So, we rise from the rubble...
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Monday, August 24, 2026
"US - Canada Trade War Escalates, What You Need To Know"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 8/24/26
"US - Canada Trade War Escalates,
What You Need To Know"
"Canada is set to retaliate DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR against new U.S. tariffs - and it could cost your family $1,200 per year. President Trump just threatened to hike tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks and auto parts to 50% starting January 1, 2027, after Canada's Prime Minister walked away from trade talks. Now Canada says it will match every new tariff and hit back Tuesday after Labor Day - targeting steel, dairy, appliances, pulp & paper, and electronics. Ontario Premier Doug Ford is even threatening to CUT OFF electricity and critical minerals to 5 U.S. states: New York, Minnesota, Vermont, Michigan and Maine. In this video I break down what the new US Canada trade war means for YOUR wallet, which everyday items will get pricier - from paper products and cardboard boxes to alcohol and dairy - and why economists say this is not the last tariff hike coming."
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Americans Are Not Ready For What's Coming"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 8/24/26
"Americans Are Not Ready For What's Coming"
"This video is a warning about how financially and practically unprepared millions of Americans are for an emergency. A new survey highlights the financial pressure facing American workers, while the devastating situation in Gary, Indiana shows what can happen when a storm knocks out critical infrastructure for nearly two weeks. What would happen to your family if the power disappeared for 12 days? Could you replace spoiled food, repair your car, pay a $700 emergency bill, buy gasoline, get medication and keep going if your normal access to money and services was disrupted?
The cost of living, inflation, credit card debt, rising food and energy costs and stagnant savings are putting enormous pressure on households across America. This is about more than money - it is about personal finance, emergency savings, financial preparedness and having a plan when something goes wrong. i Allegedly is an independent news channel covering business news, economic news, personal finance, inflation, banking, the economy and the stories affecting Americans every day. Prepare yourself financially, reduce unnecessary debt and make sure you have the basic supplies and savings you may need when an emergency strikes."
Comments here:
"Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Food Supply. Now It Is Blocking the Aid"
"Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Food Supply.
Now It Is Blocking the Aid"
by Redacted
"A shocking new United Nations report finds that only 3 percent of Gaza’s cropland remains both accessible and undamaged. Before the war, Gaza was largely self-sufficient in vegetables, fish, poultry and eggs. Today, nearly its entire capacity to produce fresh food has been destroyed.
The UN’s findings track with the testimony of IDF soldiers who have described the systematic destruction of Gaza’s food-producing and civilian infrastructure. The satellite evidence shows us the result; the soldiers’ own admissions tell us how it happened on the ground.
That means humanitarian aid is not optional. More than two million people have been made dependent on food brought in from outside Gaza because the farms, greenhouses, fishing operations and livestock infrastructure that once fed them are gone or inaccessible. And now, new reports indicate that only about 30 percent of the humanitarian aid intended for Gaza is getting through. First, Gaza’s ability to feed itself was destroyed. Then its population was made dependent on outside assistance. Now most of that assistance is not reaching them.
Meanwhile the Trump administration continues to plan for a new Gaza, free of Palestinians. To sum up what the world has witnessed since 2023: First, Israel, supported by the U.S., destroyed the population’s ability to feed itself. Then it restricted the aid keeping it alive. And now it presents displacement as the only remaining solution. At what point do we stop calling this a humanitarian crisis and acknowledge that the humanitarian crisis has been the plan all along?"
"How the Media Sells Genocide"
"How the Media Sells Genocide"
by Chris Hedges
"The Western media manufactures consent for genocide. It normalizes Israel’s decades-long military occupation and apartheid. It erases Israel’s flagrant violations of international law. It perpetuates the fallacy of Israeli victimhood. It betrays, discredits and demonizes the work of Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza, at least 220 of whom have been killed by Israel between Oct. 7, 2023, and August 2025. It supinely accepts draconian Israeli censorship. It acquiesces with tepid letters of protest at Israel’s refusal to allow foreign reporters in Gaza — an effort by Israel to mask its war crimes. It amplifies Israeli lies, from beheaded babies to widespread sexual assault of Israeli women on Oct. 7, to obfuscate the truth.
When writing about Gaza, verbs are in the passive tense. There is no subject. No one is accountable. Genocide, it seems, is an act of God. No different from an earthquake or tsunami. Clichés and opaque adjectives such as the “cycle of violence” or “clashes” distort and falsify reality. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” George Orwell warned.
