Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 5/3/25
"This is Bad and Things Are About to Escalate:
Here's What Will Happen Next"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Saturday, May 3, 2025
"Welcome To Mad Max: Desperate Homeless Living Off The Grid In The Desert Trying To Survive"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 5/3/25
"Welcome To Mad Max: Desperate Homeless
Living Off The Grid In The Desert Trying To Survive"
Comments here:
"Economic Collapse Begins Next Week - It's a Nightmare! I'm Afraid"
Full screen recommended.
Steven Van Metre, 5/3/25
"Economic Collapse Begins Next Week -
It's a Nightmare! I'm Afraid"
"Trade’s crashing, paycheck’s are shrinking, and delinquencies
are about to spike. What’s coming can only be described as a nightmare."
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Two Steps From Hell, "Evergreen Extended"; "Downstream"
Full screen recommended.
Two Steps From Hell, "Evergreen Extended"
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Full screen recommended.
Two Steps From Hell, "Downstream"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Braided, serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggest this nebula's popular name, The Medusa Nebula. Also known as Abell 21, this Medusa is an old planetary nebula some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Like its mythological namesake, the nebula is associated with a dramatic transformation.
The planetary nebula phase represents a final stage in the evolution of low mass stars like the sun, as they transform themselves from red giants to hot white dwarf stars and in the process shrug off their outer layers. Ultraviolet radiation from the hot star powers the nebular glow. The Medusa's transforming star is near the center of the overall bright crescent shape. In this deep telescopic view, fainter filaments clearly extend below and to the left of the bright crescent region. The Medusa Nebula is estimated to be over 4 light-years across.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121025.html
Chet Raymo, "Seeing"
"Seeing"
by Chet Raymo
"There was a moment yesterday evening when the elements conspired to evoke these few lines, spoken by Macbeth:
"Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky woods,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse."
The fading light. The crows gliding down the fields to the trees in Ballybeg:
"Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky woods,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse."
It's all there, in those few lines - the mysterious power of poetry to infuse the world with meaning, to anoint the world with a transforming grace. One could spend an hour picking those lines apart, syntax and sound, sense and alliteration. The t's of light thickening, tongue against the teeth. The alar w's making wing. The owl eyes of the double o's. The d's nodding into slumber - day, droop, drowse.
The poet Howard Nemerov says of poetry that it "works on the very surface of the eye, that thin, unyielding wall of liquid between mind and world, where somehow, mysteriously, the patterns formed by electrical storms assaulting the retina become things and the thought of things and the names of things and the relations supposed between thing." It works too in the mouth, in the physical act of speech - tongue, teeth, those d's gliding deeper into the darkness of the throat.
I stand in the gloaming garden and the black birds glide, down, down to Ballybeg, and I marvel that with so few syllables Shakespeare can - across the centuries - teach me how to see."
"In A Nation Ruled By Swine..."
“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile - and the rest of us are f****d until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.”
- Hunter S. Thompson, “The Great Shark Hunt”
"We Deserve Better..."
"We are the world. We are the people and we
deserve better, not because we're worth it, but because no
worth can be put on the incalculable, on the infinite, on life."
- Nick Mancuso
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“Each of us inevitable; Each of us limitless -
each of us with his or her right upon the earth;
Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth;
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.”
- Walt Whitman
"A Deal With the Devil"
"A Deal With the Devil"
Now the Devil is demanding his due…
by Charles Hugh Smith
"Unbeknownst to most people, America's leadership made a pact with the devil. Rather than face the constraints and injustices of our economic-financial system directly, a reckoning that would require difficult choices and some sacrifice by the ruling financial-political elites, our leaders chose the devil's Pact: Substitute the creation of asset-bubble "wealth" in the hands of the few for widespread prosperity.
The devil's promise: that some thin trickle of the trillions of dollars bestowed on the few would magically trickle down to the many. This was as visibly foolish as the promise of immortality on Planet Earth. But our craven, greedy leadership quickly sealed the deal with the devil and promptly inflated the greatest credit-asset bubble in human history. Rather than trade away one's soul, America's leaders traded away the future security and stability of the nation.
Sacrificing Innocents at the Altar of the Gods: By refusing to deal with the real problems exposed by the collapsing financial scams in 2008-09, our leaders – both the unelected Federal Reserve and the elected "best government money can buy" – chose to bail out the scammers who had greased their palms so generously and sacrificed the prosperity of the many to do so. This is more or less the equivalent of sacrificing innocents at the altar of the gods to ensure the leaders' rule will continue to be successful.
The devil was delighted to serve up the illusion of godlike powers to our corrupt, greedy leaders. The deal looked oh-so win-win: we enrich the top few percent and offload the costs and sacrifices on the powerless many, who were told that they would benefit from the trickle of cash leaking out of the super-wealthy's bulging pockets.
