Full screen recommended.
Liquid Mind, "Velvet Morning"
Liquid Mind ® is the name used by Los Angeles composer and producer
Chuck Wild of the best-selling Liquid Mind relaxation music albums.
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Saturday, May 31, 2025
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.
Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”
Jeremiah Babe, "I Went To Walmart Today, I Was Shocked"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 5/31/25
"I Went To Walmart Today, I Was Shocked"
Comments here:
"Halt and Catch Fire..."
"There's a great phrase, 'Halt and Catch Fire', which means, basically, you know sh&t's going to hit the fan, so you stop, accept it and move the [another expletive we'd prefer not to write] on. 'Halt and Catch Fire'is an early machine command that sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all conditions to compete for superiority at once."
- Addison Wiggin
"What Will Moscow Look Like in 2030?"
Full screen recommended.
Lisa with Love, 5/31/25
"What Will Moscow Look Like in 2030?"
"Modern Moscow in unreal!
Russia will build this in the Future!" 🇷🇺
Comments here:
Now imagine what America will look like in 2030...
what's left of it.
o
Meanwhile, elsewhere...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell, 5/31/25
"I Went to a Russian BBQ Festival: Grill Fest 2025"
"Do Russians like to BBQ? What is it like to attend the most popular BBQ Fest in Russia? Join me at the Russian BBQ Festival held annually in Moscow, Russia. What are the new styles of BBQ cooking techniques on show?"
Comments here:
"It Is Inevitable..."
"We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us; and if it be delightful to us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching. Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so."
- Blaise Pascal
"The Point..."
“You do not really understand something
unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”
- Albert Einstein
○
Full screen recommended.
Moody Blues, "Don't You Feel Small"
"See the world, ask what it's for.
Understanding, nothing more..."
"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"
"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour
and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"
by Maria Popova
“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; tomorrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease - for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude.
The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit - James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) - explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.
In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon - an old high school friend of his - to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book "Nothing Personal" (public library). Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits - of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age - and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope - are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”
At no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes:
"Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed."
It is a fearful speculation - or, rather, a fearful knowledge - that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.
Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives and a century after Tchaikovsky found beauty amid the wreckage of the soul at 4AM, Baldwin adds: "Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it - life - one more time?"
After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay - lyrics from “Long Old Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” - Baldwin continues: "I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."
That alone, Baldwin insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a “yea-sayer” to life - to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill this blink of existence bookended by nothingness with the courage of a bellowing aliveness.
In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem “Wait,” composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, Baldwin writes: "For, perhaps - perhaps - between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct - I believe -causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death."
And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith - so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, Baldwin argues, at four AM: "At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor - the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self - death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. And many of us perish then."
What then? A generation after "Little Prince" author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart, Baldwin offers: "But if one can reach back, reach down - into oneself, into one’s life - and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality - oneself - which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again."
Baldwin - whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in introducing his last public appearance before his death - wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try - we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves.
Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that “we must believe, without fear, in people,” Baldwin adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours: "Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost."
More than half a century later, "Nothing Personal" remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before Baldwin, on how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit, then revisit Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority, how he learned to truly see, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, his advice on writing, his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book."
o
Freely download "Nothing Personal",
by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, here:
o
Bessie Smith "Long Old Road"
June 11, 1931
The Poet: Czeslaw Milosz, "A Song On The End Of The World"
"A Song On The End Of The World"
“On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.”
~ Czeslaw Milosz
o
Full screen recommended.
Czeslaw Milosz,
"A Song on the End of the World"
"This poem was written in Warsaw in 1944. CzesÅ‚aw MiÅ‚osz ( 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called MiÅ‚osz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry - particularly about his wartime experience - and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, "The Captive Mind," brought him renown as a leading émigré artist and intellectual.
Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith. As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience. Miłosz died in Kraków, Poland, in 2004. He is interred in Skałka, a church known in Poland as a place of honor for distinguished Poles."