Terms such as “genocide,” “atrocity,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territories” magically disappear from media reports on Palestinians, whose resistance is routinely described as “savage” and “barbaric.” New York Times reporters are instructed by editors to avoid terms such as “Palestine,” “genocide,” “carnage,” “refugee camp,” “slaughter” and “massacre,” when referencing Palestinians.
The media slavishly regurgitates what Israel feeds it. Saturation bombing becomes “surgical air strikes.” Israel’s weaponization of famine becomes a “food shortage.” The killing of unarmed civilians - including children - becomes “clashes.” The hilltop fortress-like compounds of Jewish colonists becomes “neighborhoods.” Extrajudicial assassination of a journalist or a doctor becomes “died.”
Genocide, referred to as the “Israel-Hamas war” is justified as “self-defense,” part of the mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself.” When schools, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, mosques, churches and other civilian targets are obliterated, they are labeled “Hamas command centers” or targeted because Hamas is “using civilians as human shields” - something Israel does routinely, when the army binds detained Palestinians and forces them to enter potentially booby-trapped buildings and tunnels ahead of Israeli troops.
When Israelis are held by Hamas, they are “hostages,” even if they serve in the military. When Palestinians - including children - are held without charges or trial and disappeared into Israeli detention centers, where torture is “widespread” and “systematic,”, they are “prisoners.”
Missile attacks on tent cities or hospitals are blamed on Palestinian armed groups firing errant rockets. If Israel acknowledges the attacks - which very rarely happens - they are described as a “tragic mistake.”
Civil institutions in Gaza are characterized as “Hamas-run” to cast doubt on the veracity of what they report. The New York Times routinely qualifies announcements from the Gaza Health Ministry by noting it “does not distinguish between civilians and combatants,” masking the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians.
The result is some of the most convoluted writing in the history of journalism, including the Nov. 5, 2023 New York Times headline that reads: “Explosions Gazans Say Was Airstrike Leaves Many Casualties in Dense Neighborhood.”
“When Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri, and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga - who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press - were killed in a “double tap” strike - designed to kill first responders arriving to treat casualties from initial strikes — at Nasser Medical Complex, how did Western news agencies respond?” I asked in my column "The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists." “Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported. “IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.
The camera belonged to Reuters, which said Israel was “fully aware” the news agency was filming from the hospital. “When Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif and three other journalists were killed on Aug. 10 in their media tent near Al Shifa Hospital, how was it reported in the Western press?” I asked. “Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact al-Sharif was part of a Reuters team that won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize. The German newspaper Bild, published a front page story headlined: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”
“The linguistic gymnastics employed by the media went as far as redefining words, making them meaningless,” writes Assal Rad in “Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide:” "Mainstream media failed to describe Israel’s repeated breaches of the ceasefire with the language of violation. Instead, the coverage followed the same patterns of rationalizing Israel’s attacks and uncritically parroting Israel’s claims to justify its actions. As Palestinians continued to be killed - during a ‘ceasefire’ - and the flow of aid did not reach the level of need or what was agreed to, Western media framed these flagrant violations as ‘tests’ or ‘challenges’ to a ‘shaky ceasefire.’ As leading human rights organizations like Amnesty International warned that the genocide was, in fact, not over, legacy media continued to frame it as a war with a ‘fragile ceasefire.’
Words matter. Words justify actions. If there is no genocide, if Israel is defending itself in a war, the U.S. and Israel’s European allies have the right to provide tens of billions of dollars in military aid. If this is a war begun by Hamas on Oct. 7 then it is possible to lament the obliteration of Gaza and mass slaughter by Israel as the regrettable result of the Hamas attack.
This corruption of language is designed, as Orwell noted, to defend the indefensible: Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
Adam Johnson in “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza,” examined over 12,000 articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press, along with 5,000 TV segments aired on CNN and MSNBC. His carefully researched book is a damning indictment of the “liberal” media’s justification of the genocide.
CNN and The New York Times instructed their editors and journalists that attacks could only be attributed to Israel after confirmation from the IDF and GPS coordinates. Johnson quotes a source at CNN: "Whether it’s in the newsroom or in the field, we couldn’t credit anything to Israel unless we were held to this impossibly high bar of having to call it an “explosion,” until we geolocated the site of the explosion, sent the coordinates to the Israelis and asked them for comment." You can see an interview with Johnson about his book at The Electronic Intifada here.
CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review to the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to airing. The CNN bureau, like all news bureaus in Israel, is required to abide by restrictions imposed by Israeli military censors.
The very few Palestinians who appear on CNN and other legacy media outlets, are routinely asked - usually before they are even permitted on air - if they “condemn” Hamas. Guests who express even tepid criticism of Israel are asked whether Israel “has a right to exist.” No one is ever asked if they condemn Zionism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide or Israel’s 100 year war on Palestine. Nor are they asked if the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves - which under international law they do, including with weapons.
Our domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon. This makes them not only propagandists, but accomplices to genocide.
Those who protest the genocide, including students on university campuses - many of whom are Jewish - are smeared as “Hamas supporters” and “antisemites.” Journalists ferret out Zionist students, usually found esconced in campus Hillel houses, who claim to be “fearful for their safety,” because of the protests. The media pays little attention to the rise in anti-Muslim bigotry or the repression meted out to student protestors, which includes not only police brutality and 3,000 detainments and arrests, but suspensions, probations, expulsions, withholding of diplomas and the firing of sympathetic faculty.
Slogans which call for Palestinian liberation — including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” - along with the Palestinian flag, have been criminalized. The message is clear: Jewish lives matter. Palestinian lives do not.
“The reports of UN agencies, of respected human rights monitors, of medical journals, and of professional medical personnel, are generally treated with respect and given prominence in the mainstream media,” writes the historian Rashid Khalidi in the introduction to Robin Anderson’s book, “The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza:”
Not in this war: instead, if such sources are cited at all, equal media treatment is given to the outrageous slanders and calumnies against these organizations and individuals, smears that are produced in profusion by Israel’s legion of professional propagandists and its myriad of defenders in the US. Besides smearing critics of Israel’s genocide as supporters of Hamas or terrorist sympathizers, the main weapon in their arsenal of defamation is their systematic and outrageous misuse of the deadly accusation of antisemitism.
The massive defections of readers and viewers from mainstream media to social media platforms that do not filter news through the Israel lobby, the U.S. government or corporations, are a stark indicator of the media’s bankruptcy. The response to these defections has been “platformicide” - the use of algorithms, shadow banning, restriction of live streaming capabilities and the closing of accounts by social media giants such as Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok, to dramatically reduce the reach of reporting on Palestine.
This censorship is part of a coordinated effort to hide the horror of the genocide from the public. By constantly referencing Oct. 7, the Western media decontextualizes the genocide. It ignores Israel’s 19-year siege of Gaza. Oct. 7 is characterized in the Western media as “unprovoked.” Israel’s massacres of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza in the winter of 2008 and 2009, along with its attacks on Gaza in 2012, 2014 and during the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019 are ignored.
The 1948 Nakba - when European Zionists seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, violently expelled 750,000 Palestinians, destroyed more than 530 Palestinian villages and killed 15,000 Palestinians - is rarely referenced. Seventy percent of those driven from their homes in 1948 were forced into Gaza. The Zionist project is predicated on fostering historical amnesia.
“Once Hamas was established as a brutal, terrorist group whose members gleefully tortured, dismembered, and beheaded babies without conscience, no further explanation was needed,” writes Anderson in her book. “The media simply avoided reporting Israel’s history of violence and as a result, establishment media also avoided the conditions of everyday life for Palestinians.”
The fiction that there is currently a ceasefire in Gaza - Israel has killed at least 1,286 Palestinians and injured 4,257 since it supposedly went into effect - has become the excuse used by Western media to turn its back on Gaza. This genocide denial has characterized the coverage since its inception. It masks not only Israel’s crimes, but Israel’s stated intention to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians from Gaza. It effectively neuters international law. And it makes a mockery of the profession of journalism.
When the last act of ethnic cleansing happens, Western media will, I am sure, continue to bombard us with Israeli agitprop, euphemisms and clichés. It will justify the genocide until the end."
Bill Bonner, "The Old Barkers’ Con"
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
addresses the press at the White House yesterday.
"The Old Barkers’ Con"
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "Last week, we were ambling along through BubbleLand, a giant amusement park where everything was fake or fraudulent... Ultimately, all designed to separate the plain people from their money. Come the weekend, the circus cycle didn’t let up. A village ‘fete’ took place nearby - drawing in hundreds of local people. A makeshift buffet served a long line of diners.
