"720,000 Layoffs Killed Black Friday - 15 Big Retail Chains Are Falling Apart"

Full screen recommended.

RV Crisis, 12/21/25

"720,000 Layoffs Killed Black Friday - 

15 Big Retail Chains Are Falling Apart"

"Black Friday was supposed to be the rescue - this year it wasn’t. Instead of overtime and extra crews, two thousand twenty five brought layoffs in the hundreds of thousands, draining wallets long before anyone even reached the checkout line. It did not just change one weekend. It changed what “normal spending” looks like day to day. So what happens when the weekend that used to patch weak quarters stops doing its job? Chains cut payroll, vendors tighten terms, and stores tighten policies - quietly, carefully, while acting like nothing has changed. That is why this collapse does not always look like a collapse. It looks normal… right up until it doesn’t. So in this video we are revealing fifteen big retail chains that are falling apart, starting with one that still looks sleek, modern, and safe…"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"

"Pretty to think so..." Not how it ever was or will be...

Steve Cutts, "A Brief Disagreement"

Full screen recommended.

Steve Cutts, "A Brief Disagreement"

"A visual journey into mankind's 

favorite pastime throughout the ages."

"Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe. The advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare. According to Conway W. Henderson, "One source claims that 14,500 wars have taken place between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, costing 3.5 billion lives, leaving only 300 years of peace (Beer 1981: 20).] An unfavorable review of this estimate mentions the following regarding one of the proponents of this estimate: "In addition, perhaps feeling that the war casualties figure was improbably high, he changed 'approximately 3,640,000,000 human beings have been killed by war or the diseases produced by war' to 'approximately 1,240,000,000 human beings...'" The lower figure is more plausible but could still be on the high side considering that the 100 deadliest acts of mass violence between 480 BC and 2002 AD (wars and other man-made disasters with at least 300,000 and up to 66 million victims) claimed about 455 million human lives in total."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War

"It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human

 race proved to be nothing more than the story of an

ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump." 

- David Ormsby-Gore

And humanity just never, ever learns from it all...

"For Whom..."

“Life passes like a flash of lightning, whose blaze barely lasts long enough to see. While the earth and sky stand still forever, how swiftly changing time flies across man’s face. O you who sit over your full cup and do not drink, tell me – for whom are you still waiting?”

- Hermann Hesse

"Don't Take Anything Personally"

"Don't Take Anything Personally"

by Don Miguel Ruiz

"Whatever happens around you, don't take it personally. Using an earlier example, if I see you on the street and I say, "Hey, you are so stupid," without knowing you, it's not about you; it's about me. If you take it personally, perhaps you believe you are stupid. Maybe you think to yourself, "How does he know?  Is he clairvoyant, or can everybody see how stupid I am?"

You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said. As soon as you agree, the poison goes through you, and you are trapped in the dream of hell. What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about "me." During the period of our education, or our domestication, we learn to take everything personally. We think we are responsible for everything. Me, me, me, always me!

Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds. Their point of view comes from all the programming they received during domestication.

If someone gives you an opinion and says, "Hey, you look so fat," don't take it personally, because the truth is that this person is dealing with his or her own feelings, beliefs, and opinions. That person tried to send poison to you and if you take it personally, then you take that poison and it becomes yours. Taking things personally makes you easy prey for these predators, the black magicians. They can hook you easily with one little opinion and feed you whatever poison they want, and because you take it personally, you eat it up.

You eat all their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage. But if you do not take it personally, you are immune in the middle of hell. Immunity to poison in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement.

When you take things personally, then you feel offended, and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You make something big out of something so little, because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong. You also try hard to be right by giving them your own opinions. In the same way, whatever you feel and do is just a projection of your own personal dream, a reflection of your own agreements. What you say, what you do and the opinions you have are according to the agreements you have made- and these opinions have nothing to do with me.

It is not important to me what you think about me, and I don't take what you think personally. I don't take it personally when people say, "Miguel, you are the best," and I also don't take it personally when they say, "Miguel, you are the worst." I know that when you are happy you will tell me, "Miguel, you are such an angel!" But, when you are mad at me you will say, "Oh, Miguel, you are such a devil! You are so disgusting. How can you say those things?" Either way, it does not affect me because I know what I am. I don't have the need to be accepted. I don't have the need to have someone tell me, "Miguel, you are doing so good!" or "How dare you do that!"

