Dialogue Works, 6/28/25
"Scott Ritter: Iran Outsmarts Israel:
War Plan Destroys Surprise Attack!"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Saturday, June 28, 2025
"Do This Now Before You Lose Your Job; Another Ominous Sign For The Housing Market"
Jeremiah Babe, 6/28/25
"Do This Now Before You Lose Your Job;
Another Ominous Sign For The Housing Market"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: 2002, “Challenge From Heaven”
Full screen recommended.
2002, “Challenge From Heaven”
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Globular star cluster Omega Centauri, also known as NGC 5139, is some 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a volume about 150 light-years in diameter. It's the largest and brightest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy.
Though most star clusters consist of stars with the same age and composition, the enigmatic Omega Cen exhibits the presence of different stellar populations with a spread of ages and chemical abundances. In fact, Omega Cen may be the remnant core of a small galaxy merging with the Milky Way. Omega Centauri's red giant stars (with a yellowish hue) are easy to pick out in this sharp, color telescopic view."
"Never, Ever Forget..."
"Never, ever forget that nothing in this life is free. Life demands payment in some form for your "right" to express yourself, to condemn and abuse the evil surrounding us. Expect to pay... it will come for you, they will come for you, regardless. Knowing that, give them Hell itself every chance you can. Expect no mercy, and give none. That's how life works. Be ready to pay for what you do, or be a coward, pretend you don't see, don't know, and cry bitter tears over how terrible things are, over how you let them become."
- Ernest Hemingway, "For Whom the Bell Tolls "
don Miguel Ruiz, “The Power of Doubt”
“The Power of Doubt”
by don Miguel Ruiz
“Have you ever asked yourself if something you heard was actually true? Have you ever wondered if someone was lying to you, or worse yet, have you ever wondered, “Am I lying to myself?” Do you believe those voices in your head that are giving you opinions? Do you tend to believe other people’s opinions? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you will understand when being skeptical is a good thing.
Right now, you’re delivering a message to yourself and to everyone around you. You’re always delivering messages, and you’re always receiving messages from one mind to another mind. But the most important messages are the ones you deliver to yourself. What are those messages? The word is a force you cannot see, but you can see the manifestation of that force, the expression of the word, which is your own life. The way to measure the impeccability of your word is to ask yourself: Am I happy or am I suffering? If you’re suffering, it’s because you’re telling yourself a story that isn’t true, but you believe it.
When you look at yourself in a mirror, do you like what you see, or do you judge your body and use the word to tell yourself lies? If you believe that you are not attractive enough, then you believe a lie, and you are using the word against yourself, against the truth.
Is it really true that you are too heavy or too thin? Is it really true that you are not beautiful? If you’re telling yourself: “I’m fat. I’m ugly. I’m old. I’m not good enough. I’ll never make it,” then be skeptical. Don’t believe yourself, because none of these messages come from truth, from life. These messages are distorted; they’re nothing but lies. The truth is, there are no ugly people. There’s no universal book of law where any of these judgments are true. Every judgment is just an opinion - it’s just a point of view - and that point of view wasn’t there when you were born.
Everything you think about yourself, everything you believe about yourself, is because you learned it. You learned the opinions from Mom, Dad, siblings and society. They sent all those images of how a body should look; they expressed all those opinions about the way you are, the way you are not, the way you should be. They delivered a message, and you agreed with that message. And now you think so many things about what you are, but are they the truth?
What is the truth and what is the lie? Humans believe so many lies because we aren’t aware. We ignore the truth or we just don’t see the truth. When we are educated, we accumulate a lot of knowledge, and all that knowledge is just like a wall of fog that doesn’t allow us to perceive the truth, what really is. We only see what we want to see; we only hear what we want to hear. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.
In our development, as we grow throughout our lives, the structure of our beliefs becomes very complicated, and we make it even more complicated because we make the assumption that what we believe is the absolute truth. We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that’s always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory. As children, we are innocent; we believe almost everything that we learn, but everything that we learn isn’t true. We put our faith in lies, we give them power, and soon those lies are ruling our lives.
Just imagine becoming the way you used to be as a very young child, before you understood the meaning of any word, before opinions took over your mind. The real you is loving, joyful and free. The real you is just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun. There is nothing to justify, nothing to believe. You have no mission except to enjoy life. You are here just to be, for no reason. Then the only thing you need to be is the real you. Be happiness. Be love. Be yourself. That’s wisdom. It’s the complete acceptance of yourself just the way you are, and the complete acceptance of everybody else just the way they are. The reward is your eternal happiness.
