Full screen recommended.
Three-Quarter Town,
"The Evening the Whole Town Came Outside"
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Thursday, August 27, 2026
Blind Willie Blues, "A Flicker in the Field"
Blind Willie Blues, "A Flicker in the Field"
“A Flicker in the Field” is a deep, vintage Gospel Blues song about loneliness, brokenness, and holding onto faith when the darkness feels endless. With a slow, soulful blues groove, aching male vocals, warm vintage guitar, mournful piano, and a prayerful atmosphere, this song tells the story of a wounded soul searching for one small sign of hope in the middle of an empty field. When everything feels lost, sometimes faith is nothing more than a tiny flicker in the distance - but that little light can be enough to keep us walking. For every broken heart, every lonely night, and every soul still whispering a prayer."
Native American Elder, "Why Letting Go Is the Last Great Lesson of Life"
Full screen recommended.
Native American Elder,
"Why Letting Go Is the Last Great Lesson of Life"
"Native American Elder Explains Why Letting Go Is the Last Great Lesson of Life" explores the timeless psychology of acceptance, emotional healing, inner peace, and personal transformation. Discover how releasing attachment to the past, resentment, fear, and unrealistic expectations can unlock a calmer, stronger, and more meaningful life. This inspiring speech blends ancient wisdom with modern psychology and mindset shift principles to help you overcome emotional pain, reduce stress, and embrace lasting happiness. If you're seeking emotional resilience, self-growth, mental clarity, or spiritual wisdom, this video offers life-changing insights that can transform the way you think and live. Watch until the end to uncover the most powerful lesson that can bring true freedom and peace."
Musical Interlude: Yanni, "To The One Who Knows", "You Only Live Once"
Full screen recommended.
Yanni, "To The One Who Knows",
"You Only Live Once"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Why isn't this ant a big sphere? Planetary nebula Mz3 is being cast off by a star similar to our Sun that is, surely, round. Why then would the gas that is streaming away create an ant-shaped nebula that is distinctly not round?
Clues might include the high 1000-kilometer per second speed of the expelled gas, the light-year long length of the structure, and the magnetism of the star visible above at the nebula's center. One possible answer is that Mz3 is hiding a second, dimmer star that orbits close in to the bright star. A competing hypothesis holds that the central star's own spin and magnetic field are channeling the gas. Since the central star appears to be so similar to our own Sun, astronomers hope that increased understanding of the history of this giant space ant can provide useful insight into the likely future of our own Sun and Earth.”
Chet Raymo, “The Silence”
“The Silence”
by Chet Raymo
“The hiding places of my power
Seem open; I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all, and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel…”
“These few lines from Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” leapt off the page at me. They capture well enough what my life has become. All those years of teaching, of writing in the Boston Globe, were years of sharing public knowledge, knowledge that had been vetted by the scientific community. The work was not about me. The teacher was me, the writer was me, but what I taught and wrote was reliable, consensus knowledge of the world. A student in my classes or a reader of my newspaper columns would have been hard pressed to know my politics or my religion or the nature of the questions that came in the darkest hours of the night. And that is the way it should have been; that was my homage to objectivity.
Those were valuable years, years of building up a sturdy polder in the sea of mystery, a place to stand with a firmness of foot. And now, in retirement, with time on my hands- and on my mind- I find myself more inclined to explore what Wordsworth called “the hiding places of my power.” I approach. They close. I touch with my hand the surface of the pond that Pat wrote about the other day; my hand comes out of the depths to meet me. I see by glimpses. It is, I suppose, a kind of forgetting. With the forgetting comes a certain freshness. My fingertip touches the surface of the world from above and from below, and concentric circles spread outwards, rippling, like a soundless sound, and I struggle, in words, as best I can, to give a substance and a life to what I feel.
This does not mean, I trust, that I am going soft, finding supernaturalist religion or getting all New Age squishy as “age comes on.” I keep my feet planted on solid fact and read my weekly “Science” and “Nature” along with my Wordsworth. No, it is rather a simple freedom to explore the hiding places, attending to private particulars as opposed to public universals, listening for the small voice that whispers from the nooks and crannies of yet unassimilated reality.
There is a passage in “The Prelude” where a young Boy (the poet?), standing in evening air by the glimmering lake, makes a mimic hooting with his hands to his mouth and the owls answer. Twooo-twooo. And the reply. Twooo-twooo. Then, unaccountably, the answers cease. And in the silence the boy becomes more keenly aware than ever of water, rocks, and woods, and mountain torrents, “that uncertain heaven, received into the bosom of the steady lake.” Thoreau has something similar. He rejoiced in owls; their hoot, he said, was a sound well suited to swamps and twilight woods. The interval between the hoots was a deepened silence, suggesting, to Thoreau, “a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.” It is that that I now attend: the deepened silence between the hoots.”
o
"Edward Gibbon: On The Seven Key Indicators Of Civilizational Decline"
"Edward Gibbon: On The Seven Key
Indicators Of Civilizational Decline"
By Kaisar
"Most modern historians are weak. But there is one who stands out above the rest. I can think of no post-Enlightenment historian who better captured why civilizations wither and die than Edward Gibbon. His 1788 work "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" describes the process of collapse well, using Rome as the example. I highly recommend this read, even if using the abridged versions.
