Prepper News, 12/7/25
"Alert! 'It's All Fake!', Major Escalation
In One Month Warns Russian Spy"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, December 7, 2025
Free Download: John Maynard Keynes, "The Economic Consequences Of The Peace",
Freely download "The Economic Consequences Of The Peace",
by John Maynard Keynes, here:
"Yemen Proved It: Israel Won't Survive Next War with Iran"
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Full screen recommended.
Larry C. Johnson, Lawrence Wilkerson, 12/7/25
"Yemen Proved It: Israel Won't Survive Next War with Iran"
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o
"Honey Badgers"
Full screen recommended.
"Scott Ritter has humorously described the Yemeni Houthis as "the honey badgers of the Middle East, absolutely fearless and relentlessly ferocious." They just simply don't care. They've declared war on Israel while all the other Muslim states just talk, and send missiles and drones to attack Israel and attack any ships connected to Israel in any way. They totally control the 12 mile wide Bab-el-Mandab ("Gate of Grief") strait connecting the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, which transits 40% of the world's oil. Closing that is having catastrophic consequences on global economies, and the Houthis know it. And so it is...
Honey badgers are the Italian mafia of the animal kingdom. No one, and I mean no one, wants to mess with these savages. They literally wake up and choose violence daily. They are regarded as the most fearless animal in the wild and they back that up every day, all while looking like a ferret on steroids. They'll combat anything from lions, leopards, hyenas and even cobras and pythons. But how did they become so fearless? How do these compact sized danger-weasels take on the deadliest predators like it was a regular Sunday’s brunch with the girls? These are moments of honey badgers being straight up savages."
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"A Look to the Heavens"
“The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its more familiar outlines are seen in the brighter central region of the nebula in this impressive wide-angle view. But the composite image combines many short and long exposures to also reveal an extremely faint outer halo. At an estimated distance of 3,000 light-years, the faint outer halo is over 5 light-years across.
Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. More recently, some planetary nebulae are found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years. Visible on the left, some 50 million light-years beyond the watchful planetary nebula, lies spiral galaxy NGC 6552.”
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"Our planet is a tiny porthole, looking over a cosmic sea.
Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception?"
"The Poet: Wendell Berry, "The Circles Of Our Lives"
"The Circles Of Our Lives"
"Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon,
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.
Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.
And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone
into the darker circles of return,
Within the circles of our lives..."
- Wendell Berry
o
“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust,
swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of Infinity.
Life is Eternal.
We have stopped for a moment to encounter
each other, to meet, to love, to share.
This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in Eternity.”
- Paulo Coelho
o
"We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars... Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being."
- Thornton Wilder
The Universe
“There are no accidents. If it's appeared on your life radar, this is why: to teach you that dreams come true; to reveal that you have the power to fix what's broken and heal what hurts; to catapult you beyond seeing with just your physical senses; and to lift the veils that have kept you from seeing that you're already the person you dreamed you'd become. There are no accidents. And believe me, that was one heck of a dream.”
“Tallyho,”
The Universe
“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”
"Hell..."
"Many people don't fear a hell after this life and that's because hell is on this earth, in this life. In this life there are many forms of hell that people walk through, sometimes for a day, sometimes for years, sometimes it doesn't end. The kind of hell that doesn't burn your skin; but burns your soul. The kind of hell that people can't see; but the flames lap at your spirit. Heaven is a place on earth, too! It's where you feel freedom, where you're not afraid. No more chains. And you hear your soul laughing."
- C. JoyBell C.
I believe it was Sartre who said, "This is Hell, cleverly disguised just
enough to keep us from escaping." Look at the world... look around.
I believe he may be right...
"I Am Done"
"I Am Done"
by OHMama
"I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.
My 1940s born Dad raised me to be patriotic and proud, to love the war bird airplanes of his era as much as he does, and to respect our flag and our country as a sacred thing. I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift a person could have. I grew up thinking that our country was as strong, and honest and true as my Dad. I grew up thinking I was free.