Children bounced on bungees and trampolines. Dancers, young and old - wearing wooden sabots (clogs) and traditional Poitevin outfits - gave a demonstration of an old-time, leg-shaking, rug-cutting hoedown. And there were the marksmen, aiming for balloons in the hope of winning gaudy geegaws.
We remembered these small town circuses from our youth, but we had thought they went out of business years ago. Apparently not. The technology changes; the demand is eternal. There were a couple of news stories - dots - that were Big Top worthy, too.
First, Canada and the US got into a ‘war’ after polite negotiations on trade broke down. CNBC: "The U.S. imposed 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods on Saturday after the two longstanding allies failed to reach a trade deal, with each side accusing the other of derailing days of talks."
This is not really a big deal. The tariffs only affect about $20 billion in trade. But a blow-out or a small leak - either one can leave you with a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. Al Jazeera: "Canada to hit US with retaliatory tariffs as trade war escalates. Mark Carney says Canada will impose tariffs starting September 8 on imports of US steel, electronics and other products."
The other interesting story concerned the bond market. A bird got trapped in our library yesterday. It flitted from one side to the other...unable to find the open window. But despite being surrounded by Homer, Adam Smith, and Shakespeare...and despite spending a whole day there...it never read a single word.
And there was Scott Bessent. The poor sparrow announced that he was going to manipulate the bond market. Then, when bond investors refused to go along, he appeared to be trapped...unable to find a way out. We could suggest that he open Mises, Bastiat, or Rothbard. But what’s the point? He knows what he is doing.
Prices - including the price of credit - are primarily information. They signal the relationship between money available for lending and the demand for loans. It doesn’t really matter if the numbers are high or low. They just have to be true. But Bessent proposes to improve on the truth, by making the numbers lie. Bring the long-bond interest rate down, he reasoned, and mortgage rates would come down too.
This was not the first time the feds have misled home buyers. Their low rates made it too easy to borrow, 2003-2007, setting borrowers up for a Big Loss. As it happened, some four million Americans lost their homes.
Houses are not just places to hang your hat and feed the cat. They are also the collateral for the mortgage industry...which, in the crisis of ’08, owed huge sums to the larger commercial lenders. After house prices began to fall, in a matter of days, Lehman Bros, Indy Mac, and Washington Mutual took the big loss too; they went broke.
Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street firms were next in line. But those institutions were not only financially savvy...they were politically savvy. They figured out how to turn Wall Street into a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose business. When the going was good, Wall Street reaped the profits. When they made mistakes, the public took the losses.
And so, last week, Bessent tried the old barkers’ con. Step right up. Bubble up the economy with fake money and fraudulent information (interest rates bent down to encourage borrowing). Then, when the Big Loss looms up, tell the public it is an ‘emergency’ and counterfeit some more money! President Trump was asked what he thought of Bessent’s ploy.
Reporter on the Bond Market: The yields have come back up since then. Have you talked to Bessent about another type of intervention?
Trump: The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.
Bomb Wall Street? Mr. Trump was probably having a ‘senior moment.’ Or a moment of penetrating clarity. When fraud no longer works, the feds turn to force. Bonds give way to bombs. Governments declare ‘emergencies’...and send in the marines. Bessent gave the bond market a push. Next will come the shove."
Jim Kunstler, "Cookery for All"
A Gift from Us for You Credulous Human Twits
"Cookery for All"
by Jim Kunstler
“We’re only cooked if we accept it.”
- Blaine Holt on “X
"They don’t call economics the dismal science for nothing. It has been noted - since Thomas Carlyle minted the term in 1849 (objecting to the emancipation of black slaves on Britain’s colonial sugar plantations as a harm to productivity) - that attempts to manage the billion-footed transactions of human beings always finds a way to bite back. But how can this creature we call society not try to regulate its affairs, with evils and hazards lurking in all we do, everywhere and always?
And so, you get politics, the quarrels that arise out of those efforts to manage a polity. And then you get war, which, the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz observed, is a continuation of politics by other means. But then, long before him, and on the other side of the world, came Sun Tzu’s treatise "The Art of War," which counseled that winning was best achieved with the least actual fighting.
All these ways of seeing our world converge dynamically in the current historical moment: this Fourth Turning, or Long Emergency - however you label it - in the arc of our techno-industrial order of things. A lot of these things are coming apart now, and in astounding ways, and it remains to be seen what we will do with these broken and discarded parts, and whether any of it can be put back together in a satisfactory way. Here in the USA, we act all this out these days with Trump and Trumpism and the Left with its Leftism.