Here is a brief summary: "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is a monumental work by Edward Gibbon, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. Gibbon’s magnum opus provides a comprehensive historical account of the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire, spanning from the height of its power to its eventual fragmentation and fall. The work is considered a masterpiece of historical literature and a key text in the study of the Roman Empire.
Gibbon begins with the reign of Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD and traces the history of the Roman Empire through its various phases, ultimately concluding with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. You can take his causes of decline from the fall of Rome and apply it to every major national collapse since then. We can summarize these causes into seven key categories:
Internal Decay: Gibbon argues that internal decay played a crucial role in Rome’s decline. This included moral decadence, corruption, and a loss of civic virtue among the ruling class.
Military Challenges: The Roman military, once a formidable force, faced challenges such as overextension, external invasions, and reliance on mercenaries, contributing to its decline.
Economic Issues: Economic factors, including heavy taxation, inflation, and a reliance on slave labor, are highlighted by Gibbon as contributing to the empire’s decline.
Religious Factors: Gibbon explores the role of religion in the decline, emphasizing the rise of Christianity and its impact on the traditional Roman values and institutions. This created a breakdown from the original tradition, and a splintering within the foundational values of the state.
Barbarian Invasions: External pressures from barbarian invasions, particularly by Germanic and Hunnic tribes, are obviously identified as significant contributors to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Administrative Inefficiency: Gibbon critiques the Roman administrative system, pointing to bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and a lack of responsiveness to emerging challenges.
Division of the Empire: The division of the Roman Empire into East and West is seen as a weakening factor, with the Western Roman Empire eventually succumbing to various pressures while the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) persisted for several more centuries.
Any of those sound familiar? I have written on each one of these regarding the current American system:
Internal Decay: America Is Babylon
Military Challenges: The Condition Of The U.S. Military: Lying Dog-Faced Pony Soldiers
Economic Issues: Recognizing The Foundational Crack
Religious Factors: The Fall Of Christendom And The Great Lie Of The Enlightenment
Barbarian Invasions: The Ominous Purpose Of Illegal Immigration
Administrative Inefficiency: Bureaucracy Will Destroy Us
Division of the Empire: The [Much Needed] Great American Partition
If you didn’t know I was talking about Rome when you read the first list, you’d probably think this article was about the United States. Even the division piece – we don’t have an outright division yet, but the foundation is there, just as it was for Rome.
Remember: this work was written around 1788. When you read the above seven points, you would think it’s a critique of the current American state. But nope, this was Rome circa pre-collapse. It’s a great work, if you can stomach the sheer amount of content included. Those seven key indicators of decline are helpful to recognize; to properly discern the signs of the times. The lessons the book provides are phenomenal for extrapolating to future collapses. And pensively, to our own current condition."
Freely download "The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire" here:
The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Geranium”
“The Geranium”
“When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine -
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she’d lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me -
And that was scary -
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.
But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.”
- Theodore Roethke
"Go Down Swinging..."
"We lose those battles as often as we succeed. The key, though, win or lose, is to never fail. And the only way to fail is not to fight. So fight until you can't fight anymore. Never let go. Never give up. Never run. Never surrender. Fight the good fight, you fight even when it seems inevitable you're about to go down swinging."
- "Amelia Shepherd", "Grey's Anatomy"
o
The sons - in the dungeon - think they hear Henry approach to kill them.
Richard: "He's here! He'll get no satisfaction out of me!
He isn't going to see me beg!"
Geoffrey: "Why, you chivalric fool - as if the way one fell down mattered!"
Richard: "When the fall is all there is, it matters.”
- James Goldman, "The Lion In Winter"
"It May Be Necessary..."
"You may encounter many defeats, but you must
not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to
encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are,
what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it."
- Maya Angelou
Adventures With Danno, "Shocking Prices At Walmart!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 8/27/26
"Shocking Prices At Walmart!"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Fired Carl, 8/27/26
"Kroger Just Got Caught...
Americans Knew Something Was Wrong"
"Kroger has been facing growing questions about its business practices… and many Americans are wondering if there’s more going on behind rising prices, store closures, and aggressive cost-cutting. In this video, we break down what has been happening at Kroger, why customers and employees have been raising concerns, and which details about the company’s strategy often stay out of the spotlight. From pricing controversies and automation to delivery changes, layoffs, and employee experiences - here’s what Kroger’s recent decisions reveal about the future of one of America’s biggest grocery chains."
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Consumer Just Quit Spending"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 8/27/26
"The Consumer Just Quit Spending"
"The American consumer is pulling back, and major retailers are warning that discretionary spending is under serious pressure. Dick’s Sporting Goods just reported disappointing results, sending its stock sharply lower, while Foot Locker sales fell 3.6%. At the same time, consumers are cutting back on athletic apparel, sporting equipment and other purchases they can postpone. The message from retailers is becoming increasingly clear: Americans are changing the way they spend money. Home Depot and Lowe’s are seeing another side of the same economic shift. Consumers are still buying and repairing things, but they are postponing major home improvement and remodeling projects and choosing smaller do-it-yourself repairs instead. From sporting goods and fitness clothing to home improvement and big-ticket purchases, the economy is showing signs of a consumer who is becoming increasingly cautious, selective and financially stretched. This is iAllegedly, covering the economy, consumer spending, retail, personal finance and the warning signs you need to know."