As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from under us.
I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.
We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year without going into debt.
At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.
I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the medicine cabinet.
I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.
I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility.
Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence. And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.
And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They were probably relieved that upstart Trump was gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.
I will not vote again; they’ve made it abundantly clear that my voice doesn’t matter. Whatever irrational, suicidal lunacy the nanny states thinks is best is what I’ll get. What it decided I need is a geriatric pedophile who shouldn’t be charged with anything more rigorous than choosing between tapioca and rice pudding at the old folks home, and a casting couch skank who rails against racism while being a descendant of slave owners.
I’m free to dismember a baby in my womb and kill it because “my body my choice”, but God help me if I won’t cover my face with a germ laden Linus-worthy security blanket or refuse to let them inject genetically altering chemicals into my body or my child’s. I can be doxed, fired, shunned and destroyed for daring to venture that there are only 2 genders as proven by DNA, but a disease with a 99+% survival rate for most humans is a deadly pandemic worth murdering an economy over. Because science. Idiocracy is real, and we are living it. Dr. Lexus would be an improvement over Fauci.
I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heartbreaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.
I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to or from the society they live in.
I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but f**k these motherf**kers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all, mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all."
"720,000 Layoffs and Stores Were EMPTY On Black Friday - Now Walmart Is Panicking"
Full screen recommended.
RV Crisis, 12/7/25
"720,000 Layoffs and Stores Were EMPTY
On Black Friday - Now Walmart Is Panicking"
"On the biggest shopping day of the year, America finally did something it never does: it stayed home. No lines wrapped around buildings. No rush when the doors opened. This is the same year roughly seven hundred twenty thousand people lost their jobs and were folded into a neat statistic. The empty stores are not just embarrassing for Walmart - they are a clue. To understand why those empty aisles matter, you have to follow the trail back through those layoffs, those bills, and those shrinking paychecks. See, the real question is not “why did people skip the sales,” but “what broke underneath their budgets first” - and how that has one of the biggest retailers in the world quietly panicking."
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"I Can't Believe How Expensive My Grocery Bill Was - How Are Families Surviving?"
Jeremiah Babe, 12/7/25
"I Can't Believe How Expensive My Grocery Bill Was -
How Are Families Surviving?"
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o
Adventures With Danno, 12/7/25
"Grocery Price War, Who's Winning?"
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"15 Amish Foods We Will All Be Eating Again Soon"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 12/7/25
"15 Amish Foods We Will All Be Eating Again Soon"
"Grocery prices are out of control and showing no signs of slowing down. But the Amish have been thriving for generations without depending on supermarkets or supply chains. Their recipes were built for exactly the times we're living through right now. In this video, I'm sharing 15 traditional Amish foods you should learn to make before the next shortage hits. From homemade beef jerky that lasts months without refrigeration to a dry soup mix that replaces dozens of expensive canned soups, these are the recipes your great grandparents used to feed their families through the Great Depression.
You'll learn how to render your own tallow for cooking and skin treatments, can your own vegetables for year round nutrition, and make everything from breakfast casseroles that feed a crowd on a budget to comfort food classics like Amish meatloaf and butterscotch pie.
With inflation showing no signs of stopping and geopolitical tensions threatening supply chains again, knowing how to cook from scratch isn't just a nice skill to have. It's real security. The kind that no government program or credit card limit can provide.
These aren't complicated recipes. Most use pantry staples you probably already have. But the knowledge behind them? That's something our modern world has almost forgotten. The Amish never forgot because they never stopped needing it. Maybe it's time the rest of us caught up. If this video helps you feel more prepared for whatever's coming, drop a comment and let me know which recipe you're trying first. And if you want more content on building real food security for your family, make sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don't miss what's coming next."
