"Some roads stay with us long after we stop traveling them. "The House That Waited at the End of the Road" is a surreal AI film about memory, home, aging, and the quiet feeling that somewhere from our past may still remember who we were. At the end of an old road stands a small house that seems to have been waiting for years. The windows are quiet. The rooms hold traces of another time. And among the faded colors, one small orange flower still grows. This film was created for those who understand that getting older can make ordinary places feel extraordinary. A road, an empty chair, a familiar doorway, or a forgotten garden can suddenly carry an entire lifetime. There is no mystery you need to solve here. Just follow the road, listen to the music, and spend a few quiet minutes in a dreamlike town where memories never completely disappear.
About the Film: A Very Unusual Town is an original surreal AI film series combining cinematic storytelling, dreamlike imagery, stop-motion-inspired visuals, and original music. This chapter explores nostalgia, returning home, forgotten places, aging, memory, and the strange comfort of feeling remembered."
“You Gotta Pay Your Dues in Life” is a gritty, wisdom-filled blues about earning your way through life the hard way. The singer reflects on long hours, mistakes, disappointments, and sacrifices, knowing that nothing worthwhile comes without a price and that every lesson leaves a mark. Driven by raw blues guitar and the deep, knowing cry of the harmonica, the song carries a steady groove filled with resilience and hard-earned truth. The voice is weathered and confident, sounding like a man who has walked enough miles to understand that struggle is often the price of becoming stronger. Everybody wants the reward… But nobody gets to skip the dues."
"Why does this galaxy have such a long tail? In this stunning vista, based on image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Dragon (Draco). Its eye-catching tail is about 280 thousand light-years long and features massive, bright blue star clusters.
One story goes that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of Arp 188 - from right to left in this view - and was slung around behind the Tadpole by their gravitational attraction. During the close encounter, tidal forces drew out the spiral galaxy's stars, gas, and dust forming the spectacular tail. The intruder galaxy itself, estimated to lie about 300 thousand light-years behind the Tadpole, can be seen through foreground spiral arms at the upper right. Following its terrestrial namesake, the Tadpole Galaxy will likely lose its tail as it grows older, the tail's star clusters forming smaller satellites of the large spiral galaxy."
“The TLS (“Times Literary Supplement”) had an absorbing review of American Historian Joel Harrington's book on the manuscript diary of a 16th-century German executioner, Franz Schmidt of Nuremberg. Remarkably, Schmidt kept a full record of the criminals he executed, the crimes they perpetrated, and the gruesome ways they met their fate. It is a tale that would chill most 21st-century readers.
Hangings, beheadings, burnings at the stake, and breakings with the wheel. In the latter custom, a heavy cartwheel is dropped onto the person to be executed, who is tied down spreadeagled on the execution platform, starting with the feet and working the way up to the head. There are also less final punishments: floggings, finger-choppings, ear-choppings, brandings, and an ingenious catalog of tortures.
For Herr Schmidt, it was all in a day's work. He might as well have been a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker. He had a family to support, and he was good at his job. His neighboring townspeople attended the executions. It was good public entertainment.
Of course, there is nothing unique to the 16th century or Germany about any of this. Hideous tortures and executions have been part of human history from the beginning. Think of the Roman gladiatorial entertainments with their cheering crowds. Or the public stonings, beheadings and amputations still common in certain parts of the world today. It seems that only in the post-Enlightenment West do we look with disapprobation on Herr Schmidt's trade, ostensibly at least. We have the grisly torture chambers of the Gestapo and NKVD to remind us that Enlightenment values are fragile.
All of which raises the question: Is taking pleasure in the infliction of pain on others nature or nurture? Are we born with a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other? How do we explain the huge popularity of slasher movies and shoot-'em-up video games? Is there something of Herr Schmidt in all of us?”
“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.”
"The summer of 2026 may go down in history as the time in which millions of Americans woke up and realized they no longer live in a free country. The question is, are they being fed a limited view of reality, in a way that amounts to too little too late? The old free America has been gone for at least a few decades, but most Americans are just now waking up to that fact. And even now, they aren’t being told the gravity of the problem or the depth to which America has already sunk into the technocratic quicksand that leads to tyranny.
