As always...
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Saturday, May 23, 2026
"America’s Cost of Living Is Making People Give Up"
Full screen recommended.
The Unfolded States, 5/23/26
"America’s Cost of Living Is Making People Give Up"
"America’s cost of living crisis is changing how millions of people live, work, and think about the future. In this video, we break down why so many Americans feel financially exhausted even while working full-time jobs. From rising rent prices and grocery costs to healthcare expenses, debt, and wage pressure, everyday life across the United States feels noticeably more expensive than it did only a few years ago. This video combines real experiences, economic trends, and social observations to explore why so many households feel stuck financially despite trying to stay responsible with money. We also take a closer look at the growing pressure on the American middle class, including housing affordability, inflation fatigue, side hustle culture, and the psychological impact of constantly adjusting to higher monthly costs.
Using current data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Redfin, the Federal Reserve, KFF, and the New York Federal Reserve, this video examines how rising living expenses are reshaping spending habits, long term planning, and financial stability across the country. Topics include rent increases, grocery inflation, healthcare costs, household debt, and why even six figure incomes no longer feel as secure for many workers in high cost areas.
Sources referenced in this video include the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index reports, Redfin housing and rental market data, Federal Reserve household financial surveys, KFF healthcare cost reports, Bankrate emergency savings studies, and New York Federal Reserve household debt reports. If you have noticed changes in rent, groceries, insurance, or daily expenses where you live, share your experience in the comments below."
Comments here:
"Whole Foods vs Walmart - What You Really Get for the Money"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 5/23/26
"Whole Foods vs Walmart -
What You Really Get for the Money"
"America is changing the way it shops, and today Dan from i Allegedly takes viewers inside one of the largest Whole Foods Market locations in California to answer a simple question: Is expensive grocery shopping actually worth it? From premium organic produce and artisan cheese to smoked meats, sushi, seafood, and prepared meals, this walkthrough shows why some shoppers willingly pay more for quality, cleanliness, and convenience. Compare premium grocery prices with discount shopping trends, inflation concerns, and everyday budgeting realities in 2026.
This video explores personal finance, grocery inflation, smart shopping habits, savings strategies, food quality, and consumer behavior as Americans rethink where they spend money. Dan compares high-end grocery shopping with budget stores like Walmart while showing viewers how people balance quality versus affordability. Topics include organic foods, coupon shopping, prepared meals, business trends, rising food costs, bulk buying, family budgeting, and whether premium stores are becoming a luxury many Americans can no longer afford."
Comments here:
"No Wonder Men Are Opting Out"
"No Wonder Men Are Opting Out"
by Bettina Arndt
"The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book - "The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment" - arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible and less than a real man.
Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame and the yoke comes off. Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labor force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. One in three American men - roughly 33% - were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins. The trend is not confined to America. Similar declines - though less dramatic than in the United States - have occurred in the UK, Australia and Canada.
The marriage collapse runs in lockstep with the workforce data. According to US Census Bureau data, married-couple households made up 71% of all US households in 1970; today it’s just 47%. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox documents in his 2024 book "Get Married", the marriage rate has fallen 65% in the last half century.
Ehrenreich had made the argument that marriage and productivity were inseparable - that the same mechanism which got men to the altar got them to work. The data suggest she was right. What Ehrenreich did not fully reckon with - and could not have foreseen in 1983 - was that the inducements for tying the knot would collapse. The shame mechanism has disappeared, yes. But the incentive has simultaneously imploded. The product on offer has changed beyond recognition. If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them - and the costs are severe - but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.
The modern woman: a prospectus:
ͦ They are the most miserable, anxious and insecure cohort in living memory - hardly great marriage material.
ͦ Most married women go off sex - and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
ͦ Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
ͦ They’ve gone full throttle Left - and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
ͦ They’ve rigged the education system and colonized corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
ͦ Yet their hypergamy is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they still demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
ͦ The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behavior - silence, opinions, jokes, breathing - gets flagged as a red flag.
ͦ They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.
What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life? To examine more carefully what is going on here, let’s start by looking at the latest addition to this sorry reckoning. I’m referring to the finding published in the New Statesman last month that many young women don’t like men.
A Merlin Strategy poll of young Britons aged 18 to 30 found three times more young women than young men held a negative view of the opposite sex. Only about 50% of women had a positive view of men compared to 72% of men feeling positive about women. For women under 25, it was even starker: only around one-third (35%) reported a positive view of men. This applies particularly to professional and managerial young women of whom just 36% hold a positive view of men, compared with 61% of working-class women.