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"An Outline of Post-Western Civilization"
"An Outline of Post-Western Civilization"
by Paul Rosenberg
Western civilization is over. It may live on in some of us, but at the public level it has been replaced. Every major institution has thrown in with the new civilization. The question facing us, then, is what this new civilization is like. And so, with the usual caveats, here are the essential components of the new boss, Post-Western civilization:
Governance: Democracy may remain as a sort of talisman, but fewer and fewer changes of power will be forthcoming. Already Europe is controlled by unelected apparatchiks and the United States is ruled by executive order. (Canada has perhaps been worse and Australia has very definitely been worse.) Resistance has been minimal. Public information has been censored and police forces have been willing to enforce almost anything.
Commerce: Stakeholders (giant corporations, states and a few others) have taken control. Small businesses have been destroyed en masse and the middle class has been hollowed out. Commerce and state are no longer separated.
Debt: Debt would normally be considered part of commerce, but over the past two decades it has been universally available and Westerners have used it to maintain an illusion of prosperity. This left them unable to resist a usurping civilization. To put it simply, Westerners have been silenced by a variant of Coach Lombardi’s dictum: Debt makes cowards of us all.
Property: Home ownership is now passe. All ownership is passe. The houses of America are being bought-up by pension funds, hedge funds and giant corporations (aka, stakeholders). The burden of property is no longer something for “the people” to bear; they are expected to rent everything.
Law: Post-Western civilization features the pre-Christian model of two legal classes. Bear in mind that the old names for these classes were lords and serfs. The new model employs the terms stakeholders and people, but the difference is mainly semantic. Once you have two separate legal classes, with different obligations and privileges, serfdom is more or less a given, especially once the concept of profit has been demonized. Certainly the word “serfs” will not be used, but stakeholders will be privileged and people will not. Already the spokesmen for post-Western civilization are saying, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” The new boss will be very much like the medieval boss.
Public rhetoric: Convincing masses of people that your ideas ought to be followed is essential in every civilization, and post-Western civilization has moved to a new model of public rhetoric. As we’ve seen, that model is outrage. Facebook and Twitter broadcast the call, a thousand surplus intellectuals find clever ways to demonize the designated heretics, and the group coalesces around that which they hate. This is why, among other things, racism is back, this time targeting whites. It’s all driven by outrage, which routes around both tolerance and reason.
Education: Quality in education is pretty well over. Lockdown-schooling is a failure, which is useful if you like unchallenged power. For the moment, homeschooling and private education remain, but the new system will eventually turn it’s attention toward them. (It will maintain a few elite schools for itself.)
Religion: With Christianity ejected from the West, replacement religions have arisen. Greenism (by whatever name) is the dominant new religion, especially in Europe. Socialism remains a popular compliment. Man’s soul abhors a vacuum, and these are religions in every way that matters. They have clear dogmas, heretics and even inquisitors. Church and state have rejoined.
Philosophy: Philosophically, post-Western culture is anti-rational. Post-modernism is flatly ridiculous (“We’ll use arguments to convince students than no argument can mean anything”), but it’s firmly in place. It’s cousins, critical theory and deconstruction, have combined with it to produce millions of surplus intellectuals who know nothing but how to tear down, and who despise the old ethic of production.
Science: Science in post-Western civilization has a new epistemology. That is, it no longer believes that truth comes from rigorous testing and verification. Rather, truth comes from institutional consensus. Break with it and you’ll lose your job. Knowledge and state have rejoined.
The press: The purpose of the press in post-Western civilization is to “protect the people from bad information.” This was necessitated by social media, and it will be tightened over time. Censorship is the new norm and disgraceful intellectuals are lining up to defend it.
Money: “Honest money” is over. Money is now created (in any amounts) by state-aligned networks. Bitcoin and gold still exist, but they are either demonized or ignored. And so long as compliance continues, a cashless and fully controlled monetary system will be enforced, combined with a social credit score. The Lords of Wall Street will either be eliminated in a night of the long knives, or else will be given privileged seats at the table.
So… So, there’s a first outline of the new civilization. Whether we like it or not, this is what now stands in the public square."