Comments here:
"Americans Film Their Grocery Receipts And Nobody Can Afford A Full Cart"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 8/27/26
"Americans Film Their Grocery Receipts
And Nobody Can Afford A Full Cart"
"The weekly shop used to be the boring part of the budget. It is now the part that decides whether the rest of the month works. Sixteen American shoppers filmed their own carts and their own totals. A woman works out that she is $85.26 from being overdrawn and asks how anyone buys two weeks of groceries with that. A mother feeds herself and her daughter for a week on $35. Another sets a $40 weekly budget and films whether it holds. One family adds up three stores in a single day - $169.73, $215.69, $153.54 - and lands on a total over $538. A man asks people to guess what his cart cost and the guesses come in low. A woman films the moment her food stamps are wiped from the card. Two others film the walk into the food pantry, one of them saying she had nothing left to lose. None of them are experts. None of them are reading a script. They are standing at a till or sitting in a car park with a receipt in their hand, and the total does not match the money that is there.
If you have started putting things back on the shelf, or doing sums in the aisle, you are not disorganized and you are not overspending. That is genuinely where food prices have landed for a great many households, and it has happened fast enough that budgets built a year ago no longer hold. A few things are worth looking at. Food pantries are not means-tested in most places and do not ask what you earn - the people in this video who used one all say the same thing about how ordinary it was. Check whether your state has expanded SNAP eligibility, because the thresholds moved and a lot of working households now qualify who did not before. Many supermarkets mark down meat and bread on a predictable schedule; ask a member of staff what time. And if a relative has offered to pick up a shop, let them."
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "America’s Yard Sale"
Bison crossing a road in Yellowstone National Park
"America’s Yard Sale"
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "Dan sent an intriguing thought. What if US bonds were not ‘certificates of guaranteed confiscation’ after all? What if America’s credit was well secured...by trillions of dollars’ worth of real assets? Dan: "Yesterday a guy I follow and respect said the $40 trillion in debt is secured by America’s massive (not quite infinite) natural resources...land, water, food, energy that sits on public lands ostensibly ‘owned’ by the American people. His implication was that these public assets more than balance out the $40 trillion in debt. We’re good for it!"
The thought comes up from time to time. What’s Yellowstone worth? NASA? Millions of acres of prairie? The Washington Monument? Cape Canaveral? Are they worth enough to cover a $40 trillion in debt...along with $15 trillion more in pension and prostate operations for federal employees...not even to mention the trillions more in ‘mandatory’ spending in line behind them?
But many of America’s most precious assets never show up on the balance sheet. Gold, for example. The feds carry their gold on the books at $42 an ounce. It’s actually worth more than 100 times as much. That alone would bring in about $1.2 trillion at auction...enough to fund the government for about two months.
Then, there is land. The feds own 640 million acres - more than a quarter of the entire US landmass. What it is worth is anyone’s guess...since dumping that much property onto the market would surely crash prices. And even if you could sell it for an average of $100 an acre (think of all that desert and uninhabitable wilderness), it would still only net you $64 billion, again, enough to keep the feds going for three days.
And here is where we’re beginning to see the vast gap between reality and fantasy. An acre of Alaskan forest is real...it has a real value, based on where it is and how it could be used. But the debt numbers are fantastical, wisps in the wind, unimaginable, unfathomable, and unmanageable. When you look at them hard, you see that no plausible combination of real things can measure up.
Proponents of the ‘the feds are good for it’ hypothesis turn to the near-mythical ‘resources’ under federal land - oil, gas, coal, minerals etc. They claim they are worth as much as $200 trillion - far beyond what the feds owe. Hurrah, they say. Problem solved.
But look again. Oil may sell for $100 a barrel, delivered to the refinery. But it may cost more than $100 to deliver it. That’s why most of the world’s oil ‘reserves’ remain in reserve, until the price rises enough to make them viable.
The Cato Institute had a go at better numbers. Its Randal O’Toole did the math and came up with as much as $2 trillion worth of energy resources, along with less than $2 trillion more for the land itself. Of course, the feds have much more in assets. The General Accounting Office says they have $2 trillion in (mostly) student loans, $1.4 trillion in buildings and equipment, $1.2 trillion in cash (last year) and military hardware worth about half a trillion more.
Click image for larger size.
There really is no way the feds are ever going to auction off the nation’s treasures. Who in Congress would vote to sell Yellowstone, for example?
But let’s imagine that the sale would go on. Picture the excitement when the Pentagon holds its first lawn sale. Israelis, Iranians, Chinese - what a marvelous collection of eager buyers. They would kick the tires on jeeps...climb up on the half-tracks...and try out the rocket-launchers to make sure they were in working order. And then, after the buyers had gone home - laden with F-35s and huge tracts of empty land in Wyoming and Montana (one of which included an ICBM silo!) - the feds could count their money.
Damn! Selling everything, even the Lincoln Memorial, would bring in less than $15 trillion, and probably much less. After all, how many of those student loans are actually collectible? No matter, the ‘going-out-of-business’ sale might bring in enough to retire a third of the national debt. But wait. Deficits add about $2 trillion to the debt each year. Within six or seven years, the debt would be back to where it was...
And then, having sold its buildings, land and other assets, the feds would have turned themselves from proud owners to grudging tenants...and instead of receiving lease payments, grazing fees, timber rights, and royalties, they would get nothing. The feds would still be in business...and still losing money...but without a pot to you-know-what in."
