Full screen recommended!
The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy For The Devil"
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Thursday, April 16, 2026
"A Look to the Heavens"
"What created Devils Tower? The origin of this extraordinary rock monolith in Wyoming, USA is still debated, with a leading hypothesis holding that it is a hardened lava plume that never reached the surface to become a volcano. In this theory, the lighter rock that once surrounded the dense volcanic neck has now eroded away, leaving the dramatic tower.
Click image for larger size.
Known by Native Americans by names including Bear's Lodge and Great Gray Horn, the dense rock includes the longest hexagonal columns known, some over 180-meters tall. High above, the central band of the Milky Way galaxy arches across the sky. Many notable sky objects are visible, including dark strands of the Pipe Nebula and the reddish Lagoon Nebula to the tower's right. Green grass and trees line the foreground, while clouds appear near the horizon to the tower's left. Unlike many other international landmarks, mountaineers are permitted to climb Devils Tower."
"Gaslighting: The Psychology Of Shaping Another's Reality"
"Gaslighting:
The Psychology Of Shaping Another's Reality"
by Cynthia Chung
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.
I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
– Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
"We are living in a world where the degree of disinformation and outright lying has reached such a state of affairs that, possibly for the first time ever, we see the majority of the western world starting to question their own and surrounding level of sanity. The increasing frenzied distrust in everything “authoritative” mixed with the desperate incredulity that “everybody couldn’t possibly be in on it!” is slowly rocking many back and forth into a tighter and tighter straight jacket. “Question everything” has become the new motto, but are we capable of answering those questions? Presently the answer is a resounding no.
The social behaviorist sick joke of having made everyone obsessed with toilet paper of all things during the start of what was believed to be a time of crisis, is an example of how much control they have over that red button labelled “commence initiation of level 4 mass panic”. And can the people be blamed? After all, if we are being lied to, how can we possibly rally together and point the finger at the root of this tyranny, aren’t we at the point where it is everywhere?
As Goebbels infamously stated, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State [under fascism].”
And here we find ourselves today, at the brink of fascism. However, we have to first agree to forfeit our civil rights as a collective before fascism can completely dominate. That is, the big lie can only succeed if the majority fails to call it out, for if the majority were to recognize it for what it is, it would truly hold no power.
The Battle for Your Mind: “Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief. The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”
– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”
It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognize that one was “oppressed” meant they must first have an idea of what was “freedom”, and if one were allowed the “privilege” to learn how to read, this discovery was inevitable.
If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of “dangerous ideas” that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in “The Brave New World”, would quickly organize the masses and revolution against their “controllers” would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to “think”. However, it hasn’t exactly played out that way has it?
The greater majority of us are free to read whatever we wish to, in terms of the once “forbidden books”, such as those listed by The Index Librorum Prohibitorum. We can read any of the writings that were banned in “The Brave New World”, notably the works of Shakespeare which were named as absolutely dangerous forms of “knowledge”. We are now very much free to “educate” ourselves on the very “ideas” that were recognized by tyrants of the past as the “antidote” to a life of slavery. And yet, today, the majority choose not to…
It is recognized, albeit superficially, that who controls the past, controls the present and thereby the future. George Orwell’s book “1984”, hammers this as the essential feature that allows the Big Brother apparatus to maintain absolute control over fear, perception and loyalty to the Party cause, and yet despite its popularity, there still remains a lack of interest in actually informing oneself about the past.
What does it matter anyway, if the past is controlled and rewritten to suit the present? As the Big Brother interrogator O’Brien states to Winston, “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not? And thus, are free to rewrite it as we choose…”
Of course, we are not in the same situation as Winston…we are much better off. We can study and learn about the “past” if we so desire, unfortunately, it is a choice that many take for granted. In fact, many are probably not fully aware that presently there is a battle waging for who will “control the past” in a manner that is closely resembling a form of “memory wipe”.
William Sargant was a British psychiatrist and, one could say, effectively the Father of “mind control” in the West, with connections to British Intelligence and the Tavistock Institute, which would influence the CIA and American military via the program MK Ultra. Sargant was also an advisor for Ewen Cameron’s LSD “blank slate” work at McGill University, funded by the CIA.
Sargant accounts for his reason in studying and using forms of “mind control” on his patients, which were primarily British soldiers that were sent back from the battlefield during WWII with various forms of “psychosis”, as the only way to rehabilitate extreme forms of PTSD.
The other reason, was because the Soviets had apparently become “experts” in the field, and out of a need for national security, the British would thus in turn have to become experts as well…as a matter of self-defense of course.
The work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, had succeeded in producing some disturbingly interesting insights into four primary forms of nervous systems in dogs, that were combinations of inhibitory and excitatory temperaments; “strong excitatory”, “balanced”, “passive” and “calm imperturbable”. Pavlov found that depending on the category of nervous system temperament the dog had, this in turn would dictate the form of “conditioning” that would work best to “reprogram behavior”. The relevance to “human conditioning” was not lost on anyone.
