Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"How to Know When It's Time
to Walk Away From Everything"
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Sunday, July 19, 2026
"I Ain’t Rich, But I Sleep Good'
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"I Ain’t Rich, But I Sleep Good'
"Money buys a lot… but peace still ain’t on the shelf. “I Ain’t Rich, But I Sleep Good” is a warm, grounded Delta King’s Blues tune about simple living, clear conscience, and the kind of wealth that doesn’t fit in a wallet. A steady, easy-rolling acoustic guitar moves like a quiet walk home after a long honest day. The harmonica breathes soft and content, carrying the sound of a man with nothing to hide. The groove stays slow and restful, built for front porches, tired boots, and clean pillows. This is blues about the riches that matter. For folks who may not have much - but rest easy every night. I ain’t rich… but peace pays better than money ever did."
"Pick and Choose Your Own Truth"
"Pick and Choose Your Own Truth"
by Todd Hayen
"Here I go again. Getting perplexed by the sheep-types in my life. I seem to be in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. I’ve whacked my forehead so many times with the heel of my hand that I am surprised I have not seriously damaged my brain. Well, maybe I have!
It’s really crazy to me, how something can come forth that makes a point we have all made in the past into an incontrovertible truth, and these sheepsters will still not see it. I just got around to watching Mikki Willis’ "Follow the Silenced," and after getting 20 minutes into it, I said, “What could be better evidence of the truth that these vaccines were bad news?” I shared this with someone close, who is, believe it or not, a sheep, and they said, “That just isn’t true.”
What? They were quite casual about it, too. Like there wasn’t anything to argue about. It would be the same as if I showed them a movie of a human walking around with a rat’s head. They wouldn’t be freaked out wondering if it might be true; they would just know it wasn’t. No question. No second thoughts. “That just isn’t true.” Of course, this is different than a rat-headed human (although with AI these days it would be an easy “untruth” to pull off). I am talking about things that are facts, no question, clear and simple. Facts.
Sure, Willis’ film probably isn’t 100% factual. Or at least, what IS factual doesn’t necessarily prove it is widespread. But much of what is presented is factual. And the argument that what Willis is presenting is all play-acting just doesn’t cut it. Sure, that happens too, but there are times when that sort of manipulation is plausible. Willis’ film is not one of them.
And since when does something presented have to be 100% factual for it to be considered? We used to live in a time where we determined what was worth paying attention to by assessing its relevance, the percentage of accurate information compared to the whole, and the context of what was presented. Now, any idea at all must meet the “100%” test. This reminds me of the fact check that stated Paul Revere’s ride, where he is shouting “The British are coming, the British are coming!” was not a fact, because not ALL of the British Empire was invading the country, only a small military faction. So, the whole statement then is deemed incorrect. This is standard “fact-checking” on social media, and it is insane.
Still, there are many other examples of this demonstration of picking what you choose to believe. And there is something psychologically weird about how people respond to this stuff. So, what else is new? We truly have entered into a time where people are truly whacked. And I’m a psychotherapist! You can’t find this stuff in a textbook.
Take the whole climate change debacle, for instance. I’m not here to debate whether the planet’s getting hotter or if it’s all a cosmic prank - though I’ve got my suspicions about the latter. But watch how the sheep latch onto “their truth” like it’s the last lifeboat on the Titanic. On one side, you’ve got folks who swallow every alarmist headline hook, line, and sinker: polar bears drowning, cities underwater by next Tuesday, all because we dared to drive SUVs and eat steak.
Show them data suggesting natural cycles, solar flares, or even historical warm periods like the Medieval Warm Period (when Vikings were farming Greenland, for crying out loud), and they glaze over. “That’s denialism,” they say, as if the word itself is a magical shield against inconvenient facts. Why? Because it fits the narrative they’ve been fed - the one that makes them feel virtuous for recycling their plastic straws while ignoring the private jets of the elites preaching the gospel.
Flip the coin, and you’ve got the other crowd, convinced it’s all a hoax cooked up by globalists to slap carbon taxes on the little guy. Present them with satellite images of melting ice caps or rising sea levels, and they wave it away as manipulated data or “weather, not climate.” Both sides dig in their heels, not because the evidence is lacking, but because admitting the other side might have a sliver of validity would shatter their worldview. It’s tribalism on steroids, where “my truth” isn’t about seeking reality - it’s about belonging to the right club. Psychologically, this stems from confirmation bias, that sneaky brain trick where we cherry-pick info that strokes our ego and ignore the rest. Add in a dash of fear - fear of change, fear of being wrong, fear of the unknown - and voilà, you’ve got a recipe for intellectual stagnation.