"The Lighter Side Of Dating, Mating, And Civilizational Collapse'
"The Lighter Side Of Dating,
Mating, And Civilizational Collapse'
by John Wilder
"Even thirty years ago, finding a spouse was as easy as grabbing a beer at a kegger. You met. Maybe at school, maybe at church, maybe at work, maybe some friends introduced you. Hell, maybe at the kegger. It was a straightforward and reliable process, and it was also often sweaty and fun.
Even before my time, though, it was even easier. Take it back to the 1800s, and men brought home the bacon, women kept the hearth warm, and together they built a life, maybe a farm, maybe a picket fence. Often, people would meet and spend their whole lives in the same location. The process wasn’t perfect, but it worked for thousands of years.
Fast-forward to 2026, and the mating market is a dumpster fire. A constant source of conversation is the baby bust, describing how women aren’t reproducing enough children to keep society going. Part of the reason for that is that cultural shifts and technological disruptions have turned love from carnal creativity in the backseat of a Camaro™ to the swipe of a finger on the smooth glass of a screen protector. The result? A generation of lonely hearts, spinsters, and guys who’ve decided sweatpants and beer are a better deal than chasing women who don’t even see them as people. Culture and tech crashed the human mating economy, and why it’s tearing the family, the atom of society, to shreds.
For thousands of years, societies kept a lid on female promiscuity, not because of some patriarchal conspiracy (okay maybe it was, we’re still meeting Thursday night, right guys?), but because it worked.
People who tear down traditions often don’t realize exactly what they’re destroying until it’s gone, and then it’s too late because the fragile fabric that it was supporting has collapsed. It’s sort of like playing Jenga™ with retarded monkeys on crack, but I won’t speak any more about how I know that.
Tradition knew what science later confirmed: high rates of female promiscuity correlate with lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates. Skanky women are horrible for society. A 2020 study from the Institute for Family Studies found that women with more sexual partners before marriage are less likely to stay married. They graph waivers after the big increase in marrying a woman who has had more than one sex partner to a big drop at around four sex partners (for some reason). If you can’t get a virgin, four seems to be the lucky number. But if you’re the 167th guy to tap into that action?
The chances of you being “the one” are nearly zero, yet in 2026 she still wants a ring worth six months of blood, sweat and tears and a house and she brings...you being number 167. Back when shame was a thing, women faced social pressure to be selective, and men had a reason to step up for a low-mileage woman. Now? Shame is as outdated as a Marvel™ movie. Women are free to “explore” and “find themselves” and “live their best life” all while banging a neverending stream of potential Prince Charmings.
Then there’s money. Historically, men were the breadwinners, or at least the leaders in the grind in the family business or farm, with Ma raising the kids and churning the butter while Pa tamed the back 40. Women relied on men for financial stability, and men relied on women to keep the home and raise the children.
Enter the modern workforce: women now make up nearly half of U.S. workers and 90% of the human resources department everywhere. That leads to the dilemma of the Stunning and Brave woman: she wants a man who makes more than her, yet demands equal pay. A 2023 Pew Research study found 55% of women prefer a partner with higher income (and 45% of women are liars). That’s fine, but men’s wages have stagnated since the 1970s while women’s have risen. The math doesn’t add up.
Worse, the government has stepped in as Husband 2.0. Welfare programs, from food stamps to housing subsidies, act like a sugar daddy for single women, especially mothers. In 2022, over 40% of single-mother households received some form of public assistance. Why marry a man when Uncle Sugar’s got your back and they can still bang all the men they want and don’t have to listen to any man?
Women on welfare aren’t wives anymore; they’re concubines of the state, trading solemn vows for EBT and government cheese. The family, once the bedrock of civilization, is now a casualty of games and prizes fueled by promiscuity and feminism. But I repeat myself.
And that’s not even factoring in divorce-rape where unhaaaaapppy or bored women can hit the eject button and blow up the marriage with no real consequences except getting to keep the house, kids, cash and getting a free ticket to ride on the Chad carousel.
That’s bad enough. It’s actually worse than Madonna’s herpes. If culture cracked the mating market, technology crushed it like a python on a peanut. Enter Tinder®, Bumble®, and the swipe-right revolution. Women, all women, are hypergamous. They want the very best mate they can find. Society used to keep them in check through societal pressure. Oh, and soon enough they would have run out of random men to pleasure. Now the apps give them a digital buffet of Chads, Brads, and Thads. Is anyone named Thaddeus nowadays? I digress.
A 2021 study showed women on dating apps rate 80% of men as “below average” in attractiveness, while men rate women more realistically on a bell curve. The result? A 5 or 6 woman swipes right on a 10. Call him Prince Charming the Senator’s son, complete with abs and a hedge fund, who might bang her once but won’t stick around for breakfast or be seen in public with her, let alone hang a ring on her.
She walks away thinking, “He was the one, I could get him to marry me,” and now every guy who doesn’t match up to Prince Charming is... settling. Yes. Settling, even though Prince Charming doesn’t remember her and only picked her up because it was a Tuesday, and was just taking his father’s deathbed advice: “go ugly, early” and picked her up just for amusement. Spinsterhood beckons, with a side of cat and wine memes.