Of course, the Federal Reserve and the rest of the Savior State has saved us from the financial consequences of rampant speculation for decades. As a result, few of those in the casino have the necessary experience of hardship and losses to accurately assess risk. The vast majority have only experienced being saved: the most profitable response to a losing bet is to double-down on the next bet because the house (the Fed) will amply reward every "buy the dip."
The Devil Is Demanding His Due: But as I often point out, risk cannot be extinguished, it can only be transferred. Risk has been offloaded from speculators to the entire financial system itself, and so rather than a few speculators going down in flames, the entire casino will collapse.
Now the devil is demanding his due: the unprecedented credit-fueled bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate are popping, and America's corrupt leaders can only stammer and spew excuses and empty promises. All this amounts to begging the devil to renegotiate the deal because now the downside is not just visible but inevitable. So sorry, America's leadership – the devil doesn't respond to pleas or threats. Sorry about that; the deal stands as agreed. All your bogus gains and powers will evaporate, and then the destruction really begins.
How does all this end? In ruin, of course. Our craven, self-serving leadership may well bleat, "the devil made us do it!" but that is not true: they fell all over themselves to sell the future stability and security of the nation for the quick-fix riches of bubbles and corruption. And of course, we’re staring at recession. But hey, look on the bright side…
Recessions Aren’t All Bad: Everyone looking at the inevitability of recession with alarm is forgetting the many upsides of recession, especially one that crushes all attempts to reverse it with the usual tricks. Let's not forget the simple joys of lighter traffic, faster commutes and the relative ease of getting a table at your favorite bistro – if it survives the bust.
Graveyard levity aside, there really is no equivalent to the positive force of crushing recessions. Only recessions which defy the usual tricks of monetary easing (create trillions of new dollars) and fiscal stimulus (give away a few of those new trillions) have the power to cleanse a system clogged with dysfunction, waste, fraud, corruption and financial zombies that soak of resources while doing little more than enriching the few at the expense of the many.
The problem with free money is that there's no mechanism to distinguish between waste and productive investment or fraud and productive utilization. All uses of free money are equally beneficial because if this free money is squandered, there's always more to spend tomorrow. In other words, in a system in which free money is the solution to all problems, there's no motivation to limit waste, friction or fraud because there's always enough free money for both waste, friction and fraud and needed spending and investment.
Time for Some Discipline: Recessions driven by inflation and the collapse of speculative bubbles aren't fixable with free money because free money fires up the afterburner of inflation. Once there are limits on how much free money can be created and distributed, squandering what's left means there's not enough left to fund essential services and to invest in the only real-world source of income and wealth. That’s productivity increases – doing more with less capital, labor and resources.
Only crushing recessions introduce the discipline of having to choose between waste, friction and fraud and essential services and investments. Waste, friction and fraud aren't simply gargantuan drains on resources… They corrupt the system by incentivizing friction (unproductive complexity and gatekeeping) and fraud (collusion, fraudulent billing, buying political favors, insider trading, etc.) and giving the recipients of friction and fraud the financial means to protect their fiefdoms with complexity thickets and political protection.
Recession Is the Only Cure: Financial systems that never experience crushing recessions can't tell the difference between a speculative mania driven by corporate buybacks and a bull market driven by improving productivity that lifts both profits and wages. The phony charade of speculative bubbles inflated by the Federal Reserve's spew of free money for financiers fatally distort the entire incentive structure of the financial system, which then balloons up and fatally distorts the entire economy.
Unbeknownst to those trembling in fear of a crushing recession, the crushing recession they fear is the only curative for a fatally distorted system which has lost touch with reality. Yes, there is a difference between speculative bubbles and bull markets. And yes, there is a difference between an economy riddled with the cancers of waste, friction and fraud and one strengthened by incentives and corrective mechanisms that bury unproductive zombie financial entities and reward those who actually increase productivity rather than destroy it. Recession will mean short-term pain but long-term gain."
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Stipendium peccati mors est...
Full screen recommended.
"Doctor Faustus, Final Monologue And Ending" (1967)
"A most fantastic and moving performance by the late, great Richard Burton in this dazzling adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's astonishing work. The way the vision of Helen of Troy cackles and mocks Faust is so cruel and honest as we see the poor, lost soul accept the fate of eternal damnation, wrought entirely by his own hand." - ScarletDusk99
Freely download "The Tragical History of The Life
And Death Of Doctor Faustus", by Christopher Marlowe, here:
"A Full Confession"
"A Full Confession"
by Paul Rosenberg
"You can’t write about this till I’m gone,” he said, “but that won’t be long.” I hadn’t been to Jay’s Bar in a while, but I was invited by my old friend Martin. He was a basically nice guy who ended up working for an elite group.
