So, we rise from the rubble...
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Friday, July 31, 2026
John Wilder, "Winter Is Coming"
"Winter Is Coming"
by John Wilder
"The last few years have seen more change than the last twenty years, combined. This is to be expected, especially if you give Strauss and Howe’s "The Fourth Turning" idea any credence. A short version of The Fourth Turning (also known as Kondratieff Wave Theory) is that there is a roughly 80-year cycle of human affairs. Let me use the life of my Dad, Pa Wilder, to describe it:
When Pa Wilder was young he spent most of his childhood in Winter, the first defining experience of his life was the Great Depression. Back then, they had printed versions of the Internet that they would get delivered to their house every day, called newspapers. They also had cell phones that never needed charging, and that you could never lose because they were in the living room and conveniently connected by a cord to the wall.
I’m sure all of the kids on the playground talked with Pa about how obvious it was that the Federal Reserve’s® monetary policy, combined with bankers lending to anyone with a pulse led to near financial collapse. Oh, and how their parents couldn’t afford shoes. Thankfully, Pa lived in a farming community, and every little house in town had a very large garden out back. Food from the grocery store?
Why would you spend money on food when you had to pay for the mortgage? That’s the sort of lesson that bored itself into Pa Wilder’s mind. As a kid, he saw people lose houses, he saw people lose fortunes. He saw a nation nearing collapse.
Click image for larger size.
Economic collapse led to the second thing that defined Pa Wilder’s youth: World War II. Not long after Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor he was in boot camp in Ft. Sill and before long was a 2nd lieutenant in the Army. The next four years he spent on an all-expenses-paid European vacation
The end of the war was the end of Kondratieff Winter. What followed was Spring. In post-war United States, growth and unrivaled prosperity followed from 1945-1965. Pa Wilder, like the rest of the G.I. generation, came back and built families and factories and farms. They looked out at a world that was shattered, and they made fortunes rebuilding it. They even found Dean Martin’s favorite eel. Don’t remember that? It’s a moray.
Spring was characterized by extreme faith in government institutions – sure the government had fumbled the ball in the Great Depression, but it had unified the country for World War II. It stayed back enough to allow growth, and Eisenhower’s America got out of North Korea and planted the seeds for the Super Science® projects that would provide unmatched weapons systems and the seeds of space exploration.
Spring gives over to Summer. Around 1965, the spiritual awakening was followed in 1975 by the “Me” decade. In Summer, the economy is humming along, the weather is great, and the first questioning of the previous ideas that led to the success of the country begins. It’s probably no coincidence that the disastrous Immigration Act of 1965, the arguably unconstitutional Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Lyndon Johnson’s voter-plantation Great Society acts (1964 and 1965) took place at the start of Summer when Americans were questioning their values, questioning the things that made America great.
Pa Wilder was an established businessman, working as the president of a very conservative farm bank. You could get a loan, but only if you had collateral and a good income stream. Pa Wilder told more people “no” than “yes” for loans. That bothered him, with the exception of the fact that he told me, “I’ve never had to foreclose on a house, son.” To him, it was a moral duty. Thankfully Pa never served in the paratroopers, otherwise, they would have called him “debt from above.”
In society, however, the big splits had started in 1965. The subversion of colleges started and would be nearly complete by the 1980s. Religious decline started, and Nixon got tired of hiding the fiscal shenanigans of the country that gold was exposing. His solution? Get rid of gold.
But Summer was still a good time. Autumn, however, is harvest. Pa Wilder was pretty close to retirement at this point, and the real economic power had moved to the Boomers. Pa’s natural fiscal conservatism led to a strong and stable business. The people that took over from him, however, would “give a loan to anyone with a pickup and a backhoe.” They even loaned out money on haunted houses, places they were sure were going to be repossessed.
Inertia is important in an economic system. But in 1985 the financial systems of the United States began to be harvested. “Greed is good” became the motto, and systems were run entirely for near-term economic benefit. Everyone from Pa Wilder’s generation was dead or retired – the new people in charge had no living memory of the national crisis brought on by The Great Depression.
The end of Autumn is the first chill of Winter, and the end result was the Great Recession (right on time!) in 2007-2008. In the Winter, things fall apart. I’ve been really quite amazed that things have held together so well since that first cold snap. Obama was, well, a disappointment. Trump seemed (in many ways) overwhelmed by the system and couldn’t figure out how to move the levers of power in any significant and lasting ways – which makes sense on a failing system.