Men aren’t entirely innocent bystanders here, either. Faced with an endless parade of women chasing the top 10% of guys, many men have thrown in the towel. Why grind for a better job, hit the gym, or learn to dress like you didn’t just roll out of a laundry basket?
A 2024 survey found 30% of men aged 18-29 have given up on dating entirely, opting for porn, video games, or “monk mode.” They’re not wrong to notice the game is rigged against traditional one-for-one sorting. Now, Chad gets his choice, and, if they’re lucky, the might get the attention of a slagged-out woman who is still pining for Chad – a widow for a man that was only in her life for a night.
This isn’t just about lonely Friday nights. This is about the death of the family. Men want decent looks, monogamy, and a partner who’s kind - basic stuff. “She can’t read but she’s faithful and hasn’t had sex with Baltimore” has become a passing grade for many. Women want the whole package: money, status, looks, protection, and a guy who’s basically a football start with a corner office. Wait. Tom Brady didn’t work out for his wife. Neil Armstrong’s wife became unhaaaapppy. What chance does the average guy have?
Marriage rates are at historic lows, being down 60% since 1960. Divorce rates hover around 40%. Kids grow up in fractured homes or none at all, with single-parent households now at 30% nationwide and rising. The family, the core unit, the atom that glues society together, is being eroded by individualism on steroids. I could write a book about this topic, but you get the idea.
So how do we dig out of this mess? Start with culture. Bring back shame. The scarlet-letter kind. Encourage women to value loyalty over chasing Chad, and men to step up instead of checking out. That starts with incentives, because I don’t think anyone has any shame left.
Let’s rethink current incentives. Have a kid and no husband? Tough luck. No child support, no state support. Same thing with divorce. No fun and prizes for that, and if you’re at-fault, you lose the kids. Sure, tax breaks for married couples or policies that don’t make Uncle Sugar a better bet than a husband are nice, but we don’t need a nudge, we need a nuke.
Will the norm come back? It has to. Two more generations of this, and civilization will cease to exist. Perhaps G. Michael Hopf (LINK) got the old quote wrong and it should go more like this:
Bad times create strong men,
Strong men create good times,
Good times make women skanky,
Skanky women create bad times.
Don’t worry, nothing’s depending on this. I mean, nothing other than the fate of civilization."
"They Know What's Coming Because They Planned It" (Excerpt)
"They Know What's Coming Because They Planned It"
by Jim Quinn
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency involved.” – Ludwig von Mises
“The financial history of the last century shows a steady increase in the amount of public indebtedness. Nobody believes that the states will eternally drag the burden of these interest payments. It is obvious that sooner or later all these debts will be liquidated in some way or other, but certainly not by payment of interest and principal according to the terms of the contract.” – Ludwig von Mises
Excerpt: "Anyone living in the real world of commuting to a job, buying groceries, paying rent, filling up their gas tank, paying utility bills, paying property taxes, and generally trying to live an honest hard working life with a couple weeks of vacation per year, knows they are being fed a load of bullshit by the Trumps, Bessents and Warshs of the world. They are spinning false narratives, faking the economic statistics, lying to you about how dire our economic situation is, and above all, spending and printing fiat at hypersonic speed in a desperate attempt to give the appearance of normalcy, when in reality we are living through the most abnormal, corrupt, degenerate, dangerous period in history.
This normalcy bias is employed by the vast majority of dumbed down, I-gadget addicted, debt enslaved, mRNA jabbed, zombie-like consumers, as they shuffle through their daily existence believing the propaganda shoveled at them 24/7 on the boob tube and their social media accounts, by billionaire oligarchs, corrupt politicians, captured media talking heads, and the invisible government pulling the strings to manipulate their thoughts, decisions, and false beliefs. As a born cynical skeptic, I no longer believe anyone or anything. I’m real fun at parties.
As our national debt surpassed $40 trillion last week and has been accelerating at a rate of $13.4 billion per day (annualized rate of $4.9 trillion) since July 1, the only analogy I can make is the final scene of Thelma & Louise when they purposely drive off a cliff into the Grand Canyon, rather than face the consequences of their actions. But, in my daily existence, the people at the gym, drugstore, and grocery store seem happily oblivious to the extreme danger we currently face as citizens of a dying empire, intent on going out with a bang. We are accelerating towards an economic meltdown, inflationary financial collapse, and possibly global war, and no one seems to care or acknowledge reality.
It’s almost as if the 270 million sheep, who allowed themselves to be injected with a Big Pharma toxic gene altering poison, with little critical thinking skills to begin with, have been rendered deaf, dumb and blind to the machinations of their overlords as we spiral towards collapse. It seems only 5% to 10% of the population have the proper critical thinking skills, distrust of the government, ability to do math, comprehension to understand history, and courage to tell the truth and act rationally, in an irrational, perverted, debased world, built on debt, delusions, and denial. It makes me sick to my stomach observing the cowardice, corruption, and degradation of the pedophile elites who wield the power in our society, leading the sheep to slaughter and the world towards catastrophic ruin."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
"Trinity’s Shadow"
"Trinity’s Shadow"
by Edward Curtin
"I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep.
Someday I will die and I wonder why. This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young. That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.
Trinity has shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has enkindled my days. Sick minds play sick word games as they inflict pain and death. They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gadget,” as if it were an innocent little toy. They took and blasphemed the Christian mystery of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were. They thought they were gods. Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.