"Mega Solar Storms are Pushing Earth into Energetic Chaos, A New Era is Beginning"
Full screen recommended.
by Stefan Burns, 5/31/25
"Mega Solar Storms are Pushing Earth
into Energetic Chaos, A New Era is Beginning"
Powerful Solar Storms - the strongest of 2025 - are about to hit Earth and trigger a G4 or even G5 geomagnetic, all the while a radiation storm is already happening and M6+ earthquakes are beginning to pop off like fireworks. Technological disruptions are likely to occur, such as satellite failures, GPS issues, even power grid failures! And there are known biophysical and health effects from solar and geophysical activity such as changes to blood viscosity and clotting, activation of the sympathetic nervous system, higher risk of cardiac infarctions in elderly persons and those with cardiac issues, as well as general symptoms such as alterations to circadian rhythms, inflammation, fatigue, and more. A third solar storm may have just launched towards Earth, and in general over the next few days ANYTHING can happen. Space Weather Report by geophysicist Stefan Burns."
Comments here:
"My Task..."
“My task, which I am trying to achieve, is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel; it is, before all, to make you see. That and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, all you demand – and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”
- Joseph Conrad
"10 Fast Food Chains Going Out Of Business In U.S. Biggest Farm Collapse"
Full screen recommended.
Discovery Globe Collapse, 5/31/25
"10 Fast Food Chains Going Out Of
Business In U.S. Biggest Farm Collapse"
"The U.S. is facing its biggest farm collapse, and the ripple effects are shaking the fast food industry like never before. In this video, we reveal the harsh reality behind the 10 fast food chains going out of business. From supply chain disruptions to soaring costs, these closures highlight deep challenges in agriculture and retail. Understanding the connection between farming struggles and the fast food chains' decline is crucial for consumers and communities alike and signals urgent changes in how food is produced, distributed, and consumed.More than just a crisis, this situation opens the door to new solutions. We discuss ways communities can adapt, support sustainable farming, and how businesses might innovate to survive and thrive despite these pressures. Stay informed and empowered as we unpack a story everyone should know to better navigate today’s economic and food landscape."
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno, "Massive Price Increases At Sam's Club!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 5/31/25
"Massive Price Increases At Sam's Club!"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Solar Energy Could Kill You"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 5/31/25
"Solar Energy Could Kill You"
"Could solar energy have a dark side? In today’s video, I’m diving into a wild story about hidden remote kill switches reportedly found in solar panels and products from China. Are these switches a national security risk? Could they destabilize our grid? Millions of Americans have gone solar, but what if this push for green energy comes with hidden dangers and unexpected costs? Let’s break it all down, from maintenance nightmares to the potential for grid shutdowns.
I also touch on lawmakers cutting solar incentives in California, the financial strain on homeowners, and why some investment companies refuse to touch properties with solar installations. Are we being set up for failure while facing rising taxes and fuel costs? Plus, I share my thoughts on Hawaii's shocking tax proposals for tourists and whether the push for green energy is really working for us - or against us."
Comments here:
Friday, May 30, 2025
"Two Plasma Shockwaves Are Going To ENGULF The Earth ⚠️ Severe to Extreme Geomagnetic Storm Warning!"
Full screen recommended.
Stefan Burns, 5/30/25
"Two Plasma Shockwaves Are Going To ENGULF The Earth⚠️
Severe to Extreme Geomagnetic Storm Warning!"
"The Sun blasted two coronal mass ejections (blobs of plasma) towards the Earth on May 30th 2025 from one large and very active sunspot, and the combined effect of these shockwaves will trigger powerful geomagnetic storming across the planet. Technological disruptions are more likely to occur, such as satellite failures, GPS issues, even power grid failures! And there are known biophysical and health effects such as changes to blood viscosity and clotting, activation of the sympathetic nervous system, higher risk of cardiac infarctions in elderly persons and those with cardiac issues, as well as general symptoms such as alterations to circadian rhythms, inflammation, fatigue, and more. More solar flares are possible in the days ahead, and these two solar shockwaves are likely to hit Earth from June 1st to June 2nd. Space Weather Report by geophysicist Stefan Burns"
Comments here:
Prepper News, "Alert! Israel is Preparing to Strike Nuclear Sites!"
Full screen recommended.
Prepper News, 5/30/25
"Alert! Israel is Preparing to Strike Nuclear Sites!"