That was the starter’s gun on the crisis, the date Winter began. We should have been a long way through it by now, but this Winter is different: The United States had a uniquely dominant position at the start of Winter, having both complete military dominance as well as a strong economic dominance of the world. The Federal Reserve© decided to just print all the money that it could to spend its way into continued prosperity.
Sure, sometimes government wants to stop a crisis so that the citizens can have a stable country. Sometimes. But other times, governments are waiting for the crisis, looking forward to it. Planning on it. In one article titled Sometimes the world needs a crisis: Turning challenges into opportunities, the Brookings Institute lists the things they love about crises. I admit that some of them are positive, but here are a few that I think are a bit more ominous – these descriptions are directly from Brookings:
Systemic Change: Global crises that crush existing orders and overturn long-held norms, especially extended, large-scale wars, can pave the way for new systems, structures, and values to emerge and take hold. Without such devastation to existing systems and practices, leaders and populations are generally resistant to major changes and to giving up some of their sovereignty to new organizations or rules.
Dramatic Policy Shifts: Sometimes the fear generated from a crisis and corresponding public outcry enables and even forces leaders to make bold and often difficult policy moves, even in countries not involved in or affected by the crisis.
COVID-19 was the big crisis they were waiting for. As the economic systems unwinded under the unsustainable debt the ‘Rona was the perfect opportunity. Imagine the tapestry of that you see was planned. What end was being sought? Well, they told us already. Systemic Change. Changes to virtually every system in the United States. Want to have a nice, neat, prosperous, and orderly community? Too bad. That’s not a thing that’s going to happen. The police will be neutered. How badly will communities suffer? Here’s how bad it was:
● Leftist controlled Chicago: arrests/stops were down 53 percent, murders are up 65 percent.
●Leftist controlled New York City: arrests/stops were down 38 percent, murders are up 58 percent.
●Leftist controlled Louisville: arrests/stops were down 35 percent, murders are up 87 (not a typo) percent.
●Leftist controlled Minneapolis: arrests/stops were down 42 percent, murders are up 64 percent.
●Leftist controlled Los Angeles: arrests/stops were down 33 percent, murders are up 51 percent.
● Leftist controlled St. Louis: in 2020, the murder rate hit “a 50-year high, with 87 out of every 100,000 residents being murdered.”
When there is murder and mayhem there is control. This is their plan. This is the crisis. Remove police – replace with ideological commissars that aren’t bound by law. Now, if they see a “crime” that they feel is wrong, they can punish it however they see fit. Most commonly, this will just be by removing the protection of the law and letting the mob do the rest. The biggest crimes? The crimes against the Left. That’s just the first of the planned Systemic Changes. There are more planned.
● Universal basic income.
● Boards to approve hiring at private companies.
● Equity everywhere.
●More rules than you can imagine. All of them will be based on some fear – guns in rural areas will be restricted because people in the city can’t stop killing each other.
● Climate change lunacy: to meet climate goals, Americans would be restricted to four pounds (344 milliliters) of meat a year. This will be walked back.
● And your ideas: they probably won’t be as bad as the real plans.
To be clear: Winter is here. The Left has an endless list of Leftist goals to accomplish during the crisis to come. The Winter will be dark. Where are our goals? The Right cannot just have the goals of “what the Left wants, but less,” or, “the opposite of what those guys want."After that? Organization. And leadership. And longjohns. Winter is here."
"The Fourth Turning Is Here: The Old Order Is Breaking Down"
"The Fourth Turning Is Here:
The Old Order Is Breaking Down"
by Chris MacIntosh
"In 1997, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe published "The Fourth Turning," a cyclical theory of Anglo-American history built around generational archetypes and recurring saecular rhythms of approximately 80 to 100 years - roughly the length of a long human life. Their framework identified four "turnings," each lasting roughly 20 to 25 years, that repeat in sequence.
The First Turning, the High, is an era of institutional confidence and community solidarity following a great crisis. The rules work, people trust them, conformity is rewarded - think the post-WWII boom, or the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.
The Second Turning, the Awakening, is a spiritual and cultural awakening that challenges the institutional consensus of the High. Individualism resurges; the establishment is questioned - the consciousness revolution of the 1960s-70s, the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s-30s.