The contempt for men is hardly surprising - that’s what they have been taught. Mary Harrington, a British journalist and cultural critic who writes on Substack, frequently criticizes what she calls the “femosphere” - the online feminist spaces where women bond through shared grievances about men.
“The online feminist scene often feels like one long group therapy session for women to compare notes on how awful men are,” she writes, suggesting this makes men the universal scapegoat, where ordinary male behaviour is routinely framed as toxic or oppressive, while women’s collective resentment is rewarded and amplified. “Casual, low-level male-bashing has become the background hum of progressive online culture.”
Not only does this toxic climate encourage women to be wary of men, but growing up in a hate-fuelled online sewer takes a toll on their mental health. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been warning that the toxic world of social media would lead to a rise in mental health problems, particularly in girls and young women. “Since the early 2010s, young people across the developed world are becoming more anxious, depressed and lonely. The increases were even greater in young women,” he said.
Recent large-scale surveys (Ipsos 202-–2026 across 31 countries, Gallup 2025) are showing Gen Z women currently report the highest recorded levels of anxiety, persistent sadness, hopelessness and depression of any female generation at the same age.
Not much fun for their partners. Last year Psychology Today had a stark warning for men about these women as marriage prospects. The saying ‘happy wife, happy life’ may have some validity, but the lesser-known saying ‘anxious wife, miserable life’ has research-approved validation. The more neurotic the spouse is, the less happy the relationship - but women’s neuroticism seems to carry more weight in the overall marital happiness equation.
Then there’s the intriguing issue of married women turning off the tap, leaving sex-starved husbands as the norm. For as long as anyone can remember, men were shamed into showing up economically. Society has absolutely nothing to say to women who stop showing up sexually. One obligation was enforced by church, law and community for centuries. The other is now abrogated on the grounds of bodily autonomy.
So here we have the portrait of the modern woman as marriage prospect: miserable, anxious, politically radicalized, contemptuous of men, often sexually rejecting and trained to see menace in ordinary male behavior. And yet the puzzled chorus from commentators, economists and policymakers continues: why won’t men commit? Why won’t they work?
The approved explanations are dutifully trotted out. The economic story: men have been displaced by automation and globalisation. The health story: opioids, disability, mental illness. The educational story: men are falling behind women in universities and therefore in the job market. The cultural story, favoured by progressive commentators: toxic masculinity is preventing men from adapting to a modern service economy. All of these contain a grain of truth. But they do not account for what is really going on. The obvious explanation - the one staring out of every data table - is intentionally ignored.
Marriage was the primary incentive for sustained male economic effort. It has always been - Ehrenreich knew it in 1983, and the economists have now confirmed it. There’s an economic research paper, ‘The Declining Labour Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men', which establishes that the prospect of forming and providing for a family constitutes a critical male labour supply incentive, and that the decline of stable marriage directly removes it. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that declining marriage rates are responsible for roughly half the drop in the hours men work.
Remove the marriage and you remove the responsibility. The data have been telling us this for decades. But here is what nobody in the mainstream conversation will say: it is not only that marriage has become too costly and too legally treacherous for men - though it has. It’s that many young women themselves have become, to put it plainly, not worth having. Half of young British women don’t trust men. More than half of educated young women view men negatively. They arrive at relationships pre-loaded with grievance, primed by algorithms that have fed them a diet of male failure and female outrage since adolescence. They are, by their own account, anxious, miserable and politically furious.
What rational man, surveying this landscape, concludes that what his life is missing is a legally booby-trapped commitment to a woman primed to be impossible to keep happy?
Ehrenreich feared in 1983 that if the shame mechanism collapsed, male productivity would follow. She was right. What she could not have anticipated was the other half of the equation - that the feminist revolution would produce not a generation of fulfilled, generous, companionable women, but one that is, by every available measure, angrier and unhappier than any before it. The yoke is off. The men have looked at what’s on offer. And many have, with considerable rationality, decided to go and play video games instead."
About the author: As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponization of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.