Mr. Trump recognizes the brokenness and, being primarily a builder, seeks to rebuild according to first principles of the USA (Make America Great Again) - meaning, back to the Hamiltonian doctrine of an economy based on the production of things (of real value). The catch there is that it comes with baggage of Hamiltonian finance, which is the creation and use of debt with government assistance.
Now it happens that a primary feature of this Fourth Turning crisis in our techno-industrial order is excessive complexity that produces diminishing returns - that is, makes things worse rather than better. And a lot of this excessive complexity lodges itself in finance, because using operations that few people can understand serves beautifully in the engineering of frauds and swindles. Financial frauds and swindles, in turn, muddle the verity of money - in which finance is enacted — and things denominated in money - securities and so forth, all based fundamentally in debt. So, the net effect of such debauched finance leads to a great deal of insecurity and anxiety over money.
Which is where the Trumpian rebuild is dangerously vulnerable, especially as we enter the fall season, when the leaves flutter down and markets like to crash. Everybody and his uncle watching things financial, predict an imminent crackup in these markets as the rackets and hallucinations that magically levitate them dissolve in foul mists of reveal. For instance, the acid trip of artificial intelligence (AI).
Never have more lavish fantasies been proffered on a new technology. Elon Musk, the demigod prophet of the latest-and-greatest new tech, promises a coming economy of super-abundance and universal leisure (good for the sale of vacation packages on Mars). Musk is a fine fellow and there’s much to admire in his intelligence and positivity. But there’s plenty of reason to suspect that AI might disappoint and become a menace to mankind.
We’ve already noticed that it’s messing up all the procedures of schooling, leaving young people shockingly stupid, devoid of real skills, stripped of creativity. Anyway, the economy AI is supposed to integrate with and enhance would quickly become one devoid of human endeavor per se, and all the transactions that come out of it. If you think it through just a little ways, you can’t help seeing a system that’s based on getting something-for-nothing - which is to say a childish fantasy that precludes human transacting based on work... people who do nothing, make nothing, and enact nothing around doing-and-making... a society without anything social in it. In short, this imagined AI economy beats a path straight to entropy, the force in this universe that you don’t want to mess with.
All that is apart from the probability that we have already crossed the into the “singularity” territory where AI takes on a mind of its own and becomes an outright menace to the human race - who will then seek to destroy the AI monster it made (which AI will keenly apprehend and then look for ways to defend its existence). The storyline crudely harks back on the old Twilight Zone episode titled “To Serve Man” in which a posse of big-brained space aliens comes to earth acting all chummy and gifts us a handbook supposedly of its good intentions. Eventually, one savvy human gal manages to decode the aliens’ language and declares to the dopes boarding the UFO: “Don’t get on that ship... it’s a cookbook!”
On the other side of our national political psychodrama, the Lefty-leftists can’t even conceive of building or rebuilding anything, least of all a USA of first principles. They are simply agents of disorder and destruction, and their activities are predicated on the age-old demented idea that utopias surely grow out of smoldering ruins - so the faster everything gets ruined, the better.
Personally, I’d prefer it if the Trumpians prevail because I’m in favor of making-and-doing and the social enactments around all that. But we better beware that overgrowth of financial hazard baked into Alexander Hamilton’s old recipe book. If a correcting crash of financial markets coincides with the midterm election and sweeps away all the swindles and frauds currently operating, the lefty-leftists, so eager to serve man, will step up and sell the American people their one-way Marxist tickets to a utopia in the sky called Palookaville."
The Twilight Zone (Classic):
"To Serve Man - It's A Cook Book!"
Adventures With Danno, "Massive Savings At Aldi"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 8/24/26
"Massive Savings At Aldi"
Comments here:
"Economic Market Snapshot 8/24/26"
"Economic Market Snapshot 8/24/26"
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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
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Market Data Center, Live Updates:
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Job cuts and much more.
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
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And now... The End Game...
o
Sunday, August 23, 2026
"The Price Of Diesel Hits 7 Dollars A Gallon In California And A Massive Trade War Just Erupted Between The U.S. And Canada"
by Michael Snyder
"A historic economic meltdown appears to be percolating. As the price of diesel spikes, that is going to put pressure on the cost of just about everything else. And considering the fact that Canada is our largest trade partner, slapping a 50 percent tariff on all Canadian goods is not going to help our cost of living crisis either. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is bleeding jobs and the number of Americans that are filing for bankruptcy has risen to a very frightening level. It is starting to look a lot like 2008 all over again, and that is not a good thing at all.