Comments here:
"Land Of Confusion: US Economic Data Is A Big Lie, Inflation Rate Is BullSh*t, Prices Skyrocket"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 5/30/25
"Land Of Confusion: US Economic Data Is A Big Lie,
Inflation Rate Is BullSh*t, Prices Skyrocket"
Comments here:
"Why The American Dream is Dead"
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 5/30/25
"Why The American Dream is Dead"
Comments here:
"The Domino Effect Begins: Why Markets May Never Bounce Back!"
Full screen recommended.
Steven Van Metre, 5/30/25
"The Domino Effect Begins:
Why Markets May Never Bounce Back!"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
"In silhouette against a crowded star field along the tail of the arachnalogical constellation Scorpius, this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower.
In fact, clumps of dust and molecular gas collapsing to form stars may well lurk within the dark nebula, a structure that spans almost 40 light-years across this gorgeous telescopic portrait. Known as a cometary globule, the swept-back cloud, is shaped by intense ultraviolet radiation from the OB association of very hot stars in NGC 6231, off the upper edge of the scene. That energetic ultraviolet light also powers the globule's bordering reddish glow of hydrogen gas. Hot stars embedded in the dust can be seen as bluish reflection nebulae. This dark tower, NGC 6231, and associated nebulae are about 5,000 light-years away."
"The World..."
"The world is a comedy to those that think,
a tragedy to those who feel. "
- Horace Walpole, In a Letter, 1770
Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap 30-May"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 5/30/25
"INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern:
Weekly Wrap 30-May"
Comments here:
"Larry C. Johnson: Iran Wipes Out Israeli Attack - Russia Prepares for The Worst"
Dialogue Works, 5/30/25
"Larry C. Johnson: Iran Wipes Out Israeli Attack -
Russia Prepares for The Worst"
Comments here:
"Alert: Russian Nuclear Base Historic Data Leak! 2 Million Documents Reveal WW3 Bunker Secrets!"
Prepper News, 5/30/25
"Alert: Russian Nuclear Base Historic Data Leak!
2 Million Documents Reveal WW3 Bunker Secrets!"
Comments here:
"There Are Simply No Answers..."
“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
- Barry Lopez
“I Know How to Live… I Don’t Know How to Die”
“I Know How to Live… I Don’t Know How to Die”
by Bill Bonner
“I’ve never done this before…” The woman on the bed was almost a skeleton. The flesh had already gone from her. What was left was an 86-year-old empty tube – shriveled, bent, used up. “I know how to live,” she said. “I don’t know how to die. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think or what I’m supposed to do.”
“Don’t worry about it,” we advised. “It’ll come naturally. Do you need anything?” “Need anything? I need nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. I’m dying. And I have everything I need to do it.” “How about some more pain medication?” “No. I don’t want any. I am only going to do this once. I don’t want to get doped up. I don’t want to miss anything.”
Heaven with Tobacco Fields: People who are dying have a status somewhere between Nobel Prize winners and mobsters. We are reluctant to contradict them. We remember a scene from childhood: We had gone to visit a dying uncle, Edward. Like all our relatives, he was a tobacco farmer. But now the plant he had cared for all his life was killing him: he had lung cancer. Other relatives had gathered at the house to say goodbye. The mood was gloomy, dark… quiet. But the conversation, in early spring, ran in a familiar direction – toward the weather and soil conditions. “They won’t be planting tobacco where I’m going,” said Uncle Edward.
The group fell silent. Some looked down at the floor. Some shuffled toward the kitchen. But Agnes, a cousin, challenged him. “How do you know where you’re going or what they’re doing there?” This enlivened and emboldened the confrérie of tobacco growers. “Yeah, for all we know they’re pulling the plants already,” said one, glancing out the window to see if the rain had stopped. (The plants were “pulled” from the nursery beds for transplanting in the fields. We particularly disliked pulling them because black snakes enjoyed the warm of the gauze-like covering and slithered among the plants.)
The 12-year-old in the group – your editor – forever admired his cousin Agnes. She could see the truth and had the courage to speak it. None of us knew what happened after death. Why not tobacco farming? We tried to imagine Heaven with tobacco fields. It was so implausible that we had a hard time with it. But we persisted. Rows of the green plants, tended by generations of deceased farmers. The sun must not be so hot in Heaven, we concluded, for there was nothing heavenly about the scorching summer sun when you were cutting tobacco. The ghost farmers must hoe each row… and “top” the plants to remove the flower and force the growth to the leaves, just as we did in the Maryland fields. At the end of the day, sweat-stained and tired, they must gather around their pickup trucks – one foot up on the running board, an elbow on the raised knee, with a cigarette in the right hand.
