Hey! They've got something big for you, too, Good Citizen!
Same as it always was, same as it always will be...
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Saturday, July 18, 2026
"You Won't Believe the Amount of Insanity Hitting the U.S. This August"
Full screen recommended.
Finance Economist, 7/18/26
"You Won't Believe the Amount of
Insanity Hitting the U.S. This August"
"You won't believe the amount of insanity hitting the U.S. this August. Oil executives just warned the White House that petroleum inventories are at "tank bottom." Exxon's senior VP warned Brent crude could hit $150 to $160 per barrel. Gas is at $4.26 and climbing. The IEA confirms 10.5 million barrels per day of Gulf production is offline and demand exceeds supply by 1.78 million barrels per day. The personal savings rate collapsed to 2.6 percent, the lowest since before COVID. Twenty-nine percent of Americans are financing groceries on installment plans. The New York Fed warned last week that nearly half of all businesses have more tariff price increases planned. The $5 trillion debt ceiling raise from the OBBBA will be burned through in just two years. Hurricane season peaks in August while the grid is already under extreme stress. Texas came within 4 minutes of total grid collapse in 2021. The first official data on healthcare coverage losses and SNAP cuts is expected this summer. The CBO projects 5 million will lose insurance. And Congress goes on recess in August with nobody in Washington to manage any of it. Seven converging pressures in one month on a consumer who has $170 a month left in savings."
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Adventures With Danno, "Shocking Prices At Sam's Club"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/18/26
"Shocking Prices At Sam's Club"
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o
Meanwhile, in a sane, civilzed society...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell ,11/8/25
"I Went To Russia's Newest
Discount Supermarket: Chizhik"
"What does the newest supermarket in Russia look like in 2026? Join me as I visit a brand new supermarket in Moscow, Russia. Chizhik Supermarket is a new chain store that has just opened its 3,000th store in only 5 years of trading."
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"Walmart Just Got Caught... And Everyone Knew Something Was Wrong"
The Unfolded States, 7/18/26
"Walmart Just Got Caught...
And Everyone Knew Something Was Wrong"
"Walmart meat overcharging concerns exploded after packaged ham was found weighing far less than the amount printed on its label. One package labeled at four point nine three pounds registered only one point eight three pounds on a Walmart store scale, raising serious questions about grocery price accuracy. This video examines the mislabeled meat at Walmart case, including the repeated three point one pound discrepancies found across several Kentucky Legend ham packages. We calculate how much customers could have overpaid, review how store employees responded, and separate confirmed evidence from claims that remain unproven.
We also examine Kentucky Legend’s explanation, Walmart’s refund response, previous weighted grocery settlements, and the control gap between supplier labeling and retailer oversight. The evidence confirms an incorrect package weight problem, but it does not prove a deliberate nationwide scheme. More importantly, the case shows how supplier errors can reach store shelves when packaged meat labeling controls fail. You will also learn how shoppers can document suspicious weights, request verification, preserve receipts, and report unresolved discrepancies to local weights and measures authorities. Subscribe for more evidence based consumer investigations, and share your opinion below. Who should verify the weight before a product is sold, the supplier, Walmart, or both?"
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Dan, I Allegedly, "Get Ready to Go to Jail"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 7/18/26
"Get Ready to Go to Jail"
"Millions of dollars in COVID relief were meant to keep businesses alive, but investigators now say massive fraud took place through PPP loans and EIDL loans. The SBA, Department of Justice, FBI, and Inspector General are aggressively pursuing fraudulent applications, with hundreds of thousands of loans under investigation. If you thought this story was over, think again. In today's video I break down the latest SBA fraud investigations, whistleblower rewards, PPP loan fraud, EIDL fraud, taxpayer losses, business news, and why many people could soon face criminal charges. We also discuss the housing market, pending home sales, restaurant closures, and other important business and financial news that impacts all Americans."
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"China’s Beidou Satellite System is a Game Changer in Iran’s War with the US"
Click image for larger size.
"China’s Beidou Satellite System
is a Game Changer in Iran’s War with the US"
by Larry C. Johnson
"Hat tip to Kevin Wamsley of Inside China Business. His recent video explaining the importance of China’s Beidou satellite navigation system provides a critical insight into the current success of Iran’s missile strikes on US and Israeli targets. It is a game changer. Here’s the video:
Let me summarize it. During the 12-day war in June 2025, Iranian missiles and drones struggled against sophisticated Israeli and American electronic warfare. GPS jamming and spoofing repeatedly disrupted their guidance systems, limiting their effectiveness during the intense 12-day conflict. Fast-forward to early 2026, and the battlefield dynamics had shifted dramatically. Iran’s precision strikes began threading through advanced air defenses, hitting high-value targets across the Gulf with surprising accuracy. Intelligence analysts pointed to one key factor: Iran had ditched GPS for China’s Beidou satellite navigation system.
The US unwittingly provided the spark that ignited China’s quest for the Beidou. The story begins in 1993 when a single Chinese container ship, the Yinhe, sailing to Iran, the vessel was accused by the CIA of carrying chemicals for weapons production. Middle Eastern ports, under pressure from the US, refused entry and the ship was stranded in the Indian Ocean. The US not only pressured allies but reportedly disabled the ship’s GPS access, forcing it to drop anchor for weeks. Inspections in Saudi Arabia eventually cleared the vessel, but China received no apology or compensation.
