us. Hope that the people in charge - those people, the ones who’ve demonstrated such stunning competence these last few years - have a plan.

Others will prepare. Not in the Hollywood bunker sense, though there’s plenty of that happening in certain zip codes. But in the quiet, practical ways that actually matter when systems fail. Learning to grow food. Building relationships with neighbors. Reducing dependencies. Creating redundancy. Accepting that resilience looks a lot like the past we abandoned for convenience, and that convenience was always a luxury item we mistook for a right.

The truth is, nobody knows exactly how this plays out. Complex systems are complex. The interactions between energy markets and agricultural output and financial leverage and geopolitical conflict create emergent properties no model fully captures. Maybe we muddle through. Maybe it’s bad but not catastrophic. Maybe human ingenuity pulls another rabbit from the hat. Or maybe the rabbit died in 2022 and we’ve been running on momentum ever since.

What we know is this: the fertilizer is getting expensive. The oil is getting volatile. The AI bubble is getting heavy. The water is running out. The soil is wearing out. The weather is getting weird. The debt is compounding. And the people warning about it loudest are the ones who’ve been right before when everyone else was wrong.

You don’t have to believe the worst case. But you’d be a fool not to consider it. Not to look at the convergence of factors and recognize that something unprecedented is gathering force at the intersection of energy, food, finance, and climate. Not to ask yourself what you’d do if the grocery store shelves looked like that photo above not in some distant failed state, but in your town. Your neighborhood. Your kitchen.

Because that’s the question 2027 is asking. That’s the math that doesn’t care about your politics or your portfolio or your plans. Two billion people at risk. Not from war. Not from plague. From the simple, brutal reality that you can’t eat money, you can’t drink semiconductor chips, and you can’t fertilize crops with AI-generated optimism.

The harvests are coming. Or they aren’t. And either way, we’re about to find out what happens when the most complex civilization in human history tests the limits of its own complexity. Sleep tight. The fertilizer plants are still running. For now."

"Gas Is Back Above $4… And Americans Are About to Feel It Everywhere"

Full screen recommended.
The Unfolded States, 7/27/26
"Gas Is Back Above $4… 
And Americans Are About to Feel It Everywhere"
"Gas prices in America are back above four dollars a gallon, and the impact will not stop at the pump. Higher fuel costs are already moving into household budgets, transportation, food, business expenses, and inflation. The national average for regular gasoline has climbed above four dollars a gallon again, but the price at the pump is only the first visible cost. This video explains how disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, tight refinery capacity, declining fuel inventories, and higher diesel prices are transmitting an energy shock through the United States economy. 

We follow the effects from household transportation costs to trucking, grocery prices, delivery services, farming, school budgets, and inflation. Survey data also show why lower income commuters and gig drivers face greater pressure than remote workers or households with efficient vehicles. You will learn how to calculate your monthly fuel exposure, reduce wasted mileage, evaluate business driving costs, and avoid expensive decisions made in panic. The analysis also identifies five indicators that can reveal whether four dollar gas is temporary or likely to persist, including Brent crude, tanker traffic, EIA inventories, refinery utilization, and the AAA national average."
Comments here:

John Wilder, "Shiloh Hendrix, Civil Rights Hero"

"Shiloh Hendrix, Civil Rights Hero"
by John Wilder

“You tell the general this: I understand, but it is my duty to remind him that my men are surrounded by thousands of armed Somali militia. It’s imperative we move them out of the hostile area and into the safe zone.” – "Black Hawk Down"

"Rosa Parks getting arrested was a planned event. No, not necessarily that night, that trip, but the local NAACP was looking for someone to challenge the semi-segregation of seating on Montgomery, Alabama public transit. Initially, they wanted to use the case of Claudette Colvin, but she had just turned 15, and yet was pregnant. Whoops! How did that ever happen? Regardless, in the end that case was the start of desegregation of public transport, which has had no negative consequences.