"Great Was It's Fall"
"Great Was It's Fall"
by Edward Curtin
"When it comes, it comes on slowly
The day feels holy, a hush falls down
Whispered names, remembered faces
From desperate places, all gather ‘round"
Tom Paxton, “Come on, Holy”
"Early morning and the first heavy snow is falling. It is beautiful. I walk around the lake in the holy hush. Alone except for two newly arrived ducks swimming on an open patch of icing water. When I stop to watch them, the soft sound of the falling snow grows gradually louder, beating drums, like truly listening to Beethoven, not the lionized one, about whose honored status James Agee wrote “is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas,” but the Beethoven whose music you won’t hear nicely but will hurt you and for which you should be glad.
Although I have come here to flee for an interlude the sound of the world’s anguish and to contemplate its beauty, I am deflected, as usual. How could I not be? Isn’t it true as the poet Rilke said, that “beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror,” and we, with all our strange thoughts inside us, try to swallow the sobs that accompany all our joys.
My brother-in-law died unexpectedly a few days ago.
I watch the ducks swim so placidly in circles and I wonder.
I realize that my thoughts are meaningless to most but me, a minor writer in a world of screamers, yet I record them here to learn what I may think and to share with a few other human souls the musings of a distraught man in a world made mad and running red like a butcher’s bench with the blood of the innocent shed by ruthless people. I am old but hope I am forever young with a strong foundation that will help me find some insights along this path. Who knows?
I have spent many decades lost in beauty and an intense scholar’s study of the propaganda the world’s rulers use to convince the gullible that their intentions are pure and their actions are carried out for the common good. Few have heeded my findings. Why should they?
While the rulers’ endless lies should be apparent, they are not, for too many people have built their own lives upon foundations made of sand, and though they are shaking, few believe they will fall. And to think the official doll’s house of fabricated reality within which they dwell and upon whose words they build their lives will also fall – that is deemed impossible.
William Saroyan, in his 1939 play “The Time of Your Life,” (winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award) has a minor character, the Arab, repeat, “No foundation. All the way down the line.” That is all he has to say. “No foundation. All the way down the line.” Concise and cutting to the bone. True then, but much, much truer now.
Then came World War II and the defeat of Germany, Japan, and their allies with the United States dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after fire-bombing Tokyo, Dresden, Cologne and dozens of other Japanese and German cities, intentionally killing vast numbers of civilians.
And if that wasn’t enough, the future CIA Director Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and colleagues brought nearly 2,000 Nazis scientists, engineers, biological weapons experts to the U.S. to work in government programs, while helping thousands more flee justice by helping them escape to South America and other places along the “rat lines.”
Thus the U.S. became the evil they denounced in others, and it could rightly be said Hitler triumphed in defeat. Upon this evil foundation, which is now crumbling, the U.S. empire was built despite its alleged Christian underpinnings.
There’s an old saying: And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.
And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. Mathew 7:21-29
Being alone on my walk helps me focus on the elementary truth that we are all mortal and that beauty is terrifying since it evokes the anguish of its and our endings. And when we go, end, pass on, or die – take your pick – all the secret thoughts, hopes, memories, lives, and dreams we have had will vanish with us, if we have not, while living, found a way to tell the truths we harbor in our secret hearts. We will be but mysterious melodies others might hum without grasping our lyrics, as the Gershwin brothers referenced in their song “They Can’t Take that Away From Me.” Our melodies may linger on for a while once our songs have ended, as the songwriter says, but who we really were will vanish with us into the mists of time.
In quiet moments of timeless reflection, everyone knows we are complex creatures; just as they quickly don their masquerades when time resumes to face the faces that they face to deny such complexity.
When I left the ducks to their circle games, I continued on my way along the lake. The snow blew from the north into my face and made it hard to see. The lake and the neighboring woods disappeared and so did my thoughts as I constantly wiped my eyes of snow. But I felt a certain joy beyond telling.