In the summer of 2026, the internet suddenly came alive with stories about the dystopian “Flocking” of America, and the blowback from Americans who still care about and value living in a free society has been intense. Some have taken matters into their own hands and are cutting down Flock cameras. More than 100 cities and towns have canceled or refused to renew their contracts with Flock.
As conservative writer Terry Newton aptly stated in an August 30 article for The Discern Report: “It is not a cop on a corner who happens to notice a stolen Buick. It is a private contractor building a searchable map of every car that rolls past a pole. Connor O’Keeffe put it cleanly. The government would never get away with dropping a GPS tracker in every glove box. So it rented the next best thing and called it public safety.”
Forgive me for being so black pilled, but I find this sudden awareness to be suspicious. Flock has been dutifully serving the government’s surveillance needs for nearly 10 years with their AI-powered spy cameras saturating every major highway and increasingly even on minor roadways, in public parks and store parking lots, and they’ve been doing it in an atmosphere of a near total news blackout. Then, once the calendar flipped to 2026, it’s like someone flipped a switch and we have wall-to-wall coverage of the ubiquitous surveillance grid, but only as it relates to one company, the Atlanta-based Flock Group, and its government partners.
Flock cameras are spying on us every minute of every day in real time, with 120,000 AI-powered cameras in more than 6,000 cities and towns watching our every move. They record where you go, how frequently you go there, how long you stay, and other key data points, all of which adds up to establishing the travel patterns of every single American who drives a car. That’s not something that dovetails very nicely with the way American political figures like to speak about this country, always in terms of us being that paragon of liberty and freedom, that shining city on a hill that’s supposed to be the envy of every other country. It’s all fake. We are not much different than China. And people are waking up to it.
Trump, who is easily the biggest mouth in U.S. political history championing how great and free America is, now has the lowest approval ratings of any modern president at 33 percent. He’s a fake and people know it. The 33 percent are basically low-information elderly boomers who get their information from Fox News. Most of them made their money in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and aren’t affected much by high fuel prices. Most are not affected at all by the lack of job opportunities or the AI/robotics revolution that is rapidly replacing humans with machines in the workplace.
What’s more, we have had endless stories breaking this summer of law enforcement officers “misusing” the data from Flock technology. This is a big reveal in the propaganda war, because the very term, misusing, implies that there is a correct way to use this Orwellian surveillance network.
I broke the story last week along with Jon Padfield that Flock itself has been lying to us about the purpose of its technology. It’s not designed to “keep us safe,” as they say, but rather to create an integrated nationwide “dynamic surveillance network.” The company is very up front about this in its August 2022 filing with the U.S. Patent Office. See last week’s article here.
But I’m also skeptical for another reason about the timing of the sudden media offensive exposing Flock. Not only are they mischaracterizing the technology as basically benign and even helpful in “keeping us safe,” with only a rare instance of a cop “misusing” it, but they are also ignoring the fact that Flock is not the only player in this field. Motorola, Axon and Leonardo are just as important and these three companies are getting no media coverage at all. All we hear about is Flock, Flock, Flock.
What is Leonardo? Of these three other companies, Leonardo may be the most dangerous, says Padfield. “They capture the unique identifiers of every electronic device on you (watch, phone, Bluetooth headphones, tablet, Fitbit, laptop, etc.) and every electronic device in you (pacemaker, glucose monitor, hearing aids, insulin pump),” he said. “They tie your electronic devices to your license plate so they know who those devices belong to. Then if they see my Apple Watch and my AirPods in YOUR vehicle, they make a note of it that we know each other because you are giving me a ride in your car. The more frequently they see our devices near each other, the stronger the relationship.”
That kind of information in the hands of a rogue government, or any government, should concern every American. But it doesn’t stop there. “They also collect data from your tire pressure sensors in your vehicle’s tires, so even if they later took down the camera, they could still recognize your car from the electronic signature of your tires as you drive by,” Padfield said.
Padfield is an electrical engineer who worked for General Motors and former staffer of the Indiana Department of Transportation. He knows what he’s talking about. “Here in Indiana, I can get a new license plate at any time for just $9.50. However, most people only get new tires once every three to five years. Once your tire pressure sensors are tied to your license plate, they are tied to your actual identity. Getting a new plate doesn’t break that connection.”