This humiliation - losing navigation mid-ocean due to reliance on a foreign-controlled system -became a pivotal lesson for Beijing. It accelerated development of an independent satellite navigation network: Beidou (BDS).
ͦ BDS-1 (2000s) provided initial regional coverage.
ͦ BDS-2 expanded capabilities.
ͦ BDS-3 (completed around 2020) transformed it into a global powerhouse with dozens of satellites, far more ground stations (especially in the Global South), and superior accuracy in many regions compared to GPS.
Today, Beidou outperforms GPS in coverage and precision across roughly 165 countries, offering a resilient alternative that cannot be unilaterally jammed or spoofed by Western powers.
After the 2025 conflict exposed vulnerabilities in GPS-dependent systems, Iran moved decisively. By late 2025 or early 2026, it integrated Beidou into its missile and drone arsenals. Reports from March 2026 already highlighted dramatic improvements: Iranian munitions evaded electronic countermeasures that had worked months earlier.
Key advantages of Beidou for Iran include:
ͦ Resistance to jamming/spoofing - Advanced frequency-hopping and anti-interference tech.
ͦ Higher accuracy - Circular error probable under 5 meters in key regions, enabling precise strikes with fewer munitions.
ͦ Real-time command - Secure messaging allows mid-flight adjustments over long distances.
This upgrade has contributed significantly to Iran’s ability to penetrate US defenses in the Gulf countries and dramatically improved Iran’s ability to strike critical targets, which has undermined confidence in US security guarantees in the Gulf.
The US decision to use GPS as a weapon in 1993 has backfired spectacularly - proof that humiliating China inspired a technological leap that now gives China and its allies a strategic advantage over the US."
Scott Ritter, "To All Americans: Brace for the Blast!"
Scott Ritter, 7/17/26
"To All Americans: Brace for the Blast!"
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Friday, July 17, 2026
Canadian Prepper, "Urgent: The Iran War Is About To Explode"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 7/17/26
"Urgent: The Iran War Is About To Explode"
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The Poet: Wendell Berry, "A Warning To My Readers”
"A Warning To My Readers”
“Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.”
- Wendell Berry
Musical Interlude: Spirit Tribe Awakening, "Raise Positive Vibration"
Full screen recommended.
Spirit Tribe Awakening, "Raise Positive Vibration"
"Peaceful, empowering and soothing music and nature to nurture your mind, body, and soul. Supporting and empowering you on your life journey. 528Hz positive energy healing music with 417Hz Solfeggio frequency. These frequencies have a specific healing effect on your subconscious mind." Be kind to yourself, savor this extraordinarily beautiful video. Headphones recommended, not required.
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident.
The featured exposure covers a sky area several times the size of the full moon. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six of the sister stars visible to the unaided eye. The actual number of Pleiades stars visible, however, may be more or less than seven, depending on the darkness of the surrounding sky and the clarity of the observer's eyesight."
The Poet: John Jefferson, “Wounded But Not Slain”
“Wounded But Not Slain”
“I am wounded but I am not slain.
I’m bruised and faint they say…
I shall lay me down and bleed a while,
then I shall rise and fight again.
Just let me lie and bleed awhile;
I’ll not be long this way.
My Spirit’s low and my eyes flow.
My heart is sad and sore;
But when my pen’ent tears are gone,
I’ll stand and fight some more.
I’ll bind these wounds; I’ll dry these tears;
I’ll close this bleeding vein;
I’ll not lie here and weep and die:
I’ll rise and fight again.
‘Twas yesterday I bowed so low,
Was weak from tears and pain;
Today I’m strong; my fears are gone;
Today I fight again.”
- John Jefferson
o
“You cannot kill me here. Bring your soldiers, your death, your disease, your collapsed economy because it doesn’t matter, I have nothing left to lose and you cannot kill me here. Bring the tears of orphans and the wails of a mother’s loss, bring your God damn air force and Jesus on a cross, bring your hate and bitterness and long working hours, bring your empty wallets and love long since gone but you cannot kill me here. Bring your sneers, your snide remarks and friendships never felt, your letters never sent, your kisses never kissed, cigarettes smoked to the bone and cancer killing fears but you cannot kill me here. For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. Because you cannot kill me here.”
- Iain S. Thomas
"How Did It Get So Crazy, So Fast?"
"How Did It Get So Crazy, So Fast?"
by John Wilder
"One of the comments on a post a few weeks back asked a pretty good question: “How did we get so crazy, so fast?” The answer actually involves several intertwining threads, mice, Soviets, and gasoline engines, so let’s see of we can weave a web that covers at least a chunk of what has made us so crazy, so quickly. This is a distillation of the last seven years’ worth of study and writing, so some of it might be pretty familiar. Also, it’s not necessarily complete yet, but here are the major threads that I see that have led to what Heinlein called The Crazy Years.
First: Societal Malaise Due to Abundance: I’ve written several times about John Bumpass (that’s his real middle name according to the Internet) Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment, see immediately below this paragraph for links to two previous posts. The short summary is Dr. Calhoun asked a crazy question: what would happen if you gave a population of mice everything they could want: food, water, freedom from predation, space to live, bedding material, and places to make nests.
