East Dubuque, Illinois, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, June 28, 2026
Native Elder,"How to Reclaim Your Strength After Life Broke You Down"
Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"How to Reclaim Your Strength
After Life Broke You Down"
"You Gotta Be Tough To Grow Old"
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"You Gotta Be Tough To Grow Old"
"Wrinkles ain’t weakness - they’re proof you survived. “You Gotta Be Tough To Grow Old” is a gritty, soul-deep Delta King’s Blues anthem about resilience, scar tissue, and standing tall through the years. A strong, steady acoustic guitar drives the rhythm like boots planted firm in red dirt. The harmonica blows bold and weathered, carrying the sound of hard winters and hotter summers. The groove stays slow but unbreakable - built for endurance, not speed. This is survival blues. For people who took their hits, buried their losses, and kept waking up anyway. Growing old ain’t for the soft - it’s for the stubborn."
Dan, I Allegedly, "No More Hospitals?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 6/28/26
"No More Hospitals?"
"Hospitals are closing across America at an alarming rate, creating "medical deserts" where families may have to drive 20, 30, or even 60 minutes to reach emergency care. In today's video, I break down why rural and community hospitals are shutting down, what rising healthcare costs, staffing shortages, insurance reimbursement, and inflation have to do with it, and why this is much bigger than a healthcare story. Hospital closures are an economic warning sign that impacts jobs, businesses, real estate values, emergency response times, and entire communities. We also discuss why health insurance means very little if the nearest emergency room has closed, why hospitals are often the largest employer in town, and what practical solutions could help preserve access to emergency care before more communities become medical deserts. This is a business story, a personal finance story, and a public safety story that affects every American - because you don't think about the hospital until you need it."
Comments here:
"How It Really Is"
“‘I will surely strike my hands together at the unjust gain
you have made and at the blood you have shed in your midst.”
– Ezekiel 22:13
"Peak Focus for Complex Tasks, With Beta Isochronic Tones"
Full screen recommended.
"Peak Focus for Complex Tasks,
With Beta Isochronic Tones"
by Jason Lewis - Mind Amend
"This is a high-intensity audio brainwave entrainment session, using isochronic tones. Listen to this when you need a strong burst of intense focus to concentrate and study things like advanced mathematics, scientific formulas, financial analysis or any other complex mental activity. Listen to this track with your eyes open while doing the task/activity you want to focus on. Use this session in the morning, afternoon or early evening, to train your brain for better cognition, focus and thought processing. You can either sit somewhere quiet and comfortable with your eyes closed and give your brain a nice workout, or you can also listen to this while doing an activity that requires a boost in concentration.
Headphones are NOT REQUIRED for this video.
Although headphones are not required you may find they produce a more intense effect, because they help to block out distracting external sounds.
Isochronic tones are a fast and effective audio-based way to stimulate your brain. Among many of the benefits, they can help improve focus, relaxation, energy levels, sleep and more, without taking drugs or needing any special equipment. What isochronic tones essentially do is guide your dominant brainwave activity to a different frequency while you are listening to them, allowing you to influence and change your mental state and how you feel."
I strongly suggest you read Comments here:
○
"Isochronic Tones –
How They Work, the Benefits and the Research"
This is a brainwave entrainment audio session using isochronic tones combined with music. The isochronic tones are the repetitive beats you can hear on top of the music throughout the track. If you are new to this type of audio brainwave entrainment, find out how isochronic tones work and how they compare to binaural beats here:
○
Listen folks, we're out of time! Whether you want to know it or not we're literally in the fight of our lives, for our lives right now, and it's going to get much, much worse. Some of you reading this will not survive, and I may not either, so I'll take any edge I can get, and you should too... This works for me. Prepare yourself, brace for impact...
- CP
"How Not To Forget What Matters"
"How Not To Forget What Matters"
by Henrik Karlsson and Johanna Karlsson
"Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. Often, these epiphanies are accompanied by a sense that I actually know this already, it had just somehow slipped my mind. And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes - I regress to being the same person as ever.
The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,” "is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth."
You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.
In the same way that it is not enough to make a resolution that you will learn the piano, it is not enough to realize that when the kids act out, you shouldn’t lose your temper but slow down, listen, and regulate their nervous systems with the help of yours. Imagine how good a person I would be if having insights were enough! But reacting to the frustrations of your children with calm and curiosity is a skill as much as playing the piano is - and as with the piano, the act of learning it requires rewiring your nervous system through sustained attention and practice. Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.