Axon also has a concerning track record. While dozens of police departments are ditching Flock, hundreds are latching onto Axon. What is Axon? Formerly known for its Taser weapons, Axon is now rapidly expanding its product line, including AI-powered surveillance tools. Axon initially introduced its automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology through its in-vehicle Axon Fleet 3 cameras. In 2025, it expanded into fixed-camera ALPR with new products, including a “smart streetlight” that attaches to existing light poles and power sources. Both have AI-powered trackable data capability.
Like Flock, Axon is also weaseling its way into America’s E-911 system. In 2026, Axon finalized the acquisition of Israeli defense tech firm Carbyne for $625 million. According to Axon’s website, it was made to build a unified 911 and emergency response platform. The company claims the new technology can provide intelligence from the initial 911 call through field response, investigation in Axon Evidence, and ultimately the justice system.
Carbyne was funded by billionaire pedophile and Israeli Mossad asset Jeffrey Epstein. Seven years after he pleaded guilty to two prostitution charges in Florida, Epstein secretly invested $1 million into the Israeli security startup, according to the Miami Herald.
Carbyne also did deals with many law-enforcement agencies in Florida by providing an app that allows 911 callers to share videos with 911 dispatchers. For instance, Miami-Dade County spent roughly $2 million on a three-year contract with the Israeli firm in 2021. A link between Epstein, Carbyne and Florida doesn’t look like a mere coincidence. Axon should have been aware.
Axon’s top institutional shareholders include all three of Wall Street’s largest asset-management firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. Together with other institutional shareholders they own 82% of the company – meaning they have immense influence on the company’s strategy, including the acquisition of Carbyne and broader surveillance plans across the U.S. under the security pretext. BlackRock’s CEO is Larry Fink, who is co-chairman of the globalist World Economic Forum and a good friend of President Trump.
Trusted confidants of President Trump invested between $1 million and $5 million in Axon in February 2026. CNBC exposed the deal in June and linked it to ICE’s $220 million Taser device contract which followed Trump’s investment. However, Trump’s interest in the firm could also suggest his knowledge of its broader surveillance plans.
Meanwhile, in a follow-up to my August 13 article about the federal government eyeing electric-shock gloves, that deal has now been consummated between the maker of the shock gloves and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a $16.7 million no-bid contract to purchase electric-shock gloves that will be used to force compliance with orders barked by masked ICE agents, who often are caught on video brutalizing not only illegal aliens but American citizens.
Never forget that wars, surveillance and government brutality go hand in hand. When a country becomes more warlike, as America definitely has in the post-World War II era, it becomes less trusting of its citizenry and less tolerant of dissent. Hence, the need for more and more surveillance. The U.S. government’s evolution into a full-time war state happens to coincide with the historic advancement in surveillance technology, powered mainly by the advent of artificial intelligence and the ability to store ever-growing amounts of data. They need the data centers to store previously unheard of amounts of data on each individual person living in America.
Dear readers, do not believe that America needs thousands of data centers for any other reason being falsely repeated by politicians who have track records of telling endless lies. The leader of the pack of political wolves pushing AI data centers is none other than Donald J. Trump. In his latest diatribe, Trump says those who reject these data surveillance centers will “end up being backwards and poor.”
I’d rather be backward, poor and free, if that’s what it comes down to (which I don’t believe it does) than like Trump and his ilk - wealthy, fully modern and someone’s slave. The more Trump pushes for his beloved AI data centers, it should become more obvious that this is the key to implementing the globalists’ long-held dream of total information awareness on every citizen. This level of information could only be needed for one reason, the squashing of civil liberties and all dissent, which is the hallmark of a free society. If Trump is successful in getting his data centers, we can kiss it all goodbye. Flock, Axon, Leonardo, Palantir and the rest of the tech elites will be unleashed in a winner-take all fascist system of public-private partnerships designed to coerce and enslave.
BOTTOM LINE: Do not trust or believe anything that comes out of the mouth of a politician or tech bro, whether on the right or left, no matter who he/she is or how much his/her previous statements may have resonated with your personal political views. If you put your trust in them, you will be deceived, and ultimately ensnared in Satan’s beast system. Only Jesus can save this country, or any country, in the face of such an onslaught of evil emanating from wolves dressed up in sheep’s clothing."