Another prime example hits closer to home for me as a therapist: the mental health industry’s love affair with pharmaceuticals. I’ve seen clients come in, desperate for relief from anxiety or depression, and the first thing their doctor does is scribble a script for SSRIs like they’re handing out candy. Never mind the black box warnings, the withdrawal horror stories, or studies showing placebos work just as well in many cases. Show a sheep-type patient footage of people recounting their nightmare experiences - zombie-like side effects, suicidal thoughts, the works - and they’ll shrug it off.
“My doctor says it’s safe,” they insist, as if the white coat confers infallibility. Why do they cling to this? It’s easier. Popping a pill absolves them of the hard work: therapy, lifestyle changes, digging into root causes like trauma or diet. It’s the illusion of control in a chaotic world, wrapped in the comfort of authority. Question that authority, and suddenly you’re the crazy one, labelled an “anti-vaxxer” equivalent for mental health. But facts are facts: the overprescription epidemic is real, backed by whistleblowers and buried FDA reports. Yet, “their truth” prevails because facing the alternative means admitting the system might be broken - and who wants that headache?
Or consider the origins of COVID itself. Lab leak theory was once “conspiracy nonsense,” ridiculed by fact-checkers and banned on social media. Now? Even the FBI and DOE lean toward it, with emails showing scientists privately admitting it while publicly denying. But try telling that to the die-hards who still parrot “wet market” like it’s gospel. Why? Emotional investment. If it were a lab leak, funded by our own tax dollars no less, it would implicate heroes like Fauci and shake our faith in science. Easier to dismiss whistleblowers as cranks than confront the betrayal. This isn’t new; history’s littered with it - think Tuskegee experiments or MKUltra. People pick “their truth” to preserve sanity, avoiding the abyss of realizing power structures lie.
At its core, this “pick and choose” phenomenon signals a deeper malaise: the death of objective reality. We’ve traded shared facts for personalized bubbles, curated by algorithms and echo chambers. Why? Technology plays a part, sure - endless scrolling reinforces biases. But psychologically, it’s about vulnerability. In an uncertain world, clinging to “my truth” offers certainty, even if illusory. It’s a defence mechanism against overwhelm, a way to simplify complexity. As a therapist, I see it daily: clients rewriting personal histories to avoid pain, ignoring red flags in relationships because “love conquers all.” Scale that up societally, and you get mass delusion.
Yet, here’s the rub - and maybe a sliver of hope. If everyone’s got “their truth,” then mine’s as valid as any. So why not question everything? Peel back the layers, demand evidence, and risk being the odd one out. It’s exhausting, sure, but it beats forehead-smacking frustration. In the end, truth isn’t a buffet; it’s a hunt. And if we all stopped grazing like sheep and started tracking like shrews, we might just uncover something real. Wouldn’t that be a plot twist worth waking up for?"
Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here.
"Everything We Assume Is Permanent Is Actually Fragile"
"Everything We Assume Is Permanent Is Actually Fragile"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"The great irony of the past 75 years of expanding consumption is the belief that all these decades of success prove the system is rock-solid and future success is thus guaranteed. The irony lies in the systemic fragility that's built into the large-scale industrial production that generates endless surpluses of energy, food, fresh water, etc. and the global financial system that delivers endless surpluses of capital and credit to be distributed by public authorities and private owners of capital.
The key driver of increasing efficiencies has been scaling up production by concentrating ownership and capacity into a few quasi-monopolies/cartels. In industry after industry, where there were once dozens of companies, there are now only a handful of behemoths with outsized market and political power which they wield to retain their dominance.
For example, where there were dozens of large regional banks in the U.S. not that long ago, relentless consolidation has led to a handful of supergiant too big to fail banks which can take extraordinary risks (and undertake criminal skims) knowing that the federal government will always bail them out and leave the banks' corporate criminals untouched.
Two of these too big to fail banks recently paid fines in the billions of dollars, yet no one went to prison or even faced criminal charges. This highlights the systemic problem with concentrating capital and power in the hands of the few: too big to fail means corporate wrongdoers have a permanent get out of jail free card while the small-fry white-collar criminal will get a fiver (five-year prison sentence) for skimming a tiny fraction of the billions routinely pillaged by the too big to fail banks.
The net result is a two-tier judicial/law enforcement system: the too big to fail "essential" companies get a free hand and the citizenry get whatever "justice" they can afford, i.e. very little.
This concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few corporations is of course state-cartel socialism in which the public good has become subservient to the profits of corporate owners and insiders, and the skims paid to the state's insiders. The state enables and enforces this concentration of private wealth and power in a number of ways: regulatory capture, the polite bribery of lobbying, the revolving door between government and private industry, and so on.