It was feared in the West, that such techniques would not only be used against their soldiers to invoke free-flowing uninhibited confessions to the enemy but that these soldiers could be sent back to their home countries, as zombified assassins and spies that could be set off with a simple code word. At least, these were the thriller stories and movies that were pumped into the population. How horrific indeed! That the enemy could apparently enter what was thought the only sacred ground to be our own…our very “minds”!
However, for those who were actually leading the field in mind control research, such as William Sargant, it was understood that this was not exactly how mind control worked. For one thing, the issue of “free will” was getting in the way.
No matter the length or degree of electro-shock, insulin “therapy”, tranquilizer cocktails, induced comas, sleep deprivation, starvation etc induced, it was discovered that if the subject had a “strong conviction” and “strong belief” in something, this could not be simply erased, it could not be written over with any arbitrary thing. Rather, the subject would have to have the illusion that their “conditioning” was in fact a “choice”. This was an extremely challenging task, and long term conversions (months to years) were rare.
However, Sargant saw an opening. It was understood that one could not create a new individual from scratch, however, with the right conditioning that was meant to lead to a physical breakdown using abnormal stress (effectively a reboot of the nervous system), one could increase the “suggestibility” markedly in their subjects. Sargant wrote in his “Battle of the Mind”: “Pavlov’s clinical descriptions of the ‘experimental neuroses’ which he could induce in dogs proved, in fact, to have a close correspondence with those war-neuroses which we were investigating at the time.”
In addition, Sargant found that a falsely implanted memory could help induce abnormal stress leading to emotional exhaustion and physical breakdown to invoke “suggestibility”. That is, one didn’t even need to have a “real stress” but an “imagined stress” would work just as effectively.
Sargant goes on to state in his book: “It is not surprising that the ordinary person, in general, is much more easily indoctrinated than the abnormal. A person is considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ by the community simply because he accepts most of its social standards and behavioural patterns; which means, in fact, that he is susceptible to suggestion and has been persuaded to go with the majority on most ordinary or extraordinary occasions.”
Sargant then goes over the phenomenon of the London Blitz, which was an eight month period of heavy bombing of London during WWII. During this period, in order to cope and stay “sane”, people rapidly became accustomed to the idea that their neighbors could be and were buried alive in bombed houses around them. The thought was “If I can’t do anything about it what use is it that I trouble myself over it?” The best “coping” was thus found to be those who accepted the new “environment” and just focused on “surviving”, and did not try to resist it.
Sargant remarks that it is this “adaptability” to a changing environment which is part of the “survival” instinct and is very strong in the “healthy” and “normal” individual who can learn to cope and thus continues to be “functional” despite an ever changing environment. It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best “survivors” made for the best “brain-washing” in a sense.
Sargant quotes Hecker’s work, who was studying the dancing mania phenomenon that occurred during the Black Death, where Hecker observed that heightened suggestibility had the capability to cause a person to “embrace with equal force, reason and folly, good and evil, diminish the praise of virtue as well as the criminality of vice.”
And that such a state of mind was likened to the first efforts of the infant mind “this instinct of imitation when it exists in its highest degree, is also united a loss of all power over the will, which occurs as soon as the impression on the senses has become firmly established, producing a condition like that of small animals when they are fascinated by the look of a serpent.” I wonder if Sargant imagined himself the serpent…
Sargant does finally admit: “This does not mean that all persons can be genuinely indoctrinated by such means. Some will give only temporary submission to the demands made on them, and fight again when strength of body and mind returns. Others are saved by the supervention of madness. Or the will to resist may give way, but not the intellect itself.” But he comforts himself as a response to this stubborn resistance that “As mentioned in a previous context, the stake, the gallows, the firing squad, the prison, or the madhouse, are usually available for the failures.”
How to Resist the Deconstruction of Your Mind: “He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first of all drive mad.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Masque of Pandora”
For those who have not seen the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight” directed by George Cukor, I would highly recommend you do so since there is an invaluable lesson contained within, that is especially applicable to what I suspect many of us are experiencing nowadays.
The story starts with a 14 year old Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) who is being taken to Italy after her Aunt Alice Alquist, a famous opera singer and caretaker of Paula, is found murdered in her home in London. Paula is the one who found the body, and horror stricken is never her old self again. Her Aunt was the only family Paula had left in her life. The decision is made to send her away from London to Italy to continue her studies to become a world-renowned opera singer like her Aunt Alice.
Years go by, Paula lives a very sheltered life and a heavy somberness is always present within her, she can never seem to feel any kind of happiness. During her singing studies she meets a mysterious man (her piano accompanist during her lessons) and falls deeply in love with him. However, she knows hardly anything about the man named Gregory.
