Jeremiah Babe, 3/1/25
"Zelensky Reality Check: Kicked Out Of White House"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Saturday, March 1, 2025
Musical Interlude: Melanie, "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)"
Full screen recommended.
Melanie, "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)"
Once upon a time...
"A Look to the Heavens"
"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."
"Never More Frightening..."
"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than
when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right."
~ Laurens van der Post
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“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
- Mark Twain
"Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity"
Full screen recommended.
"Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity"
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stupid ones we are defenseless - reasons fall on deaf ears. Bonhoeffer's famous text, which we slightly edited for this video, serves any free society as a warning of what can happen when certain people gain too much power."
Related:
"A Strange Game..."
“A strange game.
The only winning move is not to play.”
- "War Games"
"This is the "lesson" scene from the movie "War Games" where we learn that the only way to win in Nuclear War is not to play.
The story behind the quote: The quote comes from the 1983 science fiction thriller, "WarGames." In the film, all of the United States nuclear launch capabilities is given to a computer called “Joshua” or WOPR, which stands for War Operation Plan Response. It is programmed to consistently run military simulations to concoct the best plan of an attack if nuclear retaliation is needed. David Lightman (played by Matthew Broderick) unwittingly hacks into Joshua and causes the computer to think that the Soviet Union has launched missiles at the United States.
The quote comes from the very end of the film. David forces Joshua to play tic-tac-toe against itself in the attempt to make it understand the concept of mutually assured destruction. As Joshua obtains the final launch code, it runs through all the possible scenarios in an attempt to find a winning plan. After cycling through all of them and not finding one where anyone survives, the machine delivers the quote."
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"It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump."
- David Ormsby-Gore
The Poet: Mary Oliver, "What I Have Learned So Far"
"What I Have Learned So Far"
"Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.
All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of - indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone."
~ Mary Oliver
Free Download: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince"
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Free Download:
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince"
by Kirstie Pursey
“‘The Little Prince’, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is a children’s story with some very profound meanings and some quotes that will really make you think. I have to admit that I never read the ‘Little Prince’ as a child. I think I wouldn’t have known what to make of it if I did. Even reading it as an adult I didn’t know what to make of it!
However, it is clear that “The Little Prince” touches on some very deep themes about the nature of life, love, friendship and more. The following Little Prince quotes show just how many philosophical themes are discussed in this small, but profound work.
The story tells of a pilot who crashes into the Sahara desert. He is attempting to fix his damaged plane when a little boy appears as if from nowhere and demands that he draws him a sheep. Thus begins a strange, enigmatic friendship that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. The Little Prince, it turns out, comes from a small asteroid where he is the only living being apart from a rather demanding rose bush. The Little Prince decides to leave his home and visit other planets to find knowledge. The story tells of these encounters with rulers of strange worlds and de Saint-Exupéry has opportunities to demonstrate some philosophical themes that will make readers think.
On earth, as well as meeting the pilot, The Little Price meets a Fox and Snake. The fox helps him to truly understand the rose and the snake offers him a way to return to his home planet. But his return journey comes at a high price. The book’s bittersweet ending is both thought-provoking and emotional. I would definitely recommend that you read “The Little Prince” if you haven’t already.
It is one of the most beautiful and profound children’s books there are. If you have older children, then you might like to read it with them as it can be a little overwhelming for them to read alone. In the meantime, here are some of the best and most thought-provoking Little Prince quotes:
• “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
• “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
• “All grown-ups were once children… but only a few of them remember it.”
• “Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
• “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”
• “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
• “It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.”
• “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
• “I am who I am and I have the need to be.”
• “No one is ever satisfied where he is.”
• “One day, I watched the sun setting forty-four times……You know…when one is so terribly sad, one loves sunsets.”
• “People where you live, the little prince said, grow five thousand roses in one garden… Yet they don’t find what they’re looking for… And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose.”
• “But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.”
• “What matters most are the simple pleasures so abundant that we can all enjoy them…Happiness doesn’t lie in the objects we gather around us. To find it, all we need to do is open our eyes.”
• “Where are the people?” resumed the Little Prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.”
