Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/22/26
"Alert! War Will Restart In Days,
It's Going To Be Much Worse"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
"The Times, They are a Changin'... and Changin' and Changin'"
"The Times, They are a Changin'...
and Changin' and Changin'"
by David Haggith
"President Trump redefined his indefinite ceasefire today to a definite 3-5-day timeframe, if 3-5 days can be called definite. Yesterday the schedule was “until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.” Now it’s 3-5 days.
It happens that 3-5 days is also just the right timeframe for the arrival of the third US aircraft carrier to the gulf region. The USS George HW Bush will be back on the prowl within hunting distance of Iran’s shores by this weekend. So, the now more defined Schmeasefire extension may have just been a tactical retreat to get ready for the next round in the Iran bakeoff … or it may just be enough time for Trump’s indigestion from his last TACOfest to settle down so he can eat more TACO.
Iran stopped two cargo ships from skirting the bend in the Hormuz to escape the gulf today by firing upon them. At the same time, it skirted the US Navy with dozens of oil-laden ships of its own by going dark, turning off their transponders. Apparently that simple trick worked. Most were on their way to market from Iranian ports but a number of the tankers were headed into Iranian ports to reload - all the exact kind Trump said he would completely stop.
Donald Trump’s naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is unraveling after dozens of Iranian vessels secretly slipped past US surveillance, even as the regime tightened its grip on the critical oil passageway by attacking three tankers.
Approximately 34 Iranian oil tankers have slipped through the blockade, with 19 vessels exiting the Persian Gulf past Trump’s navy and another 15 ships entering from the Arabian Sea toward Iran, according to the Financial Times. Six of those tankers were smuggling Iranian crude oil totaling 10.7 million barrels, estimated to be worth approximately $910 million in revenue for the regime…
This all happened despite President Trump declaring the barricade a “tremendous success.” So much winning it is hard for the Prez to announce it all as quickly as it isn’t happening. You have to get the news in before the news comes out that it didn’t, or you’ll never have the chance to brag about it.
Definitive victory hard to find: I noted yesterday there have been no goal successes in Trump’s war with Iran. Objectives in this war have always been as clear as the definitely indefinite deadlines and indefinitely definite extensions of those deadlines. We have more on that in another article today:
An army of yes men, in thrall to Donald Trump’s shifts of temper and short attention span, is hampering any prospect of peace with Iran. And with the president’s indefinite extension of a ceasefire [now more definitely indefinite] being announced on Tuesday, a day after he threatened to resume bombing, the White House’s claims of success are running out of road, insiders say.
In the past 48 hours alone, the US president claimed that a deal was “close”, before then saying it was out of reach. Typifying the confusion, JD Vance, the vice-president, was still at the White House, after Trump said on Sunday that his deputy was heading to Pakistan for talks with Iranian negotiators… “No one in the administration seems to know what’s going on. What the plans are. What we’re even aiming for now. It’s all just a giant clusterf... and there’s zero accountability, either,” a Trump-world source told The Telegraph.
Even Trump’s closest aides are struggling to keep pace with his updates on Truth Social, which have generated a lot of noise but no discernible diplomatic progress…Having long passed the “four to six weeks” he said the war would take, the constant mixed messaging and exaggerated claims about a deal point to one reality: there is no clear plan. What once looked like a calculated campaign to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb has deteriorated into daily updates with no consistency.
Part of the problem may be due to the war’s religious mandates as cast by the prophets of presidential profits: Pete Hegseth, the defense war secretary, has framed the combat operations as divinely sanctioned, repeatedly invoking religious rhetoric removed from pragmatic tactics or war doctrine. The president has even claimed that Hegseth does not want the war to end, telling journalists, “Pete didn’t want [the war] to be settled”, and that he was one of the first to throw support behind the initial bombing campaign.
Indeed, Pentagon Pete and his Priesthood of Apocalypse have been telling soldiers that the purpose of the war is to bring on Armageddon so Jesus will return sooner. (See “The President’s Prophet and the Pentagon’s High Priest Predict ARMAGEDDON!”)
An objective like that might explain why it is hard for the Trumpkins in the White House to pin a timeframe on the war or its various deadlines because, as people often quote from the prophets, “No man shall know the day nor the hour” of Jesus’ return. There could, therefore, be a number of extensions needed along the way to keep realigning the times of the man in the Pentagon with the time of God.
The president, of course, is a skilled author of chaos. “His posts are what are causing the chaos,” the diplomat said. “It’s good and bad but the bad has major effects. Behind every single tweet there is a reason for posting, often at the stock market.”
Many of the time changes in this war seem to have aligned much better with the timing of massive bets in the stock market, as has been reported now several times, leading to an investigation on insider trading in the White House. Trump says one thing about a deadline, and stocks trade one way. Then he makes a surprise announcement a day or two later, changing the deadline, and that sends stocks careening in the opposite direction. The one thing that has operated like clockwork is that, each time, about fifteen minutes before Trump posts his major reversal, hundreds of millions of dollars in bets are cast in favor of the market reversing, which it always does. These have been great trades for those with the privilege to make them.
Maybe that is why the war is being fought as it is. It’s great for swinging the market wildly and betting on the swings right before you know the next announcement is coming to make it swing the other way. The people with privilege are making bank on the war.
It’s not been so great for the war: Behind the presidential podium in Cross Hall of the White House on April 1, Trump addressed the nation and told the US that its military objectives were almost complete and that the war was “very close” to being over. Yet, 21 days later – and 52 days since the first strikes were launched – the same roadblocks remain. (More to follow below on the biggest and least-recognized danger for oil in Trump’s on-and-off-again approach.)"
Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"
"Doug Casey on Tax Day, Inflation, and the War on the Middle Class"
"Doug Casey on Tax Day, Inflation,
and the War on the Middle Class"
by International Man
"International Man: Tax Day just passed on April 15th. What does it say about a society when productive people must spend part of every spring calculating how much tribute they owe the State?
Doug Casey: It's said that nothing is certain except death and taxes. But let's reserve a conversation about the inevitability of death for another day.
Taxes are not only unnecessary for running a civil society, but evil (Click here for a free copy of "Market for Liberty"). Nobody discusses the moral dimensions of taxation. People only talk about vacuous technical details. Are taxes too high or too low? Should the rich be taxed more? How should taxes be spent? People accept the institution of the State, with its coercion, taxes, and inflated currency, as part of the cosmic firmament. What passes for a philosophical discussion is whether you should support the equally loathsome Democrats or Republicans.
The "powers that be" actually want to destroy the middle class. That’s not something they’d say, but the elite would prefer a society with a small number of themselves supported by a sufficient number of proles but without a troublesome middle class. They don’t like having to rub shoulders with masses of hoi polloi when they visit St Mark’s Square in Venice or Machu Picchu in Peru. They want just enough service personnel around to make it an enjoyable experience. The elite see the middle class as an enemy and a risk to their high status. They agree with Lenin, who said the middle class should be ground between the millstones of taxes and inflation.
Lenin understood that taxes made it hard for the proletariat to accumulate capital. And since their savings are in fiat currency, inflation - a more subtle form of taxation - destroys the value of whatever they manage to save.
The State, as Mao said, comes out of the barrel of a gun. Since it’s based on coercion, it’s only natural that some form of socialism, or at least fascism - state capitalism - is their preferred way to organize society. Currency inflation, income taxes, and debt have enabled governments to get completely out of control. The prognosis is not good.
International Man: There seems to be growing public discontent over taxes. Do you see that as healthy skepticism, or the early stages of people realizing the system itself is fundamentally predatory?
Doug Casey: I'd like to believe that the average person is starting to understand that the State itself is the problem. But that would be overly optimistic. Americans have been indoctrinated over the years to think that government is benevolent, that it’s "we the people". They get to vote every four years and have the illusion that they can change things. But really, it's only a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. In the last election, the Uniparty offered Boobus Americanus the choice between Kamala Harris, simultaneously an ideological communist and a loopy dingbat. And Donald Trump, who is increasingly revealing himself as a megalomaniac and state capitalist in the tradition of Benito Mussolini. Perhaps, assuming there’s an election in 2028, we’ll be offered a choice between Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler.
International Man: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said Americans could get a "real wage increase" by adjusting their withholding. What are your thoughts on this? Does this tap into a growing public feeling that taxes have gotten so high that keeping more of your own paycheck now feels like relief?
Doug Casey: It was clever of the government to initiate withholding taxes in 1943, as a "temporary" wartime measure. Since then, the average American not only doesn’t have to write a check to the government on April 15th, but typically gets money back from the government. Scott Bessent proved himself intellectually dishonest and a liar, phrasing an adjustment in withholding as a wage increase. But it’s what should be expected from a member of the elite, a shill for the Uniparty.
It’s part of an overweening narrative of lies. The great COVID hysteria stole trillions of dollars from society. But many people learned to love and rely on the government more, as a friend and protector, when it gave them piddling relief checks. Some believe AI will create mass unemployment; there's a movement to institute UBI or Universal Basic Income. That’s just great. It will relieve millions of any lingering notions of personal responsibility. The sheep will believe that State welfare is natural, necessary, and good.
International Man: How long can the middle class survive being squeezed between higher taxes and rising inflation before it’s simply bled out of existence?
Doug Casey: Government as an institution is genetically programmed to grow. Bureaucrats move up to the next pay grade by getting more people to supervise, which requires more taxes to enable all the wonderful things that the government does. The prime directive of all living things, whether we’re talking about amoebas, individuals, corporations, or governments, is: Survive. Unfortunately, since governments don’t produce, the only way they can survive (barring conquering and looting a foreign country) is to tax, borrow, and inflate their fiat currencies. The middle class - not the proletariat or the elite - bears the burden. The State destroying the middle class, the most productive part of society, is like the parasite destroying its host.
International Man: Why do so many Americans still tolerate crushing taxes when the government’s real talent seems to be wasting capital and punishing productivity?
Doug Casey: Most Americans have betrayed the idea of America. Americans have been thoroughly indoctrinated with collectivist philosophy over many generations. They've come to conflate the State with society, thinking that they're the same thing. In fact, the State is a dead hand on society and the enemy of the common man. Now, in the 21st century, most Americans are directly or indirectly reliant upon the government. If the government collapses under its unrepayable debt, and its currency loses all value, I doubt Americans will see the State as the problem. Perversely, they’ll see it as the only possible solution. They’ll clamor for a much stronger government offering more benefits, run by a Big Man who seems to have all the answers.
What can you do about this accelerating trend? April 15th has passed, and you’ve calculated how much you owe the State to tighten the noose around your neck. You should be both angry and ashamed. I certainly am. We do what we can, but it’s not much. We know that protesting too loudly or not paying enough will result in bankruptcy or incarceration.
I’ve offered palliatives in the past, and I expect to do so in the future. But increasing, or at least preserving, your personal wealth doesn’t solve the bigger problem - namely, that you're being hunted by a giant predator, slowly eaten by a parasite. And that predator is getting hungrier, the parasite is becoming more virulent. What’s the ultimate solution? Nothing, I fear, that’s either safe or legal."