Paula agrees to marry Gregory after a two week romance and is quickly convinced to move back into her Aunt’s house in London that was left abandoned all these years. As soon as she enters the house, the haunting of the night of the murder revisits her and she is consumed with panic and fear. Gregory tries to calm her and talks about the house needing just a little bit of air and sun, and then Paula comes across a letter written to her Aunt from a Sergis Bauer which confirms that he was in contact with Alice just a few days before her murder. At this finding, Gregory becomes bizarrely agitated and grabs the letter from Paula. He quickly tries to justify his anger blaming the letter for upsetting her. Gregory then decides to lock all of her Aunt’s belongings in the attic, to apparently spare Paula any further anguish.
It is at this point that Gregory starts to change his behavior dramatically. Always under the pretext for “Paula’s sake”, everything that is considered “upsetting” to Paula must be removed from her presence. And thus quickly the house is turned into a form of prison. Paula is told it is for her best not to leave the house unaccompanied, not to have visitors and that self-isolation is the best remedy for her “anxieties” which are getting worst. Paula is never strictly forbidden at the beginning but rather is told that she should obey these restrictions for her own good.
Before a walk, he gives as a gift a beautiful heirloom brooch that belonged to his mother. Because the pin needs replacing, he instructs Paula to keep it in her handbag, and then says rather out of context, “Don’t forget where you put it now Paula, I don’t want you losing it.” Paula remarks thinking the warning absurd, “Of course I won’t forget!” When they return from their walk, Gregory asks for the brooch, Paula searches in her handbag but it is not there.
It continues on like this, with Gregory giving warnings and reminders, seemingly to help Paula with her “forgetfulness” and “anxieties”. Paula starts to question her own judgement and sanity as these events become more and more frequent. She has no one else to talk to but Gregory, who is the only witness to these apparent mishaps. It gets to a point where completely nonsensical behavior is being attributed to Paula by Gregory. A painting is found missing on the wall one night. Gregory talks to Paula like she is a 5 year child and asks her to put it back. Paula insists she does not know who took it down. After her persistent passionate insistence that it was not her, she walks up the stairs almost like she were in a dream state and pulls the painting from behind a statue. Gregory asks why she lied, but Paula insists that she only thought to look there because that is where it was found the last two times this occurred.
For weeks now, Paula thinks she has been seeing things, the gas lights of the house dimming for no reason, she also hears footsteps above her bedroom. No one else seems to take notice. Paula is also told by Gregory that he found out that her mother, who passed away when she was very young, had actually gone insane and died in an asylum.
Despite Paula being reduced to a condition of an ongoing stupor, she decides one night to make a stand and regain control over her life. Paula is invited, by one of her Aunt Alice’s close friends Lady Dalroy, to attend a high society evening with musical performances. Recall that Paula’s life gravitated around music before her encounter with Gregory. Music was her life. Paula gets magnificently dressed up for the evening and on her way out tells Gregory that she is going to this event. Gregory tries to convince her that she is not well enough to attend such a social gathering, when Paula calmly insists that she is going and that this woman was a dear friend of her Aunt, Gregory answers that he refuses to accompany her (in those days that was a big deal). Paula accepts this and walks with a solid dignity, undeterred towards the horse carriage. In a very telling scene, Gregory is left momentarily by himself and panic stricken, his eyes bulging he snaps his cigar case shut and runs after Paula. He laughingly calls to her, “Paula, you did not think I was serious? I had no idea that this party meant so much to you. Wait, I will get ready.” As he is getting ready in front of the mirror, a devilish smirk appears.
Paula and Gregory show up to Lady Dalroy’s house late, the pianist is in the middle of the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #8 in C minor. They quickly are escorted to two empty seats. Paula is immediately immersed in the piece, and Gregory can see his control is slipping. After only a few minutes, he goes to look at his pocket watch but it is not in his pocket. He whispers into Paula’s ear, “My watch is missing”. Immediately, Paula looks like she is going to be sick. Gregory takes her handbag and Paula looks in horror as he pulls out his pocket watch, insinuating that Paula had put it there. She immediately starts losing control and has a very public emotional breakdown. Gregory takes her away, as he remarks to Lady Dalroy that this is why he didn’t want Paula coming in the first place.
When they arrive home, Paula has by now completely succumbed to the thought that she is indeed completely insane. Gregory says that it would be best if they go away somewhere for an indefinite period of time. We later find out that Gregory is intending on committing her to an asylum. Paula agrees to leave London with Gregory and leaves her fate entirely in his hands.
In the case of Paula it is clear. She has been suspecting that Gregory has something to do with her “situation” but he has very artfully created an environment where Paula herself doubts whether this is a matter of unfathomable villainy or whether she is indeed going mad. It is rather because she is not mad that she doubts herself, because there is seemingly no reason for why Gregory would put so much time and energy into making it look like she were mad, or at least so it first appears. But what if the purpose to her believing in her madness was simply a matter of who is in control?
Paula almost succeeds in gaining the upper-hand in this power-struggle, the evening she decided to go out on her own no matter what Gregory insisted was in her best interest. If she would have held her ground at Lady Dalroy’s house and simply replied, “I have no idea why your stupid watch ended up in my handbag and I could care less. Now stop interrupting this performance, you are making a scene!” Gregory’s spell would have been broken as simple as that. If he were to complain to others about the situation, they would also respond, “Who cares man, why are you so obsessed about your damn watch?”