An Unexplored Mystery: The other professions must have their quarters, too… Wheat farmers need broader fields. Cobblers could enjoy their trade, too. Why not? Heaven – immeasurably large – could have a place for everybody. Even bankers and lawyers might find a spot. For a moment, we imagined what it must be like, with mechanics tightening their bolts and dairymen milking their cows. But if everybody did in Heaven what he did on Earth, what was the point of it? The juvenile mind, like its adult successor, stalled.
Half a century later, it is still stopped where it was left – like a tractor abandoned on the edge of a field, with trees grown up between the wheels. Rust has covered the hood. The tires, cracked from the sun, have flattened and disintegrated. It has moved not an inch forward… leaving the mystery of Heaven completely unexplored. “Well, you’re not dead yet,” we replied. “How about a little apple juice?”
The death rattle began two days later. The goodbyes have all been said. Prayers have been offered. Undertakers contacted. A church put on alert. Remembrances shared. Toward the end there was no one there to share the remembrances with. The spirit seemed to have packed up and moved out before the body got the message. Life, like bull markets and credit expansions, always come to an end, sooner or later. New technology and newfangled monetary policies offer delays, unfounded hope, and stays of execution – but never a full pardon.”
- http://www.thedailyreckoning.com
○
Bread, "Everything I Own"
"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call
you could make, who would you call and what would you say?
And why are you waiting?"
- Stephen Levine
"The End of History"
"The End of History"
A somewhat exaggerated obituary...
by Joel Bowman
“History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.”
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
"Remember when history ended, dear reader? The year was 1992. "Under the Bridge" and "Tears in Heaven" were playing on the FM radio. The Cold War, which had promised such a “Bang!” had ended with barely a whimper. And American philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, had just published a daring book: "The End of History and the Last Man."
In light of the great Soviet collapse, Mr. Fukuyama was of the opinion that The West had not simply triumphed over The Rest, but that the world had finally reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
In other words, whatever was to be done in the fickle and turbulent realm of politics had, by the grand old year 1992, already been done. Here is Mr. Fukuyama, joining a long line of intellectuals (including Marx) to have become ensnared in the labyrinth of Hegel’s dialectical materialism: “Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.” ~ Francis Fukuyama
But a curious thing happened on the way to the end of history; namely... history did not end. The political pendulum did not come to a full stop. Stubbornly, insolently, it kept right on a-swingin’...
Time and Again: Indeed, the ‘90s were a time of great political upheaval and experimentation, not all of it leading to the holy grail of western liberal democracy, as imagined by Mr. Fukuyama.
In the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Gorbachev’s perestroika (a program of political and economic “restructuring”) delivered the Russian people from the brutality of communism… into the unloving embrace of a corrupted oligarchy…and then to a kind of faux democracy that has seen the same man at the helm for a quarter of a century. (After the last “election,” Vladimir Putin became the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953.)
As for the Americans, co-belligerents in the aforementioned ideological conflict, they continued their own long march…headlong toward a special brand of political circuses and economic madness. In a country where any boy, girl or two-spirit animal might grow up to be president, the nation that enthusiastically sent its soldiers abroad to “make the world safe for democracy” offered up a Bush, followed by a Clinton (twice), followed by another Bush (twice), then very nearly another Clinton. Two decades of political power, held in the hands of two dynastic families.
Meanwhile, beneath fierce power struggles at the executive level, America’s vast and menacing security state – about which General Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in ‘61, at the height of the Cold War – continued its inexorable mission creep into the lives and private affairs of the good citizens of The Republic.
The Scourge of War: Neither the defeated Soviets nor the victorious Americans appeared willing to take the path Fukuyama had so carefully laid out for them. The End of History would have to wait...
Ah, but what about Europe, some venture to ask? Indeed, Mr. Fukuyama himself preferred the transnational euro-model to the comparatively unipolar American offering. Might not the “post-historic” world manifest itself over on the continent, where a common “Esperanto” currency – in the form of the euro – would facilitate free trade and citizens of all backgrounds, creeds and cultures would walk arm in arm from the Seine to the Danube, the Bay of Biscay to the shores of the Black Sea?