Musical Interlude: 2002, "Through the Rainbow"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Through the Rainbow"
Beautiful...
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can appear quite thin. Some spiral galaxies appear even thinner than NGC 3717, which is actually seen tilted just a bit. Spiral galaxies form disks because the original gas collided with itself and cooled as it fell inward. Planets may orbit in disks for similar reasons.
The featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a light-colored central bulge composed of older stars beyond filaments of orbiting dark brown dust. NGC 3717 spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 60 million light years away toward the constellation of the Water Snake (Hydra)."
Chet Raymo, “Strange”
“Strange”
by Chet Raymo
“In a review in the “New York Times” Book Review, Daniel Handler writes: “And strange? Well, let’s get this straight: All great books are strange. Every lasting work of literature since the very weird “Beowulf” has been strange, not only because it grapples with the strangeness around us, but also because the effect of originality is startling, making even the oldest books feel like brand new stories.”
Strange: Out-of-the-ordinary, unusual, curious. “The strangeness around us,” says Handler. There is a paradox here. What could be less strange than the world around us? It is the same world that was here yesterday, and the day before that. More to the point: It is a world ruled by law. Inviolable causal bonds. That’s what makes science possible.
And yet, and yet. I walk wary. Strangeness lurks on ever side. Strangeness leaps out of every pebble in the path, every wildflower, every spider web flung between weedy stalks. In the midst of the utterly ordinary the extraordinary abounds. Nothing is so commonplace as to be common. The strangeness of the world, as in literature, has its source in the head, in the convoluted interaction of mind with world. Strange, that we should be here, strangers in a strange land, pilgrims on our own yellow brick roads where nothing is ordinary because everything is perceived through the filter of a unique consciousness.
And strange? Well, let’s get this straight. I hope never to lose the capacity to see the strangeness in the familiar, the curious in the everyday, the exception in the unexceptional.
“I do not expect a miracle,
or an accident,
to set the sight on fire...”
wrote Silvia Plath. Just being here is enough. Just being here is surpassing strange.”
o
"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 93 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
- Douglas Adams
"Don't Be Brain Dead - In Other Words, Think For Yourself"
"Don't Be Brain Dead -
In Other Words, Think For Yourself"
by Robert W Malone MD, MS
"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
- Thomas Edison
"The “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect” was coined by Michael Crichton, MD to describe the experience of encountering unreliable information in main stream media and the “approved narrative” in your area of expertise, and knowing by first person experience that this narrative is wrong. And then suspending your own critical thinking skills and trusting these same type of “experts” (legacy/mainstream “approved” media) in another area outside of your expertise.
His point was that one must use critical thinking skill even when outside your core competencies. Crichton writes: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward - reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
In other words, think for yourself. As we transition into a new era of another war we must think for ourselves. Government(s) will want to control the narrative. They will control how main stream media and big tech respond to this crisis. Do not fall for the dominant paradigm, but instead do your own thinking. Dig deeper. We are so lucky to live in an era of alternative media. As much as the government hates it and those of us who look for “truth,” we still have this ability to think for ourselves and to find information that is not readily available on MSM.
This morning, while I was having breakfast with my wife Jill, we were talking about our personal finances. As I sipped coffee, I said to her “I don’t know enough about economics to make an assessment on crypto currency, how the situation in Iran will affect world economies, and the global push to transition from fiat money to digital currency.“ In so many words, she said to me that I had actually spent my whole life studying politics, investing and global economies as a way of living in the world. So why in the world would I now think that I was incapable of making an analysis of the current economic situation? And then the punchline- I needed to get going and do more research into the subject. She is right, I was being intellectually lazy. More than that, I was letting the legacy main stream media and pushed propaganda take my mind. I was giving over my critical thinking skills to MSM.
“Gell-Mann Amnesia” is exactly the trap I had fallen into. It happens all the time. Back in the day of the “founding fathers”, 250+ years ago, people did not have the luxury of being intellectually lazy. You had to think for yourself. That is what is so different about a more rural life. The problems that crop up are constantly changing, and they are very much in the present. You have to solve them yourself. That reality is what gave rise to the United States of America, as a country and as a culture.
The United States must re-create an army of critical thinkers. It is how We the People take back our power. We must find candidates for elected office who think for themselves, and we need to work to elect them. Now is the the time to not accept mediocracy and corruption in our elected officials. And no more WEF-trained hacks that do what they are told by non-US, non-elected third parties.
Elements of the population are revitalizing their core belief system to fight the heavy-handed governmental edicts coming from the globalized public health deep state. They recognize that big pharma and the World Economic Forum acolytes that backs it has infiltrated every level of our government and virtually all “world leaders” from the Western “Democracies”. They recognize that corporatism and totalitarian thinking guided by the WEF has become the norm for many elected officials. That these officials have been trained by the WEF. This must stop. The army of critical thinkers that is emerging with the Great Awakening has to support this effort in every way possible. Why? Because public health is just the “camel’s nose”; the WEF has great plans for us in all aspects of our lives!"
"The Illusion Of Freedom..."
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
- Frank Zappa
"It was strange, she thought, to obtain news by means of nothing but denials, as if existence had ceased, facts had vanished and only the frantic negatives uttered by officials and columnists gave any clue to the reality they were denying."
- "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand, 1957
The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Return”
“The Return”
“Suddenly the window will open
and Mother will call,
it's time to come in.
The wall will part,
I will enter heaven in muddy shoes.
I will come to the table
and answer questions rudely.
I am all right, leave me
alone. Head in hand I
sit and sit. How can I tell them
about that long
and tangled way?