Where are they now? Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Where are the just and the unjust? Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their doomsday machines for a rerun, the final first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living? Will they sing as they launch the missiles – “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night?”
The wheel turns. We count the years. We wonder why. Years ago I started my academic life by writing a thesis entitled “Dealing With Death or Death Dealing.” It was a study of the transformation of cultural symbol systems, death, and nuclear weapons. The last hundred years and more have brought a transformation and disintegration of the traditional religious symbol system – the sacred canopy – that once gave people comfort, meaning, and hope. Science, technology, and nuclear weapons have changed all that. Death has been socially relocated and we live under the nuclear umbrella, a sinister “safeguard” that is cold comfort. The ultimate power of death over all life has been transferred from God to men, those controlling the nuclear weapons. This subject has never left me. I suppose it has haunted me. It is not a jolly subject, but I think it has chosen me.
Was I born in a normal time? Is war time our normal time? It is. I was. But to be born at a time and place when your country’s leaders were denouncing their German and Japanese enemies as savage war criminals while execrably emulating them and then outdoing them is something else again. With Operation Paperclip following World War II, the United States government secretly brought 1,600 or more Nazi war criminals into the U.S. to run our government’s military, intelligence, space, chemical, and biological warfare programs. We became Nazis. Lewis Mumford put it this way in "The Pentagon of Power":
"By the curious dialectic of history, Hitler’s enlargement and the refurbishment of the Nazi megamachine gave rise to the conditions for creating those counter-instruments that would conquer it and temporarily wreck it. In short, in the very act of dying the Nazis transmitted their disease to their American opponents; not only the methods of compulsive organization or physical destruction, but the moral corruption that made it feasible to employ those methods without stirring opposition."
There are always excuses for such moral corruption. When during WW II the U.S. firebombed almost all Japanese cities, Dresden and Cologne in Germany, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in gratuitously savage attacks, these were justified and even celebrated as necessary to defeat evil enemies. Just as Nazi war criminals were welcomed into the U.S. government under the aegis of Allen Dulles who became the longest running CIA director and the key to JFK’s assassination and coverup, the diabolic war crimes of the U.S. were swept away as acts of a moral nation fighting a good war. What has followed are decades of U.S. war crimes from Korea through Vietnam and Iraq, etc. A very long list.
The English dramatist Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Address, put it bluntly: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
Nothing could be truer. When in 2014 the U.S. engineered the coup in Ukraine (coups being an American specialty), it allied itself with neo-Nazi forces to oppose Russia. This alliance should have shocked no one; it is the American way. Back in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting death squads in Central America, Ronald Reagan told the world that “The Contras are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” Now the Ukrainian president Zelensky is feted as a great hero, Biden telling him in an Oval Office visit that “it’s an honor to be by your side.” Such alliances are not anomalies but the crude reality of U. S. history.
But let me return to “Trinity,” the ultimate weapon of mass destruction since I was reading a recent article about it. Kai Bird, the coauthor of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," the book that inspired the film "Oppenheimer" about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist credited as “the father of the atomic bomb” and the man who named the first atomic bomb Trinity, has written an Op Ed piece in The New York Times titled, “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” True in certain respects, this article is an example of how history can be slyly used to distort the present for political purposes. In typical NY Times fashion, Bird tells certain truths while concealing, distorting, and falsifying others.
I do not consider Oppenheimer a tragic figure, as does Bird. Complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future. Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical or big tech industries to regulate themselves.
Bird rightly says that Oppenheimer did not regret his work inventing the atomic bomb, and he correctly points out the injustice of his being maligned and stripped of his security clearance in 1954 in a secret hearing by a vote of 2 to 1 of a security panel of The Atomic Energy Commission for having communist associations. “Celebrated in 1945 as the ‘father of the atomic bomb,’” Bird writes, “nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.” A “victim,” I should add, who named names to save his own reputation.
But tucked within his article, Bird tells us: “Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.” By which he means these officials like Anthony Fauci were maligned when they gave the public correct scientific information. This is absurd. Fauci – “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” – and other government “civil servants” misinformed the public and lied over and over again, but Bird implies they too were tragic figures like Oppenheimer.
He writes: "We stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation. Our politicians need to listen more to technology innovators like Sam Altman and quantum physicists like Kip Thorne and Michio Kaku."
Here too he urges “us” to listen to the very people responsible for Artificial Intelligence, just as “we” should have listened to Oppenheimer after he brought us the atomic bomb. Implicit here is the belief that science just marches progressively on and there’s no stopping it, and when dangerous technologies emerge from scientists’ work, we should trust them to control them.
Nowhere does Bird suggest that scientists have a moral obligation before the fact to not pursue a certain line of research because of its grave possible consequences. Maybe he has never read Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein", only written over two hundred years ago.
Finally, and most importantly, Bird begins his concluding paragraph with these words: "Today, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are a stark reminder that we can never be complacent about living with nuclear weapons This is simply U.S. propaganda. The U.S. has provoked and fueled the war in Ukraine, broken all nuclear weapon treaties, surrounded Russia with military bases, stationed nuclear weapons in Europe, engaged in nuclear blackmail with its first strike policy and threats, etc. Putin has said in response that if – and only if – the very existence of the Russian state and land is threatened with extinction would the use of nuclear weapons be considered."