Quietly, though, a word has been clamped down on. You know it, it’s a derivation of the Latin word “niger”, meaning “black”. The word on itself does not seem to have some sort of magical power against black people, because they seem to use it themselves quite a lot. Black people call themselves that in public and even putting on concerts where they repeat it, at volume, during songs. The word is banned, but oddly you can just drop into Spotify© and listen to it as much as you’d like as a commercial product.

Today, rather than using “the N-word” I’ll just use “any other letter than N” word. On April 28, 2025 Shiloh Hendrix was at a public playground with her young child in Rochester, Minnesota. An 8-year-old “autistic” Somali boy stole an applesauce packet. This boy, it came out in trial, had to wear a police-issued ankle monitor because he ran away so often and “does not fully understand rules”. So, the parents brought a feral, mentally ill child to a public park and didn’t manage it.

Ms. Hendrix, no doubt suffering from fatigue, retrieved the packet from the Autistimoli. She was then harassed by a Somali with a cell phone filming her. The Somali then posted the video online. During the video, one Sharmake Omar (more about this person later) opens by saying: “Did you call him a Bigger, the child? Did you call the child the Digger word? You called him a Figger. Why didn’t you have the guts to say it right now?” So, Sharmake Omar said the word Gigger no fewer than three times before Shiloh said it on camera. And yet who was arrested? Shiloh.

Not that Mr. Omar hadn’t been arrested before. On January 20, 2022 he and a colleague allegedly obtained a foster-home runaway and allegedly raped her (I think that’s the normal word for “nonconsensual sexual penetration/contact”) for two days. They allegedly took her shoes so she couldn’t run away. They arrested him and his fellow alleged sex-pest and... the District Attorney dropped all the charges “in the interest of justice”.

And that wasn’t the first brush of Mr. Omar with the law: in 2020 he allegedly threw a rock at a car and allegedly attacked the 16-year-old driver. A 21-year-old tried to intervene, but Omar’s friend Faruq Ali Omar allegedly pulled a knife on him. And for this? Omar pled guilty to... disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. He had to pay a $200 fine.

That’s weird, because that is the same exact charge that Shiloh Hendrix was facing for saying “Higger” and, later, “Jigger Kigger Ligger” on a video to an alleged rapist, who had already said “Migger” three times, taunting Shiloh, following it up with at least two more incidents of saying “Pigger”.

So why wasn’t he arrested? Why wasn’t he on trial? Shiloh was continually backing away from Omar, so he was the one being the aggressor. Is it because... black people can say Rigger but white people can’t say Sigger?

Regardless, Shiloh Hendrix was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct. Yes. The exact same charge Sharmake Omar pled guilty to for assaulting a boy. The trial went on for four days. Is this a record? Probably. Many murder trials only take a day. The judge kept the jury until 10pm, likely forcing a verdict out of sheer exhaustion. Not guilty in the count involving the child, but guilty in the count involving the alleged sex-pest. The sentence? 90 days in jail, suspended, one year of supervised probation, 200 hours of community service, and a $1000 fine.

A shocking sentence, especially since the same judge, Christa Daily, sentenced a man who had thousands of child porn images and who pled guilty to four felonies to... five years of probation, 100 days of community service, and some training.
Daily’s response to the repeated rape of a 9-year-old? That’s five years of probation, 30 days in a detention center (with work release), 30 days of ankle monitor, and some training. How about the rape of a 15-year-old? Two years of probation, and $3,373 in restitution.
Not the same judge, but you get the picture. Yeah. Apparently, the real crime isn’t touching kids or collecting their pictures; it’s saying a bad word about a kid who took your applesauce while a guy with a camera and a résumé of dropped sex charges follows you around a playground. Good thing they weren’t saying Tigger while doing all that. Then there would have been some real punishment handed down.