The Third Turning, the Unraveling, sees institutions weaken, individualism reach its apex, and civic order decay. Trust collapses in government, media, corporations, each other as it did through the Culture Wars era of the 1980s-90s, or the Gilded Age of the 1870s-90s.
The Fourth Turning, the Crisis, is a decisive era of institutional destruction and reconstruction, typically catalysed by an existential threat - war, economic collapse, or civilizational rupture. The old order is swept away; a new one is forged. The Great Depression and WWII. The Civil War. The American Revolution.
"History is seasonal, and winter is coming."
- William Strauss and Neil Howe, "The Fourth Turning," 1997
The Current Position: By Strauss and Howe’s reckoning, the current Fourth Turning began around 2008 - the Global Financial Crisis being its catalytic spark - and will likely reach its resolution sometime in the 2025-2030 window. We are, in other words, in the heart of it. The battles being fought now - over monetary systems, institutional legitimacy, national sovereignty, and the nature of truth itself - are the defining conflicts of the crisis era.
What Fourth Turnings produce is not predictable in detail but consistent in structure: the old institutions are exposed as either corrupt or incompetent, a battle ensues between competing visions of the replacement order, and the outcome is determined by which faction can mobilise sufficient force - social, political, economic, or military - to impose its vision. The process is neither clean nor just. Fourth Turnings historically produce enormous suffering alongside the reconstruction.
The GFC was Act One: the revelation that the financial system was not a wealth-generation machine but a debt-recycling mechanism sustained by regulatory capture and central bank intervention. The quantitative easing programmes that followed - printing roughly $20 trillion across major central banks between 2008 and 2022 - bought time at the cost of massively inflating asset prices, concentrating wealth, and making the eventual reckoning worse.
Covid was Act Two: a simultaneous crisis of public health, institutional credibility, and civil liberties, weaponised by an apparatus of state control that had been building for decades and found in the pandemic a perfect justification for deployment at scale. More on this shortly.
Act Three is visible on the horizon: the currency crisis that follows years of money creation, the geopolitical realignment driven by a rising China and a fragmenting Western alliance, and the social rupture of populations that have been systematically lied to discovering the magnitude of the deception. Fourth Turnings do not end until the crisis is resolved. We have not arrived there yet."
Jim Kunstler, "The Curse It is Cast"
"The Curse It is Cast"
by Jim Kunstler
“I have nothing to hide. I can explain and validate everything that I’ve done.”
- Dr. Anthony Fauci, recorded for TV in 2022
"However you cut this Fauci business, one thing Americans have learned is how slippery and treacherous this thing called The Law has become. You saw it in the sundry Trump prosecutions of 2024, too - a marvelous demonstration of how to play Hide-the-Salami with the truth about anything and everything. You saw it in the structured failure to adjudicate election fraud in 2020. You saw it in the Jan-6 prosecutions and the Congressional Jan-6 Committee charade that followed. And much more.
And one thing it’s good for is demoralizing the whole citizenry to the max. Who in this land was not mortally depressed watching Rand Paul’s Senate hearing Wednesday starring Dr. Fauci? (One last time, the center of attention!) We have become a procedural republic, slipping into an impotence of legalistic self-f*ckery the way old folks slip into dementia, one lost memory at a time. There sits the murderer of millions cloaked in the banality of his evil - as it was at Nuremburg eighty years ago - and this time, you just have to lump it, America. The law can’t touch him at all.
Dr. Fauci ran his own titanically corrupt fiefdom out of the nation’s public health complex. Half-a-million a year wasn’t enough for - let’s call him what he was - an executive bureaucrat. He doled out millions in grants to universities, drug companies, and putative public service orgs, and extracted his vig, about a million bucks in prize money during the Covid-19 episode, not counting his share of royalties from drug patents. A modest million. He must have thought: who will even notice. . . who would ever be bothered by that tiny number when Congress, the Federal Reserve, and everybody else is drowning in numbers with so many zeros it gives them tachycardia just to glance at the balance sheet.
Plus, the thoroughly dishonorable news media was busy making Dr. Fauci a rock-star. He had everything but the stadiums. The grand old gals of Hollywood were going all moist over him. “Julia Roberts sent me flowers today,” he typed into his government-issue diary. Barbra Streisand called him on the phone. “I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA,” He gushed. His work resulted in the deaths of millions and the injury of millions more. Neverminding that, he carefully tracked and marveled at his burgeoning fame:
“Big front-page article abut [sic] me appeared in the Washington Post, [Dr. Fauci wrote]. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.”