“I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States,” declared Fukuyama at the time, in brave defense of his curious, end-of-days timeline. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a ‘post-historical’ world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.”
Alas, not unlike the Ruskies and the Yankees before them, the Europeans would go on to disappoint Mr. Fukuyama, too. After a relatively sanguine start to the new millennium, the Eurozone spent most of the ensuing two decades descending gradually into first economic, then political, and now widespread cultural disaster. Today, protests from one end of the continent to the other – Finland to Greece, the Netherlands to France, Poland to Ireland and plenty more between – underscore real discord between neighbors in the great eurocrat utopia. Not to mention the scourge of war, which threatens to drag the entire continent, if not the whole western world, into yet another great conflagration.
Under the Bridge: And so, almost a quarter of a century after Mr. Fukuyama stopped the clock on History, it plods along regardless. Evidently, something about the political spirit of mankind just doesn’t want to sit still. In the year 2025 the world is faced with a plethora of political challenges, for which many of the seeds were sown in the dimming twilight of the last century.
That is to say, the ideological struggle continues against the backdrop of protests, uprisings, springs, occupations, revolutions and, over the weekend, here in the United States of America, attempted assassinations. (How close the Republic was to having its own Franz Ferdinand moment, we may never know...)
When Mr. Fukuyama stopped the clocks back in 1992, America’s debt clock was just ticking past $3 trillion. As we type these very words, that figure is fast approaching $37 trillion, a rather brassy 775 percent increase. According to the latest estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, it is set to top $56 trillion within the next decade. And the rate of increase is only accelerating…The CBO had revised its estimate of the budget deficit for 2024 from $1.6 trillion to $1.9 trillion - an increase of more than 20 percent.
As a proportion of annual GDP, the debt will rise from almost 100 percent this financial year to 122 percent in 2034, meaning that the debt is growing at a much faster rate than real economic output. Interest rate costs to service the debt, now approaching $1 trillion, will rise to $1.7 trillion by 2034, when it will become the single largest line item on the federal budget.
Which brings us back to the lessons of history…Will the United States have to go “Full Argentina” before the pendulum swings back the other way, to sanity, fiscal responsibility and limited government? Or is the die cast? We wait to see…Of course, Mr. Fukuyama is not alone in wondering how all this ends. Only, if history has taught us anything, it doesn’t. The show, as always, goes on."
"When One Cannot Be Sure..."
"When one cannot be sure that there are many days left, each single day becomes as important as a year, and one does not waste an hour in wishing that that hour were longer, but simply fills it, like a smaller cup, as high as it will go without spilling over."
- Natalie Kusz
John Wilder, "How Society Shapes Humanity"
"How Society Shapes Humanity"
by John Wilder
“Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living
really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.”
– "Idiocracy"
"One constant theme of this blog is change. We live in a world that is defined by change, and the benchmarks we measure society are things like change in GDP, change in population, change in the availability of different PEZ™ flavors. Blue is a flavor, right?
The focus of humanity on change is not the norm, but rather an exception. The amount of novel situations and technology entering our lives is at an all-time high and is increasing year-over-year. Let’s backtrack a bit and put this in perspective.
Going back to food, 15,000 years ago we ate a lot of meat and fish, some rando fruits and vegetables that some cave-bro had been brave enough to taste and not die, and nuts.Nothing about society would change for 15,000-year-ago bro’s tribe for thousands of years.There are people who maintain that the human organism hasn’t changed enough so that our very different diet of sugar, grains, sugar, industrial chemicals, sugar, minerals from a mine in Bulgaria, sugar, beef jerky, and microplastics isn’t somehow normal and that our bodies haven’t adapted to it.Maybe they have a point?
Anyway, this isn’t so much about feeding your head as it is about feeding your mind with the change in the way we deal with information.How has that changed humanity? In the beginning was the Word. And, the word. If you couldn’t speak it, chances of getting your genes propagated were slim because if you can’t talk your grubby cave-gal out of her wolfskin jeans, your genes aren’t gonna be around for the next round. Thus, we became a society where language was important so her Tinderclub© didn’t swipe left.