I ran into Martin at my old gym, as I stopped one day to visit. He wasn’t looking well. I knew he had a fairly serious condition and was getting on in years, but he had been holding it at bay the last time I saw him. This time he was clearly close to his end, and had come to the gym to say his goodbyes. And so, when he invited me to meet him at Jay’s (“the same place I saw you last time”), I had to go.
We sat in a quiet spot, and I listened as he told me how close he was to death. That was two weeks ago as I write this. I saw his obituary this morning but will skip the funeral for reasons that may shortly become clear.
The Confession Begins: Martin ordered a triple scotch. I had never seen him drink before, except for a bit of white wine. But I followed his pattern, ordering a scotch on the rocks. “I have things that I need to tell you,” he began. “You know most of it fairly well, but you’ve never had confirmation before, and that makes a difference.” I nodded.
“I’ve read two of your books and half a dozen issues of your newsletter, you know.” “No, I didn’t,” I replied, “but thank you.” He smiled, raised his glass slightly, and took a big drink. He seemed like he was trying to relax, but his body was limited in its ability to feel comfort. It was an odd and troubling thing to notice. “Let’s start with the industrial revolution, shall we?” “That’ll be fine.”
“As iron and steam power moved across the continent they brought an economic revolution, and political revolutions followed. Through the middle 1800s nearly every monarchy was disrupted in one way or another. The aristocracy was pulled off the stage. Such people, however, don’t just accept displacement, and they fought to retain lordship in some form. I haven’t read it yet, but you wrote on this, didn’t you?” “Yeah, I said that these people seem to have demonetized silver and moved into central banking.” “Well, it wasn’t ‘seemed to.’ They very definitely did.” “Thank you,” I said. And he was right, getting confirmation helped me in some internal way.
He went on. “Land was no longer the store of value it had been since the beginning, and currency was taking over. And so the aristocrats plunged into banking. This put the British royals at the top of the hill, since they retained their positions and had a central bank that used debt as currency.
So the displaced aristocrats opened one central bank after another, on the model of the Bank of England. And since they had connections to Queen Victoria, they could be authorized by the major power of the day, the owner of the most important currency. Central banks became new duchies, keeping their owners in elevated positions.”
Then he stopped and took another long pull from his scotch. He was clearly using it as a painkiller. I took a sip of mine. "You realize that this isn’t going to change anything,” he said. I said nothing and waited.
“I’m telling you these things because I care about you. You’re an honest man, and you shouldn’t be stuck in uncertainty. But telling this to the world won’t change anything. They’ll just tune you out. They already tune you out, don’t they?” “Yeah, Martin, lots of them do.” “It deprives them of illusions. They can’t live without them.” “Well, I’m not sure it’s just illusions. A lot of them are so battered by daily events that the outside voice soon fades away.”
“I think you’re being kind to them, Paul. I have studies saying that they live in a ‘society’ bubble and can’t listen anything outside it.” He had a point, of course, but I quickly responded with, “Not all of them, though.” “What do you mean?” “I have people who’ve subscribed to my newsletter for years. Not a huge number, but still I have them. They pay to hear things that go past the illusions… or at least as well as I can get past them.”
“You do plenty well,” he said, to which I responded with a non-verbal thank you. “And these people stay with you over some significant period?” “Ten years or more for many of them.” “Well, then perhaps there is some hope… but we’re still talking about a tiny fraction.” “True enough,” I admitted.
The Thorn In Their Side: Our conversation paused for a few minutes, while the afternoon bartender came around, asking if we wanted anything else. (We didn’t.) We each had a few of the nuts he left on our table, and we sipped more of our drinks.
“America was a thorn in everyone’s side,” he said. “Even after they had a central bank. These people believed they were given their rights by God… and it made no end of trouble.” “How do you mean, Martin?” “Oil was the big one. None of the rulers saw the internal combustion engine coming, and once it did oil and refining become huge… but Americans owned the mineral rights to whatever land they held. That meant that the greatest new source of wealth was firmly in the hands of plebs… of common people. That was a problem.”
“Yes,” I injected,” I heard an old oil man talking about that once. In Europe mineral rights remained with the rulers, not the land-owner.” “Right, which is why American oil production led the way, and why American oil companies weren’t state-owned, like in Europe. Huge power fell into the wrong hands…” “As your old bosses saw it, at least,” I quickly added.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’m giving you their point of view. But,” he went on, “ that only mattered until the industry was developed. After that, our groups could just hire American engineers. Then they could do things as well as the Americans, and our groups gathered the oil everywhere else.”
Martin continued talking for a while, but mainly about his childhood and early career. Then, he moved back to the problem that America posed to rulers. “In America, at least in the early days, people believed they were the primary factors; that they created rulership structures for their own sake… that the structures had no validity, except to serve them.”