Did Dr. Fauci know that his work-product, the Covid-19 episode and the operations around it, were aimed at setting up conditions to get President Trump bum-rushed out of office in favor of the vacant and pliable tool that was “Joe Biden?” Did others on the White House Covid Task Force know how that would work? Did they know who or what they were in league with?
Anyway, it didn’t turn out as well as they’d planned, of course. The four years of “Joe Biden” only proved how much that coalition of Deep Staters, globalists, and domestic riffraff hated the old American republic and its pain-in-the-ass Constitution. But when they foundered in 2024 - when old Joe-from-Scranton finally gave away the game on that fatal debate stage - and the party had to stuff his idiot veep into the nomination, the Democratic Party crossed an event horizon into total detachment from reality, where they remain to this day.
So then, where did the Democratic Party get the idea that going balls-out Bolshevik-Jacobin would be their salvation after what they already did to try to wreck our country? And by Bolshevik-Jacobin I mean the marriage of murderous envy with civic psychosis. The line it is drawn; the curse it is cast, Dylan prophesied half a century ago. They’re in your face now. Just listen to them. They mean it. They want all your stuff and they want you dead. They want to put your sons in a cocktail dress. They want mutts from savage lands slavering on your daughters in a drainage ditch. Will half the people in this country really vote for that again?
Yet great forces unseen just now are driving the nation to an autumn reckoning, and the main thing to be reckoned is the survival of the USA as a functioning republic with the credibility of law restored and the demons of lawfare crushed. The possibility of legislated election reform slips away day by day, it’s true. But, please understand, this president will not allow the coming election to get pounded down a rathole. If nothing else, we are going to get an intervention under a national security executive order, on the president’s constitutional duty (and his oath) to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
The ensuing fight over this will be short and decisive. These mad dogs will be put down, as mad dogs must be. We are going to take our country back. Depend on it."
"Alert! World War Z Is Unfolding! Russia Nuclear Time Bomb! Middle East Chaos!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 7/30/26
"Alert! World War Z Is Unfolding!
Russia Nuclear Time Bomb! Middle East Chaos!"
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Thursday, July 30, 2026
Gerald Celente, "Media Censorship, Market Bubble, Endless Wars"
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 7/30/26
"Media Censorship, Market Bubble, Endless Wars"
"The headlines keep changing, but is the truth being buried? In this episode of Trends in the News, Gerald Celente breaks down the forces shaping today's world: media silence on the biggest stories, markets soaring one day and sinking the next, echoes of the dot-com bust, false ceasefires fueling endless conflict, China's rise as a global leader, the impact of interest rate policies, and why Gen Z may be becoming the true voice of the people. As economic uncertainty grows and geopolitical tensions escalate, Celente connects the dots between government policy, financial markets, media narratives, and the growing push toward war. When all else fails, they take you to war. Don't miss Gerald Celente's hard-hitting analysis and trend forecasts you won't hear from the mainstream media."
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"Something Big Is About To Happen, This War Will Change America Forever"
Jeremiah Babe, 7/30/26
"Something Big Is About To Happen,
This War Will Change America Forever"
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Musical Interlude: 2002, "Greater Than The Sum"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Greater Than The Sum"
In Ancient Greece, philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
wrote “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”
"A Look to the Heavens"
"In silhouette against a crowded star field along the tail of the arachnalogical constellation Scorpius, this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower.
In fact, clumps of dust and molecular gas collapsing to form stars may well lurk within the dark nebula, a structure that spans almost 40 light-years across this gorgeous telescopic portrait. Known as a cometary globule, the swept-back cloud, is shaped by intense ultraviolet radiation from the OB association of very hot stars in NGC 6231, off the upper edge of the scene. That energetic ultraviolet light also powers the globule's bordering reddish glow of hydrogen gas. Hot stars embedded in the dust can be seen as bluish reflection nebulae. This dark tower, NGC 6231, and associated nebulae are about 5,000 light-years away."
The Poet: Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
- Dylan Thomas
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The Marmalade, "Reflections Of My Life"
"The world is a bad place, a bad place, a terrible place to live,
oh, but I don't want to die..."