Then we started writing stuff down. Most kings and leaders didn’t need this, but a growing segment of the population did – people like scribes and lawyers. Eventually, they made more money than people who couldn’t read. The ladies of the past weren’t so different than the ladies of today (except they couldn’t vote and were property pretty much) but the written language genes also showed up for the future. In lots of places, but not all. Some never jumped from talking to reading, so the segment of their population that couldn’t read never got flushed. This is evident in many sub-populations even today.
Generations of humans would live and die during this period with little change in technology or the basic factors that determine the shape of their lives. They would be born and die in a house that looked just like the house (and maybe was the same house) that their ancestors 100 years previous had lived in.
Writing and reading made society more complex, and allowed ideas to span continents, and I’ve written about this before. So far, so good. But more complex societies have more complex outcomes. Rather than sort for good eyesight or the ability to take down a mammoth, the selection process moved to selecting for people who got along well with strangers, and who could plan.
The harsher the climate, the more the pressure for these selections. Did we still need people who could kill, kill, kill? Sure we did. They came along, too because their mating opportunities are high. There’s a reason that 1/8 of Asia is related to Genghis Khan. I think his go-to pickup line was “I’ll conquer your steppe, baby.”
At some point around the Renaissance, Western civilization decided to get rid of the members who had impulse control issues. England, for example, started executing criminals who couldn’t control themselves, and kept it up for hundreds of years. This was pretty good at weeding out the undesirables. China had gone through this process hundreds of years in the past, which may explain why so many Chinese have a bit of Khan in their respective woodpiles.
Societies back then also let stupid people die. There wasn’t a welfare system to keep stupid people alive, so there were selection pressures for smart. Some folks call it “social Darwinism”, but I call it the universal penalty for being stupid.
Essentially, this is a society-enforced soft eugenics program, culling out a portion of the population just because they never make enough money to breed. And, let’s be honest: everyone feels bad for the kids on the short bus, but nobody really thinks they should be having kids of their own in an attempt to see how many more chromosome pairs than 23 that you can fit.
Society has changed now. Besides subsidizing poverty, which ensures we’ll have more of it, we’ve also changed in a fundamental way how we take in information. The media we consume has been decreasing in complexity for over 100 years. My guess at the high-water mark for complexity in media and the most intelligent era in human history (in Western Civilization) would be around the time of Dickens. Go back and read the language of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of debates meant to appeal to the common voter of the time, and tell me what would be made of the breadth of language and the depth of argument today? Could an average eight grader keep up with it? Could an average Harvard™ freshman without having ChatGPT® or Grok© summarize it?
Since current political debates look much more (in many cases) like the wrestlers of the WWE™ before a steel-cage match, I think most people would get bored and wander off. That’s the media that we’re trained with today. We went from books, to magazines, to television, to 10-minute YouTube™ clips, to 20-second TikTok™ videos. Trump? His 2016 election was based on 140-character Tweets™.
The building of complex arguments has largely been abandoned in the public sphere and decisions of vast chunks of the population are made on what emotions are stirred by looking at a photograph. Certainly, many of those are now staged, and in a decade half of them will be the propaganda products of A.I.
The selection and sorting still exist, but now it has (like in the film "Idiocracy") selected for people who are the opposite of the groups society selected for in 1820: someone seems to want low-impulse control, and non-productive populations that are incapable of planning. Sure, it could be a coincidence that major policy initiatives all remove incentives for stupid people not to have dozens of babies.
This process, thankfully, is self-limiting. A technological society depends on a stream of competent people to plan and run society. And, no, not like Soviet Central Planning, but rather, “Hey, we need more lettuce in the Modern Mayberry Walmart©, so since we’re Walmart™ and want to make money, we should ship them some” planning.
It’s always quicker to burn down a house than to build one, so it’s really no surprise that making things worse is a lot easier than making them better. Paraphrasing what Thomas Sowell (I think) said, “We shouldn’t look at poor places and ask why they’re poor, we should look at rich places and ask why they’re rich.” Nah, there aren’t any votes in that. And it sounds like hard work, right? Besides, stupid is growing faster than TikTok™ dance challenge videos.
Have we reached the point where we’ve made a society so complex it allows devolution to the point it can no longer be maintained? If so, congratulations! You’ve been alive during the period of peak novelty in human history. The good news is that you can get blue-flavored PEZ™ here at the peak."