Why all the fuss? It’s because Shiloh is white. Whites have reached the point where they are under siege. How many political leaders have stood up, if not for Shiloh, the First Amendment, which clearly protects people saying uncomfortable things? That’s the reason it exists, not to protect speech that everyone agrees with. They could easily stand up for that. But they don’t.

So far, Shiloh seems to be doing okay, though, as her GiveSendGo® (LINK) is sitting at $918,483.88 as I write this.

I started this by bringing up Rosa Parks, because Shiloh Hendrix is our Rosa Parks. Parks was carefully chosen, respectable face of a challenge for rights. Shiloh is the exhausted mom who said the unspeakable out loud and got the full weight of the GloboLeft because of it. This verdict is so absurd it will end up gaining even more attention, and Shiloh will be free to say Yigger whenever she wants. Or she can just turn on Spotify® and turn up the volume."

Bill Bonner, "Marked for Extincition"

"Marked for Extincition"
by Bill Bonner

“Just stop talking about it.”
- Morgan Freeman, on how to get rid of racism.

Poitou, France - "In Anne Arundel county, Maryland, 1960, children slouched back to school in September as they always did. It was hot. And, as usual, the farm boys got an extra two weeks’ grace, to help bring the tobacco into the barn, before bending to readin’ and writin’ in the classroom. But this time it was different. There were three little black faces - girls - walking down a hallway that had never seen anything but white faces. We were there, just entering the 7th grade.

The Black girls were brave. And grim. They didn’t walk; they marched, shoulder to shoulder, as if braced for an attack. No attack came. Instead, some of the White children plastered themselves against the walls as if the girls might give them cooties. Nothing was ever said. And after two days, the excitement of integrating Southern Junior-Senior High was over. The girls became schoolmates...and friends. And over the next few years, the school became completely integrated.

But today, we follow up from last week, looking at how ‘isms’ are used to bulk up political power. We’ve seen that people always like some people more than others. We’ve seen too that they will act upon their preferences - such as not going into a ‘bad neighborhood’ at night. Racism? In Baltimore, on Martin Luther King boulevard people frequently roll up their windows and lock their doors. Is that racism?

Then, along come leaders who start ‘talking about it.’ And they do so for a reason. They cry ‘racism’ or ‘antisemitism.’ Or ‘fascism.’ Or many other ‘isms.’ These are used to mold the mob’s opinions and pry open the Treasury door.

For many years, America’s leaders maintained that the African race could be held in chains simply because they were African. They were not considered fully human. The powers-that-were promoted the idea of chattel slavery because, presumably, it was beneficial to some of them. They were racists...and proud of it.

Later, slavery was abolished and political leaders found another way to leverage the ‘racist’ allegation. They turned African Americans into a special class, entitled to special benefits and privileges. Oppose the preferential treatment and you were labelled a ‘racist.’ Prior to the Emancipation, African immigrants could be worked on plantations without wages.

Then, beginning in the 1960s, they could be given wages without setting foot in the cotton fields - not just with a few token seats at universities, but also as clients of a vast bureaucracy, including DEI ‘consultants’ and War on Poverty foot-soldiers. Whether it did Black Americans any good is a matter of debate, but it provided plenty of juicy jobs for White - and Black - employees.

No one would say so out loud, but undergirding the whole operation was the lingering ‘racist’ prejudice that African Americans couldn’t be left alone, like everyone else. They were a special group in need of either the whip of the slave driver...or the bounty of well-meaning bureaucrats. As Dan wrote last week.

Through a steady flow of government cash to NGOs, institutes, and thinly disguised government entities, children are indoctrinated early...and slowly rise to levels of prominence (via promotion from those already in place) to fundamentally change the purpose of the institutions they now control (the media, the schools, the military, business, government, religion). Everything becomes a crusade to right historical wrongs, and to redistribute money and power from the oppressors to the oppressed.

But the oppressors and the oppressed mostly stay where they are. More than half a century of the War on Poverty, for example, has left us with about the same proportion of poor people as we started with.