The result? The mice died out. At a certain point they stopped mating, mother mice stopped taking care of infant mice, gangs formed, and some mice (the “beautiful ones”) just spent their time grooming themselves and not really interacting. If this sounds like Reddit® or TikTok™ or the Democratic National Convention, well, you’re right. For a certain subset of the population, abundance has ruined them.
I think it started in the 1960s. I’m just guessing. I like to blame the hippies, so they’re likely the early-version. It then continued into the wildest era of abundance the world has ever seen: the 1990s. If you look at any time lapse, that’s when the United States started leading the world (it has spread now, literally) in having obesity, not hunger, be the bigger (pun intended) health problem.
I think this started to manifest itself, big time, in the music of the 1990s. We went from Warrant singing about Cherry Pie to Kurt Cobain mumbling about how living in the suburbs with all the Pop Tarts™ his fat face could eat was killing him. Turns out that shotguns are even more deadly than Pop Tarts©. Who knew? We had a generation that was lost because they had everything. I think a candidate for the hallmark phrase of this Crazy Cause is: “Why are we even here, dude?”
Second: Societal Anxiety Due to No Challenges: I recently made the comment on X® that a lot of people would e better off if they had been bullied as kids. Was I serious? Yeah, I was. One response was, “Why do you want to make things worse?”
The truth is, for me, that bullies actually helped me build my character and my resolve. And, believe it or not, sometimes the bullies were right and the things that they bullied me about (second graders can be assholes) were things I needed to fix to be a better person. Did I lift harder to get stronger because of it? Yes. Did I develop the internal resilience so that the people who (rightfully) bullied the smarmy second grader that I was eventually earned the respect of the bullies?
Yes. Males, even young males, need to develop a hierarchy and understand their place in it and why they are inferior to Chuck Norris.
No child is born perfect, and it is the challenges in life that help define and develop character. Without challenge, development is stunted.
I think that today’s twentysomethings have the problem that they look into a future that certainly looks grim to them, yet they’ve never had a chance to develop their character and are told again and again how perfect they are and how their choices are important.
Newsflash: the choices of a second grader generally deserve about as much attention as the choices my dog wants to make. Both will eat all of the cake in the house if you let them and make messes everywhere. It’s our job as parents to not care what they think when it’s important to develop character and virtue.
As a society we face many of the same problems: what is it we stand for and what are we trying to accomplish? We don’t have Soviets to fight, we’re actively encouraging invaders into our country to replace us, and we don’t have any cool national purpose like the Apollo program. I think a candidate for the catchphrase of this crazy cause is: “Why am I so worthless?”
Third: Societal Atomization Due To Tech: As humans, we have minds that are built around smaller social systems, mainly. The big move from rural to urban happened in the west only recently. Our legacy social structure is (mainly) to live in a town for a very long time, put down roots, make friends, make a reputation.
Most people aren’t leaders, they’re followers, and want to be led. Why else would sane people want zoning regulations? But now, put us in a constantly churning urban landscape where we don’t know the next-door-neighbor in the apartment building? Who do we turn to? Well, whatever latenightjokeman says or whatever TikTik™ says or whatever InstaFace© allows to be printed. People are defining themselves on how YouTube™ says Europeans feel about Donald Trump.
They are also allowed to pick whatever gender they are. How do I know tech is driving this? Back when COVID made everyone homeschooled, transgenderism dropped. Why? No one to identify to – which is why “transwomen” with no girl parts get offended when gynecologists won’t give them appointments. Yes. That’s a thing.
The iPhone™ is a big driver. It puts connections in the hands of kids. I talked with one Millennial, and he said that at the start of his high school career, kids “cruised main” looking for other kids. By the end of high school, it was all phones. Friendships dropped, and dating dropped. Mix that with the first two causes above, and it leads to fewer kids.
Dating sites magnify this, and make every girl “4” think that she deserves a Chad ranked 9 or higher because one time a drunk Chad had sex with her. This leads to Chads being happy, but girls being sad and hollow inside. I think a catchphrase for this Crazy Cause is “Who or what the heck am I?”
Result of these interacting strands of Crazy are a large number of people who:
• Stand for nothing.
• Have no examples of virtue other than seeking money in their lives.
• See no point in anything other than the present moment.
• Are distracted.
• Think they’re too good for PEZ™.
• Are filled with the combination of anxiety and narcissism.
• Do and feel whatever the media tells them to do.
• Haven’t built social circles of any particular strength – clubs and churches are on constant decline.
There’s good news. All of this is self-limiting. We’re not mice, and plenty of good humans haven’t fallen into Calhoun’s Behavioral Sink. Many of those same people have overcome challenges sufficient to shape their character for the better. Finally, there are enough of us that don’t follow. We lead. Or we choose our own path. And? We’re gonna win."
"H.L. Mencken Explains American Idiocracy 100 Years Ago"
"H.L. Mencken Explains
American Idiocracy 100 Years Ago"
by Joey Clark
"I am happy to report one of my favorite H.L. Mencken quotes has been making the rounds again on social media: “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Though I am happy to see people exposed to Mencken’s political invective in any dosage no matter how small, I worry many are not quite getting the point. I fear they may only be wading into the shallow end of the pool. So, allow me to now baptize you in the dangerous depths of Mencken’s political cynicism.
Forgive me if you are reading this and have already been christened in these rarified waters. If so, I say bravo! Encore! I suppose it won’t hurt to be christened again. I try to do so weekly. One can never be too certain about one’s political soul.