No, I don't take it personally. Whatever you think, whatever you feel, I know is your problem and not my problem. It is the way you see the world. It is nothing personal, because you are dealing with yourself, not with me. Others are going to have their own opinion according to their belief system, so nothing they think about me is really about me, but it is about them.

You may even tell me, "Miguel, what you are saying is hurting me." But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way that I can take this personally. Not because I don't believe in you or don't trust you, but because I know that you see the world with different eyes, with your eyes. You create an entire picture or movie in your mind, and in that picture you are the director, you are the producer, you are the main actor or actress. Everyone else is a secondary actor or actress. It is your movie.

The way that you see that movie is according to the agreements you have made with life. Your point of view is something personal to you. It is no one's truth but yours. Then, if you get mad at me, I know you are dealing with yourself. I am the excuse for you to get mad. And you get mad because you are afraid, because you are dealing with fear. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will get mad at me. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will hate me. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will be jealous or sad.

If you live without fear, if you love, there is no place for any of these emotions. If you don't feel any of those emotions, it is logical that you will feel good. When you feel good, everything around you is good. When everything around you is good, everything makes you happy. You are loving everything that is around you, because you are loving yourself. Because you like the way you are. Because you are content with you. Because you are happy with your life. You are happy with the movie you are producing, happy with your agreements with life. You are at peace, and you are happy. You live in that state of bliss where everything is so wonderful, and everything is so beautiful. In that state of bliss you are making love all the time with everything that you perceive.”

- http://www.livinglifefully.com/

"Do Only The Stones Remember?"

"Do Only The Stones Remember?"

by Sylvia Shawcross

"We would not make good communists. We of the democratic nations. Not the proper kind. Not the disciplined, purified kind. We would try - briefly - with the awkward sincerity of people wearing borrowed clothes. We would recite the words, mispronounce the vows, trip over the rules. Even if we meant well, we would break it. We always do. We know this about ourselves. Somehow, they do not.

They would attempt the reshaping. They would ration hunger into virtue, align our homes like teeth in a jaw, file down difference until it passed inspection. They would tax us into gratitude, choreograph our steps, teach our necks the correct angle for obedience. They would borrow our children for “the future,” our voices for morning hymns to the ruler of the week. They would bleach the color from things - walls, words, weather - and send us out masked and careful into their tidy grey little worlds where nothing is far and nothing is free.

They would try. We might even cooperate. It would last fifteen minutes. Soon we would itch for tattoos on our skin - and then everyone would need the same tattoo, because variation is a threat. We would crave stories chosen by accident, music found at the wrong hour, images that do not behave - except most would be sealed away, some thoughts declared unspeakable, some devices never issued.

Some days we would want sweetness instead of sustenance - chocolate instead of bugs - but desire would no longer count as a category. The store would decide. The shelves would be obedient. The shelves would hold bugs.

We would remember the forest.

The ungoverned green.

The place that does not ask permission.

But the forest would require paperwork. Two days a year. Weather permitting. We would last fifteen minutes. This is not rebellion. It is anatomy. We are not designed for this boundaried shape. We are human. Forgive me for explaining this to the elites - to the Predatory Class - but humans revolt the way lungs breathe. History is a pulse of it. Again and again we have risen for a word that tastes like air: freedom. Once it has passed the lips, nothing else nourishes. We did not merely sample it. We lived inside it. We grew old beneath it. We buried our dead for it. We expect it now.

We paid in blood.

We paid in sweat.

We paid in names no one remembers except stone.

And war - the old kind, the blunt kind - we are done with it. In this, at least, we have learned. We are more civilized than our rulers believe. The Predatory Class will need a new idea. Humans have changed. They have not. How such wealth can coexist with such primitiveness is a mystery. For all their cleverness, they remain ancient. They do not adapt.

Poor predators. We are finished being prey."

- https://off-guardian.org/

The Wile E. Coyote Insight: What We "Know" Is More Dangerous Than the Unknown

The Wile E. Coyote Insight: What We "Know"

 Is More Dangerous Than the Unknown

by Charles Hugh Smith

"Oh crikey, is this another boring post trying to make philosophy relevant? No, it's a post about survival of the fittest, as what we "know" will lead us straight off the cliff in a state of delusional confidence. What we "know" is a mix of what we accept as known and what is knowable, which is defined by the system/zeitgeist/frame of reference we inhabit.