I hesitated at his statement. I had written about this at some length, and while I very much support that concept (and a lot of colonials did too), there were people with power (Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists in particular) who pushed the opposite view. “Aren’t you sounding like an idealist here, Martin?”
He stopped, thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, I suppose I am, but that’s not the case. When you look at it from the perspective of my groups, it seemed that way. In every other country people felt like creatures of the state, but in America we kept running into roadblocks, because people believed the state to be a creature of their own making.” “Ah…” I said. “That would be a frustration on the other side.”
Then he explained that he was the person who got the “We can’t contaminate a culture” dogma into "Star Trek," and into the "Next Generation" series in particular. He had lived and worked in LA for some years and pushed this idea to the money-men behind the venture. “The purpose of the whole thing,” he said, “was to reverse this American ideal. And we were terribly successful. Even the spin-off series maintain the illusion that people derive from cultures, rather than the other way around.”
“It’s funny,” I told him, “that always rubbed me the wrong way, though for the longest time I wasn’t sure why.” He smiled, pleased to have given me a gift. Then he motioned to the bartender and asked for another triple scotch. I demurred. We sat in silence till his drink arrived and he took another two swigs. He was getting drunk by this point, but he was finally sitting comfortably… loosening up in his speech too.
“I’m glad to be back here,” he said while making a wide gesture with his arm. “I grew up with people like these (the half-full bar included pretty much everything from manual laborers to lawyers), and I still like them…” Then he stopped and eyed two men and a woman in the corner who had to be politicians. “Except the little cluster of parasites,” he spat out, which surprised me. “Didn’t you work with politicians?” I asked. “Yeah!” he went on, a bit too loudly, “and do you know how eagerly and cheaply they sell themselves?”
“I have some idea.” “A fraction of one percent of a project,” he said. “So,” I added with a smile, “you’re like Rick in Casablanca. You don’t mind a parasite, but you object to a cut-rate one.” At that he burst into laughter; it was the only time I’d ever seen him laugh like that. Then he composed himself, finally realizing that he was too loud.
“I guess that’s true, but they really are cut-rate parasites. As long as they get enough money for publicity campaigns, they’ll sell you anything you want…” He paused, and looked like he might not finish the thought. “What?” I half-demanded.
He looked at me hard, deciding about something, then went on. “The sickest part of it all,” he said, “is that people respond to them, no matter how stupid they are. Every election they spout the same bullshit, which any sane adult knows is bullshit, and they vote for them just the same.”
“Yeah, I know.” “No, Paul. You don’t!” I waited. “I made a living only because most people support their abusers… they respond to any and every fictional fear… their imaginations are weaponized against themselves.” I paused a moment, then nodded my understanding, not just of his statement, but what he was implying. We sat in silence for what seemed a long time, until his phone rang. It was his wife, who would drive by and pick him up in twenty minutes.
What’s Next: I knew this would be my last time with Martin, and that he didn’t want to speak any further of his failing health and impending death.
“And what of the near future?” I asked. “2009 was a colossal mistake,” he said. “They could have survived a crash then. They had cooperative national leaders and willingness to believe was still riding the 9/11 surge. Plus, there was no alternative to the banking system. A crash would have hurt, but the game would have gone on.
“Now they’ve got people with fear fatigue, sex fatigue, ridiculous rulers and serious alternative currencies. On top of that, European banking is in uncharted waters, tied to a hopeless system of bond-issuance. They’re facing real trouble. They have amazing surveillance systems, but everything else is in question.”
“The surveillance concerns me deeply,” I said. “Yes, I understand… None of us could believe our luck with Facebook and Google. The whole world fell for the oldest scam in the book, selling their souls for services they could have purchased for a few dollars per month. No one expected that.
“But during those same years, politicians became true believers. We have 20-somethings in the US congress, who know almost nothing and who actually believe in socialism, for God’s sake! And we have an inveterate self-promoter in the White House who will do who-knows-what tomorrow morning. The politicians on the left actually believe the bullshit they sell, and many on the right see Trump as a demi-god. Who could have imagined that? It threw a wrench into the gears.”
“So what’s next?” “At some point, something will go wrong and financial structures will break. Already Facebook and their friends are getting ready for the dollar to fail. Wal-Mart’s in the game too. They talk nice, but they’d love to supplant the central banks. And if my group can fight them off, what of Bitcoin? They can’t do everything at once, and they’ve already attacked Bitcoin a dozen times with no enduring effect.”
I asked for an explanation of that statement, and he provided it. “They got the Department of Justice to sell all the Bitcoin they had seized. They did it in coordinated dumps at critical times. They succeeded in beating the hell out of the Bitcoin price, but the thing refuses to die.” I couldn’t help smiling, but remained silent. “Incredibly, the commercial systems of the world may end up resting on your Bitcoin people… if they can bear the load. My groups had the greatest lucky streak in history, but it seems to be running out.”