Here in heaven mothers
knit green scarves;
flies buzz.
Father dozes by the stove
after six days' labor.
No - surely I can't tell them
that people are at each
other's throats.”
- Theodore Roethke
"Blockade"
"Stuck in the Strait of Hormuz"
"Blockade"
by Robert Gore
"The world is threatened by a blockade more deadly than Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. That blockade is the refusal among the West’s ruling class to allow entry of any thoughts not conforming to their prejudices, slogans, and unattainable objectives. Their minds are more tightly sealed than Hormuz or Bab-el-Mandeb ever has been. In their credentialed arrogance they preen about their intelligence. They are fools repeatedly rushing in where no angel would tread.
If President Trump’s Iran adventure represents what now passes for his and his administration’s mental processes, the U.S. and the world are in grave danger. This fiasco in progress has bypassed every marker of intellectual proficiency. It offers no cognizance of history, geography, or military reality, no recognition of past mistakes, no lessons learned, no acknowledgement that their may be things about which its perpetrators are ignorant. It’s bereft of elementary common sense, much less wisdom tempered by experience and humility.
Trump is not playing with a full deck. Not only are his mental processes visibly deteriorating, but he’s morally compromised in every way possible. His abject servility to Netanyahu, Israel, and the American Jewish lobby may well be due to their ruthless blackmail. He is leading the U.S. to humiliation and defeat that will spell the end of the last vestiges of its failing empire.
That fall may come to be regarded as the first phase of the Age of Chaos. Many of us will be probably be alive to see the culmination of this first phase, but the entire Age of Chaos will probably play out long after we’re all dead. An empire must have the ability to expand its dominion and to subjugate the people within it. Both expansion and subjugation have become problematic.
The American empire is a confederation constructed after World War II. Unlike the Roman empire, its lifespan will be measured in decades, not centuries. The U.S. confederation has been unable to expand its dominion to North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or most of the Middle East. The exception to the latter is the imposition of the Zionist state of Israel, but that “success” may ultimately lead to the downfall of both Israel and the U.S. empire. The one unambiguous success has been the incorporation of Warsaw Pact nations after the fall of the Soviet Empire. That incorporation has reached its limits with the confederation’s attempt to absorb Ukraine, which may well fail due to Russia’s opposition.
Notwithstanding this litany of mostly failure and the obvious difficulties inherent in an effort to subjugate Iran, Trump and Netanyahu went ahead with what was within a few weeks a readily apparent fiasco. There are, as Jeffrey Sachs and others have pointed out, disturbing indications of megalomaniacal insanity in both men. Failing empires get the leaders they deserve; the fall of the Roman empire had its crazy emperors
Empires are inherently offensive. Sustenance comes from plunder; they must grow or die. The problem for the U.S. and imperialism in general is the yawning disparity between the costs of offensive and defensive warfare and the emerging dominance of asymmetric, or guerrilla, warfare. Historically, guerrilla warfare has been the weapon of the weak, usually defensively employed. The problem for would-be invaders is that the weapons of the weak have become so effective against the weapons of the strong (assuming nuclear weapons are off the table) that it’s stymied offensive warfare. The former are orders of magnitude cheaper than the latter - $30,000 drones are taking out multimillion dollar aircraft, tanks, and seagoing vessels.
Recent history is replete with examples that only fools and madmen (i.e. Trump and Netanyahu) ignore. Exhibit A would be the Russia-Ukraine war, which featured the debut of the newest “star” of asymmetric warfare: drones (See “The Ants New Weapon,” Robert Gore, SLL, June 17, 2025). That war has settled into a World War One-style battle of attrition as drones and artillery have made advancement for either side difficult and costly. New drone-based tactics and counter-tactics evolve almost daily with only measured progress by the Russians; certainly not what they expected when they began their offensive over four years ago. And this is in eastern Ukrainian territory that’s Russia friendly!
Exhibit B would be Yemen’s Houthis, whose closure of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the southern end of the Red Sea was a test drive for ally Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis have punched well above their weight, waging often effective land, aerial, and naval warfare against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and the U.S. They are part of the Axis of Resistance and receive both tangible and rhetorical support from Hezbollah and Iran. The U.S. government alleges that they also receive support from the Russian, Chinese, and North Korean governments.
The Houthis have employed increasingly sophisticated drones and missiles, many of which have been supplied by Iran. President Trump’s Operation Rough Rider, which launched air and naval strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen; a subsequent cease fire forced by Houthi attacks on more than 190 ships, and Trump’s dubious declaration of victory were a preview of U.S. and Israel’s two subsequent attacks on Iran and their attendant lipstick-on-a-pig propaganda.
The foundation of guerrilla warfare is decentralized cells, operating with a high degree of autonomy from central command. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iranian government has adopted this guerrilla strategy, named Mosaic, as its mode of defensive warfare. Iran has been turned into 31 autonomous operational zones with substantial drone and missile capabilities. Thus, killing most of Iran’s formal leadership and extensive bombing, particularly of Tehran, did not achieve the stated objective: a quick Iranian capitulation. Nor did it prevent a lethal Iranian counterstrike.
Guerrilla warfare works because it engenders chaos against forces attempting to either impose order or their own brand of “managed” chaos, from which order will supposedly emerge. The Iranians have certainly engendered chaos in the Middle East, and if order emerges, it will apparently be on their terms. Most important, Iran could exercise control of the Strait of Hormuz with its sovereignty intact and greatly enhanced influence in the region.