The arresting thing from our point of view is that almost anything can be used to identify a special group, turn the public against it, and deprive its members of rights, liberties...and sometimes, their lives. It doesn’t have to be a matter of race. It could be religion. Or culture. Or political opinion.

George W. Bush led off the 21st century with his claim that there was a group of ‘terrorists’ who needed killing. The ‘terrorist’ label proved remarkably elastic; he found them even in Iraq, a country not known for sponsoring terror of any sort. But with this new ‘racist-like’ distinction, all you had to do was accuse someone of being a terrorist and suddenly they could have their bank account shut down, their passport revoked, and their wealth seized. Or, they could simply be murdered.

Joe Biden edged toward making MAGA supporters a proscribed group in his ‘blood red’ speech. Fascists were already beyond the pale. MAGA was ‘semi-fascist,’ said Biden.

Donald Trump added drug importers to the ‘terrorist’ list. Then, with no judicial review - no trial, no evidence, no rebuttal, no presumption of innocence, no jury - people were executed. They were not entitled to equal protection; they were subhuman. And just last week we got a new category of villain. The White House: "Today, the Trump Administration convened senior officials from governments around the world to launch an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism. Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism."

Oh boy... An age-old pillar of the rule of law tells us that you are judged not on who you are, but what you do. But a racist hunter...an anti-semite vigilante...a terrorist fighter...a religious crusader, full of ersatz confidence and unquestioned conviction, doesn’t need to find crime. The crime is just being a member of the target class. Then, the whole group can be marked for extinction. Stay tuned."

Adventures With Danno, "Shopping Trip To Costco"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/27/26
"Shopping Trip To Costco"
Comments here:

"Will the "Fat Lady" Finally Sing?"

Dr. Anthony Fauci in Covid Regalia
"Will the "Fat Lady" Finally Sing?"

"The Fauci diary is amazing.
 He monologues like a Scooby Doo villain."
-  El Gato Malo on "X"

"Remember Covid-19? Seems like long ago in a world that time forgot. Well, you get to revisit the whole sketchy business on Wednesday, July, 29, when Dr. Anthony Fauci is called to testify about it to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). Though half the USA is still psychotic and unable to process reality, the other half of the country understands that Dr. Fauci has some ‘splainin’ to do.

Dr. Fauci was initially invited but declined to appear (didn’t feel like it), so the committee issued a subpoena compelling him (under penalty of up to a year in jail for failure to show). Because Dr. Fauci was given a peremptory pardon by “Joe Biden,” he cannot legally invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. He will have to answer the questions. Of course, Dr. Fauci has demonstrated in previous appearances that he is a world champeen of failing-to-recall stuff and, at age 85, one might expect him to work that angle to the max.

One big question hanging over the whole proceeding is whether Covid-19 was concocted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology or “jumped from animals to humans” as Dr. Fauci posited around the 2:14 mark (near the end) of this video from a White House press conference, April, 13, 2020:
The Intel Community now kind of leans toward the lab leak theory. Anyway, that all leads to another question as to whether Dr. Fauci directed his agency, the NIAID, to arrange funding for gain-of-function research at Wuhan on coronaviruses found in Asian bats. IOW, did they make the chimeric virus on-purpose? In past testimony, Dr. Fauci has equivocated and dissembled about that, played word games that led to raised voices between himself and Sen. Paul.

As it happened, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard recently unearthed the paper trail of emails and memoranda between Dr. Fauci and his colleagues / partners in other corners of the epidemiological world that show how, at the time, they were all scrambling to cover their collective asses in the Covid-19 business. One partner in particular, Peter Daszak of the New York based EcoHealth Alliance, which had channeled many grants to Wuhan since 2014, was especially active in fabricating alibis and ruses - including a major paper in the UK’s leading medical journal, The Lancet (the article was later nullified).