And this is much harder than making a habit out of playing the piano. When you’re trying to make something like piano practice a habit, the standard advice is to chain it onto some already existing habit - to practice immediately after you brush your teeth in the morning, for example, or after you change out of your work clothes in the afternoon. Chaining the new habit to an already existing one provides a predictable trigger that helps remind you to practice. But the habits that make up our characters often do not follow a predictable schedule like this. I never know, for instance, when our children will act out (except that it will usually be when I’m least capable of handling it with grace—whenever both they and I are unusually hungry and tired). The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. If Johanna and I talked about how we want to deal with the kids’ conflicts the night before, I will nearly always handle the situation well. The problem is to keep it top of mind.
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that - unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
This was, as I understand it, an exercise designed to combat the problem I outlined above. Meditating on what matters is a simple habit, which you can chain onto your morning routine, but it reinforces the habits you can’t plan, the habits that make up your character. It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise - an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises.
The most famous example of this practice is the meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote in his tent as plague swept through the camps during the military campaigns along the Danube River, but it seems to have been a fairly widespread practice among the “cultivated class.” A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation -insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on - and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way.
What could be an example? Today I woke up with a headache after having slept with my neck at an odd angle and so didn’t feel like working. Having procrastinated for an hour or so, while Johanna tried to get me to start the day, I recalled principle 23 from a list Nabeel S. Qureshi has compiled for himself: "Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much ‘rest’."
Walking around the farm with a cup of coffee, reminding myself of the truth of this observation, I gained a sliver of motivation, enough to throw myself into rewriting this essay - and now my headache has lifted, and I feel excited. For more examples of things one might meditate on, I suggest looking at Nabeel’s list. I also like to meditate on stories that make real to me some ethos I aspire to, such as the story of how Werner Herzog, dead broke while scouting for locations for Nosferatu in Brittany, happened upon a field of menhirs and decided to abandon his work to stay at the field for as long as necessary to solve the mystery of how the giant stones had been erected - a story that makes it visceral to me what it means to “take your curiosity seriously.”
The hypomnēma was a mechanism for centering your mind on what matters, and for gradually refining your understanding of what matters. It was, to use a word from Plutarch, a tool for ethopoiesis (ethos meaning “character” and poiesis “making”), a tool for turning truth into character. By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing - you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.
I first came across the idea of using in this way eight years ago when a friend sent me a copy of Foucault’s “Self-writing.” In the essay, Foucault talks about hypomnēmata and other modes of reading and writing used to fashion a self during the Hellenistic and Imperial eras. I didn’t pick up the practice in its full form. But rereading the essay now, I realize how much it has influenced how I write: my essays are (often) meditations I do in order to deepen core ideas I want to live by, and to strengthen parts of myself I want strengthened. (Writing treatises and letters was a common way of internalizing the content of the hypomnēmata.) And this practice has been transformative for me. I have often noticed that my experience of reality improves if I write and think about something.
But it strikes me now that the practice Foucault wrote about was probably more transformative than what I’ve ended up doing. Essay writing is incredibly time-consuming, and a lot of that time is spent on things that aren’t self-transforming: I spend less time reshaping my mind than I spend solving literary-technical problems that help me write more functional and beautiful essays, for the joy of the craft and for the benefit of readers. Another limitation of my practice is that when an essay is done, I move on. The ideas - though they have been much deepened and more firmly lodged in my mind - fall out of attention and start to fade.
There is an element of self-deception involved here. I like to write essays, so it is comforting to think of it as a powerful practice, something that helps me live more fully and grow as a person. But if I look at it soberly, it is clear to me that essay writing is not a practice that is ideal for the purpose of ethopoiesis. It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us - therapy, meditation, psychedelics, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.
The most important ideas we need to return to weekly, even daily. Essay-writing, then, is not a functional substitute for having a practice that keeps the important truths top of mind, day after day. But it did help me reach that conclusion."
Joel Bowman, "Fatal Conceits"
"Fatal Conceits"
by Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "What is it, we wonder, that stirs the crowd? That swells the chest and moves the masses? From wild stock market manias… to the sound of trumpets on the battlefield… to belting out national anthems, hands on hearts, before sports matches…Is it the sense of wanting to belong to “something bigger”? Is it a case of mass psychology permeating our vastly interconnected world?
Or is it, as some folk have suggested, a replacement for religion in an increasingly secularized (Western) world? Among English-speaking peoples, from Europe to Australia, Canada to South Africa, fewer people identify with organized religion than they did a generation ago. Even in the United States of America, “One country, under God,” church attendance has declined significantly during our lifetime.
According to Pew Research, the share of Americans identifying as Christian fell from roughly 85–90% in the early 1990s to 62% as of the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study. Meanwhile, the so-called “religiously unaffiliated” more than tripled, from about 8% to 29%. So what do people pour into this “gap of the gods”? Hmm…
Click image for larger size.