The public good would best be served by competition and transparent markets and regulations, but these are precisely what's been eliminated by relentless consolidation and the paring down of the economic ecosystem to a handful of too big to fail nodes which work tirelessly to eliminate competition, transparency and meaningful public oversight.
This ruthless pursuit of efficiencies and profits has stripped the economy of redundancies and buffers. Production supply chains have been engineered to function in a narrow envelope of quality, quantity and time. Any disruption quickly leads to shortages, something that became visible when meatpacking plants were closed in the pandemic.
Supply chains are long and fragile, but this fragility is not visible as long as everything stays within the narrow envelope that's been optimized. Once the envelope is broken, the supply chain breaks down. Since redundancies and buffers have been stripped away, there are no alternatives available. Shortages mount and the entire system starts breaking down.
Quality has been stripped out as well. When markets become captive to cartels and monopolies, customers have to take what's available: if it's poor quality goods and services, tough luck, pal, there are no alternatives. There are only one or two service providers, healthcare insurers, etc., and they all provide the same minimal level of quality and service.
The moral rot in our social, political and economic orders is another source of hidden fragility. I'm constantly told by readers that corruption has been around forever, so therefore nothing has changed, but these readers are indulging in magical nostalgia: things have changed profoundly, and for the worse, as the moral rot has seeped into every nook and cranny of American life, from the top down.
There is no "public good," there is only a rapacious, obsessive self-interest that claims the mantle of "public good" as a key mechanism of the con.
As I discussed in "Everything is Staged", everyone and everything in America is now nothing more than a means to a self-interested end, and so the the entirety of American life is nothing but 100% marketing of various cons designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. That America was a better place without endless marketing of Big Pharma meds and "vaccines", and colleges hyping their insanely costly "product" (a worthless diploma) has been largely forgotten by those indulging in magical nostalgia.
What few seem to realize is all the supposedly rock-solid permanent foundations of life are nothing more than fragile social constructs based on trust and legitimacy. Once trust and legitimacy have been lost, these constructs melt into the sands of time.
A great many things we take for granted are fragile constructs that could unravel with surprising speed: law enforcement, the courts, elections, the value of our currency -- these are all social constructs. Once legitimacy is lost, people abandon these constructs and they melt away.
It's clear to anyone who isn't indulging in magical nostalgia that trust in institutions is in a steep decline as the legitimacy of these institutions, public and private, have been eroded by incompetence, corruption, dysfunction and the rapacious self-interest of insiders.
What we've gotten very good at is masking the rot and fragility. Masking the rot and fragility is not the same thing as strength or permanence. The nation is about to discover the difference in the years ahead."
"The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of Perspective on How to Live with Our Human Nature"
"The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of
Perspective on How to Live with Our Human Nature"
by Maria Popova
"When Earth first erupted with color, flowers took over so suddenly and completely that, two hundred million years later, the baffled Darwin called this blooming conquest an “abominable mystery.” When earthlings first realized that our Milky Way is not the cosmic whole but one galactic particle of the whole - one of unfathomably many galaxies, each abloom with billions of stars orbited by other worlds - the universe suddenly appeared “so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” When it became clear that a mysterious substance is holding each galaxy together, keeping each world’s orbit a perfect corolla around the stigma of its star, we gave that substance a name befitting an abominable mystery: dark matter.
Along the way, we - thinking, feeling, meaning-hungry creatures - kept trying to make beauty of the truths we found, composing poems about flowers and poems about dark matter as we composed our equations and our theories.
Reality’s ability to continually baffle us with what we don’t yet know, and our willingness to continually plumb the unknown for new truth and beauty, even as it baffles and terrifies us, is the loveliest thing about being alive. Being alive together, as members of this boundlessly inquisitive and imaginative species, is the loveliest thing about being human.
That is what Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) - a scientist, poet, and perhaps my favorite writer about the native poetics of reality - explores throughout his altogether exquisite final essay collection, "The Fragile Species" (public library).
In the opening essay, originally delivered as a talk in 1987 for the fiftieth reunion of his Harvard Medical School class, Thomas reflects on the splendid bafflements of science since he and his classmates parted ways in the prime of their lives half a century earlier. With his signature winking genius, he writes: "I cannot count the number of new items of ignorance I’ve picked up in fifty years; the list is simply too long. Instead, I have prepared another kind of list, shorter, more personally humbling, of some things I think I might have been learning more about if I hadn’t been so puzzled all those years by medicine itself. There are matters that I assume most other people my age comprehend nicely, and I never got round to studying.