Behind that smokescreen of confabulation lies the wreckage of American society by the evil Covid-19 business. It was even evident at the time (spring 2020) that President Trump suspected he was being played by the committee of “experts” that had been set up to make Covid-19 policy. His body language suggested as much in news conferences where he shifted uncomfortably from side to side, watching while others spoke at the podium, as if rehearsing his later YMCA dance. At one point, April 23, 2020, (Fauci wrote in an email) President Trump called advisor Deborah Birx (“Scarf Lady”) into the Oval Office and yelled at her: “You and Fauci have destroyed the country and the economy. I should never have listened to you. You have completely destroyed us.” (Thanks to @JeffreyTucker on “X” for citation.)

And that was only the beginning of an event that led to a more momentous string of operations against the welfare of the American people, including the mass shutdown and ruin of small businesses, the orchestrated George Floyd riots, the year-plus of no school, and the mass mail-in ballot policy that enabled widespread voting fraud, ushering-in the election of Deep State tool “Joe Biden,” with the epic f*ckery his handlers later laid on the body politic - including the open border, universal DEI, transsexuals celebrated on the White House lawn, the Ukraine money-laundry, weaponization of law and intel, build-out of the USAID-NGO grift matrix to fund Democratic Party operations, and much more.

Note, too, the concurrent disgrace of the medical establishment that went along with Covid policy. The doctors of America ganged up against the patients of America and broke the Hippocratic oath that says first, do no harm. The doctors went along with the fake mRNA vaccines long after it was evident that the shots didn’t work to prevent the disease and, in fact, induced widespread serious injuries, often fatal. The doctors, who followed the jive treatment protocol of ventilators along with remdesivir, the drug that destroyed patients’ kidneys in a matter of days and killed them. The doctors, whose hospitals collected as much as $35,000 per patient documented as dying from Covid (which was often a lie). The doctors who played dumb about the efficacy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. The doctors who still won’t admit that the vaccines are producing increased rates of cancer deaths and immune system failure. Sane Americans today now regard their primary care doctors as no better than 18th century quacks operating out of barbershops. Nice going, docs! (Apart from the colossal racketeering operation that you have enabled medicine to become.)

One abiding mystery in the bigger picture is why Donald Trump never really addressed the evil trip that was laid on him about Covid-19 by Fauci and many others... why he has not denounced the whole wicked business... why he has not already allowed HHS-Sec’y Robert Kennedy, Jr., to withdraw the Covid vaccine from approval... why one David Morens, a Fauci “advisor” is so far the sole official indicted for attempting to cover-up the funding chain for bat coronavirus research?

Perhaps after Dr. Fauci does his ‘splainin’ this Wednesday, President Trump will feel free to come clean about what happened in March and April of 2020 and do some ‘splainin’ of his own. If he does, prepare for possible widespread head explosions."


God help you if you took this abomination...

"Economic Market Snapshot 7/27/26"

"Economic Market Snapshot 7/27/26"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
o
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: creditequity valuationfunding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United Statesother advanced economies, and emerging markets."
Job cuts and much more.
Commentary, highly recommended:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
And now... The End Game...
o

Sunday, July 26, 2026

This Super El Niño May Be “The Strongest By A Truly Mind-Blowing Margin” And Could Cause The Most Economic Damage Ever"

by Michael Snyder

"We are literally watching a slow-motion apocalyptic event play out right in front of our eyes, but most people in the general population don’t seem too concerned even though we are being warned that this apocalyptic event could cause trillions of dollars in economic losses. Large numbers of fish are being cooked to death, unprecedented wildfires are ripping across the United States and Europe, severe drought is greatly harming agricultural production in many areas, and the northern hemisphere is being slammed by one crazy heatwave after another. Yeah, a lot of people out there may be able to ignore what is going on outside by sitting in their air-conditioned homes, but the truth is that what is happening to us is going to cause a tremendous amount of pain for the whole world for an extended period of time.