A little history is informative. “Barely six weeks after the Hiroshima-Nagsaki bombings,” Michel Chossudovsky tells us, “the US War Department [Pentagon] issued a blueprint (September 15, 1945) to ‘Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map’ (66 cities with 204 atomic bombs), when the US and the USSR were allies. This infamous project is confirmed by declassified documents.” (For further details see Chossudovsky, 2017)
Below is the image of the 66 cities of the Soviet Union which had been envisaged as targets by the US War Department.
See also Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War. “90 Seconds to Midnight”: The Pentagon’s 1945 “Doomsday Blueprint” to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”
But back to Bird, who, in writing a piece about Oppenheimer’s “tragedy” and defending science, has also subtly defended a trinity of other matters: the government “science” on Covid, the transformative power coming from AI, and the U.S. propaganda about Russia and nuclear weapons. There is no mention of JFK’s call to abolish nuclear weapons. This is how the “paper of record” does its job.
I sit here now at the end of the day. Shadows are falling and I contemplate such trinities. I am stunned by the fact that we exist, but under a terrifying Shadow that many wish to ignore. Jung saw this shadow side as not just personal but social, and when it is ignored, the collective evils of modern societies can autonomously erupt. Bird argues that nuclear weapons are the result of a scientific quest that is unstoppable. He writes that Oppenheimer “understood that you cannot stop curious human beings from discovering the physical world around them [and then making nuclear bombs or designer babies].”
This is the ideology of progress that brooks no opposition since it is declared inevitable. It is a philosophy that believes there should be no limits to human knowledge, which would include the knowledge of good and evil, but which can then be ignored since it and all thought and beliefs are considered a priori to be relative. The modern premise that everything is relative is of course a contradiction since it is an absolute statement. Many share this philosophy of despair disguised as progress as it has crept into everything today. It is tragic, for if people accept it, we are doomed to follow a Faustian pact with the devil and all hell will follow. I think of Bob Dylan singing :
"I just don’t see why I should even care,
It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there..."
But I do care, and I wonder why. As night comes on, I sit here and wonder."
"This Day In History Krakatoa Explodes With Massive Force – 1883"
Full screen recommended.
"This Day In History
Krakatoa Explodes With Massive Force – 1883"
by History.com
"One of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history occurs on Krakatoa (also called Krakatau), a small, uninhabited volcanic island east of Sumatra and west of Java, on August 27, 1883. Heard 3,000 miles away - and believed to have produced the loudest sounds in human history - the explosions threw five cubic miles of earth 50 miles into the air, created 120-foot tsunamis and killed 36,000 people.
Krakatoa exhibited its first stirrings in more than 200 years on May 20, 1883. A German warship passing by reported a seven-mile high cloud of ash and dust over Krakatoa. For the next two months, similar explosions would be witnessed by commercial liners and natives on nearby Java and Sumatra. With little to no idea of the impending catastrophe, the local inhabitants greeted the volcanic activity with festive excitement.
On August 26 and August 27, excitement turned to horror as Krakatoa literally blew itself apart, setting off a chain of natural disasters that would be felt around the world for years to come. An enormous blast on the afternoon of August 26 destroyed the northern two-thirds of the island; as it plunged into the Sunda Strait, between the Java Sea and Indian Ocean, the gushing mountain generated a series of pyroclastic flows (fast-moving fluid bodies of molten gas, ash and rock) and monstrous tsunamis that swept over nearby coastlines.
Four more eruptions beginning at 5:30 a.m. the following day proved cataclysmic. The explosions could be heard as far as 3,000 miles away, and ash was propelled to a height of 50 miles. Fine dust from the explosion drifted around the earth, causing spectacular sunsets and forming an atmospheric veil that lowered temperatures worldwide by several degrees.
Of the estimated 36,000 deaths resulting from the eruption, at least 31,000 were caused by the tsunamis created when much of the island fell into the water. The greatest of these waves measured 120 feet high, and washed over nearby islands, stripping away vegetation and carrying people out to sea. Another 4,500 people were scorched to death from the pyroclastic flows that rolled over the sea, stretching as far as 40 miles, according to some sources. In addition to Krakatoa, which is still active, Indonesia has another 130 active volcanoes, the most of any country in the world."
"The Earth Is Being Hit By One Catastrophic Disaster After Another, And This Is Only Just The Beginning"
by Michael Snyder
"Those people didn’t have a chance. One moment they were normally living their lives, and the next moment they were gone. Many that were swept away by the rushing waters didn’t even live in the region. In fact, we are being told that “hundreds of tourists” are missing…Devastating flash floods and mudslides have wiped out buildings and bridges along the Nepal–Tibet border – with hundreds of tourists still missing. In Nepal, houses and roads were swept away by rushing water and mudslides. Meanwhile, officials in China–controlled Tibet said they feared ‘major casualties’.
We have seen flooding in Nepal and Tibet before, but this was different. As the wall of water and mud rushed forward, it came slamming into homes and bridges… Harrowing footage from the scene showed fast-flowing floodwater ripping through the streets and destroying everything – including homes and bridges – in its path. River banks burst as walls of water came rushing through the densely populated areas, sweeping people underwater as others sought safety on higher ground. Aerial footage showed floodwater completely consuming land near the Nepal-Tibet border, sending people running for their lives as buildings collapsed in seconds. In the end, the final death toll will probably be in the thousands.