As the snow and wind eased up, I saw up a hill through a cut in the woods a large doe with her three fawns grazing under some sheltering pine trees on posted property owned by a local college. A smart mother, I thought, since I knew shotgun deer hunting season was underway.
It was then that the hushed peace of the morning was broken by a few shotgun blasts from the western woods. Did the doe and her fawns, who in days past I would often meet and converse with at very close range along the road, take heed? Can such creatures learn to avoid men with guns? Why were the hunters on the prowl for deer to kill? Did they need the meat to eat, or did they just get their kicks from the killing and slicing and gutting of once living creatures who never did them any harm?
I wondered – and leave that wondering to you – as my mind turned to the genocide in Gaza and the murder of the innocent in so many other places by men with guns and weapons more amazing in their killing power, manufactured in spotless factories by people indifferent to how their bread is buttered. But I knew that the workers on the factory floors were no more guilty than those whose butter comes from investments in these ghoulish places. Yes, Thoreau knew: "Do not ask how your bread is buttered, it will make you sick if you do – and the like. A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. If within the sophisticate man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil’s angels."
When I was about four years old, I went with my mother to the local butcher shop. When Sol the butcher came to wait on my mother, I noticed his white apron was covered in blood, so I asked him if he cut himself. He laughed and asked me if I would like a slice of liverwurst.
Didn’t Hitler claim to be a vegetarian because of animal suffering?
The shotgun blasts increased on my way home. I stopped to gather some long-needle pine and wild red berry branches for our mantle since it was December and the birth of the Prince of Peace was approaching. My knife slipped and I cut my finger, the blood dripping onto the white snow matched the berries’ redness. It was startlingly beautiful, but the cut was painful as I stanched it with a few tissues.
When I got home and was bandaging my finger and my wife was decorating our mantle with my cuttings, I recalled an analysis of our current situation offered by the French demographer, Emmanuel Todd, “The Dislocation of the West.”
Todd is an all facts guy, an historian, a sociologist, a middle-of the roader, far from a romantic dreamer, an analyst of the extensive data that he gathers. Years back, based on data analysis, he correctly predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. Now he is predicting the fall of the West based on certain specific variables that he considers key. When I read his work and heard him talk, I concurred completely, for I had for years, based on my work in the sociology of religion, reached the same conclusion without all his data to back me up.
We in the West, he says, are living at a time when nihilism, meaninglessness, and zero religious belief is the norm. It has come on slowly over a century and a half to the point where nothing seems holy. We have passed from a Zombie religious state when traditional religious values, but not belief, survived somewhat, to a time when nihilism undergirds everything. A nihilistic foundation, meaning no foundation. Reality has been undermined and a zombie state of lostness prevails, and irrational pure evil state nihilism lives for endless war. Moral values have disappeared behind a façade of fake belief.
If Thoreau were around, he might ask people what they really believed about God, death, and moral values, and the stuttering responses would befit the times. But no one is asking.
The song is over but only the melody lingers on, even as Bing Crosby sings “O Little Town of Bethlehem” on a cyber sale at Amazon.
Todd is a data man, a non-believer, a normal academic, and yet from his research he probably sounds to many as if he is unhinged. But he is just repeating what Jesus, Saroyan’s character, and the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (in 1948) all said was happening with the shaking and undermining of the Western foundation. Hell would break loose. Nihilism would triumph.
And it did, of course, and will unless... I don’t know; Todd has no answer. "I think of all the blood in the woods, on the tracks, all the blood being shed everywhere, the killers licking their chops, the earth indifferently drinking all the blood, and the words of the French poet Jacques Prevert’s “Song in the Blood”:
"Where’s it going all this spilled blood?
Murder’s blood, war’s blood, misery’s blood,
And the blood of men tortured in prisons,
And the blood of children calmly tortured by their papa and their mama,
And the blood of men whose heads bleed in padded cells,
And the roofers blood when the roofer slips and falls from the roof,
And the blood that comes and flows in great gushes with the newborn,
The mother cries,
The baby cries,
The blood flows,
The earth turns,
The earth doesn’t stop turning,
The blood doesn’t stop flowing,
Where’s it going all this spilled blood?