The modern use of Mencken’s “moron” quote almost always seems to focus on the hilarious punchline – the “downright moron” label applying to a particular president or presidential candidate – without paying enough attention to the setup. Not only is a president being called idiotic; so too is the whole democratic ideal itself.
According to Mencken, mass democracy and the culture it produces marches us towards conformity, folly, and stupidity. So, the question remains – why, as “democracy is perfected,” does the inner soul of the people reflect morondom? Well, Mencken provides a full answer in his 1920 essay (the source of his “moron” quote) on the presidential election of that year, “Bayard and Lionheart.”
Given the way Mencken speaks of the candidates – Warren Harding and James Cox – he might as well be describing Biden or Trump. “Neither candidate reveals the slightest dignity of conviction,” writes Mencken. “Neither cares a hoot for any discernible principle. Neither, in any intelligible sense, is a man (now "person") of honor.”
However, Mencken then takes a turn. He shifts his focus away from the gladiators in the arena and onto the blood-thirsty spectators. He reminds us that democracy is not about the propagation of diverse and sound ideas, but winning votes at all costs. And how does one win votes?
“Of the two candidates, that one wins who least arouses the suspicions and distrusts of the great masses of simple men,” writes Mencken. “Well, what are more likely to arouse those suspicions and distrusts than ideas, convictions, principles? The plain people are not hostile to shysterism, save it be gross and unsuccessful… But they shy instantly and inevitably from the man who comes before them with notions that they cannot immediately translate into terms of their everyday delusions; they fear the novel idea, and particularly the revolutionary idea, as they fear the devil.”
Mencken goes on to venture that this fear of ideas is a “peculiarly democratic phenomenon” which has been perfected in America, a country that has developed the doctrine of “right-thinking” with a “singular passion for conformity” and “dread of novelty and originality in almost every aspect of life.”
If one is not in agreement with the right thinking of the time, then one is immediately suspect, “...any novel idea, in any field of human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men.”
Mencken continues: “Such tests arise inevitably out of democracy – the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob emotions. In private life no man of sense would think of applying them. We do not estimate the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to accept our ideas; we estimate him by the honesty and effectiveness with which he maintains his own. All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own. But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental – men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost.”
That said, we can now craft a simple formulation for why, according to Mencken, the White House will one day “be adorned by a downright moron.”
• Democracy offers power to the masses.
• With power on offer, the masses come to care more about winning power than the free expression of ideas.
• With winning as the goal, all novel ideas take a back seat to conformity, virtue signaling, and emotional appeals.
• With the rules of the mob now set as such, only the most empty-headed or hucksterish politicians rise to the top.
• And finally, as this process is perfected and the democratic populace expanded, fewer and fewer ideas will matter until we have reached the land of Morondom with the president as our idiot idol.
So, the next time you wish to quote Henry Louis Mencken to call some president a moron, feel free, but I hope you understand it is the American people’s common love of mass democracy that has brought us to this “great and glorious day.”
If you would like to know more about Mencken, read this definitive essay by Murray Rothbard, called “H.L. Mencken: The Joyous Libertarian.”
"Mass Layoffs Are About to Destroy the Job Market in 2026"
Full screen recommended.
The Unfolded States, 7/17/26
"Mass Layoffs Are About to
Destroy the Job Market in 2026"
"Mass layoffs 2026 are exposing a dangerous shift in the American labor market, but the biggest threat is not simply how many workers are being fired. It is what happens when slower hiring, longer unemployment, and AI restructuring make comparable jobs harder to find. This video examines major job cuts involving Microsoft, Walmart, Rogers Communications, General Motors, and reported restructuring plans at Volkswagen. It compares corporate layoff announcements with Bureau of Labor Statistics data, long term unemployment, job openings, and the low hire, low fire economy. You will see how artificial intelligence, outsourcing, automation, hiring freezes, and team consolidation can reduce head counts without always appearing as traditional layoffs. We also explore the human cost of job loss, from depleted savings and housing commitments to lower salary offers and heavier workloads. The 2026 job market has not collapsed everywhere, but displaced technology and white collar workers may face a slower, colder, and less forgiving path back to stable employment."
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"Nobody Can Afford Their Old Life Anymore And Everyone's Finally Saying It Out Loud"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 7/17/26
"Nobody Can Afford Their Old Life Anymore
And Everyone's Finally Saying It Out Loud"
"The cost of living crisis in America, told by the people living it. Eighteen ordinary Americans, one story: full-time work and nothing left at the end of the month. Inside this video: an eviction notice with $800 still missing, furniture abandoned because moving costs more than the furniture is worth, overdraft fees charged to people who already have no money, rent that went from $500 to $3,000 on a wage that barely doubled, and junk fees for everything the rent already promised. The data backs them up. The Brookings Institution found 45.5% of U.S. households couldn't cover basic needs in 2024.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition counts just 34 affordable rentals for every 100 of the poorest renters. The National Association of Realtors' affordability index fell below 100 — the typical American family now earns less than a median home costs. This was never a spending problem. It's a transfer - the same house, the same shift, the same paycheck, quietly repriced so more of it flows upward every month."