The U.S.-Israel alliance is confronted with a choice. It can recognize the epochal reality currently unfolding: short of nuclear attack, invasion and traditional offensive warfare are being rendered virtually obsolete. The implications of full reality recognition would be enormous. The U.S. would have little or no influence in the Middle East, perhaps withdrawing completely (other than commercial transactions), while that of nearby powers Russia and China would expand.. The petrodollar arrangement from which the U.S. has so greatly benefitted would be over. The development would herald the end of the American empire and the possible ascendancy of Russian and Chinese-led multilateralism.
That would have its salutary aspects for the U.S. Psychologically, it’s way past time for a well-deserved comeuppance. Economically, the empire is an unaffordable luxury for a government $39 trillion in debt. Politically, the nation has enough problems at home without creating more for itself abroad.
However, the outlook for Israel would be bleak. For decades it has fomented chaos and division in the Middle East to reduce the chances of unified Islamic opposition against it. An Iran that has defeated the U.S.-Israel alliance and become the dominant power within the region would be Israeli and American Zionists’ worst nightmare. Israel’s continuing existence would be in question. Not necessarily because Iran would acquire nuclear weapons, if it doesn’t already have them. Rather, the small Jewish state will stand revealed as militarily vulnerable, and it has many actual and potential enemies in the Middle East. That fact suggests that the alliance won’t choose reality recognition, but rather nuclear nihilism.
The Sampson Option is Israel’s well-known strategy should it be confronted with circumstances that its leaders feel threaten its existence. They would activate Israel’s nuclear weapons - if Israel’s going down they’ll take the rest of the world with it. It may have enough nuclear bombs to do so. The Israelis characterize the Sampson Option as a deterrence strategy, and if push came to shove nobody knows if they’d press the button. However, the apocalyptic rhetoric spouted by Netanyahu and his cohort, and American Christian-Zionists like Mike Huckabee, is not reassuring. If the Israel-American alliance opts for nuclear nihilism, global chaos is assured. The continuation of Homo Sapiens is not.
Regardless of the alliance’s choice, increasingly amplified chaos is in the cards. Even if the impossibility of maintaining an empire is fully, if begrudgingly, recognized, the American empire’s dissolution will be chaotic. Its satrapies will be left to scramble for alternative military and economic arrangements. Accommodations will have to be made with the global majority as centuries of Western domination draw to a close.
That’s not to say that multipolarity among the global majority will be any kind of nirvana. The ever-strengthening forces of decentralized chaos will be impossible for any government to contain. Power always corrupts; multipolarity won’t abolish rivalry among nations and venality among their rulers. Russia and China, the leaders of the multipolar bloc, are currently led by exceptionally adroit authoritarians; their successors probably won’t be as adept. Governments, as coercive political arrangements, are incompatible with human freedom. As such, they’re never permanent, and today’s tyrannical behemoths are well past their sell-by dates.
Chaos may be most intense within the U.S. Much of its apparent strength rests on the shakiest of foundations. Decisive defeat in the Middle East will undermine the military “glue” that has supported the U.S. since World War II and its fiat dollar since 1971. Then there’s the exponentially mounting debt. Those two factors will eventually obliterate U.S. financial markets. The burgeoning chaos reflects the mental chaos playing out in so many American minds - apocalyptic Christian-Zionist dispensationalism, woke, transhumanism, “art” and “culture” that are neither, elite depravity, and who knows what other mental and moral depredations (it’s hard to keep track). These are the ingredients for uncontrollable chaos.
Insanity inevitably meets reality, and the latter always wins. There’s a good chance the U.S. will splinter. The most optimistic scenario is that some of the resultant pieces become enclaves committed to protecting freedom and individual rights. They would have to have the capability to protect themselves from malign elements. They would also require an unswerving commitment to reason and mental clarity not currently apparent among any appreciable segment of the American population. However, chaos will impart wisdom among some of those who survive it, and they could potentially rebuild and institute order based on choice, incentives, and cooperation, not coercion and violence.
Contemplating bewildering day-to-day developments without a broader analytical framework only heightens the bewilderment. That framework doesn’t come from a social sciences perspective, but the physical sciences offers some understanding. Without getting into the weeds of the concept of entropy, it’s fair to say that entropy is associated with disorder and randomness; that in systems left to spontaneous evolution entropy remains constant or increases, that energy is required to slow, stop, or reverse the entropic process, and certain processes are irreversible.
For centuries, order - controlling entropy - has been imposed by governments, but now they’re being overwhelmed by entropic processes. They can no longer command the resources necessary to contain the decentralized and ever-increasing dispersal and power of computing, communications, and weaponry. The “energy” of governments is being overwhelmed by disorder and randomness, and that process is almost certainly irreversible. Ironically, most of what governments now do to impose order only increases disorder and chaos; they are adding to rather than subtracting from entropy.
This analysis yields no confident predictions about what happens next; chaos is unpredictable. Nor does it yield claims of knowledge about billions of unknowable data points. What it does yield is some comprehension of the epochal breakdown well underway. Not particularly comforting, but it at least offers insight amidst the unending confusion."
"And Never, Never To Forget..."
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
- Arundhati Roy
"Hope In a Time of Hopelessness"
"Hope In a Time of Hopelessness"
by Washingtons Blog
"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage;
anger at the way things are, and courage
to see that they do not remain the way they are."
- Augustine of Hippo
"Several long-time activists have told me recently they are overwhelmed, worried, and think that we may be losing the struggle. One very smart friend asked me if there is any basis for hope. Hope is an act of will, not a passive mood. Admittedly, things are easier when circumstances bring hope to us, and we can just receive the hopeful and inspiring news. But if we care about winning, we have to be able to decide to have hope even when outer circumstances aren't so positive.