"The Importance of Inexpert Opinion"
"The Importance of Inexpert Opinion"
by Todd Hayen
"I was out with a friend for lunch the other day (yeah, I still have a few of those left). This friend leans more to the liberal side of things. He certainly doesn’t care for Trump, is a vax advocate, etc. A very nice guy, I have to say - a superb artist, an excellent father, and just a good all-around person. I won’t go off on a tangent here, but sheep types are typically not bad people. They are just like us, only asleep. Anyway, I digress.
Needless to say, our conversation focused on music and other safe subjects and didn’t venture into the dark zone of world politics, public health, and the like. But he did say one thing that got me thinking. It’s something you hear often, and usually when you hear it, the person saying it is rather livid. They just can’t believe it, and they present it as if it is one of the main reasons the world is going to shit. “Why does everyone think they are an expert and run off at the mouth all of the time? Why can’t they just shut up and listen to the people who know what they’re talking about?”
Quite frankly, I hear this from shrew and sheep alike (though more from sheep, actually - at least they seem more angry about it than shrews do). One of my pet peeves over the years is seeing headlines like “Scientists Discover!” or “Experts Agree!” or some other equally breathless proclamation that suggests only “scientists” can discover something and only “experts” can have anything important to agree on.
What about all the very important discoveries that trained scientists did not discover? The wheel? Fire-making techniques? Countless effective folk remedies? Even modern examples like the microwave oven and Post-it notes? Screw the scientists and screw the experts. What about Grandma? Or Joe the auto mechanic? Or Bob next door - the guy working ten hours a day out in his garden, nurturing his roses? Doesn’t he know something worth hearing?
Sad to say, this sustained effort to train us to believe that only certain sanctioned people are allowed to speak to us is clearly part of the agenda. And whenever it comes up in conversation, it makes my blood boil.
Now, there is a flip side to this as well. I am not a fan of putting all of my eggs in the basket of someone who is not informed or has not done their homework. I don’t necessarily believe that Joe the mechanic knows how to treat my chronic back pain - but he might. That is the key element to what I am saying. Average, everyday people may know something useful.
In our complicated world, though, this “common sense” knowledge does become less and less likely to be beneficial when applied to highly technical matters. I doubt many people intuitively know how to fix a cell phone if it goes on the fritz, but that doesn’t mean they can’t express an opinion about it. I can’t tell you the number of times a suggestion my wife makes about remedying some weird computer issue has actually fixed the problem. Maybe it’s voodoo and has little causal reason behind it, but it will often work.
Still, there is a continuing problem: many people don’t bother to learn even basic things about a situation they are confronted with. This is where our shrew mantra “do your research” comes in. I don’t think we expect sheep-types to learn all of the intricacies necessary to come up with valid and useful opinions based on truth and facts, but we do expect them to know the basic things so their instincts are based more on what is actually happening rather than some fabrication (or outright lies) the agenda has fed them in order to form an opinion that aligns with its intentions.
The irony here is that the sheep-types don’t keep their uninformed, inexpert mouths shut either. They babble on with the story that the agenda has presented to them. The agenda gives the label of “expert” to the select few in their ranks. They pay for the scientists to do their work and the experts to do their bidding; they themselves are the moneymakers and the power brokers of the culture. The public sees all of this as the authority, the expertise, the purveyors of reliable information. So, they spout off about it: “experts agree,” “scientists discover.”
Two things are happening here. First, these sheep masses want everyone else to shut up. If everyone they want silenced is not presenting opinions based on what they have been told is the only source of truth (the experts), then they want them quiet.
Second, these sheep masses believe they already know everything they need to know. They simply refer to the experts, scientists, and politicians. None of their own thought, instinct, common sense, or experience is factored into their conclusions. They think that when they “express their opinion,” they are expressing what they believe. But they are not - they are simply spitting back what authority (their experts, thus their truth) has said.
I don’t think us shrew-folks do this. In fact, we don’t trust the mainstream to a fault. For the most part, nothing the mainstream says is trusted, including the scientists and the experts. Unfortunately for us, this is not always the smartest way to go.
Believe it or not, some of these people (scientists and experts) actually have something good and useful to say. Believe it or not again, even some politicians are not under the power of Satan (I would say this is typically found at the local level of government). For the most part, though, we formulate our own opinions about things; we don’t automatically defer to someone with a fancy label. Hopefully, we listen to them as well when formulating our opinion - hopefully we listen to everyone.