Then his phone beeped. It was a text from his wife. She was a couple of blocks away and would pull up in front. We started, slowly, to extract ourselves from the booth, pay the bill, and head to the front door. “Do you think your Bitcoiners can survive that pressure, Paul? Can they be the adults in the room?” “I know some of them can, Martin.” “I hope it’s enough,” he said.
His wife pulled over and we walked the five or ten steps to where she stopped. “I won’t see you again,” he said. I hugged him, we both shed a few tears, and I helped him into the car. But before the door shut, he turned and said, “I hope your people can do it.” Then the door shut and he was gone. And so I leave it with you. Can we rise to the occasion and be the adults? Because it might come down to us."
* As noted previously, all events related to Jay’s Bar are fictional, though often related to real people and/or events.
The Poet: Henry Austin Dobson, “The Paradox Of Time"
“The Paradox Of Time"
“Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go;
Or else, were this not so,
What need to chain the hours,
For Youth were always ours?
Time goes, you say? – ah no!
Ours is the eyes’ deceit
Of men whose flying feet
Lead through some landscape low;
We pass, and think we see
The earth’s fixed surface flee;
Alas, Time stays, – we go!
Once in the days of old,
Your locks were curling gold,
And mine had shamed the crow.
Now, in the self-same stage,
We’ve reached the silver age;
Time goes, you say? – ah no!
Once, when my voice was strong,
I filled the woods with song
To praise your ‘rose’ and ‘snow’;
My bird, that sang, is dead;
Where are your roses fled?
Alas, Time stays, – we go!
See, in what traversed ways,
What backward Fate delays
The hopes we used to know;
Where are our old desires?
Ah, where those vanished fires?
Time goes, you say? – ah no!
How far, how far, O Sweet,
The past behind our feet
Lies in the even-glow!
Now, on the forward way,
Let us fold hands, and pray;
Alas, Time stays, – we go!”
- Henry Austin Dobson
"I Hope You All Die Well"
"I Hope You All Die Well"
Why natural death is a good thing, actually,
and why you should plan for it now, before it's too late.
by Peachy Keenan
"I hope you all die, and I mean that with all of my heart. Allow me to explain. Last month we spent our spring break visiting family, friends, and graveyards. Against the backdrop of Pope Francis’s death and funeral, my children and I paid our respects at the grave of a dear friend’s infant daughter, who tragically died on her due date last year. She was laid to rest in a rural cemetery in Tennessee, the prettiest one I’ve ever seen.
A few days after that, my mother took us to a few of the local tourist attractions: civil war battlegrounds and soldier cemeteries. It’s strange to learn that the parking lot where you left your car was the site of hours of frenzied, hand-to-hand combat featuring the gruesome point-blank bludgeoning, strangling, and stabbing of thousands of men with bayonets, rocks, sticks, and fists: 10,000 casualties in five hours of combat.
At some of the historic homes in the area that are now museums, you can take tours of family bedrooms that were turned into emergency field hospitals. Guides point out giant bloodstains visible in splatters and puddles soaked into the oak floors. One child’s bedroom has a bloody handprint on the floor, and another corner, the tour guide informs you, is particularly dark with bloodstains because “that’s where they stacked the limbs.”
Average age of a Confederate solider was 25, with some as young as 10. In the cemetery for soldiers killed in the 1864 Battle of Franklin, row after row of sometimes unnamed soldiers are grouped by state.
I am not a civil war historian, but I did read "Gone With the Wind" about 50 times as a kid, and I do enjoy learning about battles. It must be so strange to live in a state where Americans fought and died all over the place, to constantly drive by sites where many thousands died agonizing deaths and generally experienced moments I pray no in America ever witnesses again.
Maybe the battlefield monuments, and the sheer number of dead soldiers buried in the soil all over the South, serves as a visceral reminder to people to never forget what it cost to deliver the country we enjoy today, and how fragile it all is. Americanism cost many, many people absolutely everything.
The overwhelming pathos enveloping these bucolic places is so intense it makes you want to grab those long-dead Southerners and shout, “Read the room, Buford. Please, Buford. Slavery’s over, bro. It’s done. 20th century industrialization isn’t going to need your slaves: they’ve got dirt poor Americans willing to send their own five-year-olds down into coal mines for a penny a week. If you guys had just freed them all, you’d have survived with your lives, and your nice houses would not have gotten wrecked so it badly.”
Sigh. The main thing you learn from visiting a civil war cemetery is war: what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. But people like learning things the hard way, over and over again.