"The EPA just approved early winter blend gas sales two weeks ahead of schedule - and gas prices are expected to drop 10 to 30 cents per gallon starting this week. But there's a flip side nobody's talking about: lower MPG, older engines at risk, and a Strait of Hormuz crisis that could wipe out the savings overnight. In this video, I break down why winter blend fuel is cheaper, whether it actually increases supply (spoiler: not really), and what $4+ gas prices mean for your wallet over the next 5 to 7 days. I also cover the Iran strikes on U.S. bases, Kharg Island's role in global fuel, and the Venezuela oil deal that sounds better on paper than it is at the pump."
"The money is in the account. The screen shows it. And the person behind the counter cannot give it to you. These are first-person accounts of what that actually looks like: a paycheck frozen during a fraud investigation nobody would explain, a $175 hold placed on a debit card for $72 of gas, an account closed by two different major banks with a letter that said only "suspicious activity", a closed account that kept charging overdraft and compound interest until it became a $1,000 collection, and an overdraft that landed the same week rent was due. The mechanism underneath all of it is float. A hold is not a charge - it is your money made unavailable while the bank keeps the use of it. A charge posts two days after you closed the account. Fees compound on a balance that was already zero. A $35 fee on a $4 coffee is not a mistake and it is not a lesson in discipline. It is a product, priced deliberately, and billions of dollars a year come out of it - mostly from the people with the least room to absorb it. Three things worth doing. Turn off overdraft "protection" on debit: a declined card costs nothing, an approved one costs $35. Keep a second account somewhere not linked to the first, so a freeze on one does not take everything you have. And get the hold policy in writing before you need it, because the person on the phone during the emergency will not be the one who set it. The branch is never the villain in this. The young woman at that counter cannot authorise a thing, and she knows it. The decision sits upstairs, in a policy written by somebody who has never been thirty-five dollars short of anything."
“A recent paradigm-shattering discovery in neuroscience shows how our minds share actions, emotions, and experience - what we commonly call "the monkey see, monkey do" experience. When we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing.
Only recently, however, with the discover of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerful sharing of experience is realized within the human brain. In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action. These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the the world's leading experts to predict that 'mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'.
Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" writes that "Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma has elegantly explored the properties of neurons- the so-called "mirror" neurons, or "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. His research indicates that any given cell in this region will fire when a test monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, picking up, grasping, etc. In addition, it appears that different neurons fire in response to different actions."
The astonishing fact is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action. "With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: imitation learning, intentionality, "mind reading," empathy- even the evolution of language." Ramachandran writes.
"Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."
Mirror neurons may also help explain the emergence of language, a problem that has puzzled scholars since the time of Charles Darwin, he adds. "Is language ability based on a specially purposed language organ that emerged suddenly 'out of the blue,' as suggested by Noam Chomsky and his disciples? Or did language evolve from an earlier, gesture-based protolanguage? No one knows for sure, but a key piece of the puzzle is Rizzolatti's observation that the ventral premotor area may be a homologue of "Broca's area"- a brain center associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language. Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California suggest that mirror neurons may also be involved in miming lip and tongue movements, an ability that may present the crucial missing link between vision and language."
To test his idea, Ramachandran tested four Broca's aphasia patients - individuals with lesions in their Broca's areas. He presented them with the sound of the syllable "da," spliced to a videotape of a person whose lips were actually producing the sound "ba." Normally, people hear the "da" as "ba" - the so-called "McGurk effect" - because vision dominates over hearing. To his surprise, he writes, "we found that the Broca's patients did not experience this illusion; they heard the syllable correctly as 'da.' Even though their lesions were located in the left frontal region of their brains, they had a visual problem- they ignored the lip movements. Our patients also had great difficulty with simple lip reading. This experiment provides a link between Rizzolatti's mirror neurons and the evolution of human language, and thus it calls into question the strictly modular view of language, which is currently popular."
Based on his research, Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: "they will provide a unifying framework and possibly even explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."
"For years, such experiences have puzzled psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers, who've wondered why we react at such a gut level to other people's actions. How do we understand, so immediately and instinctively, their thoughts, feelings and intentions?"
"The mirror neurons could help explain how and why we "read" other people's minds and feel empathy for them. If watching an action and performing that action can activate the same parts of the brain in monkeys- down to a single neuron- then it makes sense that watching an action and performing an action could also elicit the same feelings in people."