• “What makes the desert beautiful,’ said the Little Prince, ‘is that somewhere it hides a well…”
• “For me, you are only a little boy just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you have no need of me, either. For you, I’m only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we’ll need each other. You’ll be the only boy in the world for me and I’ll be the only fox in the world for you.”
• “To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.”
• “Only the children know what they are looking for.”
• “Sometimes, there is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day.”
• “I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words.”
• “Nevertheless he is the only one of them all who does not seem to me ridiculous. Perhaps that is because he is thinking of something else besides himself.”
• “The one thing I love in life is to sleep.”
• “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”
• “And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me.”
Closing thoughts: I hope you have enjoyed these ‘Little Prince’ quotes. Admittedly, they are sometimes difficult to fathom at first. However, like many things in life, the more you think about them, the more they begin to make sense. This is not an easy book to read and the bittersweet ending may leave you feeling a little heartbroken. However, the book offers so many insights into the human condition that it is well worth the time spent thinking about the philosophical ideas contained between the covers.”
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Freely download “The Little Prince”, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, here:
"I'd Still Swim..."
"If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told
the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim.
And I'd despise the one who gave up. "
- Abraham Maslow
"What Foolish Forgetfulness..."
“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.”
- Denis Diderot
Dan, I Allegedly, "Builders Are Panicking - Massive Business Failures Ahead"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 3/1/25
"Builders Are Panicking -
Massive Business Failures Ahead"
"Good people are struggling financially like never before, and in this video, I break down why it’s happening and what we can do about it. From skyrocketing costs at the grocery store to auto loan delinquencies hitting even those with great credit, it’s clear we’re all feeling the squeeze. Big names like Walmart and Amazon are seeing shifts in sales, while industries like retail and commercial real estate face massive challenges. Are we on the brink of something bigger?"
Comments here:
"Alert! The Economic Numbers That We Are Getting Now Are Absolutely Staggering"
"Alert! The Economic Numbers That We Are
Getting Now Are Absolutely Staggering"
by Michael Snyder
"We haven’t seen an economic shift of this magnitude in a long time. Four years of “Bidenomics” absolutely devastated the U.S. economy, and that is one of the primary reasons why Kamala Harris lost the election. The American people truly hate what has happened to the economy, and they are desperate for change. Unfortunately, our long economic slide just continues to get even worse. In fact, we just got some new numbers that are simply staggering.
Let me start with the housing market. On Thursday, we learned that pending home sales in the United States have dropped to the lowest level ever measured…"High mortgage rates and elevated home prices combined to crush home sales in January. Pending sales, which are based on signed contracts for existing homes, dropped 4.6% from December to the lowest level since the National Association of Realtors began tracking this metric in 2001. Sales were down 5.2% from January 2024. These sales are an indicator of future closings."
Just think about this for a moment. Pending home sales were not this low at any point during the Great Recession. And pending home sales were not this low when everybody was being locked down during the pandemic. Nobody can deny that the housing market is in a depressed state, and there is no indication that this is going to change any time soon.
Meanwhile, jobless claims spiked even more than expected last week…"First-time applications for unemployment benefits rose much more than expected last week, a likely indication of some “noisy” data, but also a potential worrisome hint that cracks may be forming in America’s long-solid labor market. There were an estimated 242,000 jobless claims filed last week, according to seasonally adjusted data released Thursday by the Department of Labor. That’s an increase of 22,000 from the prior week’s tally and a figure that landed well above economists’ expectations for 220,000 claims."
It’s the largest weekly spike in claims in more than four months and the weekly claims — a proxy for layoffs — are at their highest level since early December, Labor Department data shows. As I discussed the other day, we are witnessing mass layoffs all over the country right now. So I expect jobless claims to continue to spike in the months ahead.
Of course what is currently going on in Washington D.C. will just add fuel to that fire. Last week, jobless claims in D.C. jumped another 26 percent…"In Washington, D.C., new claims totaled 2,047, an increase of 421, or 26%, according to numbers not adjusted for seasonal factors." It appears that a tsunami of federal layoffs is just getting started, and so this is a developing story.
At the same time, we are being told that inflation “is moving in the wrong direction again”…"No matter what metric you’re looking at, US inflation is moving in the wrong direction again. Whether it’s a house or a carton of eggs, price growth is once again intensifying across a broad range of indicators. Much of that has to do with the same supply and demand factors and labor-market pressures that led to the initial inflation surge in the pandemic, while planned tariffs from President Donald Trump are heightening concerns that prices will rise even more."