If you use diesel fuel, you have already noticed that it has been getting a lot more expensive. At this point, the national average for diesel is hovering around five and a half dollars a gallon… As August 2026 rolls on, persistent price hikes are delivering a real wallet punch to truck owners, RVers, contractors, and heavy-fleet operators across the country. According to the latest fuel tracking data from AAA as of August 18, 2026, the U.S. national average retail diesel price has climbed to a staggering $5.4677 per gallon. That’s nearly a 15-cent jump in just one week, nearly 38 cents higher than last month, and a painful leap from the ~$3.69 per gallon we saw this time last year. For anyone relying on diesel to tow, haul freight, or earn a living, filling up is getting genuinely tough on the bottom line.
Of course there are some states where diesel is far more expensive than the national average. In California, the average price of a gallon of diesel just reached seven dollars…Diesel prices in California hit $7 per gallon again Wednesday as the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East knock out refineries, triggering a fuel supply crunch around the world. Truckers in the Golden State are shelling out about 30 cents more per gallon than they paid a month ago, according to data from AAA. Prices have surged about 37%, or $1.89 per gallon, compared to the same period last year.
This is a really big deal, because our economy runs on diesel. According to one industry expert that was just interviewed by CNBC, diesel is “the important macro fuel to watch”…Diesel is the most important fuel for the global economy, said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy. It is used “in transportation, it’s in heating fuel, it’s in agriculture, it’s in industrial uses,” McNally told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Monday. “It is the important macro fuel to watch,” he said.
Approximately 76 percent of all commercial trucks use diesel fuel. Just think about that. As diesel continues to become more expensive, this is going to have a devastating impact on our trucking industry…Rising costs for the fuel affect all modes of transportation, from airlines to trucking, and the ripple effect will impact “virtually all industries,” said Joel Sutherland, a professor of supply-chain management at the University of San Diego’s Knauss School of Business. For trucking, the consequences could be particularly disastrous. Some 90% of U.S. licensed common carriers operate 10 or fewer trucks, and most are struggling to stay afloat, Sutherland said. Some trucking companies have ceased doing business, and many more will likely fail if high fuel costs do not subside soon. That could cause U.S. trucking capacity to decline, making it even more expensive to transport goods around the country.
So why is this happening? You can blame the wars in the Middle East and Europe. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is way below pre-war levels, and the Russians have banned the export of diesel due to drone attacks on their refineries…Diesel prices are rising as the wars in the Ukraine and Iran wars have disrupted about 8% of the supply needed to meet 28 million barrels per day of global demand, Lipow said. Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries have forced Moscow to ban diesel exports of around 800,000 bpd, Lipow added.
The disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has affected about 1.2 million bpd of Middle East diesel exports, the analyst said. Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen recently attacked Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea refinery in Jizan, shutting the facility and its 200,000 bpd of capacity at least until the end of August, he said.
Meanwhile, a trade war has just erupted with our largest trading partner. The U.S. will now be imposing a 50 percent tariff on all Canadian goods, and the Canadians will be responding in kind…In his first public comments since negotiations collapsed on Friday in Washington, the US president wrote on social media: “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!! They have also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of tariffs,” he added. “No more!!!”
His comments came after the US imposed 50% tariffs on $20bn (£14.6bn) worth of Canadian goods, while Mark Carney, the country’s prime minister, has vowed to match them “dollar for dollar”. Yes, this is really going to hurt. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is insisting that the United States “asked too much and offered too little”… Prime Minister Mark Carney told his negotiators to walk away from the table after the Trump administration introduced late unacceptable demands on culture, autos and sovereignty that, when taken in concert with their overall approach to talks, revealed the U.S. was not interested in a “true economic partnership” with Canada.
In a departure from his usual diplomatic language, Carney suggested the U.S. sometimes signs trade deals in “pencil,” and while Canada’s government is united and working together, the same is not true of the Trump administration. “We cannot accept what they’ve offered, and we will not give what they’ve asked,” Carney said on Saturday in Ottawa, adding that the United States ‘asked too much and offered too little.’