Adventures With Danno, "Aldi Saver Deals You Should Be Buying"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 5/30/25
"Aldi Saver Deals You Should Be Buying"
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o
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell , 5/30/25
"Typical Moscow Food Market:
Where Russians Really Shop for Food"
"Where do Russians typically go food shopping? Join me on a tour of a typical Russian underground food market, built into the basement of a shopping centre in Moscow, Russia. This market offers shoppers a limitless array of food options."
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Bill Bonner, "It's Over"
"It's Over"
by Bill Bonner
‘A bill can be big. Or it can be beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.’
- Elon Musk
Amsterdam, Holland - "News Flash: the whole Trump program is falling apart. Over the course of the last fourteen days, federal judges have made it clear that the US still has a constitution, and nowhere in it does it give Elon Musk’s DOGE the power to cut federal programs without Congressional action...Or give Donald Trump the right to set taxes and trade policies as he pleases. More on Monday...
But these developments leave poor Elon out. What was he doing? For whom? Why? And is he now personally responsible for the billions in losses the states say they have suffered? And now it’s official. The Trump/Musk duo has broken up. The Washington Post: "Elon Musk is leaving his role in the Trump administration. A day earlier, in a major break with the president and Republicans, Musk said he did not approve of Trump’s spending bill - officially known as the One Big Beautiful Bill - with its massive tax cuts. “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in an interview with CBS News."
And this from Bloomberg: "Musk leaves Washington pretty much as he found it." Poor Elon. He never understood what government is all about...or his role in it. There he was...out on the front lines...exposed to ridicule, widely reviled, the target of the feds, the media...the enemy of the ‘casta politica’ and all of the freeloaders and parasites who want to live at others’ expense. Musk took the lead - as an unpaid volunteer. It was he who put together a team and revealed billions in ‘waste, fraud and inefficiency’ in federal spending.
In business cutting the ‘fat’ can be key to making a profit. Companies struggle to provide the best products and services at the lowest cost. ‘Fat’ is an enemy. But in politics, the ‘fat’ is the juiciest part...it’s what the politicians most want. If you take money from taxpayers to conduct a war, for example, and you spend the money efficiently, what do you get? Dead bodies. Piles of rubble. Flattened buildings. Just look at what the US gets for its money in Gaza. If the money were ‘wasted,’ on the other hand, it would do less damage. Plus, more of it would go where it was really intended to go - into the pockets of politicians, cronies, and favored clients.
Elon’s lieutenants found billions that could be cut. There were ‘foreign aid’ programs, for example, where the money never left the Washington DC area. This was, from the feds’ point of view, an ideal program. Some of the money was supposed to go to train ‘African circus performers.’ Again, a perfect swindle. Those clowns weren’t going to complain! Elon’s team even found $4.7 trillion in payments that were practically untraceable.
But after Elon busted his hump and endured so many slings and arrows, did the nation say ‘thank you for your service?’ Did the Republicans incorporate even one penny of the many money-saving examples he uncovered in their ‘big, beautiful bill?’ No, they did not. Charlie Bilello: ‘What about the DOGE spending cuts? None of them were codified in the bill, meaning that any savings announced over the past few months could just be temporary.’
The Republicans’ ‘big, beautiful bill’ extends the 2017 tax cuts...adds new cuts (for tips, etc)...increases spending...and ends up with bigger deficits than ever. And now, they are now going to hang Musk out to dry. The Independent: "Judge spares Trump from massive DOGE lawsuit - leaving Elon Musk holding the bag for ‘unauthorized role’
Musk - tapped by the president to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency - is facing a lawsuit from a group of 14 states arguing that the world’s wealthiest person lacks any legal authority to carry out mass firings, terminate grants and access sensitive government information and taxpayer data.
Musk thought he was doing the country a favor; he thought the MAGA folks really wanted to curb US debt. As it turned out, they didn’t. And now, in addition to his other problems, Musk faces a lawsuit charging that he ‘lacked any authority’ to do what they asked him to do. And the White House has pulled the rug out from under his defense, specifically stipulating that he had “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions.” For all his trouble, despite all his money, and all his expensive lawyers...and all his success in business...Musk is just another casualty of politics."
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