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John Wilder, "Six Strange Life Lessons from Completely Unexpected Sources"
"Six Strange Life Lessons from
Completely Unexpected Sources"
by John Wilder
“Well, you see, I’m not saying that I’ve been everywhere and done everything, but I do know it’s a pretty amazing planet we live on here and a man would have to be some kind of fool to think we’re all alone in this Universe.” – "Big Trouble in Little China"
Wisdom doesn’t always wear a tweed jacket with those leather elbow patches, smoke a pipe, and sit and stare in silent judgement over me for hours like the ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien after I do an Internet search for “sexy elves”. Sometimes wisdom comes from a “low-effort because I’m tired after travelling listicle-post”, so here we go...
Trees: Sometimes Just Hanging Around Is a Win: There are roughly three trillion trees on Earth. That’s more trees than there are stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy. I did not make that up, and was surprised when I found out. Most people like trees, but as I’m trying to clean out the forest next to Stately Wilder Manor that I have dubbed Mordor because, “One does not simply walk into Mordor.”
I think too much about trees. They don’t hustle. They don’t network. They don’t chase trends or pay bills. They just stand there, year after year, doing their job of being an impenetrable forest. That’s it. That’s the lesson. I don’t always have to be grinding, optimizing, or “leveling up.” Long-term presence and quiet consistency beat frantic motion most of the time. Trees have been winning at this game for millions of years while the rest of us burn out trying to do everything at once.
Health: Rest and recovery aren’t laziness. They’re how you stay standing when the storms hit.
Wealth: Patient compounding usually destroys the guy who’s constantly chasing the next hot thing.
Happiness: Sometimes the real win is just refusing to move.
While I’m doom-scrolling and stressing, the trees are out here quietly outnumbering the stars. Maybe I should take the hint.
Jack Burton: You Don’t Need to Know Everything to Be the Hero: Jack Burton from "Big Trouble in Little China" is the ultimate example. Definitely not the one with the master plan. He spends most of the movie confused, cracking bad jokes, but yet swinging when it counts. And he still ends up the hero. The lesson is simple: I don’t have to understand every variable or have the perfect strategy. Show up, stay calm when things get weird, and do the next right thing even though I don’t know where everything will end up. That’s often enough.
Health: Consistent basic effort beats analysis paralysis every single time.
Wealth: Good habits and showing up regularly compound.
Life: Confidence and action usually beat having every answer.
Jack Burton didn’t know what the hell was going on half the time. He just kept driving the truck, killing the bad guys, and going with the flow. That sometimes works better than the time I spend overthinking.
Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia: 2026 Update: Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia.
Cats: They Domesticated Themselves and Only Talk When It Matters: Domestic cats basically moved in with humans on their own terms. They showed up, handled the rats, and let us feed them. Over time we got attached. Adult cats almost never meow to other cats. They save that sound almost exclusively for humans. That’s strategic communication. They know their audience. They don’t waste energy performing for everyone. They focus where it actually gets results.
Health: Prioritize the relationships and habits that actually support me instead of trying to please the whole world who mostly don’t care if I live or die.
Wealth: Don’t chase every opportunity or person. Focus on the ones that pay off.
Happiness: Authenticity and selective effort beat trying to be liked by everyone.
Cats didn’t ask permission to be part of the household. They just made themselves useful and trained the humans. Then they only spoke up when it was worth their time. Take notes.
Everyone Remembers Godzilla. Nobody Remembers the Heroes. In decades of Godzilla movies, the giant monster is the star. The scientists in lab coats, the soldiers, the regular people trying to stop the destruction as Godzilla stomps his way across Tokyo? They’re mostly forgotten five minutes after the credits roll. Action gets all the attention. Quiet, steady competence rarely does. Yet, the lab coat guys are usually the ones who actually prevent total collapse.
Health: The boring daily consistency is what actually changes bodies but having 16” biceps never hurts.
Wealth: Nobody remembers the millionaire dentist, but everyone remembers Elon.
Life: Being the reliable one who prevents disaster is more valuable than being the one causing the spectacle, but the only one they’ll remember is the one putting on the show.
“Why?” Is Still the Most Powerful Question: Four-year-olds drive adults crazy because they will not stop asking it. “Why is the sky blue?” “Why do I have to go to bed?” “Why can’t I have ice cream for dinner?”They haven’t yet learned to accept stupid answers and are not yet smart enough to cope with the mathematics of Rayleigh scattering. It’s annoying. But it’s also their superpower. I try to never lose the habit of asking why. It cuts through marketing, propaganda, bad habits, and bad advice.
Wealth: Ask why people think that spending $700 billion on data centers makes sense and if they’re such a great deal why are the hyperscalers selling majority stakes in them.
Life: Questioning things is how I attempt to stay sharp and avoid walking into obvious traps. Kids ask “why” until adults either give a real answer or get annoyed because their small brains are too young to understand a simple equation:
Wisdom doesn’t need a stage or a book deal. Sometimes it’s standing quietly in a forest hating trees, driving the Pork Chop Express through minority-owned businesses, training humans without asking permission, not getting involved in land wars in Asia, causing glorious messes, or just refusing to stop asking questions. Now back to those elves..."
"The Peanut and the Philosopher"
"The Peanut and the Philosopher"
by Joel Bowman
“Whom the gods love dies young.”