The Federal Reserve System is at the top of my list. I’ve never known what it was or what it did or how it did it, and what is more I don’t want to be told. The same goes for the stock market, and for the bond market, and the word processor (one of which I actually possess and am baffled by), and the internal combustion engine, and the universe, black holes, galactic mirrors, those other universes, and space-time. Most of all, space-time. I cannot get ahold of it."
With so fetching a wink, Thomas turns to the real object of his meditation: our native inability to comprehend how the same processes that begot these remote abstractions also begot the fleshy, feeling concreteness of us. There is something incredibly lovely about Thomas’s warm humor - here is man of extraordinary intellect, scientific erudition, and uncommon human sensitivity, inviting the rest of us, far more ordinary and modestly lettered, to join him in his gladsome bafflement at the seeming miracle of life:
"I even have troubles of my own with evolutionary biology. Not first principles, mind you, not the big picture, mostly just the details. I understand about randomness and chance, and election, and adaptation, and all that, and I now know better than to talk, ever, about progress in evolution, never mind purpose. My problems come when I think about the earliest form of known life, those indisputable bacterial cells in rocks 3.7 billion years old, our Ur-grandparents for sure, then nothing but bacteria for the next two and one-half billion years, and now the chestnut tree in my backyard, my Abyssinian cat Jeoffry, the almost-but-not-quite free-living microbes living in all our cells disguised as mitochondria, and, just by the way, our marvelous, still-immature, dangerous selves, brainy enough to menace all nature unless distracted by music."
Leaning on his training as an etymologist - that is, an evolutionary biologist for the living organism of language - Thomas adds: "We need a better word than chance, even pure chance, or that succession of events, while still evading any notion of progress. But to go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness.
I like the word stochastic better, because of its lineage in our language. The first root was stegh, meaning a pointed stake in the Indo-European of 30,000 years ago. Stegh moved into Greek as stokhos, meaning a target for archers, and then later on, in our language, targets being what they are and aiming arrows being as fallible as it is, stokhos was adapted to signify aiming and missing, pure chance, randomness, and thus stochastic. On that philosophical basis, then, I’m glad to accept all of evolution in a swoop, but I’m still puzzled by it."
With great subtlety and sensitivity, Thomas then pirouettes to observe that this stochastic miracle of life across time exists only because death too exists. A generation before Richard Dawkins made his poetic point about the luckiness of death and an epoch after the grief-stricken Darwin, having lost his most beloved child, found personal solace in the scientific fact that the death of the individual is what fine-tunes evolution to ensure the survival of the species - “there is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin wrote - Thomas dismantles the central logical fallacy beneath our species’ fantasies of immortality, be they retro-religious or techno-futuristic.
With an eye to various speculative proposals - which have grown all the more various and more unsoundly speculative in the decades since - about hacking the entropy that frays at all matter in order to attain long-term preservation of information systems, including the information system of us, Thomas considers the inherent syllogism of such hopes: "If it had been arranged that way, we’d all still be alive forever but, in the nature of things, we would still be those same archaebacteria born 3.7 billion years ago, unable to make molecular errors, deprived of taking chances, and therefore never blundering into brains. That is, if we could be immortal, we could not exist; if we were already perfect, we could not exist. It is only because we are mortal and imperfect, you and I and Dickinson and Darwin, that the sum of us, the galaxy of humanity drifting through impartial stars, goes on."
Although he had art on his mind, Van Gogh was contouring a deep scientific truth, a truth both existential and evolutionary, when he observed how inspired mistakes propel us forward. With his pliant logic and playful love of the human condition, Thomas considers the reflexive conclusion to which this awareness might lead the inattentive: "Nature is an immense mechanism, operating itself in accordance with the laws of physics. We, and our brains, are working parts of the machinery, having made our appearance here and having our existence because of the operation of those laws, set in place on what we like to see as the pinnacle by the beneficent operation of chance and quantum mechanics. Pure luck, indeterminate and intentionless, all the way."
But this, of course, is Lewis Thomas. And this, therefore, is not a case for vacuous materialism. This is Lewis Thomas, who often makes the deepest point by caricaturing its shallow opposite: "This view takes us a long distance toward understanding our place in nature, but not quite the full distance. We are still stuck with the problem of consciousness, and because of this not-quite-settled matter, we are stuck as well with the incessant questions with which our consciousness continues to plague us and disturb our sleep (for which also, by the way, we do not have a good explanation). Questions like: Are we the only creatures on the whole planet with real consciousness? Why is being being; why not nonbeing? Why should there be something, instead of nothing? How do you organize a life, or a society, in accordance with physical laws that forbid purpose, causality, morality, and progress, especially when you have to do so with brains that stand alive with these very notions? Where’s the fun in it?"