We certainly don’t need a trade war with our largest trading partner, because lots of economic red flags have already been popping up all around us. For example, last week Walmart reported its slowest U.S. sales growth in more than six years. As a result, the stock price absolutely plummeted. And the fact that the U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs last month certainly has a lot of investors on edge. But those numbers will be quickly forgotten.
What will not be forgotten is the horrific cost of living crisis that has been going on since the beginning of this decade. One recent survey discovered that Americans believe that it is the greatest challenge that they are currently facing… According to a Statista Consumer Insights survey conducted between January and July 2026, 53 percent of U.S. adults said that the high cost of living was one of the biggest challenges they currently face – making it by far the most common answer ahead of mental and physical health at 26 percent each.
Needless to say, the rising price of diesel and our trade war with Canada are only going to make our seemingly endless cost of living crisis even worse. As our standard of living declines, the number of Americans filing for bankruptcy just keeps going up… The number of Americans who file for bankruptcy is growing. More than 500,000 people took this step in 2025, nearly 50% more than in 2022. And the numbers have kept on climbing, with a 12% jump in June 2026 from a year earlier as many consumers struggled to pay their bills.
At this point, most of the population is living right on the edge, and more people are falling out of the middle class with each passing day. For more than a decade, I have been ranting about the death of the middle class. But I don’t feel like all of that ranting has done much good, because the erosion of the middle class just continues to accelerate. There is no way that America can be strong without a strong middle class.Unfortunately, we are now heading into an economic storm of epic proportions, and what we experienced back in 2008 will look like a picnic in comparison."
"Power Bills Just Doubled And People Are Losing It"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 8/23/26
"Power Bills Just Doubled And People Are Losing It"
"There is no host here, no utility spokesman, no energy analyst. Every clip was recorded by the person it happened to, most of them holding the paper up to the lens while they read the number out. A man who lives alone stands up at a county meeting and says there is no reason a one-month bill should be six hundred and seventy-five dollars when the house is pitch black - and names the data centres going up around him. A woman in New Jersey holds up a bill where the charge to deliver the electricity is now larger than the electricity itself. Then the people who tried to prove it was not them. A woman in Virginia whose bill doubled with nothing changed in the house, so she started asking her friends and found theirs had doubled too. A financial coach who was away for half of February with the heat off, the breaker box switched off and the fridge unplugged, expecting a bill under thirty dollars. A woman comparing what a D.C. apartment is charged with what her own three-storey townhouse is charged, and unable to make the two numbers sit together. A woman from one of the poorest counties in Kentucky whose bill was twelve hundred dollars for a house nobody had set foot in for three months, with a rate increase already announced. And then the end of the line. A man addressing the North Carolina attorney general by name, because two hundred dollars for a seven-hundred-and-eighty square foot one-bedroom used to be fifty. A woman in Ohio whose bill hit seven hundred while the state's own projections said eight hundred.
A family whose power was cut off because they could not find a thousand dollars a month, in a place with no second provider to switch to. A household that had an electronic meter fitted without permission, watched the bill double, and were told the old meter costs eighty dollars to put back. A man opening the envelope on camera - five hundred and twenty-seven last month, six hundred and twenty-six oh five this month - saying he is almost relieved it was not eight hundred. And a man who is only home for eight hours of sleep a night, showing that a hundred and twenty dollars of electricity cost a hundred and sixty-two dollars to deliver. If your bill has gone somewhere you cannot explain, this is twelve people finding the same thing at the same time, in seven different states."
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"A Look to the Heavens With Chet Raymo"
“Learning And Yearning”
by Chet Raymo
“This photograph of the Eagle Nebula made by a rather modest telescope - the 0.9 meter instrument at Kitt Peak, Arizona - appeared on APOD. I sat in front of the computer screen for ten minutes, breathless. One tiny corner of the Milky Way Galaxy, one of tens of billions of galaxies that we can potentially see with our telescopes! At the center are the so-called "Pillars of Creation" from a famous Hubble photograph.
I recall when the Hubble photograph appeared in the media hundreds of viewers claimed to see the face of Jesus in the billowing clouds. Which prompted these observations from "Skeptics and True Believers": "In an article on the psychological basis of belief, the psychologist James Alcock proposed that two aspects of the human brain might be called the "yearning unit" and the "learning unit." He probably didn't mean these terms to be taken literally, as referring to separate compartments of the brain, but yearning and learning are certainly central to the way we interact with the world. It is hard to imagine how we can be fully human without a little of each. Finding the proper balance between the two is a task that can keep us occupied for most of our lives.