What a mess. Last month, beef prices moved significantly higher once again…"It’s not just eggs getting expensive. Beef prices have also been on the rise, with executives at various companies noting in recent earnings calls that it’s creating significant challenges. In January, prices for beef and veal rose 5.5%, outpacing the entire food-at-home category, which rose 1.9%, according to the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index. Courtney Schmidt, Sector Manager at Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute, told FOX Business the uptick in beef prices is driven by tighter U.S. beef production with consistent consumer demand."
And egg prices have risen to absolutely absurd levels…"Shoppers are reeling from sticker shock as egg prices hit an all-time high at stores like Walmart, with some joking that they might need a loan just to afford breakfast, while other angry Americans have been caught stealing the product. One frustrated customer took to X to vent about the soaring costs, revealing that in Bakersfield, California, a 60-pack of eggs now costs $43. “$9 – $15 a dozen. It’s ridiculous,” she wrote. “I have to take out a loan just to buy eggs.”
Overall, the USDA is projecting that egg prices will increase by 41 percent by the end of this calendar year…"Egg prices are already at an all-time high, and, according to a USDA estimate, they’re only likely to get more expensive as the year continues. According to a US Department of Agriculture projection, egg prices are expected to increase by 41 percent this year. Skyrocketing egg prices are largely the result of a widespread bird flu outbreak that forced a mass culling of egg-laying birds. With fewer birds, there are fewer eggs, and with scarcity comes increased cost.
I wish that I could tell you that things will soon get better. But I can’t. Every single day, more businesses that were once thriving are shutting their doors for good. For example, the only factory in the town of Liberty, New York is permanently closing, and 287 workers will have to find something else to do with their lives…"PepsiCo will soon lay off 287 employees of a Frito Lay manufacturing plant in Liberty, New York, likely devastating the small upstate town of about 10,000 residents.
The employees, who were not represented by a union, will officially lose begin losing their jobs on May 21 with the layoffs expected to conclude on June 6, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice filed with the New York Department of Labor. The Frito Lay factory, which produces PopCorners brand snacks, has employed hundreds of locals over its almost 30 years of operation." Similar scenarios are playing out over and over again all over the nation.
And now enormous tariffs on Mexico and Canada threaten to cause yet another shockwave for the economy…"President Donald Trump on Thursday said his proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada will go into effect March 4 and that China will be charged an additional 10% tariff on the same date. The sweeping 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada had been paused on Feb. 3 for one month. But the Trump administration has recently sown confusion about whether they would go back into effect when the delays expired. In a Truth Social post Thursday morning, Trump clarified that they would."
Sometimes people write to me and attempt to convince me that everything is just fine. But does everything seem just fine to you? Just look around. Everywhere around us stores are being boarded up, restaurants and shutting down, factories are closing, businesses are laying off workers, delinquencies are spiking, families are going broke, prices are skyrocketing and debt levels are soaring. This is what we have been warning about all these years.
The U.S. economy is coming apart at the seams, and those that refuse to acknowledge what we can all see are in a deep state of denial. Our long-term economic slide really is threatening to become an avalanche, and I fully expect our economic numbers to get even worse in the months ahead."
Musical Interlude: The Moody Blues, "The Story In Your Eyes"
The Moody Blues, "The Story In Your Eyes"
Friday, February 28, 2025
Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Zelensky is Finished But Russia Isn't Buying It!"
Canadian Prepper, 2/28/25
"Alert! Zelensky is Finished But Russia Isn't Buying It!"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "Living In A Fake World Of Economic Illusion"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 2/28/25
"Living In A Fake World Of Economic Illusion"
Comments here:
A Rousing Musical Interlude: Outlaws, “Green Grass And High Tides”
Outlaws, “Green Grass And High Tides”
Turn it up!
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.
Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."
"The Right Time Will Never Come"
"The Right Time Will Never Come"
by Paul Rosenberg
"Lots of good people are frustrated with the world, and I understand that only too well. They are, furthermore, eager for the world to improve, and I respect that a great deal. Their problem arises, however, right on the heels of these desires, when they ask the question, “What should I do?” And that’s where the wheels fall off.