But first you have to unlearn a lot, and you only have one tool to do this. That tool is doubt. Being skeptical is an important part of recovering what you really are because it uses the power of doubt to break all those spells you’ve been under. Whenever you hear a message from yourself, or from someone else, simply ask: Is it really true? With the power of doubt, you challenge every message you deliver and receive. You challenge every belief that rules your life. Then you challenge all the beliefs that rule society, until you break the spell of all the lies and superstitions that control your world.
Once you recover all the power you invested in lies, you can see what is real; you can feel what is real. Even though lies still exist, you no longer believe them. You don’t believe everything anymore, but you can see, and what you can see is the truth. The truth doesn’t need you to believe it. The truth simply is, and it survives – believe it or not. Lies need you to believe them. If you don’t believe lies, they don’t survive your skepticism, and they simply disappear.
Centuries ago, people believed that the earth was flat. Some said that elephants were supporting the earth, and that made them feel safe. The belief that the earth was flat was considered the truth, and almost everybody agreed, but did that make it true? It was nothing but a superstition, and I can assure you that we still live in a world of superstition. The question is: Are we aware of it?
Wherever you go, you will hear all kinds of opinions and stories from other people. You will find great storytellers wanting to tell you what you should do with your life: “You should do this, you should do that, you should do whatever.” Don’t believe them. Be skeptical, but learn to listen and then make your choices. Be responsible for every choice you make in your life. This is your life; it’s nobody else’s life, and you will find that it’s nobody else’s business what you do with your life.
For centuries, there have been prophets who predicted big catastrophes in the world. Not that long ago, there were people who predicted that in the year 2000 all the computers would fail and society as we know it would disappear. The day arrived, and what happened? Nothing happened. Thousands of years ago, just like today, there were prophets who were waiting for the end of the world. At that time, a great master said: “There will be many false prophets who claim to be speaking the word of God. Don’t believe.” You see, being skeptical is nothing new. Doubt takes you behind the words and helps you to discern the truth from lies. And this is a good thing.”
"A Primer For The Propagandized: Fear Is The Mind-Killer"
"A Primer For The Propagandized:
Fear Is The Mind-Killer"
by Margaret Anna Alice
“Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.”
- George Orwell
"The noose is dangling gently around our necks. Every day, they cinch it tighter. By the time we realize it’s strangling us, it will be too late. Those who – gradually and gleefully – sacrifice their freedoms, their autonomy, their individuality, their livelihoods, and their relationships on the altar of the “common good” have forgotten this is the pattern followed by every totalitarian regime in history.
Everyone wonders how ordinary Germans could have been manipulated to participate or stand dumbstruck while their government was transformed into a genocidal juggernaut. This is how. Read Sebastian Haffner’s "Defying Hitler" memoir to see how this can happen anywhere - including here.
Everyone wonders how Russians could have permitted and even zealously reported fellow citizens for imprisonment and execution under "Article 58", the penal code invented to incarcerate anyone who dared express the slightest whisper of noncompliance under Stalin’s homicidal state. This is how. Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s meticulously documented "The Gulag Archipelago" to witness this progression of authoritarian lunacy.
Everyone wonders how Hutus could have suddenly started axing their Tutsi neighbors to death after being inundated with waves of anti-Tutsi propaganda from "Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines." Read Philip Gourevitch’s "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda."
The list goes on. And on. And on. From Machiavelli’s "The Prince" to Étienne de la Boetie’s "The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" to Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s "Manufacturing Consent" (and accompanying documentary) to BBC’s "The Century of the Self," mechanisms of mass control have been chronicled for millennia.
George Orwell wrote, "As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.”
Can you imagine what master propagandist Edward Bernays would have done with access to today’s mainstream media conglomerate combined with the global surveillance infrastructure of Big Tech? And you really think that’s not happening now - with another century of psychological, neurological, and technological research under their belts?
The present ability to curate reality and coerce obedience is unprecedented, far beyond what Orwell envisioned in "1984", Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451", Huxley in "Brave New World," and Burgess in "A Clockwork Orange."