"This neural mechanism is involuntary and automatic," he says. "With it we don't have to think about what other people are doing or feeling, we simply know. It seems we're wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different," Gallese says. "At the root, as humans we identify the person we're facing as someone like ourselves."
“On the first day God created the dog. God said, “Sit all day by the door of your house and bark at anyone who comes in or walks past. I will give you a life span of twenty years.” The dog said, “That’s too long to be barking. Give me ten years and I’ll give you back the other ten.” So God agreed.
On the second day God created the monkey. God said, “Entertain people, do monkey tricks and make them laugh. I’ll give you a twenty-year life span.” The monkey said, “Monkey tricks for twenty years? I don’t think so. Dog gave you back ten, so that’s what I’ll do too, okay?” And God agreed.
On the third day God created the cow. “You must go to the field with the farmer all day long and suffer under the sun, have calves, and give milk to support the farmer. I will give you a life span of sixty years.” The cow said, “That’s kind of a tough life you want me to live for sixty years. Let me have twenty and I’ll give back the other forty.” And God agreed again.
On the fourth day God created man. God said, “Eat, sleep, play, marry and enjoy your life. I’ll give you twenty years.” Man said, “What? Only twenty years? Tell you what, I’ll take my twenty, and the forty the cow gave back, and the ten the monkey gave back, and the ten the dog gave back, that makes eighty, okay?” “Okay,” said God, “You’ve got a deal.”
So that is why the first twenty years we eat, sleep, play, and enjoy ourselves; the next forty years we slave in the sun to support our family; the next ten years we do monkey tricks to entertain the grandchildren; and the last ten years we sit on the front porch and bark at everyone.”
"My first week on Wall Street was in August of 1973. I was newbie to NYC. My office was on the south side of 100 Wall, on the second floor, looking out over Front Street. There was a tremendous thunderstorm one afternoon. I looked out the window as the street filled with water. The flood poured into a street gutter and overwhelmed it. With the gutter flooded, the rats were drowning. They came out of every hole. In twenty minutes, 500 came out of the one gutter I was watching. The rain stopped and the flooding abated. The rats on the street followed the receding water back into their holes. A memorable first impression of life in the financial district."
but it just might be a lunatic you’re looking for...”
- Billy Joel, "You May Be Right"
"They say a stitch in time saves nine. They say it is always good to be prepared. They say Preparation-H is good for hemorrhoids. They say that Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” They say the Girl Scout motto is “Be Prepared.” They say so many things like that that make me feel ashamed for my lack of preparation.
I think I heard one of “they” say that despite some people who think that death is a failure, there are far more who now say you are passing the big test as you “pass” on. I hope so, for the night before last I dreamed I was back in high school, heading to school on the subway. I had a big math test but had fallen asleep while studying the night before.
I was not prepared. I was trying desperately to catch up on my numbers when two pretty girls entered at the next stop and sat opposite me. My test preparation ended there, as my mind slipped from one plus one equals two, to which of the two would be mine. Then a further thought, as if from God, maybe one plus one does equal two, and they could both be mine. I failed the math test.
God knows, I don’t want to fail in life, so when I woke up this morning, all “they” have said flashed like lightning through my mind. I realized that all these profound past sayings were pushing me into a future for which I wasn’t prepared but must prepare now, get my ass in gear, as they say.
Since they say Franklin invented the lightning rod, I figured he must have known where lightning was before it flashed, a question that had long disturbed me to no end and whose answer left a blank in my mind until I realized it wasn’t. If you think that isn’t so, maybe you would clarify it for me, or should I look in Ben’s Poor Richard’s Almanac for an answer in one of his mathematical exercises that he included. I know how smart he was and he predicted that in the future we would be able to freeze the dead – cryonics – and resurrect them later on. I wonder where Ben Franklin is tonight. AI should know.
I realize that all desires are born in a lack, and when satisfied, they give birth to new lacks. It is a truth hard to swallow. But I still desire to be prepared despite such warnings. Weirdly, I think back to something I read in the past as I consider how to prepare for the future. Not exactly my future since – you guessed it, I’ll be dead – but I hope it’s yours. We know how to count, but for all the predictive power of numbers and calculations, we don’t know when we will die. So many people wear conventional masks to hide this and other disturbing questions. They act as if all is copacetic when it isn’t.