I have children who are counting on me to leave them with a reasonably safe and sane planet. As I've said elsewhere, I care too much about my kids and my freedom to be afraid. I care enough about them that it gets my heart beating, connects me to something bigger than myself, and that gives me courage, even when the chips are down.
If I allowed myself to lose hope about exposing falsehoods, about protecting our freedom and building a hopeful future, I would be dropping the ball for my kids. I would be condemning them to a potentially very grey world where bigger and worse things may happen, where their liberties and joys are wholly stripped away, where every ounce of vitality is beholden to joyless and useless tasks.
Many of us may be motivated by other things besides kids, and only you can know what that is. But we each must dig down deep, and connect with our most powerful motivations to win the struggle for freedom and truth.
I don't know about you, but I don't have the luxury of giving up hope. When I get depressed, overwhelmed or exhausted by the stunning acts of savagery, treason, and disinformation carried out by the imperialists, or the willful ignorance of far too many Americans, I will myself into finding some reason to have hope. Because the struggle for life and liberty is too important for me to give up."
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Full screen recommended.
Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"
And don't you ever give up...
"Florida Orange Production Down 95%, U.S. Cattle Herd Smallest Since 1951, And Winter Wheat Is Being Suffocated By Severe Drought"
by Michael Snyder
"We live at a time when most people don’t know where their food comes from, and so they have no idea that we are facing an agricultural nightmare in 2026. Yesterday, I published an article about the historic drought that is devastating our heartland and the nightmarish fertilizer crisis that has been caused by the war in the Middle East. Today, I am going to talk about the stunning decline of the U.S. cattle herd, concerns about the winter wheat harvest, and the frightening drop that we have witnessed in Florida orange production.
I have said this before, but I will say it again. If farmers don’t grow our food, we don’t eat. When I was growing up, everyone was drinking Florida orange juice. Sadly, that is no longer true. This year, the number of oranges that will be harvested in Florida will be down 95 percent from 1996…But now, the fruit that helped build Florida is disappearing. The orange is falling victim to disease, disasters and development.
Just how far the orange crop has fallen is shocking. Thirty years ago, 225 million boxes of oranges were picked from Florida orange groves. That was almost enough for one box of oranges for every American in the mid-1990s. This year, the forecast from the U.S. Agriculture Department is 12 million boxes. That is a drop of 95% in one generation. How in the world could this have happened?
Well, the cold weather that Florida experienced during the month of February severely damaged orange production. But the far bigger problem is citrus greening disease. It is not going to go away, and it could potentially completely wipe out Florida’s oranges…The cold weather in February cost the citrus industry almost $700 million according to a preliminary estimate from the state agricultural commission. Most of the loss is from a smaller crop and damaged trees.
And then there’s the decades-long fight against a small bug that has been turning Florida’s oranges green. Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection spread by the Asian citrus psyllid. The bug showed up in Florida almost 30 years ago. The first signs of the disease were visible in citrus groves about 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, the multi-year drought that the heartland of America is experiencing is making it very difficult to produce sufficient quantities of hard red winter wheat… Hard red winter wheat (HRW) futures widened to their largest premium over soft red wheat (SRW) in more than two years as severe drought intensified across key breadbasket regions in the Great Plains and Midwest. This means traders are pricing in weather impacts and tightening expectations for higher-protein wheat supplies.
It is important to note that HRW is a more valuable protein and is primarily used in bread, rolls, and all-purpose flour. It is grown in the U.S. Plains (Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas), while SRW is used in cakes, cookies, crackers, and pastries, and is grown in the Eastern U.S. (Ohio Valley, Midwest, Southeast).
Just think about all of the things that you eat on a regular basis that have wheat in them. If you feel that those products are expensive now, just wait until you see what the prices will be like later this year. Beef prices have also become very painful, and that is because the size of the U.S. cattle herd has fallen to the lowest level that we have seen since 1951… The U.S. cattle herd dwindled to its smallest size since 1951, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Friday, signaling that beef prices will stay high for consumers after setting records last year. The nation had 86.2 million cattle and calves as of Jan. 1, the USDA said in a biannual report, after a persistent drought drove ranchers to slash their herds. That was down 0.4% from a year earlier, when the herd also hit its lowest level since 1951.
In 1951, approximately 154 million people lived in the United States. Today, approximately 342 million people live in the United States. So we are trying to feed more than twice as many people with the same amount of cattle that we had in 1951.
Unfortunately, this could be just the beginning of this crisis because the New World screwworm is on a relentless march north…The flesh-eating parasite, called the New World screwworm, was detected this month in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, just 90 miles away from the U.S. border. As of last year, the insect was still 400 miles away.
“The New World screwworm is not some distant problem,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said. “It is a direct and imminent threat to Texas, and we are treating it that way. This is a high-stakes situation for our ranchers, our livestock industry and our food supply, and we are moving aggressively to stay ahead of it.”
Ranchers are frightened out of their minds, because these little parasites love to ravage cattle. All it takes for disaster to strike is for one female fly to find a body opening or an open wound…This insect is attracted to the smell of wounds and body openings, including the nose, eyes, ears, mouth and genitals.Once a female fly makes contact, it can lay 200 to 300 eggs in a wound or opening that can be as small as a tick bite. In some cases, the fly may lay up to 3,000 eggs during its 10 to 30-day lifespan. The eggs then hatch into maggots that burrow into the wound or opening and feed on the flesh. After about seven days of feeding, the larvae drop to the ground and eventually emerge as adult screwworm flies.