We find ourselves today in a very similar situation to Paula. And the voice of Gregory is represented by the narrative of false news and the apocalyptic social behaviorist programming in our forms of entertainment. The things most people voluntarily subject themselves to on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Socially conditioning them, like a pack of salivating Pavlovian dogs, to think it is just a matter of time before the world ends and with a ring of their master’s bell…be at each other’s throats.
Paula ends up being saved in the end by a man named Joseph Cotten (a detective), who took notice and quickly discerned that something was amiss. In the end Gregory is arrested. It is revealed that Gregory is in fact Sergis Bauer. That he killed Alice Alquist and that he has returned to the scene of the crime after all these years in search for the famous jewels of the opera singer. The jewels were in fact rather worthless from the standpoint that they were too famous to be sold, however, Gregory never intended on selling these jewels but rather had become obsessed with the desire to merely possess them. That is, it is Gregory who has been entirely mad all this time.
A Gregory is absolutely dangerous. He would have been the end of Paula if nothing had intervened. However, the power that Gregory held was conditional to the degree that Paula allowed it to control her. Paula’s extreme deconstruction was thus entirely dependent on her choice to let the voice of Gregory in. That is, a Gregory is only dangerous if we allow ourselves to sleep walk into the nightmare he has constructed for us."
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
– Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass"
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Full screen recommended.
Full Movie, "Gaslight"
"Benedicto"
"The summit is believed to be the object of the climb. But its true object - the joy of living - is not in the peak itself, but in the adversities encountered on the way up. There are valleys, cliffs, streams, precipices, and slides, and as he walks these steep paths, the climber may think he cannot go any farther, or even that dying would be better than going on. But then he resumes fighting the difficulties directly in front of him, and when he is finally able to turn and look back at what he has overcome, he finds he has truly experienced the joy of living while on life's very road." - Eiji Yoshikawa
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"Benedicto"
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you - beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” - Edward Abbey
The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"
"The Winter of Listening"
"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.
What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.
What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.
All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.
And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."
- David Whyte,
"The House of Belonging"
"12 Empowering Don Miguel Ruiz Quotes"
"12 Empowering Don Miguel Ruiz Quotes"
by Matt Hogan
“You have the power to create. Your power is so strong that whatever you believe comes true. You create yourself, whatever you believe you are. You are the way you are because that is what you believe about yourself. Your whole reality, everything you believe, is your creation.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“You are what you believe you are. There is nothing to do except to be just what you are. You have the right to feel beautiful and enjoy it. You can honor your body and accept it as it is. You don’t need anyone to love you. Love comes from the inside. It lives inside us and is always there, but with that wall of fog, we don’t feel it. You can only perceive the beauty that lives outside you when you feel the beauty that lives inside you.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“Perhaps you have never thought about it, but on one level or another, all of us are masters. We are masters because we have the power to create and to rule our own lives.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“To master a relationship is all about you. The first step is to become aware, to know that everyone dreams his own dream. Once you know this, you can be responsible for your half of the relationship, which is you. If you know that you are only responsible for half of the relationship, you can easily control your half. It is not up to us to control the other half. If we respect, we know that our partner, or friend, or son, or mother, is completely responsible for his or her own half. If we respect the other half, there is always going to be peace in that relationship. There is no war.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“There are millions of ways to express your happiness, but there is only one way to really be happy, and that is to love. There is no other way. You cannot be happy if you don’t love yourself. That is a fact. If you don’t love yourself, you don’t have any opportunity to be happy. You cannot share what you do not have.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“Selfishness, control, and fear will break almost any relationship. Generosity, freedom, and love will create the most beautiful relationship: an ongoing romance.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“When you make it your goal to create the perfect relationship between you and your body, you are learning to have a perfect relationship with anyone you are with, including your mother, your friends, your lover, your children, your dog. When you have the perfect relationship between you and your body, in that moment your half of any relationship outside you is completely fulfilled. You no longer depend upon the success of a relationship from the outside.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“The happiest moments in our lives are when we are playing just like children, when we are singing and dancing, when we are exploring and creating just for fun. It is wonderful when we behave like a child because this is the normal human mind, the normal human tendency. As children, we are innocent and it is natural for us to express love. But what has happened to us? What has happened to the whole world?”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“Explore the possibilities. Be yourself. Find a person who matches with you. Take the risk, but be honest. If it works, keep going. If it doesn’t work, then do yourself and your partner a favor: Walk away; let her go. Don’t be selfish. Give your partner the opportunity to find what she really wants, and at the same time give yourself the opportunity. If it’s not going to work, it is better to look in a different direction. If you cannot love your partner the way she is, someone else can love her just as she is. Don’t wast your time, and don’t waste your partner’s time. That is respect.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“You must forgive those who hurt you, even if whatever they did to you is unforgivable in your mind. You will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because you don’t want to suffer and hurt yourself every time you remember what they did to you. It doesn’t matter what others did to you, you are going to forgive them because you don’t want to feel sick all the time. Forgiveness is for your own mental healing. You will forgive because you feel compassion for yourself. Forgiveness is an act of self-love.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“You don’t have to believe me, but think, and make choices. Believe what you want to believe according to what I say, but only if it makes sense for you, if it makes you happy. If it guides you into your awakening, then make the choice to believe it. I am responsible for what I say, but I am not responsible for what you understand. We live in a completely different dream. What I say, even if it is absolutely true for me, is not necessarily true for you.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
“It’s not true that you go to hell or to heaven after you die. You live in hell or you live in heaven, but now. Heaven and hell only exist in the level of the mind.”