In his book about his passionate life, "Report to Greco," Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek writer well-known for Zorba the Greek, recounts a time when he was looking at fierce African masks in a museum. They were made of wood, hide, and human skulls. He tells us:
"In an effort to unravel the mystery of masks, I said to myself, the mask is our true face, we are these monsters with their bloody mouths, hanging lips, and horrifying eyes. A repulsive mask howls behind the beautiful features of the woman we love, chaos behind the visible world, Buddha behind Christ’s gentle face. Sometimes in the terrible moments of love, hate, or death the deceptive charm vanishes and we view truth’s frightening countenance…I pretend to believe in mankind’s faces, and in this way I am able to live with my fellow human beings."
Then this great pretender, this great disbelieving believer, this modern Odysseus, this genius writes that a girl came and stood next to him. He was not prepared for what happened next, but you can imagine. It’s an old story, masks or not. It often happens that when you look ahead too much, no matter how smart you think you are, you fail to see who is standing beside you, and when you focus on planning the future, filling in all those little squares on the calendar, the present goes out of focus, and you are ensnared in the uncanny.
Kazantzakis ends his book with a dream of his beloved Cretan grandfather who came from the land of the dead to find him. Nikos is old now, dark hair has whitened. ”In the atmosphere of love,” he writes, “who can distinguish a flash from eternity…My entire lifetime I was a bow in merciless, insatiable hands. How often those invisible hands drew and overdrew the bow until I heard it creak at the breaking point! ‘Let it break,’ I cried each time.” He ends by telling his grandfather that he has come to recline as dust by his side, “that the two of us may await the Final Judgment together.”
It was that word “dust” that brought me back to the thought of my ashes and my preparations. I don’t want to fail. Mathematics was never my strength, so even if I could understand the relativity stuff, the meaning of e=mc2 and so on, I wouldn’t believe it. And I could study it all my life but I still wouldn’t care. I could have kept my head in the math book on the subway without looking up to see the girls smiling at me. Maybe I saw their masks. But I liked what I saw. As Kazantzakis’s great character Zorba the Greek tells his friend, boss, the uptight writer, to be free you need to cut the string that ties us to the calculating mathematical mindset:
"You need a touch of folly to do that; folly, d’you see? You have to risk everything. But you’ve got such a strong head, it’ll always get the better of you. A man’s head is like a grocer; it keeps accounts. I’ve paid so much and earned so much and that means a profit of this much or a loss of that much! The head’s a careful little shopkeeper; it never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string. Ah no! It hangs on tight to it, the bastard! If the string slips out of it grasp, the head, poor devil, is lost, finished! But if a man doesn’t break the string, tell me, what flavor is left in life? The flavor of chamomile, weak chamomile tea! Nothing like rum – that makes you see life inside out!"
So nine minus five equals four, or so they say. It means nothing to me. They say we live forward and remember backwards. They say time is a river that ends at the sea. They say there is a 34% chance of rain tomorrow at 1 P.M. I’m sick of they; the hell with them! How are you with they?
Yet I’m still taking no chances. My ashes have been accumulating is a small custard cup for a year now, burnt down from the incense that is in the bathroom to make shit smell like roses. We like to make believe. So I’m getting ahead of my life and going down to town to the twisting Housatonic River to scatter my ashes in advance. I too like to make believe. Ahead of what, you might wonder: one year, five, ten, fifteen, fifty? Math can’t tell us. I just hope the stench from the waste processing plant on the other side of the river doesn’t spoil the ceremony. I prefer roses.Say what you want, call me an ashhole. Say this is all folly.
You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for. But you can’t say I’m not preparing..."
"People are finally seeing what's coming next - and $20 is the new $5. From grocery bills to rent, insurance, and gas, Americans making $50,000 or even $250,000 say they're broke. In this report I break down the real $50K budget math ($150 left), the US-Canada trade war tariffs hitting electricity & everyday goods, and why experts say financial pain could last until mid-to-end of 2027. • Why $20 has replaced the $5 purchase • The $50,000 take-home breakdown that leaves just $150 • Why even $125K-$250K earners feel like they're going backwards • How the US-Canada trade war will raise prices on everything • 3 moves to make NOW before everyone else does. What tough choice are YOU facing right now: is it this OR that?"