A textbook example of "Problem Reaction Solution", the tsunami of worldwide Covid hysteria was the latest and potentially most threatening example of mass control in history. The recipe is simple. Take a naturally occurring phenomenon, say a seasonal virus, and exaggerate its threat far beyond every imagining - despite exhaustive evidence to the contrary. Suppress, silence, ostracize, and demonize every individual who dares present facts that expose the false mono-narrative.
Whip up a witches’ brew of anger, envy, and, most importantly, fear, escalating emotions to a boil so as to short-circuit our faculties of reason and logic.
Isolate us from one another, supplant real-world interactions with virtual feuds, label nonconformists as a threat to the group, and pump the public with a disinformation campaign designed to confuse and atomize. In essence, foster a cultlike mentality that shuts down thought to guarantee assent.
Cultivate and wield our cognitive biases - especially ingroup bias, conformity bias, and authority bias - against us in a comprehensive divide-and-conquer policy that keeps us too busy squabbling amongst each other to recognize and unite against those corralling us into a Matrix-like collective delusion that enables the powerful to extract our resources for their own gain.
This ideological mass psychosis is religion - not science. If this were about science, the Media–Pharmaceutical–Big-Tech complex would not be memory-holing every dissenting voice, vilifying every thought criminal, and censoring every legitimate inquiry in quest of the truth.
Mark Twain said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” He also said: “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
The next time you’re watching the news, reading a social media post, listening to a friend repeat a scripted talking point, pay attention. Learn to identify the earmarks of propaganda, the clickbait used to trigger your emotions, the mechanisms employed to engineer your cognitive biases.
Don’t let your pride prevent you from seeing - and admitting - the Emperor is naked. We are losing our last sliver of opportunity to resist authoritarianism. This is not a partisan issue. Those who wish to control us have made it such because disunited lemmings are easier to steer than independent, critical thinkers.
This is a human issue. This is about crushing the middle class - the backbone of a democratic republic - and transferring trillions from the middle and lower classes to the ruling plutocracy. This is about demolishing the foundations of a free society and building it back - not better, but better-controlled.
I will close by recommending a series of illuminating videos on menticide (“the systematic effort to undermine and destroy a person’s values and beliefs … to induce radically different ideas”) throughout history by "Academy of Ideas." This analysis of mass psychosis is nonpartisan and of value to every thinking human being.
"Dare to question. Dare to disbelieve.
Dare to defy ideology in favor of science while you still can."
The Poet: Robinson Jeffers, "We Are Those People"
"We Are Those People"
"I have abhorred the wars and despised the liars,
laughed at the frightened
And forecast victory; never one moment's doubt.
But now not far, over the backs of some crawling years, the next
Great war's column of dust and fire writhes
Up the sides of the sky: it becomes clear that we too may suffer
What others have, the brutal horror of defeat -
Or if not in the next, then in the next - therefore watch Germany
And read the future. We wish, of course, that our women
Would die like biting rats in the cellars,
our men like wolves on the mountain:
It will not be so. Our men will curse, cringe, obey;
Our women uncover themselves to the grinning victors
for bits of chocolate."
- Robinson Jeffers
The Very Idea..."
"In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted."
- Michael Musto
“What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time. Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one’s ribs get re-broken again.”
- Inga Muscio
And sadly you know it won't be...
"Shaya's Home Run"
"Shaya's Home Run"
by Rabbi Paysach Krohn
"In Brooklyn, New York, Chush is a school that caters to learning-disabled children. Some children remain in Chush for their entire school careers, while others can be mainstreamed into conventional yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs. There are a few children who attend Chush for most of the week and go to a regular school on Sundays. At a Chush fund-raising dinner, the father of a Chush child delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he cried out, “Where is the perfection in my son Shaya? Everything that Hashem [G-d] does is done with perfection. But my child cannot understand things as other children do. My child cannot remember facts and figures as other children do. Where is Hashem’s perfection?” The audience was shocked by the question, pained by the father’s anguish and stilled by his piercing query.
“I believe,” the father answered, “that when Hashem brings a child like this into the world, the perfection that He seeks is in the way people react to this child.” He then told the following story about his son Shaya. Shaya attends Chush throughout the week and Yeshivah Darchei Torah in Far Rockaway on Sundays. One Sunday afternoon, Shaya and his father came to Darchei Torah as his classmates were playing baseball. The game was in progress and as Shaya and his father made their way towards the ball field, Shaya said, “Do you think you could get me into the game?”