"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Does Trump Know He Lost His War?"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 7/30/26
"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson:
Does Trump Know He Lost His War?"
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"Russia–Iran Retaliation Decimates Kyiv - Trump in Panic"
Col. Douglas Macgregor, 7/30/26
"Russia–Iran Retaliation Decimates Kyiv -
Trump in Panic"
In this critical breakdown, we analyze Douglas Macgregor's explosive claim that last night's devastating Russian strikes on Ukraine bore the unmistakable handwriting of Iranian military retaliation. With over 74 cruise and ballistic missiles and 284 one-way attack drones striking across 11 Ukrainian regions - including Kiev, Lviv, Vinnytsia, and Sumy - the scale and precision of this operation signals that Vladimir Putin has finally lost all patience with Zelensky, NATO, and President Trump. We examine the strategic targeting of Ukraine's military-industrial complex, including the Mayak Defence Plant, Lviv State Aviation Repair Plant, and critical weapons storage facilities. The use of hypersonic Zircon missiles, the severing of NATO's maritime supply routes, and the striking of cargo ships in the Black Sea all point to Iranian military involvement - a direct response to Ukraine's recent attack on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea."
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"Iran Decimates US Forces! 2 Top Generals, Hundreds Killed - Trump Urges Iran Stop"
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 7/30/26
"Iran Decimates US Forces! 2 Top Generals,
Hundreds Killed - Trump Urges Iran Stop"
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"A Good Man Can Get Real Tired of Being Good"
Full screen recommended.
"A Good Man Can Get Real Tired of Being Good"
“A Good Man Can Get Real Tired of Being Good” is a soulful blues about the quiet exhaustion that comes from always doing the right thing while receiving little in return. The singer reflects on years of patience, sacrifice, and forgiveness, wondering how long a good man can keep carrying everyone else before his own spirit grows weary. Driven by slow, heartfelt blues guitar and the aching cry of the harmonica the song unfolds with honesty, grit, and emotional depth. The voice is weathered but compassionate, capturing the struggle between staying kind and reaching the end of your patience. Even the strongest heart… Needs a place to rest."
"Above All..."
"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love. "
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"
"The World As I See It: Albert Einstein's Thoughts on the Meaning of Life”
"The World As I See It:
Albert Einstein's Thoughts on the Meaning of Life”
by Paul Ratner
“Albert Einstein was one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, influencing scientific thought immeasurably. He was also not shy about sharing his wisdom about other topics, writing essays, articles, letters, giving interviews and speeches. His opinions on social and intellectual issues that do not come from the world of physics give an insight into the spiritual and moral vision of the scientist, offering much to take to heart.
The collection of essays and ideas “The World As I See It”* gathers Einstein’s thoughts from before 1935, when he was as the preface says “at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age”.
In the book, Einstein comes back to the question of the purpose of life on several occasions. In one passage, he links it to a sense of religiosity. “What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it many any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life,” wrote Einstein.
Was Einstein himself religious? Raised by secular Jewish parents, he had complex and evolving spiritual thoughts. He generally seemed to be open to the possibility of the scientific impulse and religious thoughts coexisting. "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," said Einstein in his 1954 essay on science and religion.
Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes.
Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein's pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he was quite familiar with various religious teachings, including a strong knowledge of Jewish religious texts.
In another passage from 1934, Einstein talks about the value of a human being, reflecting a Buddhist-like approach: “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.”
This theme of liberating the self is also echoed by Einstein later in life, in a 1950 letter to console a grieving father Robert S. Marcus: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”
In case you are wondering whether Einstein saw value in material pursuits, here’s him talking about accumulating wealth in 1934, as part of the “The World As I See It”: “I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?”
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Freely download "The World As I See It", by Albert Einstein, here:
"I Am An Invisible Man..."
"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me."
- Ralph Ellison, "Prologue to Invisible Man"
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"There Comes A Time..."
"Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Corporations Are Overcharging Americans… And People Are Getting Angry"
Full screen recommended.