In another essay from the book, in a passage from which the entire book borrows its title, Thomas writes at the peak of the Cold War and its menacing specter of nuclear catastrophe, which has since only changed costume as the ecological catastrophe menacing our own time: "This is a very big place, and I do not know how it works, or how I fit in. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error-prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that."
In a passage of extraordinary prescience, precisely in the context of our present ecological precariousness and what its only solution might be, Thomas adds as he considers our place in the family of life: "We are different, to be sure, but not so much because of our brains as because of our discomfiture, mostly with each other. All the other parts of the earth’s life seem to get along, to fit in with each other, to accommodate, even to concede when the stakes are high. They live off each other, devour each other, scramble for ecological niches, but always within set limits, with something like restraint. It is a rough world, by some of our standards, but not the winner-take-all game that it seemed to us awhile back. If we look over our shoulders as far as we can see, all the way past trillions of other species to those fossil stromatolites built by enormous communities of collaborating microorganisms, we can see no evidence of meanness or vandalism in nature. It is, on balance, an equable, generally amiable place, good-natured as we say.
We are the anomalies for the moment, the self-conscious children at the edge of the crowd, unsure of our place, tending to grabbiness… But we are not as bad a lot as some of us say… At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of a species’ adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like. Growing up is hard times for an individual but sustained torment for a whole species, especially as brainy and nervous as ours. If we can last it out, get through the phase…. we might find ourselves off and running again."
What might save us from ourselves, Thomas intimates, is not our maturity but our mutuality: We are more compulsively social, more interdependent and more inextricably attached to each other than any of the celebrated social insects… One human trait, urging us on by our nature, is the drive to be useful, perhaps the most fundamental of all our biological necessities. We make mistakes with it, get it wrong, confuse it with self-regard, even try to fake it, but it is there in our genes, needing only a better set of definitions for usefulness than we have yet agreed on."
Complement this fragment of "The Fragile Species" - which remains one of the finest, most fiercely humanistic and scientifically perspectival books I have ever read - with philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and the forgotten visionary William Vogt, writing half a century before his ideas shaped the modern environmental movement, on our interdependence resilience, then revisit Lewis Thomas on our wiring for mutuality and his science-rooted existential meditation on the medusa and the snail - still the subtlest, sanest thing I have read about the eternal mystery of the self."
"Ten Commandments For Living From Philosopher Bertrand Russell"
"Ten Commandments For Living From
Philosopher Bertrand Russell"
"The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness."
"Three Passions "
"Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind.
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of people.
I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart,
Of children in famine, of victims tortured,
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living. "
- Bertrand Russell
"The Worst and the Stupidest?"
"The Worst and the Stupidest?"
by Victor Davis Hanson
"Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence.
Yet the divide has grown far wider in the 21st century. Globalization fueled the separation in a number of ways. One, outsourcing and offshoring eroded the rust-belt interior, while enriching the two coasts. The former lost good-paying jobs, while the latter found new markets in investment, tech, insurance, law, media, academia, entertainment, sports, and the arts making them billions rather than mere millions.
So, the problem was one of both geography and class. Half the country looked to Asia and Europe for profits and indeed cultural “diversity,” while the other half stuck with tradition, values, and custom - as they became poorer.
The elite found in the truly poor - neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base - an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes, and romance of the far distant underclass.
Second, race became increasingly divorced from class - a phenomenon largely birthed by guilty, wealthy, white elites and privileged, diverse professionals. For the white bicoastal elite, it became a mark of their progressive fides to champion woke racialism that empowered the non-white of their own affluent class, while projecting their own discomfort with and fears of the nonwhite poor onto the middle class as supposed “racists,” despite the latter’s more frequently living among, marrying within, and associating with the “other.”
The net result was more privilege for the elite and wealthy nonwhites, more neglect of the inner-city needy, and more disdain for the supposedly illiberal clingers, dregs, deplorables, chumps, and irredeemables.
The results of these contortions were surreal. The twentysomething who coded a video game that went viral globally became a master of the universe, while the brilliant carpenter or electrical contractor was seen as hopelessly trapped in a world of muscular stasis. Oprah and LeBron James were victims. So were the likes of Ibram X. Kendi, Ilhan Omar, and the Obamas, while the struggling Ohio truck driver, the sergeant on the frontline in Afghanistan, and Indiana plant worker became their oppressors. Or so the progressive bicoastal elite instructed us.