Even without the war in the Middle East, this would be an exceedingly challenging year for our farmers and our ranchers. But now thanks to the war, we are facing skyrocketing fuel costs and global fertilizer shortages…Farmers around the world are facing fertilizer shortages and rising costs due to supply disruption caused by the war in Iran, which could make food more expensive later this year. The war has halted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage off Iran that handles about a fifth of the world’s oil and nearly a third of global fertilizer trade. As I discussed yesterday, one survey found that 70 percent of U.S. farmers are admitting that they won’t be able to buy enough fertilizer this year because prices have simply gotten too high.
Diesel prices are spiking as well, and they are only going to go higher as global supplies of fuel get tighter and tighter…
Nobody can dispute any of the facts that I have presented in this article. Food prices have risen steadily in recent years, but the truth is that what is ahead will be even worse. In impoverished nations, the number of people experiencing acute hunger was already at an all-time record high before the war with Iran erupted, and now many experts are warning of widespread famines. But most people out there just expect everything to turn out just fine somehow, because that is how the stories that they watch on television always end. Of course what we are living through is not a television show. This is the real world, and in the real world bad decisions can lead to severe consequences."
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 4/22/26
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 4/22/26
"Live From Tehran: Prof. Mohammad Marandi:
Why Iran Won’t Meet With Netanyahu’s Puppets"
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 4/22/26
"Gilbert Doctorow:
The Kremlin Prepares for War With Europe"
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 4/22/26
"Joe Kent - Fmr. Dir. National Counterterrorism Center:
Why Iran Is No Threat to the US!"
Comments here:
"Everyone Hates Their Job Right Now - And It’s About To Get Worse"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 4/22/26
"Everyone Hates Their Job Right Now -
And It’s About To Get Worse"
"Americans are more dissatisfied with their jobs than ever before, and the numbers are backing it up. In this video, I break down the growing fear across the workforce as employees face record levels of job insecurity, toxic management, and declining benefits. From workers being pushed to do more for less, to entire industries like trucking being exposed for wage manipulation and unfair practices, this is a deep dive into why job satisfaction is collapsing in real time. We also connect the dots between rising costs of living, “unretirement,” and the changing economy - from Las Vegas slowing down to major business shakeups that signal deeper problems ahead. If you’ve been feeling stressed about your job, worried about layoffs, or questioning your future, you are not alone. This is the reality millions of Americans are facing right now - and it’s only getting more intense."
Comments here:
"If Food Shortages Are Coming Target Is Another Option"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 4/22/26
"If Food Shortages Are Coming
Target Is Another Option"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
The Vanishing States, 4/22/26
"9 Foods Quietly Disappearing From Shelves"
"Store shelves may still look stocked, but something is changing behind the scenes. In this video, we uncover 9 everyday foods that are quietly becoming harder to find and why some people are already preparing before it becomes obvious. Rising costs, supply chain strain, extreme weather, and increasing global demand are all putting pressure on key grocery staples. While most shoppers haven’t noticed yet, small gaps, delayed restocks, and price increases are already happening."
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 4/22/26
"Prices Are Spiking On Items
You Buy Every Single Day"
Comments here:
John Wilder, "Delayed Reaction: Systems, Cash, and Shortages"
"Delayed Reaction:
Systems, Cash, and Shortages"
by John Wilder
"One thing I’ve noticed in life is that there is always a delay between action and reaction. If there weren’t a delay, we wouldn’t need watches to see why our spouses were still not ready even though we agreed we were leaving at 9am. I digress. One famous example is a household thermostat. I think I’ve mentioned it before. In my house, the air conditioner has exactly two settings. On. Off. That’s it. It doesn’t have a “make it colder faster” setting. Or a “don’t overshoot and make the water condensing on the windows freeze” setting. Nope. Just on or off.
That alone is something that many adults don’t even recognize. If it’s 80°F (3MPa) in the house, turning the thermostat down to 58°F (6km) won’t make it get any cooler any faster. It will, however, keep the AC going long after The Mrs. has gone to get a blanket.
There are many other things like this as well. Infestation er, immigration is one. We go from “Well, that was a pleasant new Mexican restaurant,” to, “Can you speak a little more slowly and enunciate? Or, better yet, get me someone that speaks English,” to “No, let’s not go to that part of town anymore because we don’t speak hindi and they poop in the street,” in only 30 years or so of unrelenting legal and illegal immigration.
Somewhere between 30 years and 3 hours, though, there’s the space where our economy moves in its cause-and-effect loop. Part of the economy is entirely made up, that being stock prices and cash. The dollar wouldn’t exist if we didn’t all agree it exists. Where did it come from? Well, we made it up. We first said we’ll print pieces of paper that entitled you to a bit of gold, and when the “bit of gold” part became inconvenient we decided to skip the entire gold part and keep the “we’ll print” part. That’s fictional. And it always ends up the same through thousands of years of human history, but, yeah, sure. This time it will be different.
But there’s also a part of the economy that’s based in raw reality. Rather than trading bits of paper for other bits of paper, or electrons on one storage system for electrons on another storage system, at some point people need to move the actual stuff that all the fictional stuff is tracking.
And that’s real. I can’t eat a beef future that’s been cooked medium rare since it’s on a hard-drive in Pittsburgh or some place. I have to wait until I have an actual ribeye in front of me. Real things are those things that still exists when we stop believing in them. Anyone here want to buy some francs or deutschmarks? Thought not.
They don’t exist. But they used to. So, by definition, they were only as real as our belief. What’s neat about imaginary things is you can make as many as you want as quickly as you want. I think that since politicians spend our dollars with exactly that mindset, they lose the concept that they can’t just print eggs out of thin air.