All the Popular Answers Are Wrong: The world is full of people who are glad to tell you what to do. They have elaborate arguments as to why their plan is the right one and why everyone else’s is wrong. They’ll encourage you to commit to them, and they’ll try to surround you with people who have already chosen their plan. If you join, you’ll get lots of pats on the back and assurances that you’re a good person. But all those ways are wrong. They offer you fast, cheap self-esteem. They offer you a fast track to feeling useful, important, and wanted. And all you have to do is join their very pleasant crowd.
Let me make this very clear: There is no blueprint for freedom. There will be no great plan to follow. People who say they have such a thing, while they may be well-meaning, bright, and even respectable, are moving in the wrong direction. (And I truly don’t mean to criticize here; we’ve all made our mistakes.) Here’s the core of the issue: If we want a world that is safe for individuals, we’ll have to create it as individuals, not as groups. Groups beget after their own kind, and individuals beget after their own kind.
I’m not the first person to decide this, by the way; here’s what Albert Schweitzer had to say on the subject many years ago: "The unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from man to man and relies solely on the truth of the thoughts and the hearer’s receptiveness for new truth."
The Easiest Thing to Do: Following someone else’s plan is the easy way. It saves us from responsibility. It allows us to deflect the blame, at least a little, if later we’re found to be wrong. This easy way, however, is a wrong way. There’s a great line from Steven Stills’s song, “The Southern Cross,” that goes like this:
"And we never failed to fail;
it was the easiest thing to do."
It will always be the easiest thing to go downward into servitude. That is the current condition of the world, with its dominance-obsessed and status-worshiping inertia. You can go downward quickly by handing your will to the status quo, or you can go slowly by standing still. But until you act, solely upon your own judgment, you’re not going to go upward.
Are You Saying…? Yes, I’m saying that you have to make your own decision, all alone, and that you have to raise the courage to start acting upon it by yourself, with no leader telling you the best choice, with no famous author guiding you, and with no authority sanctifying the path for you. You’ll have to choose, all by yourself. And you’ll have to face all the fears that hold you back from stepping out… you’ll have to push past them… you’ll have to make your own legs start walking. That, my friends, is the price of progress… and we each have to pay it, or not pay it, alone.
We Should Act Without a Plan? Emphatically yes. The central issue here is not following a plan, but dragging ourselves out of stasis and taking some kind of initiative. Unless you’re making some kind of wild, destructive choice, almost any choice you make is a good one. Your central necessity is to unfreeze yourself and start moving. Once you’re in motion, it’s easy to correct your course. But if you never move, you’ll just keep sliding down the majority’s path, regardless of how much you complain.
In our time, most of the good people in the world remain motionless. We complain about our local fiefdom’s abuses, of course, but that’s about all. That’s the seduction of “democracy,” you see: It magically turns complaints into progress. Except that the magic of democracy never really shows up. Still, it’s the easiest thing to do. And so we complain and we wait, but we do not act.
But again: There’s never going to be a perfect plan and there’s never going to be a right time. If you wait for them, you’ll wait forever. So, pick a spot and start. You probably already have choices in mind: Bitcoin, homeschooling, intentional communities, agorism, becoming a perpetual traveler, or something else. Whatever it is, get moving: your central necessity is to face the fear and to act anyway. And if you’d like to know my favorite choice, here it is: Sit at bus stops or train stations and talk to people. You can do that at almost any time and any place.
Who Happens to Whom? In other words, “Who acts, and who is acted upon?” As an old coworker of mine used to say, “He who hesitates is lost.” If you wait, you’ll be acted upon. And then you’ll have to re-form your plan, and you’ll hesitate again. And then you’ll be acted upon again… over and over, until you’re too old to do much of anything.
The ‘right time’ never comes. Either we let the world happen to us, or we transcend our fears and we happen to the world. So, I propose a simple motto for people who have courage enough to break stasis: The world doesn’t happen to us. We happen to the world."
Crosby, Stills & Nash, "Southern Cross"
Gregory Mannarino, "Economic Realty: Alert! Prepare For Impact!"