"Nobody in this video stopped paying. That is the part that does not fit the story we are told about credit card debt. A woman calls her bank for a hardship program and is offered one option: permanent closure. A man loses all three Amex cards after twenty-five years, because he paid people through PayPal. A card with a $1,600 balance never goes down, because a third party has been pulling $24.99 out of it twice a month for years. A $5,880 balance becomes $6,000 the week after a payment, on $143 of interest. And a score that took three years to build falls from 803 to 570 in six months. The pattern is that the payment is not the thing that decides. Interest is charged on the average daily balance, so a payment made after the statement closes barely moves what gets reported. Fees post before payments in most agreements. And the score measures utilization on the day the bank reports it, not the day you paid. What actually changes the math: pay before the statement date, not the due date. Read the line items on your statement every month, because a recurring charge you never authorized will not announce itself. And if you call for hardship, ask in writing what happens to the account afterwards, because "closed" and "closed and reported" are not the same thing. None of these people were careless. Most of them were doing everything they were told to do."
"There are tens of millions of Americans that are currently living in third world conditions, and poverty, hunger and homelessness are growing all around us. Many of our most important urban areas have become rotting, decaying, drug-infested hellholes. Meanwhile, there are vast stretches of rural America that look like they have been totally left behind by the rest of our society. But if you live in the version of America that is still shiny and beautiful and clean, you may be wondering what all of the fuss is about because life still seems pretty good to you. For those at or near the top of the economic pyramid, it feels like the party will never end. Of course those that are impoverished can’t afford to live anywhere near those that are thriving. Today, 35.9 million Americans (including 10.4 million children) live below the official poverty line. Tens of millions of others make enough to be above the poverty line but are deeply suffering too.
We are a nation of contrasts. We are the wealthiest nation on the entire planet, and yet we have also piled up the most debt in the history of the world. We have more billionaires than anyone else, and yet poverty is rampant. We have luxuries and electronic gadgets that previous generations could not have even imagined, and yet much of the population is living in almost unbelievable squalor and filth.
Let me give you an example. Not too long ago, authorities in Ohio discovered sixteen children that were “found living in conditions that even livestock don’t live in”…Sixteen kids, ranging from 1 year old to 18, were found living in conditions that even livestock don’t live in, described Vinton County Sheriff Ryan Cain. The sheriff, along with Vinton County Prosecutor William Archer and Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson, held a press conference Wednesday to discuss the arrests of four family members: Gary Siders Jr., Gary Siders Sr., Christina Siders, and Elizabeth Siders.
We should be so thankful that those children were rescued. Apparently most of them had been isolated in a 12 foot by 12 foot area for the last four years…Most of the kids were kept in a 12×12 area of the home for the past four years, Sheriff Cain said. He called the area “disgusting,” adding that “our livestock were kept in better conditions than these children.” AG Wilson said it looked like a “third-world” country inside the home. “It’s not the type of thing we’re used to seeing in America,” he said.
This isn’t how Americans are supposed to be living. Once upon a time, even impoverished people in this country tried to keep their homes clean and dressed nicely when they went out. But those days are long gone. Just take a stroll through your local Walmart and observe how people are dressed.
And as far as keeping our homes clean, the truth is that in 2026 millions upon millions of Americans live in communities that are drowning in squalor and filth…Thanks to mass migration, conditions in our inner cities are particularly bad. Earlier today, I came across an article about street food vendors in Los Angeles that made my stomach turn…
The proliferation of rogue street food vendors - largely run by illegal migrants - is not only hitting Los Angeles with third-world-like blight, Democratic leaders have decided to do nothing despite being aware of horrifying health hazards, their own previously unreleased records reveal. “A dog eating meat out of a street vendor’s bag before it was served to customers. Cockroaches crawling out of a food truck. Mice scurrying beside open salsa. Raw meat baking unrefrigerated in the heat. People urinating around cooking equipment.”
Those are just some of shocking allegations listed in a staggering 662-page dossier of 9,746 public health complaints about street food vendors filed across Los Angeles County from 2023 until early 2026, according to the California Post, which obtained the list only after it made a public records request.
Los Angeles was once such a beautiful city. But now there are rats wherever you go. According to Orkin, Los Angeles is now the “rattiest city in America”… Historically, Chicago has occupied the No.1 spot every year that Orkin has released its annual rankings, which it has been reporting for over a decade. But this year, there is a new city being crowned the “rattiest” - Los Angeles.