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)
"Thought..."
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
- Bertrand Russell
"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
- Thomas A. Edison.
"Essential Readings"
"The 5 Stages of Economic Collapse”
by Dmitry Orlov
Excerpt: “Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defined the five stages of coming to terms with grief and tragedy as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and applied it quite successfully to various forms of catastrophic personal loss, such as death of a loved one, sudden end to one’s career, and so forth. Several thinkers, notably James Howard Kunstler and, more recently John Michael Greer, have pointed out that the Kübler-Ross model is also quite terrifyingly accurate in reflecting the process by which society as a whole (or at least the informed and thinking parts of it) is reconciling itself to the inevitability of a discontinuous future, with our institutions and life support systems undermined by a combination of resource depletion, catastrophic climate change, and political impotence.
But so far, little has been said specifically about the finer structure of these discontinuities. Instead, there is to be found continuum of subjective judgments, ranging from “a severe and prolonged recession” (the prediction we most often read in the financial press), to Kunstler’s evocative but unscientific-sounding “clusterf**k,” to the ever-popular “Collapse of Western Civilization,” painted with an ever-wider brush-stroke.
For those of us who have already gone through all of the emotional stages of reconciling ourselves to the prospect of social and economic upheaval, it might be helpful to have a more precise terminology that goes beyond such emotionally charged phrases. Defining a taxonomy of collapses might prove to be more than just an intellectual exercise: based on our abilities and circumstances, some of us may be able to specifically plan for a certain stage of collapse as a temporary, or even permanent, stopping point."
Please view this complete article here:
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“The 12 Rules of Survival”
by Laurence Gonzales
Excerpt: “As a journalist, I’ve been writing about accidents for more than thirty years. In the last 15 or so years, I’ve concentrated on accidents in outdoor recreation, in an effort to understand who lives, who dies, and why. To my surprise, I found an eerie uniformity in the way people survive seemingly impossible circumstances. Decades and sometimes centuries apart, separated by culture, geography, race, language, and tradition, the most successful survivors–those who practice what I call “deep survival”– go through the same patterns of thought and behavior, the same transformation and spiritual discovery, in the course of keeping themselves alive.
Not only that but it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are surviving being lost in the wilderness or battling cancer, whether they’re struggling through divorce or facing a business catastrophe– the strategies remain the same. Survival should be thought of as a journey, a vision quest of the sort that Native Americans have had as a rite of passage for thousands of years. Once you’re past the precipitating event– you’re cast away at sea or told you have cancer– you have been enrolled in one of the oldest schools in history. Here are a few things I’ve learned that can help you pass the final exam."
Please view this complete article here:
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"The Collapse Of Complex Societies"
"Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses."
Freely download “The Collapse of Complex Societies” here;
"Ruby Ridge: The History They Won't Teach In Government Schools"
"Ruby Ridge:The History They
Won't Teach In Government Schools"
by Defund The USDA 2.0
"Never forget that 33 years ago we learned the government will kill your dog, shoot your 14 year old son in the back and snipe your wife in the doorway while she holds your infant child. Imagine being 14 years old, living off the grid in the Idaho woods in 1993. You’re walking your dog when suddenly he growls and *bang*, the dog is shot and killed. You look up and see a man in a Ghillie suit with a rifle pointed at you. Fear grips you. You pull your gun and fire. You’re just defending yourself. This is your home.
You run back toward your parents, only to be shot in the back and killed before you can reach them. You never understand what went wrong or why. The next day, a sniper fires again. Your mother, standing in the doorway holding your baby sister, is hit in the head and killed instantly.
All of this started because your father Randy Weaver, sold two sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent and refused to become a government informant. They gave him a false court date and set up armed surveillance at his home, waiting for the moment they could escalate. Randy Weaver was a former U.S. Army Green Beret. He served in the military before moving off the grid with his family in northern Idaho. His military background added to the tension for federal authorities, because he was trained in weapons and survival, but it didn’t make him violent or a threat to anyone outside his property.
After an 11 day stand off with Randy and the baby inside with two dead bodies, the government was ordered to pay millions in settlements to Randy. They were proven to be in the wrong for this deadly power trip. But that doesn’t bring back a 14 year old boy or his mother. Stay educated. Some of our history isn’t taught in school for a reason."