Gregory Mannarino, 2/28/25
"Economic Realty: Alert! Prepare For Impact!"
Comments here:
o
"Complexity Theory:
the Avalanche and the Snowflake"
by James Rickards
"One of my favorites is what I call ‘the avalanche and the snowflake’. It’s a metaphor for the way the science actually works, but I should be clear: it’s not just a metaphor. The science, the mathematics and the dynamics are actually the same as those that exist in financial markets.
Imagine you’re on a mountainside. You can see a snowpack building up on the ridgeline while it continues snowing. You can tell just by looking at the scene that there’s danger of an avalanche. It’s windswept… it’s unstable… and if you’re an expert, you know it’s going to collapse and kill skiers and wipe out the village below. You see a snowflake fall from the sky onto the snowpack. It disturbs a few other snowflakes that lie there. Then, the snow starts to spread… then it starts to slide… then it gains momentum until, finally, it comes loose and the whole mountain comes down and buries the village.
Question: What do you blame? Do you blame the snowflake, or do you blame the unstable pack of snow? I say the snowflake’s irrelevant. If it wasn’t the one snowflake that caused the avalanche, it could have been the one before, or the one after, or the one tomorrow. The instability of the system as a whole was the problem. So when I think about the risks in the financial system, I don’t focus on the ‘snowflake’ that will cause problems. The trigger doesn’t matter.
A snowflake that falls harmlessly – the vast majority of all snowflakes - technically fails to start a chain reaction. Once a chain reaction begins, it expands exponentially, can ‘go critical’ (as in an atomic bomb) and release enough energy to destroy a city. However, most neutrons do not start nuclear chain reactions, just as most snowflakes do not start avalanches.
In the end, it’s not about the snowflakes or neutrons. It’s about the initial critical state conditions that allow the possibiity of a chain reaction or an avalanche. These can be hypothesized and observed at large scale, but the exact moment the chain reaction begins cannot be observed. That’s because it happens on a minute scale relative to the system. This is why some people refer to these snowflakes as ‘black swans’, because they are unexpected and come by surprise. But they’re actually not a surprise if you understand the system’s dynamics and can estimate the system scale.
It’s a metaphor, but really the mathematics behind it are the same. Financial markets today are huge, unstable mountains of snow waiting to collapse. You see it in the gross notional value of derivatives. There is $700 trillion worth of swaps. ($2.5 Quadrillion by other reputable estimates. - CP) These are derivatives off balance sheet, hidden liabilities in the banking system of the world. These numbers are not made up. Just go to the IS annual report and it’s right there in the footnote.
Well, how do you put $700 trillion into perspective? It’s ten times global GDP. Take all the goods and services in the entire world for an entire year. That’s about $70 trillion when you add it all up. Well, take ten times that, and that’s how big the snow pile is. And that’s the avalanche that’s waiting to come down."
"The Reality Of Life..."
"Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth."
- Malcolm X
"What In The World Has Happened To Our Society?"
"What In The World Has Happened To Our Society?"
By Michael Snyder
"Things weren’t always this horrible. Once upon a time, America’s shiny new cities were the envy of the entire world. Our citizens dressed sharply, they treated one another with respect, and they worked incredibly hard. But now our country is teeming with extremely slothful degenerates that want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Rampant greed is everywhere that you look, crime is completely out of control, we are facing the worst drug crisis in the entire history of our nation, millions of our fellow citizens are absolutely seething with hatred for one another, and those that attempt to stand up for what is right are considered to be the problem. We should be deeply grieved by what has happened to our society, because it truly is a great tragedy.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Matt Walsh published an excerpt from a letter that an infantryman sent to his family during the Civil War…"If you want to see how much the English language has deteriorated in modern times, go read the letters that random infantrymen wrote home to their families during the Civil War. These were young men often without much formal schooling who wrote naturally like poets. One example:"
Can you write like that? I certainly can’t. Those of us in this generation like to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of human history, but the truth is that we can’t even compare to those that have come before us.
Let me give you another example. More than a century ago, the streets of New York City were filled with extremely civilized people that dressed incredibly well when it was time to go out into the public arena…
Full screen recommended.
But now New York City is a crime-ridden, drug-infested hellhole. At this point, drug overdoses account for 80 to 85 percent of all accidental deaths in the Big Apple…
New York Times:
Is this “progress”? I don’t think so.