Globalization and its geography, along with the end of ecumenical class concerns, certainly widened the ancient mass-elite divide. But there was a third catalyst that explained the mutual animosity in the pre-Trump years. The masses increasingly could not see any reason for elite status other than expertise in navigating the system for lucrative compensation.
An Incompetent Elite: In short, money and education certification were no longer synonymous with any sense of competency or expertise. Just the opposite often became true. Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.
The masses of homeless in our streets were a consequence of various therapeutic bromides antithetical to the ancient, sound notions of mental hospitals. The new theories ignored the responsibilities of nuclear families to take care of their own, and the assumption that hard-drug use was not a legitimate personal-choice, but rather a catastrophe for all of society.
From universities also came critical race theory and critical legal theory, which were enshrined throughout our institutions. The bizarre idea that “good” racism was justified as a get-even-response to “bad” racism, resonated as ahistorical, illogical, and plain, old-fashioned race-based hatred.
The masses never understood why their children should attend colleges where obsessions with superficial appearances were celebrated as “diversity,” graduation ceremonies matter-of-factly were segregated by race, dorms that were racially exclusive were lauded as “theme houses,” Jim-Crow-style set-aside zones were rebranded “safe spaces,” and racial quotas were merely “affirmative action.”
Ancient notions such as that punishment deters crime were laughed at by the degreed who gave us the current big-city district attorneys. Their experiments with decriminalizing violent acts, defunding the police, and delegitimizing incarceration led to a Lord of the Flies-style anarchy in our major cities. Note well, those with advanced or professional degrees who dreamed all this up did not often live in defunded police zones, did not have homeless people on their lawns, and found ways for their children to navigate around racial quotes in elite college admissions.
So, the credentialed lost their marginal reputations for competency. Were we really to believe 50 former intelligence heads and experts who claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”? Even if they were not simply biased, did any of them have the competence to determine what the laptop was?
Or were we to take seriously the expertise of “17 Nobel Prize winners” who swore Biden’s “Build Back Better” debacle would not be inflationary as the country went into 9 percent plus inflation? Did we really believe our retired four-stars that Trump was a Nazi, a Mussolini, and someone to be removed from office “the sooner the better”?
Or were we to trust the 1,200 “health care professionals” who assured us that, medically speaking, while the rest of society was locked down it was injurious for the health of people of color to follow curfews and mask mandates instead of thronging en masse in street protests?
Middle Class Competence: On the operational level, the elite proved even more suspect. Militarily, the middle classes in the armed forces proved as lethal as ever, despite being demonized as racists and white supremacists. But their generals, diplomats and politicians proved so often incompetent in translating their tactical victories in the Middle East and elsewhere into strategic success or even mere advantage.
Nationally, the failure of the elite that transcends politics is even more manifest. The country is $39.3 trillion in debt. No one has the courage to simply stop printing money. The border is nonexistent, downtown America is a No Man’s Land, and our air travel is a circus - and not an “expert” can be found willing or able to fix things.
The universities are turning out mediocre graduates without the skills or knowledge of a generation ago, but certainly with both greater debt and arrogance.
Our bureaucratic fixers can only regulate, stop, retard, slow-down, or destroy freeways, dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, ports, and refineries - and yet never seem to give up their own driving, enjoyment of stored water, or buying of imported goods.
Is it easier to topple than to sculpt a statue? A generation from now, in the emperor has no clothes fashion, someone may innocently conclude that most “research” in the social sciences and humanities of our age is as unreliable as it is unreadable, or that the frequent copy-cat Hollywood remakes of old films were far worse than the originals. Yet this lack of competence and taste among the elite is not shared to the same degree in a decline of middle-class standards.
Homes are built better than they were in the 1970s. Cars are better assembled than in the 1960s. The electrician, the plumber, and the roofer are as good or better than ever. The soldier stuck in the messy labyrinth of Baghdad or on patrol in the wilds of Afghanistan was every bit as brave and perhaps far more lethal than his Korean War or World War II counterpart.
How does this translate to the American people? They navigate around the detritus of the elite, avoiding big-city downtown USA. They are skipping movies at theaters. They are passing on watching professional sports. They don’t watch the network news. They think the CDC, NIAID, and NIH are incompetent - and fear their incompetence can prove deadly.
Millions increasingly doubt their children should enroll in either a four-year college or the military, and they assume the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department are as likely to monitor Americans as they are unlikely to find and arrest those engaged in terrorism or espionage.
When the elite peddles its current civil-war or secession porn - projecting onto the middle classes their own fantasies of a red/blue violent confrontation, or their own desires to see a California or New York detached from Mississippi and Wyoming - they have no idea that America’s recent failures are their own failures.