Nowadays we can't talk about "knowing" without invoking AI, which claims to have gathered all of human knowledge and made it available to us in natural language. But as I've taken pains to describe this year in dozens of posts and two books, what AI presents as "known" has been processed in ways we don't see, and these processes limit the reliability and trustworthiness of what AI presents as "known" and "knowable."

The danger here is our ill-informed confidence in AI and in what our system presents as rock-solid "knowable." The system says Gross Domestic product (GDP) is a rock-solid measure of the economy, and since it's rising, you can be absolutely confident about chasing gains (the Roadrunner) off the cliff. (See Wile E. Coyote above.)

Here's the thing that gets passed over: AI hallucinates, but it doesn't "know" it's hallucinating; it presents fabrications as "known facts." AI didn't "knowingly" take digital Ayahuasca and LSD and "know" it will be hallucinating as a result. It "thinks" it's reporting what are established "knowns"- first, this is knowable, and second, this is known.

We're no different when we're fed hallucinations as if they're "known facts." We're unaware they're hallucinations, and so we blithely walk off the cliff because we placed our confidence in fabrications, models that have collapsed without us being aware that 1) we accepted a model as reality and 2) the model collapsed and is now generating "information" that isn't entirely knowable and isn't "fact."

You see the difference: when we knowingly take hallucinogens such as Ayahuasca or LSD, we know our experiences no longer reflect "facts." We understand our experiences may veer into territory that science defines as "unknowable," yet we are experiencing it anyway. We know it is unwise to walk along a cliff edge at dusk in a hallucinogenic state. But in model collapses, we think the hallucination is the real world. It is in this confused state that we place our confidence in a hallucination and walk calmly off the cliff to our demise.

This is where the survival of the fittest kicks in: confusing reality and a model-collapse hallucination does not generate positive survival outcomes. I explain the systemic sources of this confusion in my latest book "Investing In Revolution."

As I explained in "Model Collapse: The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination," model collapse is the inevitable result when those controlling the model's gearing/programming begin using the output of their previous results (output) to "train" the next iteration of their "knowledge," i.e. what they consider knowable and known.

Using probabilistic functions and overweighting what is accepted by conventions as knowable and known both skew the outputs, which accumulate as each iteration "trains" on the skewed outputs. Knowledge that is on the margins or discounted by conventional definitions of what is being measured as "facts" is edited out of the knowledge base or reframed in conventional terms: in AI "training," this is the Silicon Valley frame of reference.

Those who control the gearing/programming trust their own judgement and models, and so they resist recognizing the increasingly hallucinogenic nature of their model. Their frame of reference is we have god-like powers and are building utopia, and the idea that they have a poor grasp of what is knowable and what is known doesn't penetrate their hubris.

The inhabitants of their Mouse Utopia have been trained to trust their techno-leaders as demi-gods because "technology is Progress," and so their core survival skills - skepticism, a keen awareness of what is unknown because reality has one foot in what is intrinsically unknowable - have atrophied. Surrounded by novelties, addictive distractions, conveniences and comforts, they have lost the ability to differentiate the real world from a (highly profitable) artificial world.

This is a visual representation of what happens when a system "trains" on its own output: GDP is rising, so everyone's doing great, money solves all problems, except moral decay and the other sources of our hallucinations, and so on:

Here's a list of the model-collapse hallucinations we now trust as reality to our future detriment:

1. The entire global financial system is a hallucination generated by model collapse. This hallucination is most easily visible in bubbles, credit, "banking" and "money."

2. The entire AI bubble, including AGI (artificial general intelligence), is a hallucination generated by model collapse that is being purposefully obscured to maximize private gains from the public's embrace of the AI-bubble hallucination.

3. Social Media is a hallucination generated by model collapse that is being purposefully obscured to maximize private gains from the public's addiction to the social-media hallucination.

4. The entire status quo of Ultra-Processed Life is a model collapse hallucination, including the delusions that all our problems can be resolved with an "abundance of money" and "energy."

This is why "knowledge is power": those who define what is "knowable" and "known" shape the reality of everyone in the model / system. The result is we're living in a Mouse Utopia that is in late-stage model collapse that is largely unrecognized by the inhabitants but acutely visible to those keeping it glued together long enough to amass private fortunes before it all implodes.

It's highly profitable to maintain the illusion that these hallucinations are "the known world," but when the model implodes, you'll want to be outside the ruins rather than buried beneath rubble. It is only then that we'll realize that what we "know" is more dangerous than the unknown."

- https://www.oftwominds.com/