Across The States, 7/30/26
"Corporations Are Overcharging Americans…
And People Are Getting Angry"
"Ever wonder why your final bill is higher than the price you expected? Hidden fees, shrinkflation, and changing product quality are quietly affecting everyday purchases - and most people don't notice until it's too late. In this video, we break down how modern pricing tactics work, from smaller product sizes to surprise charges added at checkout. Here's the thing... the number you see isn't always the amount you end up paying, and understanding why can help you make smarter financial decisions. What most people don't realize is that these pricing strategies now appear across groceries, restaurants, rent, subscriptions, healthcare, and even online shopping. We also explore why consumers are becoming more cautious, how buying habits are changing, and practical ways to avoid paying more than necessary. The reality is that informed shoppers have more power than they think. Watch till the end to discover simple habits that can help you spot hidden costs before they hit your wallet."
Comments here:
"Grocery Items At Kroger Everyone Should Be Buying This Week!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/30/26
"Grocery Items At Kroger Everyone
Should Be Buying This Week!"
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Bill Bonner, "A Prayer For The Grandchildren"
"A Prayer For The Grandchildren"
It’s all part of the great rhythm...the beat that goes on...and on...
and on. Everything corrects. Everything regresses to the mean.
From ashes to ashes...dust to dust.
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "First, we are working in the dark. Figuratively most days. But today, literally. The windows and shutters are closed. There is a ‘heat emergency’ in our area. The temperature yesterday afternoon hit 102 degrees. This may pose no threat to the lizards of Death Valley, but here almost no one has AC. Instead, old people are told to stay inside, guzzling water, so the authorities won’t have the expense of hauling them to the morgue. This is the fourth heat wave to hit Europe this summer. People are beginning to think the planet really is heating up. You can throw a baseball as hard as you can; more than likely, it won’t go to the moon. But how likely is it that ‘global warming’ turns out to be an accurate description of coming weather? Let the feds have their delusional certainties. Here at BPR, we stick to guesswork and probabilities…sometimes right, sometimes wrong, always in doubt.
Meanwhile, in the stock market, the clouds gather and disperse. Investors celebrate paper gains by buying vacation homes. Or, they hang their heads and curse the market gods. And the most up-beat IPO of all time – Space X -- turns into the biggest loser of all time, with more than $1 trillion of market value evaporated in 45 days. Pity the poor retiring investor. He should have known better. And today, we try to ‘know better’ by looking at things that – sometime in the future -- we will wish we had known now.
The world’s biggest borrower is now in hock for nearly $40 trillion...and will never pay it back. That is almost a certainty. More likely than not, the gods will want their pound of flesh. But from whom? When? It’s all part of the great rhythm...the beat that goes on...and on...and on. Everything corrects. Everything regresses to the mean. From ashes to ashes...dust to dust. And the dollar will go to whatever godforsaken hellhole all paper currencies end up - blowing through back alleys like plastic beer cups after a block party.
There is something consoling about it. Whatever you’re worried about, it will soon be gone. One way or another, every debt will be settled. All stocks become worthless. All empires are destroyed. And all people die. ‘He should have gotten more exercise,’ they murmur over the coffin. ‘He should have listened to his doctor.’ ‘He should have lost weight.’ ‘The poor man should never have bought SpaceX.’ But sooner or later, he was going to die anyway. As are we all.
Yesterday, we kept vigil over the tech sickbed. IBM lost 25% of its value in a single day. Google will be hit hard by its losses on SpaceX. Tesla too. They were all bound to ‘correct’ sooner or later...now is as good a time as ever.
And how about the US empire? Is now a good time for it to regress to the mean? Donald Trump is doing a good job of leading the regression. But how do we know it is not just a huge head-fake...with the real decline not coming for many years? Well, we don’t know. But the federales are doing all they can to bring the empire down now. And no matter what path they choose, at least in the medium term - two to ten years - they are almost sure to stumble.
Yahoo! Finance: "Total federal debt stood at $39.065 trillion as of January 1, 2026, according to the Federal Reserve’s GFDEBTN series, and is on pace to cross $50 trillion before 2030. The stock has grown by roughly $16 trillion since 2020. The bigger issue is the vintage of that debt. A large share of that debt was issued when the 10-year yielded under 2%. As that paper matures, Bessent has to reissue it into a market where the 10-year yields 4.67% and the 30-year yields 5.15%. Every rollover raises the ongoing carrying cost of the national debt."
The US government has made the same ‘mistake’ as Google and Oracle - it squandered its cash. It raised nearly $40 trillion, net - borrowing it from relatives, friends, and enemies...while counterfeiting a few extra bills in the basement of the Treasury.