The reason why the United States begs Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia to pump more oil is not because of lazy frackers in Texas or incompetent rig hands in North Dakota, but because of utterly incompetent diplomats, green zealots, and ideological “scientists.”
Had the views of majors and colonels in Afghanistan rather than their superiors in the Pentagon and White House prevailed, there would have been no mass flight or humiliation in Kabul.
Crime is out of control not because we have either sadistic or incompetent police forces but sinister DAs, and mostly failed, limited academics who fabricated their policies.
Current universities produce more bad books, bad teaching, bad ideas, and badly educated students, not because the janitors are on strike, the maintenance people can’t fix the toilets, or the landscapers cannot keep the shrubbery alive, but because their academics and administrators have hidden their own incompetence and lack of academic rigor and teaching expertise behind the veil of woke censoriousness.
The Naked Emperors’ Furious Search for Fig Leaves: The war between blue and red and mass versus elite is really grounded in the reality that those who feel they were the deserved winners of globalization and who are the sole enlightened on matters of social, economic, political, and military policy have no record of recent success, but a long litany of utter failure.
They have become furious that the rest of the country sees through these naked emperors. Note Merrick Garland’s sanctimonious defense of the supposed professionalism of the Justice Department and FBI hierarchies - while even as he pontificated, they were in the very process of leaking and planting sensational “nuclear secrets” narratives to an obsequious media to justify the indefensible political fishing expedition at a former president’s home.
The masses increasingly view the elites’ money, their ZIP codes, their degrees and certificates, and their titles not just with indifference, but with the disdain they now have earned on their own merits. And that pushback has made millions of our worst and stupidest quite mad."
"People Are Living Above Their Means & Going Broke Like It’s Normal"
Full screen recommended.
The Unfolded States, 7/19/26
"People Are Living Above Their Means &
Going Broke Like It’s Normal"
"Living above your means no longer looks reckless because debt, monthly payments, and constant spending have become part of everyday life. Many people appear financially successful while one unexpected bill could push their entire budget onto a credit card. This video examines how financial stress develops long before someone misses a payment or files for bankruptcy. We explore why rising housing costs, expensive transportation, insurance premiums, and medical expenses leave many American households with little room for emergencies. The problem is not always low income or irresponsible behavior. It is often the shrinking distance between earnings and committed monthly expenses. You will also learn how social media comparison, lifestyle creep, Buy Now Pay Later plans, automatic subscriptions, and credit card debt can make an unstable financial life appear completely normal. Using recent Federal Reserve, Census Bureau, and consumer spending data, the video explains why being approved for a purchase is different from comfortably affording it, and why financial stability depends on the money remaining after every payment clears."
Comments here:
"CDC Warning Grows As Foodborne Illness Continues To Spread"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 7/19/26
"CDC Warning Grows As Foodborne
Illness Continues To Spread"
Comments here:
o
Wicked Prepared, 7/19/26
"What They Aren’t Telling You
About This Parasite Outbreak"
"The 2026 Cyclospora outbreak has now spread to 34 states with nearly 2000 confirmed cases - and the CDC just announced they've identified the source... well... possibly. How does this affect preppers? Does this have anything to do with food security? You bet! In this video I'm covering what the CDC found, which produce is still at risk, what "triple washed" actually means for this parasite, and the steps that go beyond standard food safety advice that you need to take right now."
Comments here:
"The Eclipse of the Soul"
"The Eclipse of the Soul"
by Todd Hayen
"Humanity is unravelling. In the span of just a few generations - scarcely a century - we have witnessed a precipitous decline in the quality of our shared life. What was once a world of craft, connection, and quiet moral coherence has given way to machine-made uniformity, moral drift, environmental squalor, widespread addiction, and a pervasive spiritual emptiness.
The symptoms are everywhere: drugs flooding communities, garbage choking landscapes, ethics treated as quaint relics, families dissolving, and relationships reduced to transactions. Many sense the rot but struggle to name its root. The cause, at bottom, is simple yet profound: we have ceased to value what is real. We have traded conscious relationship with soul for mere stuff.
This is not merely nostalgia for a romanticized past. For most of human history, daily life was saturated with human presence and intention. A child’s hobby horse was not ordered from a warehouse but carved by hand - perhaps by a parent or village craftsman. Houses rose under the skilled hands of bricklayers, carpenters, and masons who brought years of embodied knowledge and personal care to their work.
These creations carried something especially potent: the energy of focused attention, love of craft, and a sense of participation in a larger story. Even primitive shelters - the thatched huts of early communities - were built in the context of kinship, mutual reliance, and a felt connection to the living world. Soul flowed visibly through the making.