~ Herodotus (c. 445 B.C.) ...
and also Billy Joel, from "The Stranger" (1977)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Last night, beneath somber heavens, we laid to rest a source of laughter, light and love in our little family. Peanut, dear daughter’s Syrian hamster, is finally liberated from her wheel, with which she had such a complicated, love-hate relationship. Enshrouded in one of dad’s old undershirts, she was buried with a leather scarab beetle, “an homage to the Egyptians,” in a friend’s backyard, her initial’s “PB” embroidered with love and care. And inscribed on her humble cardboard coffin, in duly devoted cursive, an epitaph which brought a tear to your author’s eye:
Here lies the picture of purity and sublimity, returned to the earth.
R.I.P. Peanut (June, 2024 ~ July, 2026)
Yes, dear reader, a lot has happened since we last wrote you. Life and death... peace and war... love and loss. But still the world turns, and so we are left to make sense of the incomprehensible nature of what remains on it.
Last week we offered a few theories (not our own) on how to interpret the past... so that we might better understand where we are all headed. What is the engine of history, we puzzled? What drives a civilization forward? And how will we know if we ever “get there”? Many are the theories, hunches and hypotheses regarding the big questions; few are the truly valuable insights. As H.L. Mencken once wrote: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
Anti-Social Existence: At the tippy-top of the Wrong Heap, as near as we can tell, sits Karl Marx. Having “successfully” inverted Hegel’s dialectic, Marx began his analysis of history from the idea that it was man’s material conditions which determined his ability to think and act, not the other way around. As he (and Engels) wrote in "The German Ideology": “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” And from this one sentence springs forth one of the most dangerous theories in all human history: historical materialism.
The key lies in the phrase “social existence.” For Marx, human beings are inextricably bound to their material circumstances. Our ideas, values, and understanding of the world arise not independently of our economic lives, but largely as a direct result of them.
Little surprise, then, that everywhere Marx looked in the vast expanse of the cold, material world, he saw conflict... master and slave... bourgeoisie and proletariat... capital and labor, and so on. Society, reckoned he, is divided into a dominant class that controls the means of production (wealth and property) and a subordinate class that provides the labor.
As for cooperation... collaboration... mutually beneficial exchange... Marx saw only forced exploitation, the reductionist “people over profits” slogans you might find scrawled on a placard at a Zohran Mamdani rally for so-called “studies” students and other socialist soap-dodgers.
Only the Good Die Young: A moocher... an adulterer... a wastrel with other people’s money... an absent father... an arrogant hypocrite of bourgeois pomp and habit... Marx was many things. But a man of subtlety and nuance he was not. Unable to see the individual for the crowd, one person’s unique skill held little value for him. A unit of labor was a unit of labor, plain and simple. Which is undoubtedly why, for instance, his “labor theory of value” is so plainly and simply wrong.
Marx claimed a product’s value derived from the labor units that went into manufacturing it, an intellectually digestible concept reserved for only the most cerebrally lax. Your editor might sit at his piano a hundred lifetimes and not compose a tune like (his namesake) Billy Joel’s classic Only the Good Die Young, from his 1977 album, The Stranger.
By Marx’s calculation, the respective products of our labor – Billy’s and Joel’s – remain equal so long as we spend the same time tinkering at the keys, a proposition only the foolish, the deaf or the dishonest could possibly countenance. As dear readers well know, beauty resides as much in the ear of the listener as it does the eye of the beholder. So too for value.
It was the Austrian School economist, Carl Menger, who first proposed a workable alternative to Marx’s specious claptrap. Rejecting the “cost-base” (labor) value theories of the classical economists, Marx last among them, Menger posited a new perspective entirely: Man as the measure of all things. Goods are valuable, he asserted, because they serve various uses whose importance differs with regards to individual preference.
The Eye of the Beholder: Menger’s insights influenced many subsequent thinkers, including Ludwig von Mises, who perhaps set the record straight in clearer terms. Value, as Mises described it, was not determined by the nature of objects in a humanless vacuum, Marx’s purely “material world,” as some elemental component within the thing itself. “Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things,” he argued in Human Action. “It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment.”
In this manner, one good has value over another not because it is intrinsically bestowed… but because we afford it value through our interaction with – and appreciation for – its various properties. Who among men, dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, would not trade all the riches in the world for a drop of life-sustaining water?
We understand intuitively that, depending on the moment in time and the particular circumstances attending it, an ounce of gold can be a blessing (as in times of hyperinflation or political uncertainty) or a curse (as it was for the ill-fated King Midas). In the end, we find that life is not so easily reduced to units of labor or hours at the office, much less on the proverbial hamster wheel... but in the love and joy and value we bring to others along the way. In this way can a Peanut outshine a philosopher.
Of course, Marx was not the only man with a boneheaded theory of the way the world worked. We’ll take a look at a few of his contemporaries next time ‘round. As always, stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."
"How It Really Is"
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"Everybody Talks Too Damn Much"
"Seems like everybody’s got an opinion these days… and nobody’s listening. “Everybody Talks Too Damn Much” is a witty, old-school Delta King’s Blues tune about endless chatter, loud opinions, and missing the days when silence was just as valuable as words. A laid-back, front-porch acoustic guitar settles into a relaxed groove like a man quietly sipping coffee while the world argues around him. The harmonica answers with dry, knowing bends, saying more in a few notes than most folks say all day. The rhythm rolls slow and easy, built for people who’ve learned that wisdom usually speaks softly. This is blues for folks who’d rather hear birds sing than another pointless argument. For those who know that listening is becoming a lost art. The older I get, the less I want noise… and the more I appreciate a little peace and quiet."