The point here is that no one should be silenced. It is up to the listener to determine whether what the speaker is saying is useful. If the speaker is downright lying and knows they are lying, then that is a problem. But again, we have to individually be the final arbiter of what is truth and what isn’t. Obviously, this is where free speech comes in. We don’t get to determine what is said and who has the right to say it, but we carry the responsibility ourselves of assessing what is said. We all have the right to express our opinions. Expert and non-expert alike. You never know when a gem will turn up. It could be found in the most unlikely of places."
o
Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here.
Friday, May 22, 2026
Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Trump Emergency Meeting, Cancels Weekend Plans"
Canadian Prepper, 5/22/26
"Alert! Trump Emergency Meeting,
Cancels Weekend Plans"
Comments here:
"You're Watching The American Empire Collapse In Real Time And Nobody Cares"
Full screen recommended.
Finance Economist, 5/22/26
"You're Watching The American Empire
Collapse In Real Time And Nobody Cares"
"79% of Americans agree the country is falling apart. The Treasury declared the government insolvent. A viral report crashed the stock market and was forgotten in a week. People are dying on sidewalks in Philadelphia and pedestrians step over them. The fertility rate just hit the lowest in history. Two historians predicted in 1997 that this would happen by 2025 and they were right about everything. You are watching the collapse in real time. And the reason nobody cares is because caring has been engineered out of you. This video explains how." Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.
The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
"The World As I See It"
"The World As I See It:
Albert Einstein's Thoughts on the Meaning of Life”
by Paul Ratner
“Albert Einstein was one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, influencing scientific thought immeasurably. He was also not shy about sharing his wisdom about other topics, writing essays, articles, letters, giving interviews and speeches. His opinions on social and intellectual issues that do not come from the world of physics give an insight into the spiritual and moral vision of the scientist, offering much to take to heart.
The collection of essays and ideas “The World As I See It” gathers Einstein’s thoughts from before 1935, when he was as the preface says “at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age”.
In the book, Einstein comes back to the question of the purpose of life on several occasions. In one passage, he links it to a sense of religiosity. “What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it many any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life,” wrote Einstein.
Was Einstein himself religious? Raised by secular Jewish parents, he had complex and evolving spiritual thoughts. He generally seemed to be open to the possibility of the scientific impulse and religious thoughts coexisting. "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," said Einstein in his 1954 essay on science and religion.
Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes.
Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein's pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he was quite familiar with various religious teachings, including a strong knowledge of Jewish religious texts.
In another passage from 1934, Einstein talks about the value of a human being, reflecting a Buddhist-like approach: “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.”
This theme of liberating the self is also echoed by Einstein later in life, in a 1950 letter to console a grieving father Robert S. Marcus: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”
In case you are wondering whether Einstein saw value in material pursuits, here’s him talking about accumulating wealth in 1934, as part of the “The World As I See It”: “I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?”
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Freely download "The World As I See It", by Albert Einstein, here:
The Poet: John O’Donohue, “In These Times”
“In These Times”
“In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety,
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down,
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
May we may have courage
To turn aside from it all,
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home.”
~ John O’Donohue,
from “To Bless the Space Between Us”
○
by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to
TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing."
- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"
“My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.
You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.
I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.
Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.
We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.
Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”
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“Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jungian psychiatrist and post trauma recovery specialist, writes this to social activists. Estes is perhaps most famous for her book, "Women Who Run With the Wolves." This letter appears, in part, on Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ blog. The date of the original letter is unknown.
"I Think..."
"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
- G. M. Gilbert
"The Most Contagious Of Diseases..."
o
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over,
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
That's how it goes,
Everybody knows.
"Everybody knows that the boat is leaking,
Everybody knows the captain lied.
Everybody got this broken feeling,
Like their father or their dog just died.
Everybody's talking to their pockets,
Everybody wants a box of chocolates,
And a long-stemmed rose.
Everybody knows."
– "Everybody Knows," by Leonard Cohen
"State Sponsored Suicide"
"State Sponsored Suicide"
by MN Gordon
“A great civilization is not conquered from
without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
- Will and Ariel Durant, "The Story of Civilization"
"Enemy Within: How does a superpower die? Does it come from the blinding kill shot of a hypersonic missile streaking through the sky? Or, perhaps, a rogue cyberattack that mortally destroys the national power grid? Will the end of America come with foreign tanks rolling through New York or a massive, coordinated amphibious attack on Los Angeles? These dramatic scenarios make for captivating conjecture. But they’re highly unlikely. If you look at the autopsy reports of the world’s greatest empires, the ultimate cause of death is rarely a sudden, overwhelming external blow.