Our reader’s observation recalled to mind the myth of Narcissus. A fatally handsome young man, he arrogantly scorned all those who courted him, including the poor nymph, Echo, who suffered his rejection until she wasted away to nothing… save the sound of her voice in the woods.
As punishment for his pride, the god Nemesis led Narcissus to a drinking pool, where he left the conceited mortal to fall under the spell of his own reflection. Unable to differentiate reflection from reality, Narcissus soon became hopelessly enamored with himself. Whenever he would reach for his beloved reflection, the waters would ripple and the image would disappear. Then, in his sullen melancholy, the beautiful face would return, luring his attention back to the pool anew.
Marooned between desire and impossibility, the helpless youth remained beside the pool, unable to eat, sleep, or turn away. Too late he realized, writes the great Roman poet, Ovid: “I am he.” Even when Narcissus understood that the object of his love was himself, the realization brought no relief. Unable to possess what he desired, he wasted away and died beside the water. And where his body had lain, goes the story, a flower appeared, the narcissus, which bears his name today.
It’s interesting to note that it is not the image itself that proves fatal for our young Narcissus, but his inability to draw his attention away from it, to involve himself in the world, to make real connections with those around him."
"The Day the Lights Never Came Back: How a Single Moment Could Push Modern Civilization to the Brink" (Excerpt)
"The Day the Lights Never Came Back:
How a Single Moment Could Push Modern Civilization to the Brink"
by Milan Adams
"“Seventy percent of power transformers are 25 years or older, 60% of circuit
breakers are 30 years or older, and 70% of transmission lines are 25 years or older.”
- ASCE 2025 Infrastructure Report Card
“All it takes is one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal to start a nuclear war.”
- Richard Garwin, physicist and contributor to the first hydrogen bomb design
Excerpt: "Modern civilization often feels permanent. We wake up, switch on the lights, check our phones, pour a cup of coffee, and assume that electricity, clean water, food deliveries, digital banking, emergency services, and global communications will continue functioning exactly as they did yesterday. The complexity behind these everyday conveniences is almost invisible, and perhaps that is why we rarely stop to consider how remarkably fragile they actually are. Every aspect of contemporary life depends upon an enormous web of interconnected systems that must operate continuously, every second of every day, without significant interruption. The moment one of these systems fails on a sufficiently large scale, the others begin to unravel with astonishing speed.
History teaches us that civilizations rarely disappear because of a single dramatic event. Most decline gradually through economic exhaustion, political instability, environmental pressures, or prolonged conflict. Yet modern civilization presents an entirely different paradox. Never before has humanity possessed so much technological sophistication while simultaneously becoming so dependent on a handful of critical infrastructures. The more advanced society becomes, the more catastrophic the consequences of systemic failure become. Unlike previous generations, we have built a world where electricity is not merely a convenience but the foundation upon which nearly everything else rests.
This dependence creates a vulnerability that receives surprisingly little public attention despite repeated warnings from engineers, scientists, military planners, and emergency management experts. The greatest existential threats facing industrial society may not begin with visible destruction at ground level. Instead, they could originate hundreds or even millions of miles above us, arriving silently before spreading through the electrical networks that sustain modern civilization. Whether triggered by an extreme solar event, a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, or the opening moments of a large-scale nuclear war, the immediate consequence would be strikingly similar: the sudden failure of electrical infrastructure on a scale unlike anything humanity has previously experienced.
For decades, these scenarios were often dismissed as speculative or confined to the realm of science fiction. Popular culture certainly played its part. Films imagined machines overthrowing humanity after a nuclear apocalypse, while novels portrayed societies descending into chaos after mysterious blackouts. Although entertaining, these fictional narratives unintentionally encouraged many people to associate grid collapse with fantasy rather than legitimate strategic planning. In reality, government agencies across multiple countries have spent years studying these exact possibilities, not because they are inevitable, but because their consequences would be so severe that ignoring them would be irresponsible.
The uncomfortable truth is that many of the risks are not hypothetical at all. The Sun continues to produce powerful solar eruptions just as it has throughout recorded history. Nuclear weapons remain deployed across several nations, many still maintained on high levels of operational readiness. Geopolitical tensions have intensified over the past several years rather than diminished, while technological dependence continues expanding into virtually every aspect of daily life. Meanwhile, much of the infrastructure responsible for delivering electricity across North America was designed decades ago, long before today’s digital economy, interconnected supply chains, or sophisticated electronic control systems existed.
Key Insight: The greatest danger is not simply losing electricity. It is losing every other critical service that depends upon electricity at exactly the same time."
Full, most highly recommended article is here: