Col. Doug Macgregor, 3/5/26
"Middle East May Be Worse
Than Anything Ever Seen in History!"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Thursday, March 5, 2026
Bill Bonner, "Rules of Engagement"
"Rules of Engagement"
by Bill Bonner
Youghal, Ireland - “How ye been keepin?” a neighbor greeted us. “Not too bad. And you?” “Not bad at all...it’s been raining almost every day since November. In the Bible it says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. We beat that record handily.” “I noticed that Mick had not added a single stone to that wall he was working on in October.” “Nooo...but after so much rain...the flowers will be magnificent.”
That is how it works. It takes a rainy day to produce a beautiful one. And the gist of our dot-connecting today: you may need an umbrella. Poor Iran. It needs more than an umbrella. Bombs from America falling on its leaders. Missiles from Israel coming down on its people. And now, the earth beneath its feet seems to have turned against it. MorningOverview: "Powerful earthquake rocks Iran as US and Israeli strikes keep falling." God must not like them.
And then, we were just settling down to watch the war in Iran when...boom...another one shows up. The New York Times: "U.S. Opens Military Action in Ecuador Against ‘Terrorist Organizations’." U.S. Special Forces soldiers are advising and supporting Ecuadorian commandos on raids across the country against suspected drug shipment facilities and other drug-related sites. We’ll have to take them one at a time.
Both wars, however, are the products of one man’s ambitions. Many readers think we spend too much time criticizing POTUS. But he is the man of the hour...the day...the year...and perhaps, the 21st century. Failing to understand Trump is a little like writing about the Decline and Fall of Rome without mentioning Caesar. Or surveying the 17th century and ignoring Cromwell...or the 19th without Napoleon...or the 20th without that fellow with the mustache.
All of them were the Big Men of their time. And whatever they thought they were doing…they played important historical roles that shaped the future. Commentators might have saluted Caesar after he crossed the Rubicon and expected him to reign over Rome for many years ahead. In 1812, they might have applauded Bonaparte’s victories at Marengo and Austerlitz…and predicted ever greater victories to come in Russia. They could have remarked at how the Nazis ‘made the trains run on time’….and looked forward to their getting the rest of Europe running correctly.
And now, Donald Trump thinks he is making deals that will add to America’s (and his own) glory. Alas, the history books may describe a very different outcome. Our job is to try to figure out what it is.
What readers might take as criticism of Trump is really our own unrepentant catastrophism on display. Our guess - based on the dots we’ve connected so far - is that the future is going to be marked by inflation, chaos, bankruptcy, war…and higher nominal interest rates. Life may be poorer and more brutal. It’s not Donald Trump’s fault. He’s just helping us get there.
Take the war on Iran, for example. Pete Hegseth said on Monday that the Pentagon didn’t need no stinkin’ “stupid rules of engagement…unlike so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.”
The rules of engagement are the ones that tell you you’re not supposed to murder prisoners, attack civilians, or initiate force, among other things. They are not foolproof...as Hegseth demonstrates. But largely in response to the disaster brought on by the man with the mustache, ‘rules’ were meant to nudge the world a little further in the ‘civilized’ direction. You stick with the rules, trusting your adversary to do the same.
It rained down hard in WWII. Even then, the Nazis generally respected the ‘rules of engagement’ on the Western Front. Atrocities were the exception, not the rule. As far as we know, they made no serious attempt to murder Churchill or Roosevelt. On the Eastern Front, meanwhile, murdering prisoners and civilians was much more common; both sides gave as good as they got.
Killing the Ayatollah, contrary to the rules of engagement, may have been a good way to make a deal. Or may not. But since our goal is to protect ourselves against the Big Loss, it set off alarms. Ina Hassan: ‘The assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei is the single greatest strategic blunder in modern history. By killing him, the US and Israel didn’t just eliminate a leader, they fulfilled a 1,460-year-old prophecy and created a martyr whose shadow will haunt the West for decades.’ Whether that is true, or not...we have no way of knowing. But since Iran posed very little threat to Americans prior to the war, we can only assume that it poses a greater one now.
Looking on the bright side, after six long years, WWII came to an end. Then, the flowers came out...soldiers put down their guns and took up their hammers and briefcases...the ‘rules of engagement’ were elaborated…and most people in the West enjoyed a period of (relative) peace and prosperity that lasted for the next 81 years. And now...another sunny season may be on the way...but, in the meantime, it may be wise to keep an umbrella handy."
Adventures With Danno, "Items at Kroger Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 3/5/26
"Items at Kroger Everyone
Should Be Buying Right Now!"
Comments here:
"How It Really Is"
Strong language alert!
Full screen recommended.
"The Most Honest Three Minutes In Television History"
Comments here:
"3 Out Of 167"
167 dead school girls. Here’s 3 of them. Burn the image in your mind.
May Iran repay the debt a thousand fold.
Author: Stucky
Famine Incoming? About One-Fourth Of All Globally Traded Nitrogen Fertilizer Normally Travels Through The Strait Of Hormuz"
by Michael Snyder
"If the war with Iran persists for an extended period of time, a lot of people could literally starve. Approximately half of all global food production is dependent on the use of fertilizer. Without fertilizer, crop yields would drop precipitously and there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough food for everyone. Even now, hundreds of millions of people are going to bed hungry every night, and there are severe food shortages in quite a few African nations. This is a trend that I have been closely monitoring for quite some time. We are at a very serious tipping point, and approximately one-fourth of all globally traded nitrogen fertilizer normally travels through the Strait of Hormuz. If we can’t get that fertilizer into the hands of those that need it, we are going to have a major crisis on our hands.
At this moment, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has essentially been paralyzed…At least 200 ships, including oil and liquefied natural gas tankers as well as cargo ships, remained at anchor in open waters off the coast of major Gulf producers including Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to Reuters estimates based on ship-tracking data from the MarineTraffic platform. Hundreds of other vessels remained outside Hormuz unable to reach ports, shipping data showed. The waterway is a key artery for around a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG supply.
Hardly anything is getting through, and it is likely to remain that way for quite a while, because the Iranians have already damaged a significant number of commercial vessels…
This is something that is not getting nearly enough attention from the mainstream media. The latest vessel that was hit by Iran was a Malta-flagged container ship known as the Safeen Prestige…"A container ship was struck by a projectile while transiting the Strait of Hormuz north of Oman, maritime security agencies said. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), an agency linked to the U.K. military that monitors commercial shipping, said the vessel was sailing eastbound when it was hit by an unknown projectile just above the water line. The strike caused a fire in the ship’s engine room, UKMTO said, adding that no environmental impact had been reported. Maritime security agency Vanguard Tech identified the vessel as the Malta-flagged container ship Safeen Prestige."
We have literally never seen anything like this before. For now, the 2nd largest shipping company in the world has suspended all cargo bookings for the region…
Obviously the price of oil has gone up, and I believe that it will go even higher. But what this is going to mean for global food production could be of even greater importance.
Farmers all over the western hemisphere are getting ready to plant, and it is being reported that “close to one-quarter of globally traded nitrogen fertilizer” normally travels through the Strait of Hormuz…"Forbes’ Robert Rapier reported that “globally, about 180 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizers are consumed each year (measured in nutrient terms). Of that, roughly 55–60 million metric tons of urea move through international seaborne trade annually. The Middle East accounts for approximately 40–50% of that traded volume. “And nearly all of those exports must transit the Strait of Hormuz,” Rapier reported. “In other words, close to one-quarter of globally traded nitrogen fertilizer—and a meaningful share of total global nitrogen production - moves through that single maritime chokepoint that is now threatened by war.”
Fertilizer prices were already exceptionally high even before this war erupted. Now there is going to be a scramble for whatever supplies are available, and prices are going to go even higher. One industry insider says that the timing of this war “literally could not be worse”…"The timing of the conflict “literally could not be worse” for the industry, Josh Linville, vice president for fertilizers at brokerage StoneX Group, said by email. “There is never a good time for war, but this couldn’t be much worse.”
I honestly don’t know how this is going to be fixed. If farmers don’t get enough fertilizer, global food production could decline substantially in 2026…"Roughly half of global food production depends on fertilizers. Without them, crop yields would fall sharply, placing the delicate balance of global food security at risk. Their industrial production rests largely on the Haber–Bosch process, devised by Fritz Haber and subsequently industrialized by Carl Bosch, which combines nitrogen drawn from the air with hydrogen (today sourced mainly from natural gas) to synthesize ammonia."
Ammonia is the indispensable feedstock for a wide range of nitrogen-based fertilizers, including urea, the most widely used chemical fertilizer in the world. According to an analysis by Rabobank, a significant share of the urea passing through the Strait of Hormuz comes from Qatar and Iran, accounting for an estimated 5 million tonnes annually, while the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia contribute a further 2 million tons each year.
We really are in unprecedented territory. The farmers that are able to get their hands on sufficient supplies of fertilizer certainly are going to pay a lot more for it, because prices are already skyrocketing…"Prices for granular urea in Egypt have surged by $60 a metric ton since the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and buyers are already looking for other suppliers in North Africa and Southeast Asia, Bloomberg Green Markets reported.
Meanwhile in New Orleans, the price of March barges for urea - the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer and one crucial to corn fields - were $60 to $80 higher on Monday compared with Friday prices, and there is “potentially hundreds of dollars per ton increases in the coming days,” said Taylor Eastman, a fertilizer trader at Andersons Inc."
Meanwhile, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also driving up natural gas prices in Europe and elsewhere…"A prolonged surge in natural gas prices triggered by the ongoing war in the Middle East risks denting European growth and hitting some Asian economies hard, analysts have warned. Global gas prices have soared this week amid fears of a lengthy disruption to energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz - a key shipping route running between Oman and Iran that handles about one-fifth of global LNG trade - as the Iran conflict escalates. Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF) futures, Europe’s benchmark gas contract, rose 35% on Tuesday to more than 60 euros ($69.64) per megawatt-hour. On the week, prices are around 76% higher."
Qatar is normally one of the largest producers in the region. But now they have shut down production for at least a month and they have declared force majeure on shipments of liquified natural gas…"QatarEnergy just declared Force Majeure. Three words that mean: we cannot deliver, and legally, we do not have to. This is no longer a supply disruption. This is a contract collapse. Force Majeure is not a precaution. It is a formal legal declaration that an unforeseeable event beyond QatarEnergy’s control has made fulfillment impossible. Every affected buyer just had their contract voided. The gas they were counting on is gone, and they have no legal recourse to get it back."
82% of Qatar’s LNG goes to Asia. China relies on Qatar for 30% of its LNG imports. India 42 to 52%. South Korea 14 to 19%. Taiwan 25%. Japan is already rationing to spot markets. Asian benchmark prices jumped 39% the day production stopped. We have never seen a supply shock of this magnitude.
If this war keeps going for an extended period of time, this is just the beginning. Here in the western world, food prices are likely to keep rising at a brisk pace. But in impoverished nations around the globe, things will be far worse. If this war does not end soon, large numbers of people could end up dead as a result of the horrifying famine that is now looming."
"The Limits of US and Israeli Air Power"
"The Limits of US and Israeli Air Power"
by Larry C. Johnson
"The West, including Israel, refuses to learn from history with regards to the use of air power to achieve regime change. The decision of Israel and the United States to attack Iran on February 28 and force a change of regime is a colossal failure. The murder of the Ayatollah Khamenei, along with the Minister of Defense and the head of the IRGC, and the killing of 165 school girls aged 6 to 12, instead has galvanized the Iranian public to unite around the Islamic Republic and eliminated the chance that there will be a negotiated settlement to the war on terms acceptable to the West. Iran refuses to surrender to the US and Israel and is fully committed to removing the US from the Persian Gulf region and devastating Israel.
Donald Trump, at the urging of his Zionist cheerleaders, broke his promise to his base to not start an unnecessary war and chose instead to start a war that is bleeding US offensive capabilities. Trump, through ignorance or hubris, bet his presidency on the belief that a combination of air and naval power could effect regime change. But history shows that air power alone has never toppled a determined regime. Let’s look at seven examples where the US or Israel tried and failed to achieve military victory by relying on air strikes.
IRAQ 2003: In March 2003 the United States launched one of the most intense air campaigns in history. Over the first three weeks, coalition aircraft flew more than 20,000 sorties and dropped more than 29,000 munitions. “Shock and Awe” was designed to paralyze Saddam Hussein’s regime from the air, break its will to fight, and trigger internal collapse. Yet air power alone did not topple Saddam. Regime change required a rapid ground invasion by US.and British forces that reached Baghdad in just 21 days. George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln declared the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, just six weeks after the US-led invasion, which began on March 20, 2003. Despite this optimistic proclamation, the broader conflict - encompassing insurgency, sectarian violence, occupation, and counter-insurgency efforts - continued for more than eight years afterward.
ISRAEL 2023 to Present:Israel possesses one of the world’s most advanced militaries: unmatched air superiority, precision-guided munitions, real-time intelligence from drones and satellites, layered missile defenses, elite special forces, and the unconditional backing of the United States. Hamas, by contrast, is a non-state terrorist organization with no air force, no navy, no tanks, and a GDP per capita roughly 1/50th of Israel’s. On paper, the outcome of any conventional war should be swift and total. Yet more than two years after the October 7, 2023 attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages, Hamas remains a functioning military and political force in Gaza.
Afghanistan 2001 to 2021: The United States entered Afghanistan in October 2001 with total air dominance, the world’s most advanced special forces, precision-guided weapons, NATO allies, and a clear initial mission: destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban regime that had sheltered it. By December 2001 the Taliban had been routed from power. Twenty years later, in August 2021, the same Taliban rolled back into Kabul in pickup trucks as the US-backed government collapsed in days.
Yemen — Operation Rough Rider March 2025: The US air and naval campaign against Houthi targets in Yemen — began on March 15, 2025, and officially ended on May 6, 2025. Over 53 days the United States fired more than 1,000 strikes, expended over $1 billion in munitions, deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups, and lost several MQ-9 drones and other assets. The stated objective was clear: restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden by stopping Houthi attacks on commercial shipping. Yet more than ten months later, in March 2026, the Red Sea remains a high-risk zone. Major shipping companies continue to reroute around Africa, insurance premiums remain elevated, and occasional Houthi attacks or credible threats persist. The United States, with unmatched naval power and precision strike capability, did not achieve its core goal.
In this list of failures we should also include the following:
In Kosovo (1999), 78 days of NATO bombing forced Serbia to withdraw from Kosovo but did not remove Slobodan Milošević from power; he fell later due to internal politics.
In Libya (2011), seven months of NATO air strikes helped rebels overthrow Gaddafi only because ground rebel forces advanced on Tripoli.
North Vietnam endured years of Rolling Thunder and Linebacker bombing without regime change.
With the exception of North Vietnam, Iran possesses more military capability than any of the other cases cited above. When this war is over -- with Iran still intact - the US will have depleted critical military supplies that will not be replaced for years and Israel’s economic and military infrastructure will be decimated. Why?
First, the US started a war without an industrial base that could ramp up production of air defense and attack missiles that are being rapidly depleted. Compounding the production challenge is the lack of critical rare earth minerals needed to produce weapons and combat aircraft… China controls those and has refused to export them to the US.
Second, the US and Israel failed to accurately assess Iran’s ability to deploy and launch thousands of drones and ballistic and cruise missiles. Although Israeli censors are working feverishly to hide the damage being done - and I guarantee you that similar hits are pummeling Haifa and Israeli military and intelligence installations across Israel - the truth is leaking out."
An Enraged Repost: "All Palestinian Prisoners To Be Executed And Shot In The Head"
"All Palestinian Prisoners To Be Executed And Shot In The Head"
"The Minister of National Security of Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, says he plans to introduce legislation in the Knesset which reads: "All Palestinian prisoners to be executed and shot in the head." – The Minister of National Security of Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir
Watch this monster say it himself!
"Israel is Evil personified. Israel is Evil embodied."
- Scott Ritter
OMG...God damn these psychopathically degenerate inbred monsters to Hell! And YOU, Americans, paid for it all, every bullet, every bomb, every tank, everything, billions and billions of dollars! All that blood's on YOUR hands too! 80,000 innocent and unarmed old people, men, women and 20,000 CHILDREN slaughtered, with another 10,000 buried under the rubble and unrecovered. And these ZioNazi creatures from Hell call the Palestinians "human animals?!" Eternal shame and disgrace on us all! Stipendium peccati mors est, Israel, and it's coming...
"US-Israel-Iran War, 3/5/26"
Full screen recommended.
WLA, 3/5/26
"Israel Shaking While Iran Unleashes Worst
Hypersonic Missile Wave, Iron Dome Crumbles"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Hook Global, 3/5/26
"Iran Attacks With Full Might,
Israel Hit Across Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem"
Comments here:
"Alert! Iran's 3 Stage War Plan: Hormuz Closure, Oil Wars And Nukes!"
Full screen recommended.
Prepper News, 3/5/26
"Alert! Iran's 3 Stage War Plan:
Hormuz Closure, Oil Wars And Nukes!"
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Wednesday, March 4, 2026
"The Cost of Living in America Is Making Everyone Leave"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 3/4/26
"The Cost of Living in America Is Making Everyone Leave"
"The cost of living in the United States has reached a point where millions of Americans are making a decision that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. They're leaving. Not on vacation, not temporarily, but for good. From young couples working multiple jobs just to stay afloat, to retirees on fixed incomes watching their savings disappear, people from every walk of life are looking beyond American borders for something that used to be a given here: a decent, affordable life.
In this video, we hear directly from Americans who have already made the move and from those who are right on the edge of doing it. Their stories paint a picture that's impossible to ignore. Housing costs have surged, car insurance and groceries have skyrocketed, and wages have barely moved. For a lot of people, the math simply stopped adding up. Working full time used to be enough. Then it took two incomes. Now, for many families, even four sources of income aren't covering the basics.
What makes this even more eye-opening is what people are discovering once they leave. Americans who've relocated to Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East are reporting something that almost sounds too good to be true. They're spending less, stressing less, eating better, and actually enjoying their daily lives. Some are living on a thousand dollars a month or less and feeling healthier and more fulfilled than they ever did back home. Access to affordable healthcare, fresh food, and a slower pace of life is changing how they see everything they were taught about success and happiness.
Retirees are finding that their Social Security checks, which barely cover rent in most American cities, can fund a comfortable and even enjoyable lifestyle in dozens of countries around the world. The ability to see a doctor the same day for a fraction of the cost, to live without the constant anxiety of one emergency wiping out your savings, that's not a distant possibility anymore.
This video also breaks down the real costs of making the move. How much money you actually need to relocate, how visas work, what to expect with your benefits abroad, and why it's far more accessible than most people assume. Whether you're seriously considering a move or just curious about why so many Americans are choosing this path, this is a conversation worth having."
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Musical Interlude: "This Too Shall Pass"; "The World Needs Your Story"; "You Matter"
Full screen recommended.
Fearless Soul, "This Too Shall Pass"
"Nothing in life is permanent - not the pain, not the struggle, not even the most beautiful moments. Life moves in waves, in seasons, in quiet transformations we often don’t understand until later. This song is a reminder to breathe… to trust… to let go. Whatever you are going through right now - this too shall pass. And in that truth, there is peace. There is freedom. There is beauty. When we stop resisting life and start allowing it to flow, we begin to see: everything is unfolding exactly as it should. Even the hard moments are shaping us, guiding us, awakening us. Let this be your mantra in dark times and bright ones alike - This too shall pass. Take a breath. Release control. Trust the journey."
o
Full screen recommended.
Fearless Soul, "The World Needs Your Story"
o
Fearless Soul, "You Matter"
Musical Interlude: "Beautiful Relaxing Music - Calming Piano & Guitar Music"
Full screen recommended.
Soothing Relaxation,
"Beautiful Relaxing Music - Calming Piano & Guitar Music"
"Beautiful relaxing music by Soothing Relaxation. Enjoy calming piano and
guitar music composed by Peder B. Helland, set to stunning nature videos."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Where did this big ball of stars come from? Palomar 6 is one of about 200 globular clusters of stars that survive in our Milky Way Galaxy. These spherical star-balls are older than our Sun as well as older than most stars that orbit in our galaxy's disk. Palomar 6 itself is estimated to be about 12.5 billion years old, so old that it is close to - and so constrains - the age of the entire universe.
Containing about 500,000 stars, Palomar 6 lies about 25,000 light years away, but not very far from our galaxy's center. At that distance, this sharp image from the Hubble Space Telescope spans about 15 light-years. After much study including images from Hubble, a leading origin hypothesis is that Palomar 6 was created - and survives today - in the central bulge of stars that surround the Milky Way's center, not in the distant galactic halo where most other globular clusters are now found."
"Life Changing Poems for Hard Times"
Full screen recommended.
RedFrost Motivation,
"Life Changing Poems for Hard Times"
Read by Shane Morris
Poems:
"Defeat" by Khalil Gibran
"A Psalm of Life" by H. W. Longfellow
"If" by Rudyard Kipling
"Invictus" by William Ernest Henley
"Desiderata" by Max Ermann
"A Dreamer..."
And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you’re a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.”
- Eldridge Cleaver
“A Life of One’s Own"
“If the sun is shining, stand in it – yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass – they have to – because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. What you are pursuing is meaning – a meaningful life… There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.” - Jeanette Winterson
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“‘A Life of One’s Own’: A Penetrating 1930s Field Guide to Self-Possession,
Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want”
by Maria Popova
“One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who we are and who we ought to be – a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, “is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.” Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers – creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
In 1926, more than a decade before a team of Harvard psychologists commenced history’s longest and most revelatory study of human happiness and half a century before the humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm penned his classic on the art of living, the British psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner (February 1, 1900–May 29, 1998) undertook a seven-year experiment in living, aimed at unpeeling the existential rind of all we chronically mistake for fulfillment – prestige, pleasure, popularity – to reveal the succulent, pulsating core of what makes for genuine happiness. Along her journey of “doubts, delays, and expeditions on false trails,” which she chronicled in a diary with a field scientist’s rigor of observation, Milner ultimately discovered that we are beings profoundly different from what we imagine ourselves to be – that the things we pursue most frantically are the least likely to give us lasting joy and contentment, but there are other, truer things that we can train ourselves to attend to in the elusive pursuit of happiness.
In 1934, under the pen name Joanna Field, Milner released the results of her inquiry in “A Life of One’s Own” – a small, enormously insightful book, beloved by W.H. Auden and titled in homage to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” published three years after Milner began her existential experiment. Milner would go on to fill her ninety-eight years with life of uncommon contentment, informed by her learnings from this intensive seven-year self-examination.
In the preface to the original edition, Milner admonishes: “Let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with stern duty or high moral endeavour. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people, and to evade the continual day to day sifting of values. And finally, let no one undertake such an experiment who is not prepared to find himself more of a fool than he thought.”
This disorienting yet illuminating task of turning the mind’s eye inward requires a practice of recalibrating our conditioned perception. Drawing on Descartes’s tenets of critical thinking, she set out to doubt her most fundamental assumptions about what made her happy, trying to learn not from reason alone but from the life of the senses. Half a century before Annie Dillard offered her beautiful lens on the two ways of seeing, Milner writes: “As soon as I began to study my perception, to look at my own experience, I found that there were different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of awareness in my head; and there was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I saw. And I found that the narrow focus way was the way of reason. If one was in the habit of arguing about life it was very difficult not to approach sensation with the same concentrated attention and so shut out its width and depth and height. But it was the wide focus way that made me happy.”
She reflects on the sense of extreme alienation and the terror of missing out she felt at the outset of the experiment, at twenty-six: “Although I could not have told about it at the time, I can now remember the feeling of being cut off from other people, separate, shut away from whatever might be real in living. I was so dependent on other people’s opinion of me that I lived in a constant dread of offending, and if it occurred to me that something I had done was not approved of I was full of uneasiness until I had put it right. I always seemed to be looking for something, always a little distracted because there was something more important to be attended to just ahead of the moment.”
Throughout the book, Milner illustrates the trajectory of her growth with the living record that led to her insights, punctuating her narrative with passages from her diary penned during the seven years. One, evocative of eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath’s journal, captures the disquieting restlessness she felt: “I want to feel myself part of things, of the great drift and swirl: not cut off, missing things, like being sent to bed early as a child, the blinds being drawn while the sun and cheerful voices came through the chink from the garden.”
In another, she distills the interior experience of that achingly longed-for sense of belonging to with world: “I want… the patterns and colorings on the vase on my table took on a new and intense vitality – I want to be so harmonious in myself that I can think of others and share their experiences.”
Looking back on the young self who penned those journal entires at the outset of the experiment, Milner reflects: “I had felt my life to be of a dull dead-level mediocrity, with the sense of real and vital things going on round the corner, out in the streets, in other people’s lives. For I had taken the surface ripples for all there was, when actually happenings of vital importance to me had been going on, not somewhere away from me, but just underneath the calm surface of my own mind. Though some of these discoveries were not entirely pleasant, bringing with them echoes of terror and despair, at least they gave me a sense of being alive.”
Much of that aliveness, she notes, came from the very act of chronicling the process of self-examination, for attention is what confers interest and vitality upon life. Joining the ranks of celebrated authors who championed the benefits of keeping a diary, Milner writes: “Not only did I find that trying to describe my experience enhanced the quality of it, but also this effort to describe had made me more observant of the small movements of the mind. So now I began to discover that there were a multitude of ways of perceiving, ways that were controllable by what I can only describe as an internal gesture of the mind. It was as if one’s self-awareness had a central point of interest being, the very core of one’s I-ness. And this core of being could, I now discovered, be moved about at will; but to explain just how it is done to someone who has never felt it for himself is like trying to explain how to move one’s ears.”
This inarticulable internal gesture, Milner found, was a matter of recalibrating her habits of perceiving, looking not directly at an object of attention but taking in a fuller picture with a diffuse awareness that is “more like a spreading of invisible sentient feelers, as a sea anemone spreads wide its feathery fingers.” One morning, she found herself in the forest, mesmerized by the play of sunlight and shadow through the glistening leaves of the trees, which left her awash in “wave after wave of delight” – an experience not cerebral but sensorial, animating every cell of her body. Wondering whether such full-body surrender to dimensional delight could provide an antidote to her feelings of anger and self-pity, she considers the trap of busyness by which we so often flee from the living reality of our being: “If just looking could be so satisfying, why was I always striving to have things or to get things done? Certainly I had never suspected that the key to my private reality might lie in so apparently simple a skill as the ability to let the senses roam unfettered by purposes. I began to wonder whether eyes and ears might not have a wisdom of their own.”
That tuning into one’s most elemental being, she came to realize, was the mightiest conduit to inhabiting one’s own life with truthfulness and integrity undiluted by borrowed standards of self-actualization. Nearly half a century before the poet Robert Penn Warren contemplated the trouble with “finding yourself,” Milner writes: “I had been continually exhorted to define my purpose in life, but I was now beginning to doubt whether life might not be too complex a thing to be kept within the bounds of a single formulated purpose, whether it would not burst its way out, or if the purpose were too strong, perhaps grow distorted like an oak whose trunk has been encircled with an iron band. I began to guess that my self’s need was for an equilibrium, for sun, but not too much, for rain, but not always… So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote: “It will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it’s the only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into a theory.”
Distilling the essence of this reorientation of being, she adds: “I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it.”
Several decades later, Jeanette Winterson would write beautifully of “the paradox of active surrender” essential to our experience of art. As in art, so in life – Milner writes: “Here then was a deadlock. I wanted to get the most out of life, but the more I tried to grasp, the more I felt that I was ever outside, missing things. At that time I could not understand at all that my real purpose might be to learn to have no purposes.”
Half a century after Nietzsche proclaimed that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Milner considers the difficulty – and the triumph – of recognizing that you are crossing life on someone else’s bridge: ”I had at least begun to guess that my greatest need might be to let go and be free from the drive after achievement – if only I dared. I had also guessed that perhaps when I had let these go, then I might be free to become aware of some other purpose that was more fundamental, not self-imposed private ambitions but some thing which grew out of the essence of one’s own nature. People said: ‘Oh, be yourself at all costs’. But I had found that it was not so easy to know just what one’s self was. It was far easier to want what other people seemed to want and then imagine that the choice was one’s own.”
“One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her own diary in the same era. “Looked at, it vanishes.” Happiness, Milner found, was similarly elusive to direct pursuit. Rather, its attainment required a wide-open attentiveness to reality, a benevolent curiosity about all that life has to offer, and a commitment not to argue with its offerings but to accept them as they come, congruous or incongruous as they may be with our desires.
Looking back on the diary entires from the final stretch of her seven-year experiment, she reflects on the hard-earned mastery of this unarguing surrender: “It struck me as odd that it had taken me so long to reach a feeling of sureness that there was something in me that would get on with the job of living without my continual tampering. I suppose I did not really reach it until I had discovered how to sink down beneath the level of chattering thoughts and simply feel what it meant to be alive.”
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Freely download “A Life Of Ones Own”, by Marion Milner, here:
Freely download “A Life Of Ones Own”, by Marion Milner, here:
"There Is Always The Hope..."
“What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time. Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one’s ribs get re-broken again.”
- Inga Muscio
"You Think..."
"That's why crazy people are so dangerous.
You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage."
- Michael Buckley
"When We Can No Longer Tell the Truth "
"When We Can No Longer Tell the Truth "
by Charles Hugh Smith
"When we can no longer tell the truth because the truth will bring the whole rotten, fragile status quo down in a heap of broken promises and lies, we've reached the perfection of dysfunction. You know the one essential guideline to leadership in a doomed dysfunctional system: when it gets serious, you have to lie. In other words, the status quo's secular goddess is TINA - there is no alternative to lying, because the truth will bring the whole corrupt structure tumbling down.
This core dynamic of dysfunction is scale-invariant, meaning that hiding the truth is the core dynamic in dysfunctional relationships, households, communities, enterprises, cities, corporations, states, alliances, nations and empires: when the truth cannot be told because it threatens the power structure of the status quo, that status quo is doomed.
Lies, half-truths and cover-ups are all manifestations of fatal weakness. What lies, half-truths and cover-ups communicate is: we can no longer fix our real problems, and rather than let this truth out, we must mask it behind lies and phony reassurances.
Truth is power, lies are weakness. All we get now are lies, statistics designed to mislead and phony reassurances that the status quo is stable and permanent. The truth is powerful because it is the core dynamic of solving problems. Lies, gamed statistics and false reassurances are fatal because they doom any sincere efforts to fix what's broken before the system reaches the point of no return.
We are already past the point of no return. The expediency of lies has already doomed us.
Honest accounts of hugely successful corporations that implode share one key trait: in every case, managers were pressured to hide the truth from top management, which then hid the truth from investors and clients. is the key dynamic in failed oligarchies as well: if telling the truth gets you sent to Siberia (or worse), then nobody with any instinct for self-preservation will tell the truth. If obscuring the truth saves one's job, then that's what people do. That this dooms the organization is secondary to immediate self-preservation.
A distorted sense of loyalty to the family, community, company, institution, agency or nation furthers lying as the solution to unsavory problems. Daddy a drunk? Hide the bottle. Church a hotbed of adultery and thieving? Maintain the facade of holiness at all costs. Company products are failing? Put some lipstick on the pig. The statistical truth doesn't support the party's happy story? Distort the stats until they do what's needed. The agency failed to fulfill its prime directive? Blame the managerial failure on a scapegoat.
Pathological liars and cheats rely on self-preservation and misplaced loyalty to mask their own failure and corruption. A hint here, a comment there, and voila, a culture of lying is created and incentivized.
Obscuring the truth is the ultimate short-term expediency. Now that it's serious, we have to lie. We'll start telling the truth later, we say, after everything's stabilized, we hope. But lying insures nothing can ever be truly stabilized, so there will never be a point at which the system is strong enough and stable enough to survive the truth.
We are now an empire of lies. The status quo,politically, socially and economically, depends on lies, half-truths, scapegoats and cover-ups for its very survival. Any truth that escapes the prison of lies endangers the entire rotten edifice.
In an empire of lies, leaders say what people want to hear. This wins the support of the masses, who would rather hear false reassurances that require no sacrifices, no difficult trade-offs, no hard choices, no discipline. The empire of lies is doomed. Lies are weakness, and they prohibit any real solutions. Truth is power, but we can no longer tolerate the truth because it frightens us. Our weakness is systemic and fatal."
"How It Tragically, Really Is"
Never in the history of the world has there been such a totally kind, compassionate, caring people as you, Good Americans! $359 billion for the neoNazis in Ukraine, God knows how many secret billions to the psychopathically degenerate genocidal Israeli monsters, US debt at $38.7 trillion to pay for the literally insane policies of the Left, all while our economy's being destroyed right in front of our eyes! Stores and restaurants closing everywhere; massive layoffs everywhere, millions jobless and homeless after losing their homes; 700,000 homeless people living in tents everywhere; 60,000 homeless veterans, 22 of whom kill themselves every single day; 150,000 drug overdose deaths last year; violent crime exploding everywhere; inflation out of control and about to explode higher; elderly can't afford life saving medications; rents sky high; city and state governments bankrupt; food banks desperately getting empty and your kids are hungry; gas prices about to explode much higher; $1.5 TRILLION a year, at least, for the military and its 800 bases around the world to spread "democracy" to the suffering masses everywhere; Wall St. thieves stealing TRILLIONS of dollars, including from the pension funds you foolishly believed you'd receive, and won't, and nobody's ever charged or goes to jail; and you go broke desperately trying to pay the electric bill. And yet, despite all this, Americans find it in their loving hearts to relieve other's suffering without complaining! No mass protests! My heart bursts, it bursts I tell you, with pride and admiration! Well, not exactly, but if I put here what I really feel about all this they'd instantly delete this blog...as they did the first one. - CP
"Preemptive War, Permanent Emergency: The Real Cost of Trump’s Iran Strike"
"Preemptive War, Permanent Emergency:
The Real Cost of Trump’s Iran Strike"
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” -Jeremiah 6:13–14
“This is insane. Regime change will result in a bloody civil war... Resist this!” - Charlie Kirk (2025)
"The military-industrial complex and the American police state have joined forces. War abroad and war at home are no longer separate enterprises. They have fused. This did not happen overnight. Every modern president has stretched the limits of war-making power. Some have shredded those limits altogether. Each time that boundary is breached, the Constitution recedes a little further. This is one of those moments.
In a complete about-face from his claims to being a peace president, Donald Trump has authorized yet another preemptive strike - this time against Iran - without a declaration of war from Congress, without meaningful public debate, and without constitutional clarity. The gravity of that decision cannot be overstated.
While American troops were being ordered into harm’s way, Trump was hosting a $1 million-a-ticket fundraiser for himself at Mar-a-Lago, trotting out his signature dance moves between curtained war briefings. That spectacle tells you everything you need to know.
That is how we arrived at Operation Epic Fury.
With its Orwellian proclamations of “peace through strength,” Operation Epic Fury is less strategy than spectacle—an egotistical, muscle-flexing distraction by the Trump administration and an overarching attempt to normalize the use of unilateral force by the executive branch without congressional input or authorization.
This was never about peace. It was always about power.
And the Constitution is clear about how this is supposed to work, even if the White House is not.
And the Constitution is clear about how this is supposed to work, even if the White House is not. Permanent war places empire first.
And as usual, “we the people” will be forced pay for another unpopular forever war—financially, constitutionally, and domestically - and for the presidential hubris and the greed of the military-industrial complex and Deep State undergirding it all. Congress anticipated this danger. The War Powers Act was meant to rein in presidents who bypass Congress. But laws are only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce them. Without congressional authorization, without meaningful debate, without constitutional clarity, the executive branch claims the unilateral authority to wage war.
This is how dictatorships arise and republics erode. It happens when a president is allowed to treat constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than restraints. Trump routinely dismisses unfavorable polls, ignores the courts, sidesteps Congress, shows contempt for the will of the American people, and ignorance about the fact that he works for “we the people.” He behaves not as a public servant but as a potentate.
As John Jay warned in The Federalist No. 4: “Absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.”
If this were merely a constitutional dispute, it would be grave enough. But it is not merely constitutional. The consequences are immediate, political, and profoundly destabilizing. Trump has a tendency to bulldoze through constitutional and legal restraints, creating a spectacle or a crisis, and then leaving others to clean up the fallout - whether it is a gutted ballroom, an eviscerated federal agency, a chaotic immigration crackdown, or now a widening war in the Middle East. Long after the headlines move on, the wreckage remains.
And when the crisis involves war, the consequences are not merely bureaucratic or political - they are measured in lives and liberties
War, in particular, has always been the most convenient tool of presidents facing troubles at home. When approval ratings slide, when economic policy falters, when scandal threatens to consume the headlines, foreign conflict has a way of shifting the narrative.
Trump’s Iran escalation- a deadly, costly, immoral, unpopular distraction from missteps of Trump’s own making - comes amid dismal polling, a faltering economy, escalating immigration crackdowns, eroding constitutional protections, and renewed scrutiny tied to the Epstein files. Six out of ten Americans disapprove of Trump’s military action against Iran. And while there is little to defend about Iran - it is a brutal regime - no nation has the right to declare itself judge, jury and executioner of another without lawful authority. To suggest otherwise is the language of strongmen.
Moreover, what happens abroad does not stay abroad. The same government that claims unilateral authority to bomb foreign nations claims expanded authority to surveil, detain and silence domestically. The military-industrial complex and the police state operate in tandem. At home, we are being subjected to many of the same tactics and technologies deployed overseas. This is how America becomes a battlefield.
The pattern is not new. George W. Bush expanded warrantless surveillance. Obama normalized drone warfare. Presidents of both parties have stretched executive power. Trump inherited the imperial presidency - and leaned into it. He boasts of his authority, derides the courts, dismisses Congress, and treats constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than guardrails. He governs as though Article II were a royal charter. Defense contractors may prosper in such a climate. The Constitution does not.
History teaches that war abroad produces blowback at home. Twenty-five years ago, 9/11 was itself blowback - the consequence of decades of military intervention and occupation in the Middle East. Blowback justifies emergency powers. Emergency powers justify a police state. A police state justifies a permanent national security state. The “war on terror” did not end terrorism. It institutionalized emergency. And permanent emergency makes constitutional government fragile.
James Madison warned that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” We have seen it unfold over the past quarter century: the militarization of police, battlefield tactics in American neighborhoods, expansive surveillance justified by counterterrorism. The same tactics and rationale deployed abroad eventually get used against the American people here at home. War abroad justifies control at home. That is the pattern.
As legal scholar Aziz Huq, professor of law at the University of Chicago, warns, the same national-security powers used to justify bombing foreign nations can be turned inward- against domestic opponents and even against the electoral process itself. That is the long game being played right now.
This unprovoked attack on Iran is turning the Middle East into a war zone, in turn laying the groundwork for Trump to act on the fantasies he has long entertained about cancelling the mid-term elections. It is not far-fetched to imagine he might attempt it. He has repeatedly hinted about it and has already demonstrated how far he is willing to go to overturn an election.
On the very day bombs began falling on Tehran, Huq notes that the White House was reportedly considering a unilateral executive order asserting the power to control how and when Americans vote in the upcoming midterm elections - citing “national security” and alleged foreign meddling as justification. As Huq explains, the presidency is especially weakly bound by law when “national security” is invoked. The absence of legal authority did not prevent the strikes on Iran - strikes that are unlawful under the Constitution, which assigns Congress alone the power to initiate war.
If national security can be invoked to bypass Congress abroad, it can be invoked to bypass constitutional limits at home. In other words, if a president can launch a war without congressional authorization, he can claim similar emergency authority to restrict voting, suppress dissent, or silence opposition. This is not republican governance. It is rule by force.
Even some of Trump’s former allies sense the instability. As Marjorie Taylor Greene bluntly put it, “I think it’s time for America to rip the Band-Aid off and we need to have a serious conversation about what the f— is happening in this country and who in the hell are these decisions being made for and who is making these decisions.”
America’s founders understood this danger. They structured the Constitution to prevent any one man from dragging the nation into war. In making the case that decisions about war should never be left to one man, legal scholar David French quotes then-Congressman Abraham Lincoln at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1948: “Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.” Concludes French: “Those words were true then, and they’re true now. No matter what he thinks, Trump is not a king. But by taking America to war all on his own, he is acting like one.”
If we are to preserve any semblance of constitutional government, Congress must reclaim its war powers. The War Powers Resolution must be enforced. Emergency powers must be narrowed, sunsetted and restrained. Surveillance must be reined in. Domestic military deployment must be limited to the most narrow, exceptional circumstances. But structural reform alone will not save a republic that has grown comfortable with permanent war. Because once war abroad and war at home fully merge, the Constitution becomes little more than words on paper.
War is not peace. Preemptive war is not strength. And an imperial presidency - no matter how loudly it wraps itself in flags - is not constitutional government. The Founders understood that the gravest threat to liberty would not come from foreign enemies alone, but from the concentration of power in the hands of one man who believed himself indispensable.
A president who can send bombs abroad without consent can silence opposition at home without hesitation. A government that governs by the rule of emergency eventually ceases to govern by the rule of law. And a nation that trades liberty for spectacle will wake up to find that it has neither. History is a relentless teacher: military empires may rise on the back of war, but they fall just as quickly from being spread too thin. Already, days after the start of this debacle of a war on Iran, U.S. forces are being used to combat drug trafficking in Ecuador.
The question is no longer whether America can police the globe. The question is whether our Republic can survive the weight of the Empire it has become. We are at the point where we must choose: the spectacle of permanent war, or the survival of the American experiment in freedom. We cannot have both."
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