What did it do with the money? What ‘investment’ of public funds did it make that would repay the loans? Let’s look at the portfolio results. The Iraq war? The Afghanistan war? All of those billions in weapons to Israel? The attack on Iran? Where’s the profit?
Or how about those half-century War on Poverty and War on Drugs programs? (Even the most recent iteration has produced no bottom-line gains. Esquire: ‘Turns out, we blew up all those boats in the Caribbean for nothing.’) Or the DEI initiatives? Or the loans to college students and grants to universities? Or the billions in funding for better medical care? Where’s the payoff?
If the rate of return on the $40 trillion were just 5%, there would be plenty of coin to pay the interest...and pay down the principal. Instead, there’s nothing. And now, the total is approaching $50 trillion by 2030, when the Feds will likely have to come up with $2.5 trillion just to cover the interest.
Where will that money come from? No uncertainty there...it has to come from somewhere. And since all those ‘investments’ they made over the last thirty years have been ruinous failures, the only way they’ll be able to pay the interest is either by cutting down on current spending...or borrowing more money. Inflate or die. There is no third way, no matter what TV quack tells you otherwise.
We’re back to probabilities. Which is more likely? Take your time to think about it, dear reader....and about the people who will make the decision. And the context. Will voters give up Social Security and Medicare benefits to protect the fiscal virtue of the Republic...for their grandchildren’s sake? And what about the feds - Democrat or Republican...will they stand up to the big lobbies to save the dollar...or will they save their own political necks? We don’t know for sure. But we wouldn’t bet on the dollar…and we’ll whisper a prayer for the grandchildren."
"The Great Middle East War Escalates: Trump Has Told Us Exactly What He Plans To Do Next, And It Is Going To Change Everything"
by Michael Snyder
"President Trump’s profanity-laced tirade about Iran has shocked people all over the globe, and it appears that things are about to get really crazy in the Middle East. At the end of last week, all of the signs were pointing in the direction of a major escalation of the Great Middle East War, but then President Trump suddenly decided to stop shooting because he wanted to give diplomacy with Iran another chance. But instead of negotiating, the Iranians launched a surprise attack on a U.S. military base in Jordan instead…
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) on July 28 announced that Iran launched a series of ballistic missiles at a U.S. base in Jordan, in what the federal agency called a “surprise attack” that day. The attack took place at 5:45 p.m. ET, when CENTCOM said Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces launched “multiple ballistic missiles from Iran in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces” in the Middle East."
For a long time, Iran has been responding to attacks from the United States. But now they have taken the initiative, and we are being told that they “see themselves as having the upper hand”…"Iran’s surprise missile attack on U.S. forces in Jordan shows Tehran’s military leaders would rather risk ramping up the war than play defense or accept a peace deal that would expose them to greater domestic political pressures.
Iran fired ballistic missiles on U.S. troops early Wednesday local time, demonstrating a willingness by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which exerts more power than ever in Tehran, to escalate during a relative lull in the conflict and attempt to seize the initiative after weeks in which Iran has mostly reacted to U.S. and Israeli attacks. “They see themselves as having the upper hand,” said Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow specializing in Iran at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “It was a signal of a sort of calibrated escalation.”
Shortly after Iran’s surprise attack, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia conducted a series of joint airstrikes against Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq… Saudi Arabia entered the Iran war directly Wednesday, joining the United States in airstrikes against Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq. The operation marked the first time Riyadh publicly acknowledged taking part in combat alongside U.S. forces during the conflict. U.S. and Saudi officials said the strikes were retaliation for drone attacks launched from Iraq against Saudi oil facilities. So now Saudi Arabia has officially joined the war. That definitely takes things to another level. It is being reported that the joint airstrikes hit 8 different areas inside Iraq…
This was a very big operation. In addition to the others that died as a result of these airstrikes, we are being told that “several Iranian military advisers were among those killed”… "Sabreen News, a media outlet linked to Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq that were targeted by joint U.S.-Saudi strikes on Tuesday, said Wednesday that several Iranian military advisers were among those killed in the attacks. The news outlet released a photo showing coffins wrapped in Iranian flags with a caption reading: “The martyred Iranian advisers who were killed by the fire of the Saudi Wahhabi-American enemy in Iraq at dawn today.”