"There Was Truth..."
"Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth
even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
- George Orwell, “1984”
Jim Kunstler, "Acceleration"
"Acceleration"
by Jim Kunstler
“.The Democrat Party. . . are morally bankrupt nincompoops who
have been beaten by the establishment like the rented mules they are. “
- Kurt Schlichter on X
"Strange to relate, in last night’s speech to the nation on election chicanery, President Trump managed to both overwhelm and underwhelm public expectation. He touched on voting machine shenanigans, registration skullduggery, cyber-fuckery, labor union toolery, ballot fraud, and especially China meddling.
Internal CIA / FBI docs at the time said that China’s policy around the 2020 US election was to “leverage all domestic and foreign elements” opposed to the President to prevent his re-election. The Intel bunch never sent that memo to the White House. They were too busy pushing fake Russia meddling, fake impeachment, and a fake Covid-19 pandemic. Then they declared that the 2020 was “the most secure election in history.”
As of yesterday, the President de-classified many thousands of Intel agency documents for the public (and news media) to peruse. And naturally, the major cable news networks (except Fox) declined to broadcast the speech. As of Friday morning, The New York Times leads the offensive to disparage the actual news.
He’s Obsessed, that Trump! The actual news: China hacked over 220-million voter registrations, plus social security files; manufactured and shipped tens of thousands of fake US driver’s licenses to be used in motor-voter states; and paid favored US journalists to write negative articles about Mr. Trump. The Department of Homeland Security reported 278,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in federal elections. But that number was compiled only from states that complied with DOJ demands for voter rolls. California, New York, and Illinois and many other states refused, so the number is probably more than double the DHS figure.
The big take-away was that US Intel agencies withheld all this intel from the President of the US, Mr. Trump, in the lead-up to the 2020 vote. Yes, there really is a Deep State, as seen starkly in a now-declassified memo from the then-chief of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, one Nikki Floris, who wrote “I’m basically running a shadow government at this point” by hiding information from POTUS. Ms. Floris is now employed as Microsoft’s Director of Insider Risk (former Deputy Attorney General under “Joe Biden,” Lisa Monaco, is President of Microsoft Global Affairs.)
According to the NY Post’s Miranda Devine, in August 2020, Nikki Floris also tried to hoodwink Senators Chuck Grassley and Rob Johnson, telling them the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian op — a gag later ratified by fifty-one former intel officers (including five former CIA Directors) who signed the notorious October letter to the news media. All of this activity, Mr. Trump averred, amounted to a cover-up of a conspiracy by members of the permanent bureaucracy to overthrow the government. And that is exactly why more than one federal grand jury is convened in Fort Pierce, Florida, right now, to sort out who, exactly, is going to account for these rather grave crimes. The new document release is apt to accelerate the work of US Attorneys there, since declassification is the biggest routine holdup in the process.
On the “underwhelming” side of the president’s speech, there was little mention of the swing-state ballot fraud enabled and conducted by local election officials in Fulton County, Georgia, Maricopa County, Arizona, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Antrim County, Michigan, Mesa County, Colorado, and Philadelphia, PA. But you know that the FBI raided Fulton County election headquarters months ago and seized around 700 boxes of evidence, and then reassigned 260 FBI agents to examine all the material. All that might still be to-come.
Then there is the question of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden winkled out of China over the years before the 2020 election - records of which were stuffed in his infamous laptop, along with photos and video of his sexual exploits there - and whether Hunter’s father, Joe, was a blackmail captive of China leading up to that election. Stay tuned on that.
Altogether, Mr. Trump’s speech and document drops are obviously an effort to move election reform, the Save America Act, through Congress, where it has languished in a procedural miasma for months due to one man: Senate Majority Leader John Thune. The President’s emphasis last night on China’s election meddling is purposeful in ways not broadly apprehended, but I will tell you:
If Congress does not find a way to vote that bill out to Mr. Trump’s desk before they recess for the rest of the summer in late July, Mr. Trump will invoke an executive order under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) - Public Law 94-412; codified at 50 U.S.C. §§ 1601–1651 - requiring the fifty states to employ all the same provisions that are in the SAVE America Act for the 2026 midterm elections. Under the NEA, the federal courts cannot be used to fight or strike down the executive order; it can only be stopped by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate.
If that is the course that this takes, you can expect Antifa and the Democratic-Socialist foot-soldiers to take to the streets this fall in a violently-amplified episode of “No Kings” demonstrations - because fair and honest elections with citizens-only voting will mean the end of the Democratic Party, and they know it. Last night’s move by President Trump is only the opening bid of a quickening game against the Deep State, and their partners-in-sedition. The game is gonna get rough now."
Bill Bonner, "A Pure Bar Room Brawl"
"A Pure Bar Room Brawl"
by Bill Bonner
From the W.B.Yeats ferry to Cherbourg - "Poor Donald Trump. He hailed from Queens, not from Manhattan - separated by a few miles, the East River, and a whole cosmos of snobbery. The sophisticates, the intellectuals, the chic folk who had done their time at the Ivy League and paid their annual devotions at the Met, wrote him off as a low-bred clown. But he showed them, by God.