Blood of the blackjacked,
Of the humiliated,
Of suicides,
Of firing squad victims,
Of the condemned,
And the blood of those that die just like that by accident."
But then my wife suggested that Todd and I may be wrong. When religious belief was strong in the West, weren’t nations and people slaughtering their enemies in the name of religion? Don’t many social scientists use data to argue points that lack counterpoints? Haven’t people long been fanatical killers in the name of religion and for their gods? When did morals or religious belief ever stop the shedding of blood? Such times are few and far between. Perhaps religious belief is not the explanatory variable that Todd thinks it is and seemed so to me when I first read his work and even concurred with it a few minutes ago.
Could not the key be that mysterious human attribute – love – that like despair cannot be measured, that finds in every other living creature a part of oneself, just the inkling in our hearts that everyone is us and should always be treated as an end and not a means, especially at a time when the spiritual has been subordinated to the technical, everything has become means, and the ends have disappeared.
It may sound laughable to suggest that Fyodor Dostoevsky explained it better than all the data gatherers in his story “The Dream of A Ridiculous Man”: "It is so simple: in one day, in one hour, everything would be settled at once. The one thing is – love thy neighbor as thyself – that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live."
Or as Jesus said and other great religious leaders affirmed: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity [love], I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." - Corinthians 13
Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Not this fool. I can only wonder as I wander in the beautiful falling snow. Like Dostoevsky, “I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men. Yet all of them only laugh at my belief.” It’s understandable."
"Economic Decline Continues Relentlessly"
"Economic Decline Continues Relentlessly"
by David Haggith
"American workers are getting steam-rolled by tariffs. The economy has, according to ISM (the Institute for Supply Management), been contracting ever since Trump took office. Manufacturing has shrunk for nine months in a row, and while production saw a tiny bump in October, new orders have gone down for all of the last three months, so that took production back down to a lower point. (No sense producing more, if people are not buying.) Lowering production, equals declining employment, and we easily see that now in the data. ‘Business conditions remain soft as a result of higher costs from tariffs, the government shutdown, and increased global uncertainty’
Chaos comes with a cost. As tariffs have flashed on and off and higher and lower, businesses have been saying constantly that this is creating uncertainty that makes intelligent planning next to impossible. I’ve been trying to keep that complaint up front in these editorials, knowing it was going to take a serious toll over time.
American manufacturing contracted for the ninth straight month, a survey showed, as uncertainty tied to ever-changing tariffs and a historic government shutdown weighed on business. Not only is new manufacturing not moving to America to any significant degree, but existing manufacturing is suffering because tariffs cause foreign counter-tariffs that hurt those manufacturers’ exports, while US tariffs cause higher costs for production due to so many imported materials and parts. It’s all wearing thin at this point.
“At any given point, trade with our international partners is clouded and difficult,” one executive at an electrical-equipment maker told ISM. “Suppliers are finding more and more errors when attempting to export to the U.S. - before I even have the opportunity to import.”
All of this, of course, has also been taking a toll on employment, which I’ve tried to point out by using non-government sources, as government data fails to come through. Manufacturers continued to reduce staff by leaving open jobs unfilled or resorting to layoffs in some cases. Some two-thirds of companies said “managing head counts is still the norm at their companies, as opposed to hiring.”
As for future prospects that Manufacturers will realign their supply lines to the US, not really so: Many companies say overseas suppliers are still cheaper even after high U.S. tariffs are factored in, giving them little incentive to seek out domestic sources that in many cases don’t even exist.
It’s easier to say than do. It would take a long time to build factories to create the same supplies here, if investors could even be convinced it was worth the effort, given that their ability to export those supplies would be crimped by retaliatory tariffs and given that the foreign supplies, where they are available, still tend to cost less, so are tough to compete against. Simply put, The tariffs are “not having the intended effect, unfortunately.” Anyone reading here has had plenty of reason to believe all along that they never would.