In Portland, conditions have gotten so bad that more than 2,600 businesses have left the downtown area over the past few years…"Business owners are fleeing Portland in droves amid a pronounced rise in crime and homelessness, officials in the Democratic stronghold have revealed. Public data shows that since the pandemic, more than 2,600 downtown businesses have filed changes of address with the U.S. Postal Service to leave their downtown ZIP codes. Several big-name employers, from Unitus Community Credit Union to Umpqua Bank, have been among the mass exodus, carried out by owners who have taken issue with the rising crime levels and homelessness – and the city’s failure to address it."
Apparently officials want even more businesses to leave, because now a bill that would give homeless individuals $1,000 a month “in no-strings-attached cash” is being seriously considered…"Oregon is considering giving its vast homeless and low-income population $1,000 in no-strings-attached cash. The bill was proposed by woke State Senator Wlnsvey Campos – who was among those calling to abolish the police in the summer of 2020 when the city of Portland was besieged by protesters – and Rep. Khanh Pham." If they actually do this, most of that money will go straight to the drug dealers.
Down in San Francisco, drug addicts are fueling a crime spree that is worse than anything that the city has ever experienced. When one woman recently went into the city for a yoga class, she was told that the building “had been broken into six times in two months”…"Yesterday I went to a yoga class in San Francisco for the first time in years. They had the front door locked (had to be buzzed in), a sign on it that said “no cash on premises,” and the woman at the front desk said they had been broken into six times in two months."
Over in Los Angeles, violent crime has become such a problem that extremely expensive “executive protection dogs” have become a very hot commodity…"The elite animals - typically German shepherds, Belgian Malinois, Dobermans, cane corsos or a mix of those breeds - are marketed under names such as “personal canine bodyguards” and “executive protection dogs.” Amid a spate of high-profile crimes in upscale parts of Los Angeles, they have become highly sought after among the rich, many of whom worry about being targeted.
Protection dogs, they say, provide an immediate layer of front-line defense, unlike security cameras (which merely show an intruder on the property, and only if the devices happen to be pointed in the right direction) and home alarm systems (which can be bypassed or ignored). Even if police are summoned, they can be slow to respond, if at all. So homeowners who can afford it are being more proactive."
This is the world that we live in now. But most Americans don’t seem to care. We are literally living in an “idiocracy” in which people are dropping dead all around us, but most Americans are so far gone that they can’t even understand what is happening.
Of course it isn’t just the United States that is facing such problems. Up in Canada, crime rates are absolutely exploding thanks to the reckless policies of the Trudeau regime…"The Toronto Police Service data portal shows that Toronto experienced a 17.2 per cent spike in overall major crimes in 2022, including a 9.8 per cent increase in assaults, a 44.2 per cent spike in auto thefts, 6.5 per cent growth in break and enters, a 28.5 per cent jump in robbery, an 11.3 per cent increase in sexual violence, and a 35.8 per cent gain in theft over cases."
And in many areas of South America crime has risen to levels that we have never seen before…"Countries across Latin America and the Caribbean continued to experience high murder rates in 2024, as cocaine production reached new heights, the fragmentation of gangs continued, and the flow of weapons across the region grew more acute.
For Ecuador, the situation was downright catastrophic. Historic amounts of cocaine entering the country fueled violence, with murders skyrocketing as gangs targeted judicial officials and killed police officers at record rates. That cocaine came largely from Colombia, where recently inaugurated President Gustavo Petro has promised to shift away from the war on drugs in favor of efforts to achieve a “Total Peace” with the country’s rebel and criminal groups."
Our entire world is deeply sick. We have turned our backs on what is good, and we continue to run after evil as rapidly as we can. As a result, our society is a complete and total mess. We truly are living during one of the most critical times in all of human history, and we desperately need to change course. Unfortunately, most people seem to think that everything is just fine, and so they see no need for a new direction."
Stipendium peccati mors est...