Long before the barbarians breached the gates of Rome, the Roman denarius had been systematically devalued into a glorified copper token to fund a bloated bureaucracy. This was characterized by widespread domestic corruption and endless military expansion. So, too, long before the British Empire reluctantly packed up its global flags, it realized the staggering cost of multiple wars had left it financially bankrupt, structurally hollowed out, and entirely dependent on American loans.
Great civilizations don’t usually get slaughtered by their rivals. They commit slow, sophisticated, economically optimized suicide. As we move through 2026, the United States is following a well-worn, dangerous path. But it’s traversing it at a speed and scale that would leave ancient Rome in the dust.
The reality that no politician will publicly admit is that America’s out-of-control federal spending and its monstrous, multi-trillion-dollar financial system are doing far more structural damage to the country’s long-term survival than any foreign adversary ever could. By burying the nation in unpayable debt, Congress is willingly destroying America from the inside. Hence, the greatest threat to our future lies not across the ocean, but directly within our own borders.
Act of War: Let’s talk about the ghastly numbers. They’re often ignored by the general population because our brains are hardwired to glaze over when we start talking about trillions. Here we’ll break them down for you.
Right now, the official U.S. national debt has blown past $39 trillion. To put that into perspective, if you spent one dollar every single second, it would take you about 32,000 years to spend $1 trillion. America owes 39 of those.
But the real issue isn’t just the total balance on Washington’s credit card. It’s the cost of keeping the account active. The yield on a 30-year Treasury bond recently climbed above 5 percent for the first time in nearly 20 years. Yet today’s balance is much larger than it was 20 years ago. When you owe $39 trillion, even a tiny uptick in interest rates transforms your budget into an insurmountable nightmare.
America is currently burning through roughly $3 billion every single day just to pay the interest on its existing debt. Think about that for a second. Before a single pothole is filled, before a single soldier is paid, before a single school lunch is funded, or a Medicare claim is processed, $3 billion dollars vanishes into thin air every 24 hours. It doesn’t buy new equipment, it doesn’t rebuild infrastructure, and it doesn’t help struggling families. It’s purely the cost of treading water. Instead of investing in the future, we’re paying for the profligacy of the past.
If a foreign nation managed to sabotage the U.S. economy so severely that it drained $3 billion a day out of the federal Treasury, it would be viewed as an act of war. We would mobilize the military. Yet, because this bleeding is caused by our own fiscal policy, we pretend it isn’t happening and go back to scrolling on our phones.
Vicious Doom Loop: The entire American lifestyle – and by extension, the global economy – is built on the singular, fragile assumption that the rest of the world will always want to buy American debt. For decades, this was a safe bet. Treasuries were considered risk free in terms of default. The U.S. dollar, while under threat of the U.S. government’s making, remains king of the global financial system – for now. When global chaos hits, investors run to U.S. Treasuries like a safe harbor in a storm. This exorbitant privilege allowed Washington to spend money it didn’t have without facing immediate consequences.
But that privilege resulted in a dangerous lack of discipline and created a catastrophic level of arrogance. Politicians on both sides of the aisle began treating the national debt like a meaningless artifact. To Congress, and as elaborated by the late Dick Cheney, “deficits don’t matter.” Unfortunately, the mathematics of debt do matter. And right now, the system is locked into a vicious, mechanical doom loop. Here’s how it works…
Every month, while you pay your bills, live within your means, and balance your personal finance books, the Treasury issues mountains of new debt just to pay off the old debt that’s maturing. All the while, it’s borrowing more to cover current overspending. Yet, because the market is getting flooded with U.S. bonds, investors are demanding higher yields.
Higher yields mean refinancing becomes more expensive. More expensive refinancing creates even larger deficits. Larger deficits require issuing even more bonds. The financial system is, in effect, cannibalizing itself to stay alive. No enemy army could design a more effective trap to paralyze the American financial system. When an enemy attacks, the damage is obvious. Buildings fall, smoke rises, and the country rallies together. But when financial decay sets in the destruction is deceptive. For many people, the cause is unclear.
Inside Job: Over the decades, American leaders assumed the world had no choice but to use the dollar. Where else were they going to go? But our adversaries and allies alike have watched this fiscal train wreck unfold and are methodically diversifying their reserves. They realize that a superpower running a $39 trillion deficit is a precarious foundation for the global economy. Central banks around the world have accelerated their gold purchases to historic levels. Countries like China have been systematically reducing their holdings of long-term U.S. Treasuries.