Originally, experts were telling us that a magnitude 4.4 earthquake triggered a gigantic ice avalanche which caused the sudden flooding…
But later reports claimed that a landslide that occurred at 8:37 local time triggered the avalanche that created the flooding. Apparently the huge earthquake that was detected was actually caused by the landslide…
Though the horrifying disaster is still unfolding, initial reports suggested the floods could be the result of an avalanche triggered by an earthquake, Nepal’s foreign minister Shisir Khanal told the country’s parliament Wednesday. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported recording a 4.4 magnitude quake around the time the security footage was taken at the border. However, USGS hours later clarified that the trembling detected was not an earthquake, but caused by the landslide itself, registering as the equivalent of a 5.2 magnitude quake. But no matter how it started, nobody can deny that this was truly a historic disaster.
Meanwhile, we just witnessed a series of 13 eruptions at Mount Anak Krakatau…The Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (PVMBG) recorded 13 eruptions from Mount Anak Krakatau in South Lampung Regency, Lampung Province. The height of the eruptions varied from 50 to 300 meters from the summit of Mount Anak Krakatau, from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Jakarta time. Suwarno, Head of the Mount Anak Krakatau Monitoring Post in Hargopancuran, Rajabasa District, stated on Wednesday that the volcano remains volatile, so further eruptions are still possible.
This should deeply concern all of us, because one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history occurred there in 1883…Between 19 May and 21 October 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa (located in the Sunda Strait, then part of the Dutch East Indies - modern-day Indonesia) began erupting, lasting more than five months. On 27 August, the island had its most significant eruption, which destroyed over 70% of the island and its surrounding archipelago, the island collapsing into a caldera. The eruption of 27 August had an estimated volcanic explosivity index of 6, and is one of the deadliest and most destructive volcanic events in recorded history; the third explosion of that day, that occurred at 10:02 a.m., remains the loudest-known sound in history.
The explosion was heard 3,110 kilometres (1,930 mi) away in Perth, Western Australia, and Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,800 kilometres (3,000 mi) away.[3] The acoustic pressure wave circled the globe more than three times.[4]: 63 At least 36,417 deaths are attributed to the eruption and the tsunamis it created. Significant additional effects were felt worldwide in the days and weeks after the volcano’s eruption. Additional seismic activity was reported until February 1884, but any reports after October 1883 were dismissed by Rogier Verbeek’s subsequent investigation into the eruption.
That gigantic eruption caused a volcanic winter that lasted for about a year. Our oceans could actually use a cooling trend right now, because they are hotter than ever. In fact, average global ocean temperatures just hit the highest level ever recorded…As a record-breaking El Niño builds in the Pacific and large swaths of the globe’s oceans are affected by marine heat waves, a significant record has fallen. According to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, average global sea surface temperatures have reached a new high, rising to nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit late last week - potentially for the first time in millennia.
This mark surpassed the previous record set in March 2024. This is crazy. On August 22nd, we broke the record that had been established in March 2024… The daily average sea surface temperature across the extra-polar global ocean, between 60°S and 60°N, reached 21.1°C (70°F) on August 22, 2026, the highest value in the Copernicus Climate Pulse record beginning in 1979. The reading exceeded the previous daily record of 21.09°C (69.96°F), set in March 2024, and came in August, although temperatures across the domain normally reach their annual maximum in March and April. If global ocean temperatures are going to set an all-time record, it is supposed to happen in either March of April. For it to happen so late in the year is extremely strange.
Many want to blame humans for what is occurring, but scientists have discovered that the warming of our oceans actually gets worse the deeper than you go. That suggests that whatever is warming our oceans is coming from underneath.
Currently, 42 percent of the Earth’s oceans are experiencing unusual marine heat waves…According to NOAA data, 42 percent of the planet’s oceans are currently experiencing marine heat waves. In the Pacific Ocean alone, marine heat waves cover an area that’s equivalent to nine times the size of the contiguous United States - greatly contributing to the new global sea surface temperature record.
So why is this important? When the oceans get warmer, we tend to experience hotter temperatures, intense droughts, enormous storms and massive wildfires…Hotter oceans exacerbate the sea level rise and extreme storms that threaten billions of people, as well as driving marine heatwaves that decimate sea life and undermine coastal livelihoods, scientists warned.
The northern hemisphere summer has already been hit by record-breaking heatwaves, drought and wildfires in Europe and North America, and intense rain and typhoons in Asia. The ocean heat spike is being intensified by a fast developing El Niño event, which is set to be the hottest in at least a century. El Niño events are natural climate variations that raise global temperature and change weather patterns, with serious impacts around the world. The new El Niño has already delivered low monsoon rain in India, major wildfires in Indonesia and heightened fire concerns in Australia.
More importantly, when ocean temperatures rise to unusual levels, fish start dying in very large numbers. One expert has warned that “the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish”… Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade.
Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year. “To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish,” said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study’s lead author.
As our oceans warm, we could lose billions upon billions of fish. That is really bad news, because the world is already facing very serious food shortages in the months ahead. In 2026, global food production is being hammered from so many different directions. We really are facing a “perfect storm”, and for those of us that live in the western world that means that food prices will soon go up even higher. But for many of those that live in impoverished nations around the globe, a dramatic drop in global food production could be the difference between life and death."
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