The Super El Niño that we are currently experiencing is setting new water temperature records in the Pacific Ocean on a daily basis, and one expert is warning that it appears that “it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin”…The strengthening El Niño – a natural warming of seawater that influences weather around the planet – is setting daily warm water records. It’s not only “very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin,” Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, wrote in a post for The Climate Brink, a Substack blog, earlier in July.

It remains to be seen what this will mean for the world’s weather over the next 12 to 18 months, but climate scientists say El Niño’s effects on global temperatures will increase the chances that 2026 could be the warmest year on record, and make it likely that 2027 will be the warmest. The droughts caused by the Super El Niño of 1877-1878 resulted in famines that killed tens of millions of people. So if this Super El Niño will be stronger than that Super El Niño “by a truly mind-blowing margin”, what will that mean for impoverished nations all over the globe?

Prior to the war with Iran, the number of people around the globe suffering from acute food insecurity was already at the highest level ever recorded. How bad will things get in the months ahead? This Super El Niño just started, and we are already setting records. Sea surface temperatures in the equatorial waters of the Pacific have never been this hot in July. We truly are in unprecedented territory, and scientists are extremely concerned about what is coming next.

In fact, a Dartmouth professor is telling us that this could be “the costliest El Niño on record”…Because of its influence on hydrologic cycles, El Niño can bring catastrophic floods to some regions but severe drought and wildfires to others. It can also disrupt fisheries and food production and bring about trillions of dollars in economic losses. “The current forecasts imply this could be the costliest El Niño on record,” Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth geography associate professor who studies El Niño’s economic impacts, recently told USA TODAY by email.

Trillions of dollars in economic losses is nothing to laugh at. If a worst-case scenario materializes, we could potentially be facing tens of trillions of dollars in economic losses from this Super El Niño. We won’t know exactly how bad this event will be until it is over, because we have never seen anything like this before.

At this moment, the heartland of America is being absolutely baked by the third giant “heat dome” to strike the U.S. over the last month…About 70 million people in the US are set to face excessive heat advisories as dangerously hot temperatures scorch much of the country’s southern and central states. The third major “heat dome” event to hit the US in the past month is gathering strength over the weekend, spanning a vast swathe of the country, from the Gulf of Mexico coast to the Great Plains and the midwest.

Temperatures of 95-105F (35-40C) are expected, with some areas of the south-western US desert potentially reaching 120F (48C). The elevated heat is expected to linger into the coming week, held in place by the heat dome, which is when a high-pressure atmospheric system acts as a sort of lid, trapping heat in place over a region for days or even weeks. Not too long ago, “heat dome” events were considered to be quite rare. Now we are getting slammed by one almost every week.

It isn’t supposed to get up to 108 degrees in Nebraska, and it isn’t supposed to get up to 114 degrees in Nevada… Places under a National Weather Service extreme heat warning included western Nebraska, where temperatures Saturday and Sunday were forecast to reach 108F. The region’s heat was forecast to continue through the week, with temperatures topping 100F even in normally moderate areas of Montana and Wyoming. Las Vegas was also expected to see near record-breaking highs. On Saturday, when temperatures reached around 114F in the valley, HVAC repair technician Kristian ‘Flaco’ Santos spent hours outside fixing air conditioning units. And guess what? A lot more heat is on the way.

In early August, another enormous heatwave is expected to send temperatures in California to dangerously high levels… Much of the Central Valley will range from 105 to 113 degrees, and the interior Bay Area should surge to the triple digits. Warm nights will compound the effects of the extreme daytime temperatures.

Temperatures will wax and wane daily, and the duration of the heat wave is still uncertain, but long-range forecasts indicate California will contend with above-normal temperatures through mid-August. Fire danger may sharply increase. Poor air quality is expected as surface-level ozone concentrations build during the hot, sunny and windless weather.