It’s not a sudden boycott of the dollar. Rather, it’s a slow calculated diversification. As the rest of the world lightens up on their purchases of U.S. debt, the Federal Reserve becomes the buyer of last resort. That means creating credit out of thin air to buy U.S. Treasuries. This is a formula for runaway inflation. The type that has destroyed countless currencies throughout history.
To be clear, Fed asset purchases have been occurring for much of the 21st century. So, too, have U.S. government policies of dollar debasement. This sophisticated state-sponsored suicide takes place in ongoing Congressional hearings, mundane Treasury auctions, continuous debt ceiling increases, pretend government shutdowns, and carefully scripted statements by the Fed using concocted syntaxes that are designed to keep people from panicking.
As America closes in on its 250-year anniversary it’s being drained of its capital. The government continues to borrow tomorrow’s prosperity to pay for today’s political promises. All the while, the people watch the infrastructure of the nation’s cities crumble as $3 billion a day is directed to service interest payments. The currency buys less and less every year, forcing citizens onto an endless economic hamster wheel. Alas, it hasn’t taken an enemy to destroy America. Our politicians have already done the job for them."
Freely download "The Story of Civilization", by Will And Ariel Durant, here:
"Everybody Is Talking About The Cost Of Gasoline – Soon Everybody Will Be Talking About The Cost Of Food"
by Michael Snyder
"For most people, the price of gasoline is the most obvious consequence of the war in the Middle East. As I write this article, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is $4.56. Of course in some parts of the country consumers are paying much more than that. This is a big story, and the truth is that gasoline prices are going to go even higher in the months ahead. But if you think that the price of gasoline is bad, just wait until you see what eventually happens to food prices. The price of diesel has been rising even faster than the price of regular gasoline, and fertilizer prices have been absolutely skyrocketing. Those costs will get passed along to the rest of us. It is just a matter of time. Meanwhile, our farmers are dealing with drought conditions that are unprecedented and now a “Super El Niño” is coming.
What all of this means is that food prices will rise to very painful levels. So even though everyone is complaining about rising gasoline prices at the moment, one prominent economist is warning that “the next story is food”… The cost of food in the U.S. appears poised to rise sharply alongside oil prices, as war-related supply disruptions put pressure on the companies and farmers who keep the country’s shelves stocked.
“The big story right now is oil,” economist Justin Wolfers told MS NOW on Tuesday. “The next story is food. Oil prices have risen over 50 percent since the conflict began on February 28, pushing gas prices to a nationwide average of over $4.50 for the first time since 2022. Can you imagine what would happen if food prices were to rise another 50 percent from current levels?
Over the past year, many of the most common items that Americans purchase at the grocery store have already become much more expensive… When compared to the same time last year, fruits and vegetables have seen some of the biggest price hikes. Tomatoes are 40% more expensive now than they were this time last year. Bad growing weather, tariffs, and rising fuel prices have all contributed to the huge change in tomato prices, reports the New York Times. Coffee, another imported product, is 19% more expensive than it was last spring. You’re also likely seeing inflated prices at the butcher counter. Meat is up 9% overall, but beef has grown even more expensive. Ground beef is about 15% pricier, beef roasts are 18% more, and steak is up 16%.
We can blame the war with Iran for the recent price hikes that we have been experiencing, because the war has made diesel much more expensive. And diesel is used to transport most of what we eat…What’s contributing to the price spikes? Fuel prices have soared while the Iran war prevents cargo ships from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital corridor for global oil supplies. Diesel fuel powers fishing boats, tractors and the trucks that ship 83% of U.S. agricultural products.
Just as you’re paying more at the pump, so are truckers who transport goods all around the country. Some vendors and suppliers are adding fuel surcharges to make up for the increased cost of transporting and delivering their goods. In addition, fertilizer prices have gone absolutely haywire, and those costs will be passed along to us once harvest season arrives.
The solution to this crisis would be for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen. But Iran isn’t willing to do that. Instead, Iran intends to make the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz permanent… Iran and Oman are actively discussing a permanent security mechanism for the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is pushing to institutionalize and normalize a transit fee or toll on commercial shipping vessels navigating the narrow waterway. According to an Iranian diplomatic envoy, the proposed system is designed to secure the long-term positioning of Iran and Oman as the primary regulators of the strait, effectively transforming a temporary leverage point from the recent military conflict into a permanent sovereign right.