"Why It’s Time For Kash to Go After The Rogue FBI" (Excerpt)
"Why It’s Time For Kash to Go After The Rogue FBI"
by David Stockman
Excerpt: "They must be sweating bullets in the Washington Swamp. Kash Patel was confirmed as FBI director, and that means there is going to be a caravan of DOGE trucks hauling out the dead bodies right soon. Especially after the FBI went all-in on the Deep State campaign to defenestrate Donald Trump in 2016 and after, the level of lawlessness and blatant attacks on constitutional processes emanating from the J. Edgar Hoover Building literally knew no bounds. Soon we will have black and white documentation that the FBI not only knew all along that the Russian election interference story was a complete hoax, but that top officials of the FBI were actually even more deeply complicit in its manufacture and dissemination than has already been revealed.
But lawlessness at the nation’s purported leading law enforcement agency was nothing new. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is a rogue institution of the Washington Swamp steeped in a lifetime of ignominy and disdain for constitutional liberty and democracy. Its forerunner was created during the horrific Red Scare Raids of Attorney General Mitchell in 1918-1919 when thousands of citizens were rounded up without warrants - merely for the crime of holding socialist or other leftwing opinions or for being sympathetic to Germany.
It then flourished during the "G-man" period, prosecuting the idiotic regime of Prohibition in the 1920s. Yet the overdue repeal of the latter in 1933 simply paved the way to an even more malefic run during the J. Edgar Hoover era of communist witch-hunting and vicious prosecution of civil rights and peace leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, Hoover’s malicious campaign to expose Dr. King’s personal life was so odious as to make the fact the FBI headquarters is still called the "J.Edgar Hoover Building" a national disgrace - and one that far outranks obscure courthouses in the south named after some defunct confederate generals.
As it happened, Hoover kicked the bucket in May 1972 while in his 48th year in office, but he had accumulated such as an extensive file of dirt on any and all Washington politicians and national leaders he considered unfit that his personal secretary, Helen Gandy, immediately set upon shredding his files - lest Nixon’s men discovered them first.
In fact, Hoover’s FBI had files on tens of thousands of Americans for no good reason other than their holding opinions or political beliefs that the FBI director disdained. Your editor even got in on that act as young man uninterested in being sent to the jungles of Southeast Asia to slaughter "gooks" who had given the people of our rural county in southwest Michigan no offense that we could ascertain. Yet since we went to SDS anti-war marches and signed "We won’t Go" petitions we earned a "red file" at the FBI - something we still consider a badge of honor.
Unfortunately, Hoover’s passing did not lead to the cleansing of the institution that was long overdue. Instead, during the misbegotten War on Terror it became a fount of false fear-mongering, stings and entrapment ploys. Here are just three of the more notable FBI entrapment operations during this period - all of which were obviously designed to create public fear, arouse the legislators and cause budgets and manpower levels at the FBI to relentlessly expand.
1. The Newburgh Four Case (2009): In this case, four men were convicted of plotting to bomb synagogues and shoot down military planes. The FBI used an informant to encourage and facilitate the plot, providing fake bombs and weapons. Actually, there was not a shred of evidence that the defendants were predisposed to commit such acts on their own, but instead were systematically lured into the FBI’s entrapment.
2. The Fort Dix Plot (2007): Here, six men were arrested for planning an attack on Fort Dix, a U.S. Army base in New Jersey. The FBI used an informant who infiltrated the group, encouraged them to carry out the plot and provided the planted evidence that led to their conviction.
3. The Michigan Militia Case (2020): This scam involved a cooked-up plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The FBI used multiple informants and undercover agents to encourage and facilitate the plot. In this case, the plot ended in acquittals and a mistrial because the FBI’s facilitation was so clumsy and obvious.
Even then, the bad guys at the FBI were not done. So what eventually led to the condign justice of Kash Patel’s confirmation, was the blatant weaponization of the FBI by Deep State nomenklatura determined to destroy the duly elected President of the United States in 2016 and after. In that endeavor, however, they truly crossed a line. The Donald’s justifiable revenge for the outrageous FBI raid on his own home after he left office will be thorough and unstinting, and he could have no more capable and powerful instrument of vindication than his newly confirmed FBI director.
In short, Patel’s confirmation marks the end of 100 years of assault on the rule of law, not its promotion. And, as we have argued in "How To Cut $2 Trillion", that sordid history is reason enough to abolish the FBI completely."
Full, highly recommended article is here:
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