Don’t Fear the Reaper Too Much: While I am a big fan of natural death, I am fanatically opposed to unnatural deaths in all their forms: tragic accidents, war, avoidable diseases, drug overdoses, drownings, murder, suicide, abortion, and so on. These are stupid, needless, wasteful deaths that fill me with grief and anger.
But natural deaths, the unavoidable kind, the kind that come with old age (if you are very fortunate), or unavoidable illness, or the tragic circumstances that produce stillborn babies, are not necessarily terrible things. They are the price we are forced to pay to draw breath, to touch grass, to feel love. To have babies. It’s a steep price, sometimes unbearably so, but not a person alive would say no to taking the deal.
Natural death does not have a place in the modern world, however; allowing nature to take its course is almost a quaint ideal in light of the widespread acceptance of planned suicides. Most deaths we encounter come in the form of horrific news stories: wars, bombs, terrorism, car crashes. But I struggle to deal with it. After all, I live in stark terror of death. I’m an old-fashioned hypochondriac and chronic worrier. I sometimes can’t sleep thinking about the close calls and near misses I’ve personally experienced. If I’d stepped off the curb one second earlier. If I hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. If that shark that came up to me while I was boogie boarding had been a little bit hungrier. If I hadn’t been standing in the pool and felt my little brother scratch my leg as he was drowning on the bottom. And maybe a few others I’ll never know about. I used to fly from L.A. to New York a lot in my mid-twenties to see friends, but I wasn’t flying on 9/11.
150,000 people a day die worldwide. 9,000 in the United States. One day it will be my day. God willing, not this day! Please, no time soon, if possible! I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid. But it is a good thing to think about your own end, from time to time. To have a chance to think ahead. To ponder how this will all end much sooner than you wish it would.
The person who can use the constant foreknowledge of their own death to make each day sweeter, and to somehow not dwell on the doom, has cracked the code to happiness.
Take My Life, Please: I deeply object to the concept of immortality, or unnatural long life. Aragorn had mixed feelings about being one of the Dúnedain. I don’t like the idea of spending all my time on a futile attempt to extend my life by a few extra years.
"The Twilight Zone" had a great episode set in the future when they are selling immortality, and an old couple can only afford it for one of them. The wizened husband gets it and he is transformed into a strong, virile young man again. He is absolutely thrilled…until he realizes he is married to an ancient old woman.
Immortality sounds great until you realize you don’t just need it for yourself. You need everyone you care about to become immortal too, or you will watch everyone you know and love get old and die, over and over again.
The “Don’t Die” biohacker movement has some excellent ideas for general health and longevity, like don’t eat at night (or after 12 pm), take vitamins, and get good sleep. Yes, I would like to do all of this and live to 110! But their campaign isn’t just about maximizing your natural life span with good health. It is literally about not dying: “We are a community united in defeating all causes of human and planetary death and building all promoters of prosperity.”
But “don’t die” is a campaign doomed to fail, and overpromise. Only one man who ever lived didn’t really die, after all. 100% of us humans will in fact die, hopefully after a long and healthy life that saw at least a few of our dreams come true.
A better and healthier message would be “Die Well.” Die with your family still speaking to you and each other. Die holding the hand of someone who loves you. Die in a state of grace and after completing all the sacraments. Die confident in the possibility of true eternal life. Die with dignity, not in a suicide pod, or scared and alone in a nursing home (the fate of all too many). Die in peace.
One man who did seem to die well was Pope Francis. For all my feelings about how he poped, he seemed to die very well indeed. He died naturally after battling a long illness with courage and forbearance. He greeted well wishers one final time in Saint Peter’s Square, riding and waving in his little Pope Fiat. He even took time to meet Vice President Vance.
That’s a pretty good last couple days, filled with prayer and joy in the people who loved him. He left much to be desired as Pope, at least for me, but he set an excellent example with his approach to his looming demise: fearless and calm to the end.
Teenagers dying in terror and misery on a muddy battlefield have the worst of all worlds: an avoidable, unnatural, brutally traumatic death, much too early, and one that ensures their last moments of life are unspeakably awful. Losing a child to war is one of my greatest fears.
My friend who lost her precious baby in the womb is fearless and calm, a year later. She explained her thoughts in such a beautiful way that I have not stopped thinking of them since. She said everyone asks her if she mourns what now will never be, like seeing her daughter grow up, get married, have children. She said she doesn’t, because what happened was inevitable, and so the time she got with her daughter was in fact her complete life, the sum total of all that would ever be of her. Things happen; sometimes unavoidable deaths take 90 years, sometime they take nine months.
Then there are, of course, some souls on Earth who will not die, at least for a very long time. They are the children who were conceived but not gestated. Millions of frozen embryos exist in a state of perpetual limbo, alive but trapped. They are the true ambassadors for the “Don’t Die” movement; because most will never get a chance to live.