No, we have a technology that turns insects into usable protein in the form of an egg, the product of thousands of years of human ingenuity. It’s called a chicken. And chickens are real, especially my neighbor’s rooster, who can’t seem to figure out that midnight isn’t dawn.
Real things, like the temperature in my house, are subject to actual physical laws. And the reaction to an action is sometimes something that may take months or longer. Let’s take the price of food. When the price of fuel goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, and the price of food goes up.
The typical reaction of a politician is to solve the problem by controlling the imaginary lever he controls: spending more than they have. Then the Federal Reserve™ uses the levers they control, namely cash supply and interest rates. Interest rates are an imaginary thing that shows how much extra cash the most recent administration just spent.
But throughout all of this, we can’t imagine a steak. We still need fertilizer to make the grass grow and diesel to harvest and move the hay, and a cow to eat the hay, and someone to kill and butcher the cow and then some way to get it to my house. None of that is imaginary, and is all where the physical world intrudes on the fantasy of finance.
And, just like cooling my house, all of this operates on a delay. The oil is pumped from the ground. The oil is then pumped into a tank. It sits waiting for transport. Then it’s transported to a refinery where it sits in a tank until its turned into diesel or gasoline and put in a tank. And then it’s shipped to another tank where it sits until it’s put into a filling station tank. Then it hits the final tank: the fuel tank of the tractor or car where it will be transferred to the engine and, finally, burned to make useful energy.
At each of those steps there’s a buffer where the oil sits in a tank for some time. That buffer is the lag in the system, the time between when a shortage starts at any part in the process. As the buffer disappears, the shortage that cannot be papered over shows up at last. About 20% of the finished gasoline in the United States is stored . . . in car and truck tanks.
And in six months or a year, we’ll all wonder why steak costs $73.37 a pound and silver $290 an ounce because those can’t be created by changing a computer entry. I suppose it’s time to save money now for the future inflation crush. I did tell The Mrs. that there was no need to set the temperature so cold on our air conditioner. She told me? “Not a fan.”
Bill Bonner, "Doing the Nixon"
Former US President Richard Nixon,
after his resignation in August of 1974.
"Doing the Nixon"
by Bill Bonner
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Baltimore, Maryland - "Like prisoners on death row, investors spend most of their time waiting for something to happen. One day, a headline tells us that a deal is close...and oil goes down. Bloomberg: "Oil and Gas Plunge on Hormuz Opening, Hope for End of War." The next day, oil gushes up...as hopes for a deal fade. The Guardian: "Oil prices rise and markets fall after US seizure of ship hits Iran peace deal hopes." But unless you’ve got an inside track to the White House...BBC: "$580M oil trades made minutes before Trump’s key Iran announcement draw scrutiny."
You’re more likely to make big money by getting ‘on the right side of history,’ and staying there, than you are by speculating on policy changes. Today, we guess about where the ‘right side of history’ really is.
Right now, investors are waiting for some kind of resolution to the US/Israeli attack on Iran. Flush from the easy-peasy capture of Venezuela’s president, the kidnappers figured they could follow up in Iran. All they had to do, as another famous leader said of invading the Soviet Union 85 years before, was to ‘kick in the door and the whole house’ would come falling down.
The Trump administration made a ‘mistake,’ say the pundits. They kicked in the door - assassinating Iran’s leadership, not just the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, but his daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, daughter-in-law and about forty of the nation’s military and civilian leaders. But the roof still stood. And the walls. And the people left alive inside did just what you might expect; they fought back.
Out-gunned...out-spent...out-classed - like the Soviet Union, Iran nevertheless had an ace up its sleeve. In Russia, vast distances, poor roads, and bad weather were the Soviets’ best allies. Iran’s BFF, meanwhile, is a narrow passage between the Saudi peninsula and the Eurasian mainland. Iranian gunners can hide in caves and declivities and knock out ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
So, what was supposed to be short and sweet - Operation Epic Fury - went FUBAR. Allies edged away from the US. (The Financial Times: European Right is Pivoting Away from America). America’s financial picture darkened. (”I am certain we will spend $1 trillion for the Iran war,” says Linda Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School). The price of the world’s most vital single commodity - oil - rose 50%. (Average gasoline price is now over $4.)
And Iran remains much as it was before. More importantly, for POTUS...his polling numbers fell. The top priority of the Iranian leaders is survival. They suspect that the US would kill them if it is given the chance.
The top priority for Donald Trump, meanwhile, is the survival of Republican control of Congress. Otherwise, he will be impeached....his hopes for a Nobel Prize, or even a Medal of Honor, erased...his name taken from public buildings...his picture removed from recruiting offices...plans for a Triumphal Arch scrapped...and many of his friends and family put on trial for corruption.
At this stage, Republicans are probably making a mistake. The longer Trump stays in the captain’s chair...and the crazier and more inept he appears...the more likely the democrats are to win elections - both this year...and in ‘28. Wise Democrats might not want to ‘25th amendment his ass’ after all. We’re not offering political advice here, but a wise Trump, meanwhile, might welcome regime change and take a dive. Like Richard Nixon, he would step down - for health reasons - leaving Vance to take over, in exchange for a pardon.
For every action there is a reaction, and our guess is that the nation is weary of the Big Man’s bombast. A return to sober, sane ordinariness – even if it is mostly fraudulent - might give Republicans a fair shot of staying in power for ten more years...spare Trump from retribution…and allow the decline of the empire to continue, but at a slower, more dignified pace. Tomorrow, we will look at the alternative - how Democrats might come back...with a vengeance."
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