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"The Lost Transition to Adulthood"
"The Lost Transition to Adulthood"
by Martin Armstrong
"The latest data confirms what has quietly been building for years, and now it is no longer anecdotal but systemic, as roughly 64% of parents with Gen Z children aged 18 to 28 say their adult kids still rely on them financially for housing, money, or basic support, while 56% of those parents admit that this arrangement is putting strain on their own finances, which means we are looking at a generational shift where adulthood itself is being delayed on a scale not seen in modern times.
This is being explained away as an economic problem, with references to high costs of living, weak entry-level wages, and housing affordability, and while those factors are real, they are not the full story because previous generations faced economic hardship as well, yet they still transitioned into independence, and what we are seeing now is not just economic pressure but a breakdown in the cultural expectation of self-sufficiency.
There is a dangerous normalization taking place where parents are no longer helping temporarily but are effectively subsidizing adult lifestyles, and in many cases this support is not minor, with studies showing parents spending well over $1,000 per month on adult children while simultaneously neglecting their own retirement savings, which is creating a cascading financial problem where one generation is undermining its own future to sustain another."
Dan, I Allegedly, "Nothing Is Fair Anymore!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 4/16/26
"Nothing Is Fair Anymore!"
"Nothing is fair anymore - and people are finally starting to notice. In this video, I break down some of the most outrageous real-world stories happening right now, from massive new taxes on homeowners to skyrocketing public transportation costs during major events like the World Cup. We’re also seeing major business closures, rising costs of living, and shocking examples of how everyday Americans are being squeezed from every angle. If you’ve been wondering why everything feels harder, more expensive, and less reasonable - this is why. We also dive into economic warning signs that many people are ignoring, including retail shutdowns, HOA horror stories, fraud cases, and the growing reality that even millionaires don’t feel wealthy anymore. This is about the bigger picture: inflation, government policy, corporate decisions, and a system that feels increasingly unfair to the average person. Stay informed, stay ahead, and understand what’s really happening in today’s economy."
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"70 Percent Of U.S. Farmers Say That They Will Not Be Able To Purchase All The Fertilizer That They Need In 2026"
by Michael Snyder
"We might want to listen to what the farmers are telling us, because if they don’t grow our food we do not eat. Coming into this year, we were already facing the worst farming crisis in America in at least 50 years. Farmers all over the nation are drowning in debt, and farm bankruptcies have been soaring. In all my years, I have never seen America’s farmers so angry, and now the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz has made things much worse. Spring planting season is here and there is a global scramble for whatever supplies of nitrogen fertilizer that happen to be available. As a result, prices have skyrocketed and farmers all over the planet are facing some incredibly tough choices.
That is even true here in the United States. According to a brand new survey that was just conducted by the American Farm Bureau Federation, 70 percent of U.S. farmers say that they will not be able to purchase all of the fertilizer that they need in 2026 because it has become so expensive…Conducted by the American Farm Bureau Federation April 3-11, the survey shows 70% of respondents say fertilizer is so expensive that they will not be able to buy all the fertilizer they need. More than 5,700 farmers, both Farm Bureau members and non-members, from every state and Puerto Rico took the survey. Farm Bureau economists analyzed the results in the latest Market Intel. The analysis reveals that almost 8 in 10 farmers in the southern U.S. say they can’t afford all needed supplies this year, followed by the Northeast and West at 69% and 66%, respectively, compared to 48% of the farmers in the Midwest.
Fertilizer prices were already at frighteningly high levels even before the war with Iran started, and since that time they have surged dramatically… Nitrogen fertilizer prices have gone up more than 30 percent since the start of the conflict on Feb. 28, according to Market Intel. Combined fuel and fertilizer costs have also risen between 20 and 40 percent, with urea prices jumping 47 percent since late February.
Many people out there don’t seem to understand this yet, but this is going to affect all of us. If 70 percent of U.S. farmers use less fertilizer this year, those farmers will grow less food. If there is less food available, prices will go up. Needless to say, food prices are already at ridiculous levels, but they are going to go even higher.
In impoverished countries, conditions will be even worse. Due to a historic lack of nitrogen fertilizer, hundreds of millions of families that are currently barely existing “may soon find they are only able to afford little or no food”… In many parts of the world, vulnerable families who today are currently managing to put some food on the table may soon find they are only able to afford little or no food. “If this conflict continues, it will send shockwaves across the globe, and families who already cannot afford their next meal will be hit the hardest,” said WFP Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Carl Skau.
I wish that I could get people to understand how serious this is. Goldman Sachs is publicly admitting that the global fertilizer crisis is spreading a lot faster than they were originally projecting. We desperately need the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened immediately, but that simply isn’t going to happen.