Employment weakens: As for the employment impact, another article in today’s news points to just how much the impact has accumulated: Layoff announcements top 1.1 million this year, the most since 2020 pandemic. That’s actually, extraordinary, given that the layoffs in 2020 were the most extreme in US history as Trump forced unemployment through mandatory economic lockdowns.
Announced job cuts from U.S. employers moved further ahead of 1 million for the year in November as corporate restructuring, artificial intelligence and tariffs have helped pare job rolls, consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported Thursday. "Job cuts in November have risen above 70,000 only twice since 2008: in 2022 and in 2008…"
Companies have, at least, gotten enough heart over the years to stop timing layoffs for the holidays: “It was the trend to announce layoff plans toward the end of the year, to align with most companies’ fiscal year-ends. It became unpopular after the Great Recession especially, and best practice dictated layoff plans would occur at times other than the holidays,” said Challenger."
So, it is not surprising that …"November offered some relief from the more than 153,000 cuts announced in October, which was the highest total for the month in 22 years." Those figures from ADP are non-government cuts.
Employers have also announced 497,151 planned hires through the past year to present, but those planned hires are down 35% from the same point in 2024. The Trump administration tried its best to blame the layoffs on Democrats, of course: "Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick denied President Donald Trump’s tariffs were to blame after ADP reported a drop in private payrolls in November. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday denied that the Trump administration’s tariff policies were to blame after a new report showed a surprise drop in private payrolls in November.
Instead, Lutnick argued on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that the government shutdown temporarily slowed small-business activity…. “Remember, you had the Democratic shutdown, right? And what do you think happens to small business? The people who do business with the U.S. government, they know they’re not getting paid, so they sort of slow down their projects,” Lutnick said."
Nice try Lutnick, except you have no data to back that up. The report says nothing about any businesses claiming their layoffs were in any way related to the government shutdown. So, that’s just a guess and a miss because businesses that are generally doing well are reluctant to lay off employees due to a temporary government shutdown of indeterminate length. But the Cabinet secretary assured that those figures will “rebalance and they’ll regrow,” claiming “this is just a near-term event” and that “next year, the numbers are going to be fantastic.” O.K. We’ll let you have the last word, Sputnik."
"14,000,000 Layoffs, Grocery Bills Skyrocket, Rents Explode - America Is Out Of Control"
Full screen recommended.
RV Crisis, 12/7/25
"14,000,000 Layoffs, Grocery Bills Skyrocket,
Rents Explode - America Is Out Of Control"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Good And Bad In Our Economy"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 12/7/25
"The Good And Bad In Our Economy"
"The economy is shifting fast, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss out on the opportunities and pitfalls all around us. Repo Side Hustle: The Most Dangerous Job in America! In this video, I break down the crazy world of repossession work as a side hustle - arguably the riskiest gig in the U.S. right now! From license plate readers to insane commission opportunities, we’re diving into why this job could get you hurt but also make you money. Plus, we’re talking about what’s good and bad in the economy, from Dollar General’s expansion to the collapse of appliance chains like Howard’s. Are housing markets finally shifting to a buyer's game? Can Americans really afford these overpriced cars? And how about those $65,000 booze scams? It's madness out there, folks!"
Comments here:
"What Does Moscow Look Like Before New Year? A Magical Walk"
Full screen recommended.
Walk Silo, 12/7/25
"What Does Moscow Look Like
Before New Year? A Magical Walk"
"Moscow looks like a winter movie full of lights and magic right before New Year. Streets are glowing, Christmas markets are open, music fills the air, and the whole city feels festive. In this video, we take a walk through the heart of Moscow - from Red Square to beautifully decorated streets. Let’s see how Moscow prepares for New Year 2026. If you love travel, winter vibes, and New Year spirit, this video is for you."