Every time more of their people die, the Iranian thirst for revenge only grows stronger. Images such as the one below certainly stir up a lot of emotion…
U.S. forces spent so many years fighting in Iraq, but today Iranian-backed groups control large sections of that country. The Iraqis did not give us permission to attack those groups, and Iraq’s president has strongly condemned the joint airstrikes…"Iraq’s president has condemned a joint U.S.-Saudi attack on Iran-backed paramilitary forces in the country, which the militias said had killed at least 20 people and drew yet another country into the five-month Middle East war launched by Israel and the U.S. on Feb. 28.
In a statement, the Iraqi presidency said Wednesday that the strikes, which were the first offensive operations Saudi Arabia has acknowledged taking part in during the current conflict, were “an unacceptable attack and a flagrant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.” The statement condemned “targeting of its official security institutions in a manner that contravenes the rules of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.”
Iraq’s central government is very weak, and it simply cannot stop Iranian-backed groups from firing missiles and drones at targets throughout the region. And now one of those groups is promising that the United States and Saudi Arabia will pay “a heavy price” for last night’s attacks…Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, an Iran-aligned Iraqi militia, warned Wednesday that U.S. and Saudi forces would face retaliation following joint strikes on armed groups in Iraq.
The group said it would not allow the two countries to “desecrate Iraqi soil without paying a heavy price.” The warning came after Washington and Riyadh attacked Iran-backed militias accused of launching strikes against Saudi Arabia, further escalating tensions across the region. Other Iranian-backed organizations in Iraq have issued similar threats. So now we are at war with just about every Shiite militia group in Iraq too. More than 100,000 fighters belong to Shiite militia groups in Iraq, and those fighters operate primarily under the umbrella of the state-sanctioned Popular Mobilization Forces.
Tonight, Iran will be the focus of U.S. airstrikes. On Wednesday morning here in the United States, President Trump used some very strong profanities to describe what he is about to do to Iran…President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning issued a profanity-laced threat against Iran after the Islamic regime launched a surprise missile strike on U.S. forces in Jordan overnight. “We’re going to beat the f—ing s— out of them,” Trump told Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst. “We’ll be hitting them hard,” the president said of Iran. “They’re going to get a beating.”
We have never seen a president of the United States talk like this. And it appears that Trump is not bluffing. A senior Israeli security official just told an Israeli reporter that the U.S. is “preparing for something bigger than anything we’ve seen so far”…
It is likely that Iran will get hit really hard tonight. But will the Iranians soon be getting help in fighting off U.S. airstrikes from China? Reuters is reporting that Iran has paid somewhere between 60 and 70 million dollars for hundreds of Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense systems…"Iran is poised to receive its first shipment of shoulder-fired missile launchers from China amid the escalating war with the US - which is now in its sixth month.
The $60-70 million deal, first reported by Reuters, is one of the regime’s most high-profile efforts to boost its short-range air defenses since war broke out in February, laying bare its inability to defend military sites and strategic infrastructure against aerial bombardments by the US and Israel. The contract will see between 300 and 400 man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), complete with Chinese-made QW-12 and FN-16 missiles, delivered to Tehran in the coming weeks, sources told the outlet. These Chinese systems are designed to be able to shoot down our most advanced fighter jets."
Needless to say, this is going to make Trump very angry, and it pushes us even closer to our coming war with China. Events in the Middle East are starting to spiral out of control, and oil prices spiked once again on Wednesday… Global oil prices surged on Wednesday after an Iranian attack elicited a vow of reprisal from President Donald Trump, ending a brief calm that had renewed hope among investors of a negotiated resolution. A benchmark index for worldwide crude prices climbed more than 7% on Wednesday, crossing above $90 a barrel.
I have been writing a lot of articles about the historic energy crisis that we are facing, and now we have learned that commercial oil inventories unexpectedly fell at a very rapid pace this week…
There is no way that this is going to end well. A lot of people out there seem to think that we are nearing the top of the escalation ladder. The truth is that we aren’t even close. We have witnessed some pretty shocking escalations so far, but I have a feeling that they won’t even be worth comparing to the shocking escalations that are eventually coming."
"A Head for an Eye: The Government’s War on the American People"
"A Head for an Eye:
The Government’s War on the American People"
By John & Nisha Whitehead
“The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert… It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”
- Martin Luther King Jr.
"We have been ambushed. We should be talking about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this country. We should be talking about the data centers spreading across the landscape, draining electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and expanding the technological machinery needed to track, profile and control the population.
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