The Iranians continue to strangle commercial traffic through the Strait, and the U.S. has now “completely” cut off traffic to Iranian ports… The U.S. blockade of Iranian ports is now fully into effect, “completely” cutting off Tehran’s international sea trade that powers about 90% of its economy, the U.S. Central Command said late Tuesday stateside. The announcement comes at a time when the White House has been signaling a diplomatic solution to the conflict in the Middle East, as discussions around continuing negotiations with Iran are underway. “A blockade of Iranian ports has been fully implemented as U.S. forces maintain maritime superiority in the Middle East,” said Brad Cooper, Centcom commander, highlighting that it was achieved under 36 hours of President Donald Trump’s order.
The Trump administration is convinced that this blockade will force the Iranians to give in. According to U.S. Central Command, the first 48 hours of the blockade have been a resounding success…
But the Iranians are showing no signs of backing down. On Wednesday, an official with the IRGC warned of severe consequences if the U.S. does not end the blockade… Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced Wednesday that Tehran would not allow the import or export of goods through the Persian Gulf, the nearby Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea unless the United States lifts the blockade it imposed earlier this week around the Strait of Hormuz.
Ali Abdollahi, commander of Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya emergency headquarters, said the measures would be “firm and decisive” steps to protect Iran’s national interests and sovereignty. According to Abdollahi, if the U.S. continues the blockade Iran has decided that it “will not allow any exports or imports to continue in the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman, and the Red Sea”…
In his statement broadcast by Iranian state television, Abdollahi said Iran would move to disrupt shipping routes in the Red Sea and elsewhere if the U.S. continued its blockade, initiated by President Donald Trump. “The powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic will not allow any exports or imports to continue in the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman, and the Red Sea,” the commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said.
If Iran is able to successfully stop commercial traffic from traveling through all of those waterways, it will greatly intensify the economic problems that we are starting to witness all over the globe. In California, the average price of a gallon of gasoline has already almost reached 6 dollars… Gas prices are soaring across the country, but especially in California. The Golden State average is now nearly $6 per gallon — 40 percent above the national figure. That gap is likely to widen: UC Davis economists estimate that Californians could soon be paying more than $2.50 a gallon above the national average.
In the United Kingdom, officials are bracing for widespread fuel shortages in “two or three weeks”… Sources told ITV News that the UK is ‘two or three weeks away’ from shortages of diesel and jet fuel, although petrol supplies are healthier. The Government is said to be facing ‘difficult decisions’ over how to allot fuel supplies, including how to keep ‘ancillary power’ going for NHS hospitals.
If the war with Iran is not resolved quickly, this will only be the tip of the iceberg. The Iranians are holding the global economy hostage, and they fully realize that this gives them a tremendous amount of leverage. But there is no way that the U.S. and Israel will ever agree to their demands. So for now we seem to have an unsolvable problem on our hands, and meanwhile the damage that is being done to the global economy is getting worse with each passing day."
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
"A Dangerous Illusion: Are Americans Living On Borrowed Money Right Now?"
Jeremiah Babe, 6/15/26
"A Dangerous Illusion: Are Americans
Living On Borrowed Money Right Now?"
Comments here:
"Pursuit Of Happiness? No! Pursuit Of Misery Is The Political Way"
Gerald Celente, 4/15/26
"Pursuit Of Happiness? No!
Pursuit Of Misery Is The Political Way"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What's Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
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"Farmers Issue Food Warning: Global Famine Coming"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 4/15/26
"Farmers Issue Food Warning:
Global Famine Coming"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Insurance Is a Scam Now"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 4/15/26
"Insurance Is a Scam Now"
"Insurance used to mean protection - but today it feels like punishment. In this video, Dan from iAllegedly breaks down how skyrocketing premiums, denied claims, and industry loopholes are leaving Americans exposed when they need coverage the most. From homeowners insurance cancellations in California to outrageous medical bills and auto claim disputes, this is a real-world look at how the system is failing everyday people. We also dive into insurance fraud, billion-dollar payouts, and why companies are tightening restrictions while raising rates. If you’ve ever wondered why your insurance costs keep rising while coverage keeps shrinking, this video exposes the truth. Whether it’s health, auto, or property insurance, the risks of being underinsured - or completely denied - have never been higher."
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John Wilder, "The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect"
"The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect"
by John Wilder
"When I was younger, I was reading the book "Liar’s Poker" by Michael Lewis. In the book, the author related the story of how he was on the trading desk when news of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown hit. His co-worker, a seasoned trader who’d seen it all, looked at Lewis and said two words: “Buy wheat.”
The reason was simple. Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s biggest supplier of wheat. Now, radioactive wheat would have sounded cool in the 1950s. Imagine the cereal ads: New Atomic Pops™: NOW FORTIFIED WITH GAMMA RAYS! The seasoned trader, however, knew there was going to be a shortage of wheat on the world market since the RDA of uranium isotopes has been decreased under the Make America Healthy Again agenda rolled out. But Chernobyl happened. The consequences? One event, one domino, and the price of bread halfway around the planet starts twitching like a tall tweaker on Tang™. That’s how fast these things move when the stakes are real.