When the end comes for me (hopefully not for many decades), I just hope I remember that although I may wish it was not yet my time, it is the price I agreed to pay for a gift I tried every day to deserve.
"As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music - hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went -
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been."
Is this Robert Frost poem about standing on the edge of darkness, knowing that one day you will have to enter it - but not quite yet? To me, it is. Please pray for my friend. And may you and your children live good lives, however long they may be, and remember to die well!"
Dan, I Allegedly, "Rich People Have to Pay - Trouble is Coming!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 5/3/25
"Rich People Have to Pay - Trouble is Coming!"
"Discover the shocking truth behind Montana's secret tax loophole and how wealthy individuals are exploiting it to dodge taxes on luxury vehicles like Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and even Bugattis! In this video, I break down how registering vehicles in Montana has allowed the ultra-rich to avoid hefty sales taxes and registration fees—and why states like California and Utah are cracking down hard. From outrageous LLC setups to jaw-dropping registration statistics, this story reveals the lengths people will go to save big money and how it’s impacting everyday taxpayers like you and me."
Comments here:
Friday, May 2, 2025
"Alert! WW3 Signal? All Peace Talks Have Collapsed At The Same Time!"
Canadian Prepper, 5/2/25
"Alert! WW3 Signal? All Peace Talks
Have Collapsed At The Same Time!"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "Stocks Soar On Optimism And Hope While The Economy Plunges Into Depression"
Jeremiah Babe, 5/2/25
"Stocks Soar On Optimism And Hope
While The Economy Plunges Into Depression"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Market Gains, 5/2/25
"500,000 Workers Have Been Fired
And Nobody Can Find a Job"
Comments here:
"Japan Threatens Unthinkable, US Financial System Faces Shocking Terror!"
Full screen recommended.
Steven Van Metre, 5/2/25
"Japan Threatens Unthinkable,
US Financial System Faces Shocking Terror!"
"Rates are surging, the dollar is skyrocketing, the financial system is collapsing. And
that's what will happen if Japan unleashes their unthinkable threat. It will be total chaos!"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“A star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas, M16 is also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed image of the region adopts the colorful Hubble palette and includes cosmic sculptures made famous in Hubble Space Telescope close-ups of the starforming complex. Described as elephant trunks or Pillars of Creation, dense, dusty columns rising near the center are light-years in length but are gravitationally contracting to form stars.
Energetic radiation from the cluster stars erodes material near the tips, eventually exposing the embedded new stars. Extending from the ridge of bright emission left of center is another dusty starforming column known as the Fairy of Eagle Nebula. M16 lies about 7,000 light-years away, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
"Only Human..."
“The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.”
- Sydney J. Harris
And, of course, the universal and inevitable excuse…
“A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably
excuses himself to himself by saying, “I’m only human, after all.”
- Sydney J. Harris
I've always wondered...
Everyone says “Only human…” compared to what?
"Russian Street Style, Real Life Russian Girls in Moscow! Part 2"
Meanwhile, in a sane, civilized society...
Full screen recommended.
Window to Moscow, 5/2/25
"Russian Street Style,
Real Life Russian Girls in Moscow! Part 2"
Comments here:
Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 5/2/25
"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap"
Comments here:
"This Is The Biggest Economic Story Of 2025 So Far"
"This Is The Biggest
Economic Story Of 2025 So Far"
by Michael Snyder
"The president of the United States just threatened to end all trade with China if the Chinese do not stop buying oil from Iran. I realize that this sounds like something that Hollywood would dream up, but this isn’t a plot from an episode of your favorite television show. This is really happening. President Trump has decided to raise the level of economic pressure on Iran to the maximum in a last ditch effort to force the Iranians to make a deal to end their nuclear program. The oil industry is the central pillar of the Iranian economy, and President Trump wants to make it impossible for them to export any oil at all. So he is threatening to completely cut off all trade with any nation that purchases any amount of Iranian oil.
This is what a trade war looks like when it goes nuclear. President Trump is pledging that any nation that buys Iranian oil “will not be allowed to do business with the United States of America in any way, shape, or form”. He didn’t mention China specifically when he wrote this, but Trump knows that China buys far more oil from Iran than anyone else.
For some reason, the mainstream media is mostly ignoring this story. But State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce has confirmed that this is now U.S. policy and that China in particular is being targeted…“These sanctions are being imposed pursuant to President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign to drive Iran’s oil exports, including to China, to zero. China is by far the largest importer of Iranian oil. The Iranian regime uses the revenue it generates from these sales to finance attacks on U.S. allies, support terrorism around the world, and pursue other destabilizing actions,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said."
This is it. We really have reached a moment of truth.