To formalize its grip, Iran’s newly established Persian Gulf Straits Authority began applying conditional rules and hefty transit tolls, in some cases exceeding one million dollars per vessel, while granting selective exemptions to friendly nations like Russia or China. By engaging Oman, which shares territorial jurisdiction over the Strait, Iran is seeking to build a coalition that validates these tolls under the guise of funding localized maritime security.
The US maintains an opposing view on the matter, viewing the permanent toll as a non-negotiable barrier to reaching a sustainable peace deal. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, international straits are governed by transit passage protocols that guarantee the uninterrupted flow of global commercial shipping, a principle the US insists must be restored without conditions. This is one of the reasons why there is not going to be an agreement to end the war.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio just warned that what Iran is attempting to do with the Strait of Hormuz “will make a diplomatic deal impossible”…“A toll collection system in the Strait of Hormuz will make a diplomatic deal impossible. We are very disappointed with NATO allies, we will discuss the issue of troop deployment at the upcoming meeting.”
If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, a global inflation crisis is guaranteed. And on top of everything else, now a “Super El Niño” is rapidly approaching. We are being warned that it could potentially be the most powerful “Super El Niño” in recorded history… Scientists have warned that an imminent ‘super El Niño’ could be even more powerful than a previous event which caused over 50 million deaths.
The 1877 El Niño was one of the most severe climate events in recorded history, triggering a global humanitarian disaster known as The Great Famine. Climate reconstructions suggest water temperatures in a key region of the Pacific Ocean rose by 2.7°C (4.86°F), which caused disruption to rainfall patterns around the world. If the Super El Niño of 1877-1878 killed 50 million people when the global population was just a fraction of what it is today, what would an even more powerful Super El Niño do?
An associate professor at Washington State University is telling us that “multiyear droughts similar to those in the 1870s could happen again”…Estimates indicate the resulting scarcity of food and disease outbreaks killed up to four per cent of the Earth’s population at the time. That would be the equivalent of at least 250 million people if it happened today. Now, forecasts suggest water temperatures could potentially exceed 3°C (5.4°F) above average later this year – making the upcoming super El Niño even more powerful than the one nearly 150 years ago. ‘Simultaneous multiyear droughts similar to those in the 1870s could happen again,’ Deepti Singh, associate professor at Washington State University, told the Washington Post.
Worldwide food production was already going to be way down this year due to the global fertilizer crisis. Now an immensely powerful “Super El Niño” is being added to the equation. What do you think that all of this is going to do to food prices? Needless to say, the answer is obvious. We are in far more trouble than most people realize, but for now most of the population just continues to party."
Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson, McGovern - Weekly Wrap 22-May"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 5/22/26
"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson, McGovern -
Weekly Wrap 22-May"
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"'The Real War Begins Now' - Israeli Cities Under Fire as Iran Warns"
Scott Ritter, 5/22/26
"'The Real War Begins Now' -
Israeli Cities Under Fire as Iran Warns"
"The real war begins now." Five words from Iranian leadership that represent the most consequential strategic communication of this entire conflict. Not a threat. Not rhetoric. An announcement that the preparation phase is complete - and that everything that came before was just the softening. Having spent over a decade inside military intelligence studying Iranian strategic doctrine, I can tell you: the timing of this announcement is the announcement itself. Iran waited until every element of Israeli defensive capacity had been reduced before declaring the real war had begun."
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Col. Douglas Macgregor, 5/22/26
"Netanyahu Declares Emergency As
Iran Attack Cripples All Israel Defenses"
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Larry Johnson & Col. Wilkerson, 5/22/26
"Iran's Unseen Move:
US Laser Destroyers Can't Stop What's Coming"
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"At A Time Like This..."
"At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. "
- Frederick Douglass
"There Are Times..."
“If the sun is shining, stand in it - yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass - they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life… There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.”
- Jeanette Winterson
"Native American Elder Shares How to Make Your Last Years the Best of Your Life"
Full screen recommended.
"Native American Elder Shares How to
Make Your Last Years the Best of Your Life"
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Paulo Coelho, "Killing Our Dreams"
"Killing Our Dreams"
by Paulo Coelho
"The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams is the lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the Good Fight.
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
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