Orkin cites that growing warm climates can help a rat’s survivability rate, so hotter cities are seeing themselves fly up the rankings, giving Los Angeles the slight edge over Chicago this year. Chicago falls to No. 2 in the rankings, followed by New York and San Francisco.
I really detest rats. I also really detest dirty food. Unfortunately, we have reached a stage where it is really difficult to know what is safe to eat and what is not safe to eat.
I want to share a story with you that I shared with my core supporters on Friday. All over the country, millions of Americans won’t eat lettuce right now because of the nationwide cyclosporiasis outbreak…The massive cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce and thousands of illnesses has expanded to three new states, federal health regulators announced Thursday. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said the outbreak, which has been linked to hundreds of hospitalizations and two deaths since illnesses were first reported in July, has now been detected in Georgia, Tennessee and Texas. There have now been 11,458 illnesses reported across 20 states, according to the FDA.
I wish that I could tell you that this is an isolated incident. But I can’t. Almost every day, a new food recall is in the news. And there is a reason for that. If you actually went inside many of the facilities where our food is made, it would make you sick. We shouldn’t have to live like this.
Our schools are in deplorable condition as well. In Richmond, Virginia an elementary school that was named after Barack Obama has been forced to shut down because mold is out of control and rodents are running all over the place…Like its namesake, Barack Obama Elementary has something rotten under the surface.
The school of 285 students is now shut down for an undisclosed period after it was discovered that the buildings were testing positive for mold. The facility also had reports of rodents (mice or rats) in several rooms, alongside the more prominent mold health issue. The mold and rodent problems were noticed by staff as they prepared for the start of the new school year.
Officials say they hope to reopen the building in a week, though this has proven to be an overly optimistic goal after earlier “clear” air-quality tests were quickly contradicted by new visible mold discoveries (behind bulletin boards, on computers, in the art room, etc.), forcing repeated delays. A more realistic time frame is one month or more.
How did this happen? We are supposed to be the wealthiest nation on Earth, but we can’t even keep our military installations in livable shape…A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that the maintenance backlog for military installations has ballooned to more than $285 billion - leaving many facilities in disrepair, while risking readiness and service members’ quality of life. This figure is a jump up from 2022, when the maintenance backlog was about $137 billion. But the backlog continues to grow, because the services only request about 80% of the funds they need for installation repairs and maintenance.
We spend about a trillion dollars a year on our military, and so this is inexcusable. In many cases, mold issues and water damage go unaddressed for years… Indeed, service members face a range of issues at the facilities where they work and live. Barracks at Naval Station Norfolk, for example, have had suspected mold since 2023. But the installation office declined requests to test the growth observed there “due to the cost of testing and potential remediation.” Another highly used facility at that Naval station had evidence of asbestos and significant water damage, GAO found. While all the station’s piers require renovation, the Navy was “actively improving” only one - leaving the rest to operate in a “degraded condition.”
If conditions are this bad now, what will they be like once the economy really starts tanking? Thanks to our seemingly endless cost of living crisis, our standard of living has been steadily declining throughout this entire decade. Millions of Americans now live in their vehicles because they simply cannot afford homes any longer. According to the Federal Reserve, approximately one out of every ten Americans is now missing meals because they can’t afford to buy enough food.
When I was growing up, many would mock the “third world conditions” in other countries, but the truth is that “third world conditions” can now be found all over the United States. This is what societal collapse looks like, and if we do not take dramatic action our society will just continue to deteriorate."
"The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope - should the election be rigged or stolen - is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression. Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.
If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections. The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.
Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican. Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.
Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 - will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.
The Republican majority in the House - regardless of the vote - will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition. Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.
Trump - who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost - ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
When Volodymyr Zelensky - whose presidential term ended in May 2024 - informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trumpresponded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections…So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans – but voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night. Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud,, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.” This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.
I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists are enemies of the open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security. These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.
Power - as in all dictatorships - is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.
The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs. Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education - from kindergarten to graduate school - will be indoctrination. Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.
Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy - unlike anything seen in U.S. history - makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”
Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.” “The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:
The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.
FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local ‘election integrity’ group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”
This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November. Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.
First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations. “At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”
The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House - including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security - make these institutions unreliable.
We can only save ourselves. This means shutting the country down. Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut."