In truth, all material objects in God’s universe possess soul - they are part of one unified, living matrix. Yet humans more readily access and recognize this soul through direct connection with nature - especially other living beings, but also in the broader natural world of plants, sunsets, rivers, and even ancient rocks. Within our human realm, objects crafted by hand from these natural materials carry a particularly potent resonance of soul. These handcrafted objects act as bridges, carrying the imprint of both divine creation and human soul.
Technology has accelerated a process underway for over a hundred years. Machines now dominate production. Efficiency and scale have triumphed, delivering abundance and uniformity. While these objects are not devoid of soul, they often lack the intimate human touch that makes the divine presence more immediately accessible to us. Most people no longer notice the difference, yet something vital has diminished.
A mass-produced chair may function identically to a handcrafted rocking chair, but it carries less of the concentrated human heart and artistry that helps us feel the deeper energy. We sit in it without the subtle, unconscious nourishment that comes from knowing another soul consciously poured itself into the making. Our non-material heart - our deeper self - goes partially hungry.
This materialist shift reflects a deeper philosophical error. We have embraced a worldview that sees the universe as an arbitrary product of blind cause and effect. Without belief in an intentional creation—whether framed as God, a meaningful cosmos, or a purposeful intelligence—life collapses into mere biology: bodies consuming resources, competing, and reproducing until they expire. Meaning, purpose, and transcendence become illusions or evolutionary byproducts at best. In such a cosmos, the tangible and measurable naturally take precedence. Money, possessions, status, and pleasure become the measures of a successful life. The invisible dimensions - love, fidelity, compassion, beauty, moral courage - lose their claim on us.
The consequences cascade outward. If life is fundamentally material, then family and relationship lose their sacred weight. They become optional arrangements valued only insofar as they deliver convenience or pleasure. Yet these bonds are precisely where soul most notably dwells: in the unseen realities of commitment, regard, receptivity, and shared suffering.
When we prioritize the physical over the relational, we erode the very ground of meaning. A life oriented toward being good, caring for others, and mitigating suffering feels pointless when the highest good is material acquisition. Without belief in something bigger than the physical world (like God, a meaningful universe, or a higher purpose), people stop feeling a deep reason to be ethical or moral. Why sacrifice for the neighbour, the stranger, or future generations if nothing ultimately matters beyond the physical self and its appetites?
The further we drift from conscious relationship with soul-infused creation and connection, the more fragmented we become. Community dissolves into materialist narcissism. Work loses its dignity as vocation and becomes mere labour. Art, architecture, and everyday objects grow uglier and more disposable. We surround ourselves with artifacts that make the soul harder to feel and wonder why we feel empty.
The soul, undernourished, begins to express its neglect through shadow: addiction, despair, cruelty, and nihilism. As Jungian thought reminds us, what is unconscious does not disappear - it erupts.
At its core, this diagnosis aligns with a profound spiritual principle, often rendered as: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. This is a core teaching from "A Course in Miracles" (ACIM), a spiritual text published in 1976. It was dictated to psychologist Helen Schucman, who claimed it came as an inner voice from Jesus. The line summarizes the Course’s central idea: only what is of God/love/spirit is truly real and eternal; everything else (fear, ego, the material world) is illusion.
The materialist project, for all its glittering achievements, is built on the unreal - the illusion that meaning is secondary, that soul is superstition, and that love and purpose are mere byproducts of matter. These unreal foundations cannot sustain a flourishing culture. They are threatened by their own hollowness, and they threaten us in turn.
Reversing this eclipse does not require rejecting technology or returning to pre-modern hardship. It demands a revaluation of values. We must consciously restore our awareness of the soul present in all things, while giving special attention to those avenues—nature and human craft - through which we most readily feel God’s living presence.
This begins in small acts: choosing the handmade when possible, spending time in nature, investing deeply in family and community, orienting our purpose toward service and soul-making, and reclaiming a sense of the sacred in the created world. It continues through cultural renewal: supporting artists, artisans, and builders who infuse their work with presence; educating toward wisdom rather than mere utility; and cultivating the inner life through reflection, dream, relationship, and ethical practice.
Humanity does not fall apart from external forces alone. It disintegrates when we forget who we are—embodied souls navigating a meaningful cosmos, not mere consumers in a machine-made void. The mass-produced chair may rock the same, but the handcrafted one more readily carries the living imprint of another heart and, through it, the divine. Only one feeds what truly endures. The choice before us remains: Will we value the real, or continue building our world from the unreal? The soul of mankind hangs in the balance."
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