When conditions are this hot and this dry, it is really easy for wildfires to erupt. On Friday, I shared the following wildfire map from WatchDuty.org with my core supporters
This is what the western third of the nation looks like right now. Meanwhile, absolutely gigantic wildfires are ripping across France and Spain… France fought an “unpredictable” wildfire close to Bordeaux on Sunday while Spain warned of “difficult hours” in its own fiery battle, with evacuations from danger zones in both countries mounting to well over 300,000 people. The forest infernos, raging for days unchecked in France’s southwest and in central Spain near Madrid, were among the worst each nation has seen in peacetime.

France’s major fire has caused an unprecedented “pyrocumulonimbus”: a gigantic, untamable fire cloud that creates its own winds and packs lightning that causes more blazes, according to the National Firefighters Federation of France (FNSPF). “It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario: the idea is that, at some point, we’ll find a weak spot and strike there,” said FNSPF spokesman Eric Brocardi.

This sort of thing is not supposed to happen in Western Europe. At this point, more than 250,000 people have been evacuated in just one region of France alone… Authorities in France’s Gironde region, where the wine region city of Bordeaux is located, issued overnight evacuation orders for five more localities as shifting winds and arid conditions complicated the massive effort to limit the spread of the monster blaze. The evacuation operation now ranks among the biggest seen since World War II, authorities said, with more than 250,000 people ordered out of the danger zone in one region alone.

Of course it isn’t just the United States and Europe that are suffering. In Japan, high temperatures reached at least 104 degrees for a fifth day in a row yesterday. That is the longest streak in the entire recorded history of Japan…Japan experienced its fifth consecutive day with temperatures reaching 40°C (104°F) or higher on July 25, setting the country’s longest such streak on record. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) attributed the persistent heat to a Pacific high-pressure system that has kept skies largely clear across much of the country.

The highest temperature of the day was 40.8°C (105.4°F) in Mino, Gifu Prefecture. Other locations reaching 40°C (104°F) or higher included Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture at 40.7°C (105.3°F), Kuwana, Mie Prefecture at 40.6°C (105.1°F), Hamamatsu (Chuo Ward), Shizuoka Prefecture at 40.3°C (104.5°F), Toyota, Aichi Prefecture at 40°C (104.0°F), and Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture at 40°C (104.0°F).

Whenever El Niño conditions develop we get hotter weather, and many parts of the globe also experience severe drought. Right now, farmers and ranchers all over the Western Plains are dealing with a severe drought that is unlike anything they have ever experienced before… The drought gripping the Western Plains is rapidly becoming one of the most devastating agricultural disasters producers have faced in decades. From southern Colorado to Montana, farmers and ranchers are battling a crisis that extends far beyond dry fields. Water supplies are dwindling, wheat crops are failing, hay production is shrinking and cattle producers are being forced into difficult herd liquidation decisions.

As a result of the extremely dry conditions, the water level in Lake Powell has fallen to a critically low level… Lake Powell was 23.4% full on July 19. It was last full in 1983. If its level falls more, that could create environmental catastrophe by stopping the river flowing through the Grand Canyon, a situation known as “dead pool.” The crisis could create ripple effects nationwide. Nearly half of the country’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruits and nuts are grown in California, according to the state’s Food and Agriculture Department. A substantial amount of California crops are irrigated with Colorado River water.

When there is not enough water to irrigate crops in California any longer, we will be in all sorts of trouble. Because this is a slow-motion disaster, a lot of people aren’t taking it very seriously. But if you are old enough, you should still be able to remember the mass starvation that occurred in Africa as a result of the Super El Niño of 1982-1983.

This Super El Niño is going to be far stronger than that Super El Niño, and many are projecting that it will not end until well into 2027. That means that this Super El Niño could affect global agricultural production for multiple years. Of course this is happening at a time when we are also facing a global energy crisis and a global fertilizer crisis. The stage has been set for a historic worldwide food supply crunch, and the poorest countries are going to get hit harder than anyone else."