Shaya’s father knew his son was not at all athletic, and that most boys would not want him on their team. But Shaya’s father understood that if his son was chosen in, it would give him a comfortable sense of belonging. Shaya’s father approached one of the boys in the field and asked, “Do you think my Shaya could get into the game?”
The boy looked around for guidance from his teammates. Getting none, he took matters into his own hands and said, “We are losing by six runs and the game is already in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him up to bat in the ninth inning.” Shaya’s father was ecstatic as Shaya smiled broadly. Shaya was told to put on a glove and go out to play short center field, a position that exists only in softball. There were no protests from the opposing team, which would now be hitting with an extra man in the outfield.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shaya’s team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shaya’s team scored again and now with two outs and the bases loaded and the potential winning runs on base, Shaya was scheduled to be up. Would the team actually let Shaya bat at this juncture and give away their chance to win the game?
Surprisingly, Shaya was told to take a bat and try to get a hit. Everyone knew that it was all but impossible, for Shaya didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, let alone hit with it. However as Shaya stepped up to the plate, the pitcher moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so that Shaya should at least be able to make contact.
The first pitch came in and Shaya swung clumsily and missed. One of Shaya’s teammates came up to Shaya and together they held the bat and faced the pitcher waiting for the next pitch. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shaya. As the next pitch came in, Shaya and his teammate swung the bat and together they hit a slow ground ball to the pitcher. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could easily have thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shaya would have been out and that would have ended the game.
Instead, the pitcher took the ball and threw it on a high arc to right field, far and wide beyond the first baseman’s reach. Everyone started yelling, “Shaya, run to first! Shaya, run to first!” Never in his life had Shaya run to first. He scampered down the baseline wide eyed and startled. By the time he reached first base, the right fielder had the ball. He could have thrown the ball to the second baseman who would tag out Shaya, who was still running. But the right fielder understood what the pitcher’s intentions were, so he threw the ball high and far over the third baseman’s head, as everyone yelled, “Shaya, run to second! Shaya, run to second.”
Shaya ran towards second base as the runners ahead of him deliriously circled the bases towards home. As Shaya reached second base, the opposing shortstop ran towards him, turned him towards the direction of third base and shouted “Shaya, run to third!”
As Shaya rounded third, the boys from both teams ran behind him screaming, “Shaya, run home! Shaya, run home!” Shaya ran home, stepped on home plate and all 18 boys lifted him on their shoulders and made him the hero, as he had just hit the “grand slam” and won the game for his team.
“That day,” said the father who now had tears rolling down his face, “those 18 boys reached their level of perfection. They showed that it is not only those who are talented that should be recognized, but also those who have less talent. They too are human beings, they too have feelings and emotions, they too are people, they too want to feel important.”
That is the exceptional lesson of this episode. Too often we seek to find favor and give honor to those who have more than us. But there are people who have fewer friends than we, less money, and less prestige. Those people especially need attention and recognition. We should try to achieve the level of perfection in human relationships which the boys on the ball field at Yeshiva Darchei Torah achieved. Because if children can do it, we adults should certainly be able to accomplish it as well."
"This Assumption..."
"It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge."
- H. L. Mencken
"Do You Believe..."
“Do you believe,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?”
“Do you believe,” said Martin, “that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?”
- Voltaire
o
“Murderers are not monsters, they're men.
And that's the most frightening thing about them.”
- Alice Sebold, "The Lovely Bones"
"Iran Provided Yemen The Targets To Hit! New WAR? The Political Prostitution: “Abraham Accords”
Full screen recommended.
Mahmood OD, 6/28/25
"Iran Provided Yemen The Targets To Hit!
New WAR? The Political Prostitution: “Abraham Accords”
Comments here:
Full screen recommended.
Guardian News, 6/28/25
"Footage Shows Aftermath of
Israeli Strike on Tent Camp in Gaza City"
"Palestinians in Gaza City searched for bodies and belongings after an Israeli strike on tents in the al-Rimal neighbourhood that killed at least 12 people and injured dozens, the Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported. At least 60 people have been killed by Israeli strikes across Gaza over the past 24 hours. Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson said mediators were engaging with Israel and Hamas to build on momentum from Israel’s ceasefire with Iran and work towards a truce in the Gaza Strip ."