We yearn when we dream of fulfillment, of greater happiness, of knowing more. We yearn when we love, when we laugh, when we cry, when we pray. Yearning is wondering what is around the next bend, over the rainbow, beyond the horizon. Yearning is curiosity. Yearning is the driving force of science, philosophy, and religion.
Learning is listening to parents, wise men, shamans. Learning is reading, going to school, traveling, doing experiments, being skeptical. Learning is looking behind the curtain for the Wizard of Oz, touching the stove to see if it's hot, not taking anyone's word for it. In science, learning means trying as hard to prove that something is wrong as to prove it right, even if that something is a cherished belief.
Yearning without learning is seeing Elvis in a crowd, the fossilized footprints of humans and dinosaurs together in ancient rocks, weeping statues. Yearning without learning is buying tabloid newspapers with headlines announcing "Newborn baby talks of Heaven" and the like. Yearning without learning is looking for UFOs in the sky and the meaning of life in horoscopes.
Learning without yearning is pedantry, scientism, dogmatic belief. Learning without yearning is believing that we know it all, that what we see is what we get, that nothing exists except what can be presently weighed and measured. Learning without yearning is science without a heart, without a dream, without a hope of beauty. Yearning without learning is seeing the face of Jesus in a gassy nebula. Learning without yearning is seeing only the gas."
We yearn when we dream of fulfillment, of greater happiness, of knowing more. We yearn when we love, when we laugh, when we cry, when we pray. Yearning is wondering what is around the next bend, over the rainbow, beyond the horizon. Yearning is curiosity. Yearning is the driving force of science, philosophy, and religion.
Learning is listening to parents, wise men, shamans. Learning is reading, going to school, traveling, doing experiments, being skeptical. Learning is looking behind the curtain for the Wizard of Oz, touching the stove to see if it's hot, not taking anyone's word for it. In science, learning means trying as hard to prove that something is wrong as to prove it right, even if that something is a cherished belief.
Yearning without learning is seeing Elvis in a crowd, the fossilized footprints of humans and dinosaurs together in ancient rocks, weeping statues. Yearning without learning is buying tabloid newspapers with headlines announcing "Newborn baby talks of Heaven" and the like. Yearning without learning is looking for UFOs in the sky and the meaning of life in horoscopes.
Learning without yearning is pedantry, scientism, dogmatic belief. Learning without yearning is believing that we know it all, that what we see is what we get, that nothing exists except what can be presently weighed and measured. Learning without yearning is science without a heart, without a dream, without a hope of beauty. Yearning without learning is seeing the face of Jesus in a gassy nebula. Learning without yearning is seeing only the gas."
"I'm Rightly Tired..."
“I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein' on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin' no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin' from or goin' to or why. I'm tired of people bein' ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein' in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.”
- Stephen King, "The Green Mile"
"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"
"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour
and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"
by Maria Popova
“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease - for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude.
The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit - James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) - explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.
In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon - an old high school friend of his - to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book "Nothing Personal" (public library). Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits - of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age - and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope - are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”
At no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes:
"Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed."
It is a fearful speculation - or, rather, a fearful knowledge - that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.
Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives and a century after Tchaikovsky found beauty amid the wreckage of the soul at 4AM, Baldwin adds: "Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it - life - one more time?"
After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay - lyrics from “Long Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” - Baldwin continues: "I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."
That alone, Baldwin insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a “yea-sayer” to life - to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill this blink of existence bookended by nothingness with the courage of a bellowing aliveness.
In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem “Wait,” composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, Baldwin writes: "For, perhaps - perhaps - between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct - I believe - causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death."
And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith - so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, Baldwin argues, at four AM: "At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor - the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self - death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. And many of us perish then."
What then? A generation after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart, Baldwin offers: "But if one can reach back, reach down - into oneself, into one’s life - and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality - oneself - which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again."
Baldwin - whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in introducing his last public appearance before his death - wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try - we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves.
Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that “we must believe, without fear, in people,” Baldwin adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours: "Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost."
More than half a century later, "Nothing Personal" remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before Baldwin, on how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit, then revisit Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority, how he learned to truly see, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, his advice on writing, his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book."
Freely download "Nothing Personal", by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, here:
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