His father was rich. And hard as a paving-stone. And young Donald learned early the peculiar art of getting on as the son of a rich, hard man: he resolved to be richer and harder still. To that end he engaged a lawyer - Roy Cohn, celebrated far and wide for his meanness and his venom - to tutor him. “If someone hits you, you hit back 10 times as hard.” There was his code. His formula. His catechism.
The object was to win. By what means? Whatever it takes. By piling deal upon deal. By heaping up money. By slapping his name across the face of everything that would hold paint. And when some New York scribbler pricked him early in his career, Trump fired back the immortal riposte: “I get more pussy than you do.” A real gentleman, as always.
The formula produced, let us say, mixed dividends. The fresh enterprises had a tendency to go bust. The girlfriends arrived and departed like subway trains. And he passed a great deal of time with lawyers - some laboring to keep him out of trouble, the rest laboring, for a fee, to plunge him deeper into it. Honor and Shame Archive:
Donald J. Trump has built a career that is as legally entangled as it is high-profile. From lawsuits over failed casinos and construction contracts to criminal indictments concerning national security and election interference, Trump has been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits - a number unmatched by any other U.S. president in history.
But there was one arena in which the “hit back ten times as hard” gospel paid off handsomely, and that was politics. In business, cooperation pays; a man gives to get...he goes along to get along. But politics is a pure barroom brawl. Trump lost not an instant; he laid into his rivals - “little Marco,” “Pocahontas” Warren. Lindsey Graham he pronounced “one of the dumbest human beings I have ever met.”
It was refreshing. Liberating, even. Gone was the counterfeit respectability, the mincing and the bowing. No more Mr. Nice Guy. There was something strangely heart-warming in Mr. Trump at the zenith of his tawdry power - quick with the insult, sublimely confident, careening along as free and heedless as a runaway freight train down a mountain grade. We happily enjoyed the spectacle...and looked forward to its end.
The climax of the man’s existence very likely arrived in the moments after the election of 2024. For four long years Trump thundered that American elections were a swindle, a fraud, a rigged game. Yet, when the votes were tallied on the 6th of November, 2024, not one syllable of doubt escaped him. That election, mysteriously, had been won fair and square!
Mr. Trump had been given up for dead more than once in his long career. In the early ‘90s it looked a near-certainty that he would go broke. Money Digest: "Trump Shuttle airline to the casinos he opened in an attempt to capitalize on the legalization of gambling in Atlantic City. But by the early ‘90s, he was in dire straits. Trump Shuttle disappeared in 1992, and the early years of a recession sent his other businesses in a downward spiral that left him $3.4 billion in the red."
Trump’s empire of debt was saved by Alan Greenspan, who lowered the cost of borrowing and boosted the value of leveraged real estate. But after his rout in 2020, surely - surely - this time he was finished for good. Convicted of business fraud; compelled to pay out millions to settle a rape charge; impeached; hounded by prosecutors of the enemy party. How could the man claw his way back from that?
And then - lo and behold - up he rose, an angry zombie...undead...loosed from his political grave. He bellowed. He pranced. He barked and he danced. And he won the White House all over again! A wiser man would have sipped his triumph slowly and then withdrawn, with what grace he could muster, from the public stage. Pushing 80, astride the summit of the world, elected twice to the world’s highest office, there was nowhere left for him to travel but downhill.
Instead, he grasped at immortality. A triumphal arch. A Trump ballroom. “Trump Accounts.” The Trump Kennedy Center. A Trump “Board of Peace” to supplant the UN. His visage upon a $250 bill, upon the passports of the Republic, chiseled into the hard rock of Mt. Rushmore. But it all looked more like unrestrained vanity than celebrations of real achievement.
And while his bullying and bragging made him a champion at politics, at the actual business of policy, of diplomacy, of leadership, he was an unrelieved calamity. And he surrounded himself with the sorriest bunch of incompetent yes-men the White House has ever seen. Two heads are often better than one. But Trump had only his own weary noggin to consult - with precious little genuine knowledge or useful experience stored somewhere within it.
Everything ran on-again, off-again, hostage to the slow grind of the courts or the quick change of the president’s moods. Tariffs, immigration, war - scarcely had the citizen become accustomed to a program than it was reversed, revised, or repudiated. Instead of retiring the national debt with tariff revenue, as advertised, the feds now scramble merely to refund the money they seized in the first place, illegally.
DOGE, deficits, deportations, and the war upon Iran - all have arrived at very much the same destination: a great blast of trumpets at the launching, and then a whimpering neglect once the thing was quietly abandoned, withdrawn, or forgotten.
And now, poor Mr. Trump confronts an enemy that won’t give up, the courts that won’t let up, and elections that could set him up at odds with Congress. Even worse, he faces the one adversary against whom his creed and his training are both useless. There is no deal to be struck. There is no way to hit back even a single time, let alone tenfold. There is no insult on earth that will land the smallest blow.
Each passing day makes him less of what he once was - such as he was - and more of what we are all fated to become. His thoughts hang together less and less. His policies grow ever more incoherent. His speech slides, sentence by sentence, into blabber. Like it or not, he is mortal...and all mortal things decay. Life’s unkind. Poor Mr. Trump. He climbed so very high. The way down must be particularly painful."
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