Comments here:
60 desperate, starving men, women, children and old people living in tents slaughtered by a 2,000 Lb. bomb YOU paid for, Americans! YOU paid for it all! Eternal shame and disgrace on America for allowing and paying for all this horror! 80,000 unarmed civilians, including 19,000 CHILDREN massacred, and every drop of that blood is on YOUR hands too!
WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?!!
"Here's Proof That Israel Lost the War"
"Here's Proof That Israel Lost the War"
by Mike Whitney
Excerpt: The American people are not being told why Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Iran. Yes, Israel was rapidly running out of air-defense interceptors (making it more vulnerable to Iranian attacks.) But that issue is only of secondary importance. The real reason they wanted a ceasefire was because they were getting systematically pulverized and needed to stop the bleeding fast. That’s why Israel ‘threw in the towel’ less than 2 weeks after the opening salvo, because Iran was decimating one target after another with no end in sight. So, Israel capitulated.
Of course, that is not the story we’ve been reading in the western media where there’s no mention of the vast destruction of Israeli strategic targets (by Iranian ballistic missiles); that news has been completely omitted from the mainstream coverage. But that’s why Israel persuaded Trump to find a diplomatic off-ramp; because the losses were beginning to mount and Iran was not ‘letting up.’
Did you know that it is illegal to post videos or photos of buildings that have been struck by Iranian missiles in Israel? In other words, if you publish photos of smoldering buildings, infrastructure or military bases, you will go to jail. This is how the government controls the narrative and convinces the public that they are winning a war they are actually losing. But don’t take my word for it; here’s a video clip of an Israeli newscaster explaining how government censorship is impacting the peoples’ ability to figure out what is going on:
CH13’s Raviv Drucker: We have to say there is a bit of an Iranian aspect to the way we report missile strikes on our side. I’m not talking about the Weizmann Institute, but there were alot of missile hits on IDF bases, on strategic sites, that we still don’t report about to this day. And there’s a clear reason for that, which everyone at home understands. But along that clear reason, it created a situation where people don’t realize how precise the Iranians were and how much damage they caused in many places. We just know about the Weizmann Institute; there are many places we don’t know about.
Repeat: it created a situation where people don’t realize how precise the Iranians were and how much damage they caused in many places.
What can we glean from this statement? That Iran’s new generation of ballistic missiles are abundant, precise and lethal. To his credit, the newscaster seems to think that ordinary people deserve to be told about these cutting-edge weapons so they can make informed decisions regarding their own safety. We agree with this view, but we also know that the heavily censored, state-controlled, agenda-driven media is not going to change the way it disseminates information. After all, the media’s objective is not to inform but to shape public opinion.
But we’re getting off-topic. What we want to show is that Israel did not agree to the ceasefire because it had achieved its strategic objectives, but because it was getting hammered and wanted to stop the bleeding. We make that judgement based on a shortlist of the key military, intelligence, industrial, energy, and R&D facilities that were struck by precision guided ballistic missiles that wreaked havoc across Israel."
Full article continued here:
o
"Customer Service is Dead! We Are All Suffering"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 6/28/25
"Customer Service is Dead!
We Are All Suffering"
"Customer service is broken - and I’m here to tell you why it matters more than ever. From fast-food chaos at McDonald’s to the ongoing disaster that is Carvana’s customer support, it seems like nobody cares about quality service anymore. In today’s video, I’ll share my personal experiences, discuss the latest business news, and break down how failing customer service is impacting industries everywhere. Plus, we’ll cover topics like the struggling housing market, rising insurance costs, and even some updates on inflation and the used car market. We also dive into the challenges major companies like Carvana, Audi, and Subway are facing, not to mention how poor customer service can affect everything from healthcare to real estate. On top of that, I’ve got insights on the latest economic trends, including the rising cost of living, inflation updates, and what businesses are doing to adapt - or fail."
Comments here:
Friday, June 27, 2025
Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap 27 June"
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 6/27/25
"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern:
Weekly Wrap 27 June"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Prelude, "After the Goldrush"
Prelude, "After the Goldrush", A Cappella
o
Prelude, "After the Goldrush", Live
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can appear quite thin. Some spiral galaxies appear even thinner than NGC 3717, which is actually seen tilted just a bit. Spiral galaxies form disks because the original gas collided with itself and cooled as it fell inward. Planets may orbit in disks for similar reasons.
The featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a light-colored central bulge composed of older stars beyond filaments of orbiting dark brown dust. NGC 3717 spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 60 million light years away toward the constellation of the Water Snake (Hydra)."
Chet Raymo, “Retreat From Reason”
“Retreat From Reason”
by Chet Raymo
“Is there a flight from reason in the United States? Everywhere we look, science is under attack. In government. In the schools. In the churches. We are offered faith-based substitutes. The “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic novels outsells everything else on the shelves. People are more interested in astrology than astronomy. Intelligent design is championed at the highest levels of government. Alternative medicine - faith healing, homeopathy, energy therapies, New Age healing, and the like - is more popular than ever. Scripture and revelation are embraced as more reliable sources of knowledge than anything we might learn empirically. We are entering, it seems, a new Dark Age. For a substantial number of our fellow citizens, it's as if the Enlightenment never happened.
Let me take you back to the Hellenistic city of Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile River in Egypt, in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. Alexandria was then the seat of a magnificent flowering of mathematical and scientific thought. The city welcomed all comers - Eratosthenes from Cyrene, Aristarchus from Samos, Archimedes from Sicily, Apollonius from Rhodes, Hipparchus from Nicaea, Galen from Pergamon, and so on - the only requirement being an inquisitive mind and a bent for explaining the world in terms that made no reference to the gods. Geography and astronomy became mathematical sciences. Eratosthenes measured the size of the Earth. Aristarchus deduced the sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon.
These spectacular achievements get no more than passing mention in textbooks of Western Civilization. We learn in school about the Golden Age of Greece and the glory that was Rome, Sophocles and Ovid, the Parthenon and the Pantheon, triremes and aqueducts, but very little of the invention of scientific thinking in the white city at the mouth of the Nile.
Alexandria was built on a ribbon of land between Lake Mareotis and the Mediterranean Sea. It was graced with forums, temples, marketplaces, palaces, a double harbor with a famous lighthouse, quays, warehouses, and, prominently, a museum ("place of the muses"), and the famous library over which Eratosthenes presided. The museum and library were together the equivalent of a great modern university. It was the dream of the first rulers of Alexandria - the Ptolemys - that the library would possess a copy of every book in the known world, and within a century hundreds of thousands of scrolls were collected within its walls. By the middle of the first century B.C. Diodorus of Sicily could say that Alexandria was "the first city of the civilized world, certainly far ahead of all the rest in elegance and extent and riches and luxury."
In his book "The Greeks and the Irrational", the scholar E. R. Dodds was thinking of the Greek culture of Alexandria when he wrote: "Despite its lack of political freedom, the society of the third century B.C. was in many ways the nearest approach to an 'open' society that the world had yet seen, and nearer than any that would be seen again until modern times." It was a society confident of its powers. Aristotle had asked his fellow citizens to recognize a divine spark within themselves: the intellect. Men and women who exercise reason can live like gods, he said. For Zeno, the human intellect was not merely akin to God, it is God, a portion of the divine substance. Temples are superfluous, he said; God's true temple is the human intellect.
Of this supreme confidence in rational thought, the Alexandrians created a new empirical, mathematical way of knowing. But the seeds of irrationality were also there, embedded in popular culture, or perhaps embedded in the human soul. Soon enough, supernaturalism returned. Astrology and magical healing replaced astronomy and medicine. Cults flourished, rationalists were scapegoated, and scientific culture began to decline.
The old dualisms - mind and matter, God and nature, soul and body - which the rationalists had striven to overcome, reasserted themselves with fresh vigor. Dodds calls it "the return of the irrational." He writes: "As the intellectuals withdrew further into a world of their own, the popular mind was left increasingly defenseless. . .and left without guidance, a growing number relapsed with a sigh of relief into the pleasures and comforts of the primitive. . . better the rigid determinism of the astrological Fate than the terrifying burden of daily responsibility."
Harvard historian of science Gerald Holton sees a similarity between Dodds' description of the decline of Greek culture and the resurgence of anti-science in our own time. Once again, astrology, magical healing, and other kinds of superstitious thinking are in ascendancy. Once again, cults flourish and rationalists are scapegoated.
The Greek experience shows that movements to delegitimize science are always present, says Holton, ready to bend civilization their way by the glorification of folk belief, violence, mystification, and the rabid ideologies of ethnic and nationalistic passions. Dodds calls it "the fear of freedom - the unconscious flight from the heavy burden of individual choice which an open society lays upon its members."
Science can only prosper in a free and open society, in an atmosphere of rational skepticism where traditional patterns of thought are challenged and subjected to critical scrutiny. Science will only flourish when a people have confidence in the power of the human intellect to make sense of the world."
- http://www.sciencemusings.com/
"The Great Thing..."
"The great thing about the internet is that you get to meet people you
would otherwise only meet if you were committed to the same asylum."
- Robert Brault
"20 Big Restaurant Chains Are Closing Several Locations All Over America"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 6/27/25
"20 Big Restaurant Chains Are
Closing Several Locations All Over America"
"In the past 180 days, over 1,500 restaurant locations have permanently shut their doors across America—that's more than 8 restaurants closing every single day. This isn't just bad business decisions. What's happening right now is a perfect storm reshaping how Americans eat and spend money. When was the last time you went to a sit-down restaurant on a weeknight? For millions of families, that answer is "months ago" - because a family dinner at Applebee's now costs what used to be a week of groceries.
We're seeing skyrocketing rents, doubled labor costs, and customers who've fundamentally changed their spending habits. The restaurants closing are caught in the middle—too expensive for cash-strapped families, not premium enough for the upper class still dining out. What you're about to see is how this shift is playing out across 20 major chains. But here's what will shock you: the first seven chains are just the warm-up. Starting with number eight, you're about to see something absolutely insane."
Comments here:
"Credit Card Companies Will Sue Your A$$ Off, 6 Million Borrowers Will Have Wages Garnished"
Jeremiah Babe, 6/27/25
"Credit Card Companies Will Sue Your A$$ Off,
6 Million Borrowers Will Have Wages Garnished"
Comments here:
"California Dreamin’ in LALA Land"
"California Dreamin’ in LALA Land"
by MN Gordon
“I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.”
– Brian Wilson, R.I.P.
Hella, Iceland - "Southern California has wonderful weather. Within the coastal zone it’s especially wonderful. The sun shines brightly every day, there’s low humidity, and a cool breeze wafts off the Pacific Ocean making things perfectly pleasant. You just can’t beat it. But for every sweet smelling rose there’s a stem full of jagged thorns. In Southern California, the traffic, cost of living, state and local government taxes, and the large swaths of urban blight and homeless encampments fall far short of perfection.
The remnant luster of Hollywood’s golden age was irreversibly corroded with the slaying of Sharon Tate and her unborn baby by the Manson Family in the early morning hours of August 9, 1969. By then, the cultural decline of Los Angeles was already well underway.
Brian Wilson lost his mind in 1964. The Watts Riots burned hot in 1965. And by 1967, Pacific Ocean Park – a rival to Disneyland – had fallen to terminal disrepair. The inflation of the 1970s blighted the expansive boulevards and urban sprawl. By the 1980s kids like Jordan Hiller were overdosing on doors and fours. Others found joy in bashing their heads in. Filmmaker Penelope Spheeris captured the aesthetic in the documentary, "The Decline of Western Civilization."
The delusion of California Dreamin’ over the years has most faithfully emanated from Los Angeles – LALA Land. During the pre-World War II days, before the mania to splatter every square foot of its surface with concrete took hold of the local spirits, the place was already a magnet for eccentrics, pyromaniacs, and hucksters galore.
Howard Hughes, a total madman, would dream up his latest flying machine and then crash it into Beverly Hills. There was also Griffith J. Griffith, who amassed a fortune in the mining industry. Later Griffith shot his wife in the face in a Santa Monica Hotel and then commuted his time in San Quentin to just two years by donating the land for Griffith Park to Los Angeles. He also funded the city’s observatory. Without Griffith’s private act of preservation, the city wouldn’t have any open space left to get lost in.
Rigorous Flexibility: When it comes to immigration status, many Southern California cities have had a modus operandi of rigorous flexibility. Not having proper documentation has been a pesky detail to be readily ignored. Over many decades, things have gotten completely out of hand.
Your lowly editor was a middling student at Encanto Elementary school on 65th Street and Broadway in San Diego in the late-1980s. This is about 14 miles from the international border with Tijuana, Mexico. Some of his classmates crossed the border with their parents each morning on commuter green cards to attend school. He later moved to the big bad LA Basin in the mid-1990s. There he met his fetching bride who’d immigrated from Mexico City to LA as a child, gaining citizenship under Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program.
When the Mayflower disembarked at Plymouth Rock in 1620, John Smith and his fellow Pilgrims didn’t care if they were citizens of the New World. We doubt the thought even crossed the mind. Their focus was on carving out a new life in a new land that was free from the religious persecution they fled in England.
The Ten Commandments given to Moses make no mention of citizenship. That’s not to say present day immigration laws are vetoed by the Old Testament. We’re merely recognizing that the road to citizenship does not always follow a path -- or a morality – that’s straight and narrow.
Rules, by definition, are made to be broken. For many decades, America has had porous borders. At the same time, immigration laws were never reformed to address this reality. People were allowed to enter the country illegally. Yet nothing was done to account for or incorporate them. Ultimately, this disconnect led to what is now an absolute cluster.
No Papers: President Trump was voted into office to clean house on illegal immigration. Tightening up border security after the failure of the Biden administration was essential. But the ship for wholesale deportation sailed long ago. Things have been so out of control for so long that it’s entirely unworkable.
The City of LA is broad and expansive. There are many affluent areas with trophy homes and estate properties on the west side, cloistered in the hills. Brentwood, Westwood, Pacific Palisades, Holmby Hills, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Beverly Glen, Hancock Park, and others. These areas are in stark contrast with the areas of the city in the east and south, which are so hideous they lacerate the eye.
What’s more, there are countless unsightly cities that span east through the San Gabriel Valley and south to Long Beach. These are cities you’ve never heard of and would never go to, which are jumbled together like shipping containers on Terminal Island. East LA, Temple City, El Monte, South El Monte, La Puente, Pomona, Vernon, Maywood, Commerce, Huntington Park, Bell, Cudahy, Bell Gardens, South Gate, Lynwood, Paramount, Compton, Gardena, Lawndale, Hawthorne, and many, many more. These cities are massively populated with illegal immigrants.
We don’t know what the demographic breakdown of Huntington Park was when our grandparents lived there during the dark depression days of the 1930s. But we suppose it was far different than the 97 percent Hispanic population recorded in 2024 census data. Of this, about half were born outside of the USA. It’s not a stretch to say that the majority of this foreign-born population doesn’t have papers showing them to be of legal standing. In fact, a decade ago, Huntington Park swore in city commissioners without legal immigration status.
The city’s population density is estimated to be 18,000 people per square mile. At this density you’d expect an abundance of high-rise apartments. Instead, the city’s housing is characterized by single story dwellings and two-story infill developments. What this means is several families are regularly crowded into 800 square-foot housing units. The surrounding cities noted above have similar demographic and density characteristics.
LALA Land is Coming to a Town Near You: The Trump administrations recent ICE raids and the subsequent counter protests have shined a light on a madness that has long been ignored. The protestors, for their part, seem to be unclear about what they are after. Many are seen waving flags from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere, as symbols of defiance. But at the same time, they’re protesting deportation to the countries of which flags they wave. Shouldn’t they be waving American flags if they want to stay in America?
Sometimes in life mistakes are made that can never be reversed. When left to run wild over many decades they are impossible to go back and correct. Targeting Home Depot parking lots and restaurant kitchens with the goal of wholesale deportation may be perceived as a solution in the eyes of MAGA. But so is cutting off your head as a solution to a headache. Moreover, is ICE really prepared to deport close to one million people from just LA County alone and upwards of 15 million people from the U.S.?
The current circumstances are a total mess. Politicians, however, refuse to appreciate them or work to address them in a positive and constructive way. Former California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once had a secret love child with the Guatemalan housekeeper of his Brentwood estate, recently pointed his finger at the failures of political hacks: “This is the result of Democrats and Republicans not being able to come together in this immigration reform. And so that’s what needs to be done so that you don’t have to go and start arresting people in the first place, so we know who is in this country and who is working here, who has the temporary working permit, who has the permanent working permit.
We don’t even know who is in here. For decades now, they have been avoiding the subject because it’s an advantage to both parties to not do it. So they’re all political hacks, party hacks, rather than public servants.”
We don’t expect the political hacks will get their act together anytime soon. What this means is, LALA Land is coming to a town near you."
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