Comments here:
"How to Be Human: Kahlil Gibran’s Recipe for Our Spiritual Perfection as a Species"
"How to Be Human: Kahlil Gibran’s Recipe
for Our Spiritual Perfection as a Species"
by Maria Popova
"We walk this earth as bewildered animals trying to recover the divinity within - descendants of the great apes who invented gods to mirror back to us the best in ourselves and bridle the worst, but we are still and always have been our own only shepherds.
In times of crisis for humanity, amid the genocides and the wars and the burning forests and the firing squads of self-righteousness, the only true remedy is to remember what it means to be human - the complexity of it, the contradictions, the panoply of capacities from which get to choose in becoming who we are, as persons and as peoples.
Every crisis of and for humanity is evidence that we have forgotten what we are - what Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931), writing in the interlude between two world wars, calls a “divinity which walks among the nations and speaks of love, pointing toward the paths of life, while the people laugh and mock its words and teachings.” In "The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul" (public library) - the wonderful collection of meditations, essays, and poems drawn from Gibran’s Arabic writings about the spiritual life - he writes:
We were a silent, hidden thought in the folds of oblivion, and we have become a voice that causes the heavens to tremble. We were a faint spark buried in the ash, but have become a fire blazing above the sheltered ravine.
Art by Ariana Fields from "What Do You Know?" by Aracelis Girmay
An epoch before Maya Angelou reckoned with our multitudes in her breathtaking spaceborne poem, insisting that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Gibran considers what it would take for us, “scions of the apes,” to attain spiritual perfection as a species: "Humankind will proceed toward perfection when it feels that humanity is: A limitless sky and a shoreless ocean, an ever-blazing flame, an eternally gleaming light, a wind when it gusts and when it is calm, a cloud when it thunders and lightnings and rains, a stream when it sings or roars, a tree when it blossoms in the spring and disrobes in the autumn, a mountain when it towers, a valley when it descends, and a field when it is fertile or barren.
When humankind has felt all these things, it will have reached the midpoint in its path toward perfection. If it wishes to arrive at the road to perfection, it must, if it perceives its own essence, feel that humanity is: An infant relying on its mother, a mature man responsible for his dependents, a youth lost among his desires and passions, an elderly man whose past and future wrestle with one another, a worshipper in his hermitage, a criminal in his cell, a scholar amidst his books and papers, a fool between the black of night and the dark of his day, a nun among the flowers of her faith and the thorns of her loneliness, a prostitute between the talons of her weakness and the claws of her neediness, the indigent between his bitterness and complaisance, the rich man between his ambitions and his submission, the poet between the fog of his evenings and the rays of his dawns. Should humankind prove able to experience and know all these things, it will arrive at perfection and become one shadow among the shadows of Gods."
If you could use some kindling for the fire of your faith in humanity, warm yourself with the story of how humanity saved the ginkgo and with E.B. White’s magnificent response to a man who had lost faith in humanity, then revisit Gibran on the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, and how to weather the uncertainties of love."
Read "The Vision", by Kahlil Gibran, online here:
"You Take This Thing..."
"That life. This life. It looks as if you can have both. I mean, they're both right there, one on top of the other, and it looks as if they'll blend. But they never will. So, you take this thing. You take this thing you want, and you put it in a box and you close the lid. You can let your fingers trace the cracks, the places where the light gets in, the dark gets out, but the lid stays on. You don't look inside. You don't look at this thing you want so much, because you Can. Not. Have. It. So there's this box, you know, with the thing inside, and you could throw it away or shoot it into space; you could set it on fire and watch it burn to ashes, but really, none of that would make a difference, because you cannot destroy what you want. It only makes you want it more. So. You take this thing you want and you put it in a box and you close the lid. And you hold the box close to your heart, which is where it wants to go, and you pretend it doesn't kill you every time you feel yourself breathe."
- Megan Hart
"Above All..."
"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love. "
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"