In 2025, approximately 90 percent of all Iranian oil exports have been purchased by China…"Shipping data from cargo tracking company Vortexa shows that 90 percent of Iranian oil exports are purchased by China, and Iranian oil exports to China hit a record high of 1.8 million barrels per day in March, Reuters reported, citing ship tracking data."
China isn’t going to stop buying oil from Iran. I hope that I am wrong about that, but I do not believe that I am. And I do not believe that Trump is bluffing either. So it appears that we are about to see a full shutdown of all trade with China. Most Americans have absolutely no idea what that will mean for us.
It is being reported that “90% of the inputs in prescription drugs consumed in the US are imported”, and a “significant portion” of those inputs are produced by the Chinese…“Estimates show that 90% of the inputs in prescription drugs consumed in the US are imported,” said Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo. A significant portion of that comes from China, making it a major supply chain risk."
Ongoing tariff disputes between Washington and Beijing have investors on edge, especially in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, where any price shock could ripple across the industry and impact both investors and patients. This is a really big deal, because as I have discussed previously, more than 60 percent of all U.S. adults are currently taking at least one pharmaceutical drug.
According to supply chain analytics company Exiger, about 80 percent of the active ingredients in our pharmaceutical drugs come from China… According to a report from the supply chain analytics company Exiger released last week, the US relies on China for as much as 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients. For generic antibiotics, in particular, the dependence is much higher at 90 percent. If there is a complete shutdown of trade with China, you are going to see drug shortages like you have never seen before. I wish that I was exaggerating, but I am not. Even 95 percent of our ibuprofen comes from China. Good luck getting ibuprofen when none is coming across the Pacific Ocean.
Of course there will be shortages in countless other industries as well. Right now, most of our computers and phones are made in China…"According to Bloomberg, the U.S. relies on imports from China for a majority of the following products by value: game consoles (86%, $6 billion), PC monitors (79%, $5 billion), smartphones (73%, $41 billion), lithium-ion batteries (70%, $16 billion), and laptops (66%, $32 billion)."
This means consumers and businesses that need these products will have few to zero alternatives for products that do not come from China. Our stores are filled with televisions, appliances, toys and other products that are made in China. I hate to say it, but our economy literally cannot function normally without Chinese-made goods. We should have never allowed this to happen, but this is the reality of the scenario that we are now facing.
The good news is that it appears that the Chinese are still leaving the door open for a potential deal…"China has said it’s evaluating approaches from US officials to start negotiations about tariffs, a potential deescalation in the trade war that has raised hopes formal trade talks could start soon. “If we fight, we will fight to the end; if we talk, the door is open,” China’s commerce ministry stated on Friday. “The tariff war and trade war were unilaterally initiated by the United States. If the United States wants to talk, it should show its sincerity and be prepared to correct its wrong practices and cancel the unilateral tariffs.”
Hopefully the U.S. and China will sit down and talk, and hopefully both sides will be in a mood to make significant compromises. Because if we stay on the path that we are currently on, it will be a nightmare.
Even before the trade war erupted about a month ago, many U.S. consumers were stocking up in anticipation of the coming tariffs…"Similarly, according to a survey of 1,000 consumers by NielsenIQ done in March, 31% of consumers said they were stocking up on groceries in anticipation of tariffs while others said they were expediting non-grocery purchases before tariff-related price increases took effect." Have you been stocking up? I hope so. If there are any Chinese-made products that you will need in the months ahead, get them now. If all trade with China is suddenly brought to a screeching halt, it is going to throw our society into a state of great chaos."
Unimaginable, suicidally unbelievable insanity...but there it is.
"Butterflies..."
"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever."
- Carl Sagan
The Poet: Alfred, Lord Tennyson,"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
"The Battle of Balaclava, fought on 25 October 1854 during the Crimean War, was part of the siege of Sevastopol to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, Russia's principal naval base on the Black Sea. The Charge of the Light Brigade was a charge of British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British forces, had intended to send the Light Brigade to prevent the Russians from removing captured guns from overrun Turkish positions, a task well-suited to light cavalry.
However, there was miscommunication in the chain of command, and the Light Brigade was instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one well-prepared with excellent fields of defensive fire. They reached the battery under withering direct fire and scattered some of the gunners, but they were forced to retreat immediately. Thus, the assault ended with very high British casualties and no decisive gains.
The events are best remembered as the subject of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's narrative poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), published just six weeks after the event. Its lines emphasize the valor of the cavalry in bravely carrying out their orders, regardless of the obvious outcome. Blame for the miscommunication has remained controversial, as the original order itself was vague, and the officer who delivered the written orders with some verbal interpretation died in the first minute of the assault."
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As glorified by Hollywood, 1936:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
"It is well that war is so terrible,
otherwise we should grow too fond of it."
- Robert E. Lee
Oh, but we are too fond of it...