In a more serious world where consequences were to be a thing that actually happened, I’d bet on a huge economic tidal wave incoming from the current Israel-America-Iran War. Ten to twenty percent of the world’s daily oil supply is stuck behind blockades. To top it off, 14% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas production is offline, and won’t be able to be repaired until 2029 or 2031. Then, the Strait of Hormuz: closing, re-opening, closing again like a game of “duck, duck, missile” has already tumbled a lot of dominos.
Right now, the Strait isn’t exactly a freeway. Tankers are rerouting, insurance rates are through the roof, and every time someone blinks the flow sputters. One day it’s open enough for a few supertankers to sneak through. The next, it’s blocked again and prices expand like Madonna’s face after whatever it is she’s injecting into it.
Those first dominos are easy to spot, and they were the subject of a recent post. Fertilizer production is down because natural gas is the key feedstock, so (domino falls) food prices are headed up. Gasoline, jet fuel, and bunker fuel costs are up, so (domino falls) transport prices are up, too. Trucks, ships, planes, and everything that moves stuff from farm to factory to your grocery shelf gets more expensive. Freight rates for everything from soybeans to sneakers start climbing. Those are the obvious ones.
But dominos don’t stop at the first few if there are more in line. Before the big inflation wave really crashes ashore, weird things start happening in the markets. Gold is up on good news and down on bad news. Same with silver. Why? Because these are assets (at least the paper versions that pretend to be gold and silver) that people can sell fast and clean to cover margin calls, and other ways that they’ve leveraged the market. Each domino leads to other consequences.
What are the downstream consequences? Political unrest? Certainly. We’ve seen it before. We’re seeing it now. When food prices spike, people in places that were already living on the edge don’t write polite letters to their congressman. They take to the streets. Empty bellies and expensive diesel have a way of turning into pitchforks and torches. And what about a complete redo of the world economic stage? Yeah, that’s a hell of a big Twinkie®, er domino. But, it’s looking more likely every day.
Here’s the part that should keep you up at night if you’re the kind of person who still believes in fairy tales about “the system.” In a world where almost any country can convert whatever Christmas wrapping paper they crank out of their printing presses into any other currency almost instantly, why does the world need the dollar? I’ve been asking this question forever on this blog.
I have absolute certainty that the dollar is the same as a cryptocoin made by Algerian, Albanian, or Albigensian pirates: it’s a meme. It’s just a meme that everyone has bought into for 100 years or so. If I can dump the Zimbabwe Zloty straight into Seychelles Shekels, well, no need for dollars as the go-between as I trade my diseased goats for your rotten cocoanuts. No need at all.
Marco Rubio even let the cat out of the bag the other day when he said that in the future the United States wouldn’t be able to put sanctions on countries anymore because other countries wouldn’t be using the dollar very much. Now that’s a huge domino! It was going to happen. There was no way the world was going to forever let the United States print dollars forever and have people send us stuff like oil from the Orient or gold from Germany or PEZ® from Paraguay while we shipped them electronic representations of paper money that was now just too expensive for us to bother to print.
We’ve seen this domino before. A nation that ceases to be a nation and starts to become a financial entity is toast. One example was Spain. They pulled in all that New World gold, let their economy wither, and offshored the real work to places like the Netherlands because they could not ditch the Dutch. For a while it looked like Spaniards were on top of the world. Then the Indians who gold ran out, and the bills came due. The final nail in the coffin of Spain, which had been declining for hundreds of years? When it ceased to be a military power that anyone noticed. The Spanish-American War was that moment for Spain. In the end, I think the Spanish were tired of being Spain since it was so much work, and were more than happy for Great Britain to take the helm.
But that was then. Now Great Britian looks more like Spain circa 1870. The Royal Navy has more admirals (40) than total warships (25) and only six plausibly active surface warships. Guess that Britannia shan’t be ruling the waves of anything larger than a hot tub anytime soon.
Most of the time, nothing happens. Markets drift. Politicians talk. Central bankers print and pretend. Then that domino hits, and it happens all at once. One day the system is humming along on just-in-time deliveries and faith in the reserve currency. The next day the Strait is blocked for real, fertilizer plants shut down, grocery shelves get spotty, and suddenly everyone remembers that energy isn’t optional and cold showers suck. Energy is the blood in the veins of the whole machine.
When the price jumps, everything else has to adjust: wages, rents, retirement plans, and government budgets. The dominos don’t ask permission. And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: the United States has been running on cheap energy and the dollar’s special status for eighty years. Both of those props just got kicked. Hard. The reset isn’t coming in some distant future. It has already started.
The only question is how many more dominos have to fall before everyone admits the board has been tipped and the Monopoly™ pieces are stuck in the Cheez-Whiz™ covered Rice Krispie® treats. In the end, dominos don’t care. They just fall. One after another, faster and faster, until the structure is gone. When the last domino drops, the only thing left is whatever you built that wasn’t made of paper and promises. And sweet, nutritious, gamma rays! Remember, Kim Jong Un and Dominos™ have a lot in common: they can both make a crispy Hawaiian in less than thirty minutes."
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