"The Rising Cost Of Living Is Absolutely Crushing U.S. Households – And Here Is Why It Is About To Get Even More Painful"

                                       

by Michael Snyder

"When you are working as hard as you can and you still don’t even come close to being able to pay all the bills, it can be absolutely soul crushing. Millions upon millions of Americans are living lives of quiet desperation as they attempt to scrape by from month to month. Many of them have a really hard time sleeping at night because the financial pressure never ends. This is the result of decades of bad policies from our leaders in Washington, and the cost of living is only going to go higher. As you will see below, the global energy crisis continues to escalate, and that means that just about everything that we purchase on a regular basis will soon be even more expensive.

Right now, lines at food banks all over America are the longest that they have been since the early days of the last pandemic. But we don’t have a pandemic to blame for the long lines this time around. At a food bank in West Virginia on one recent morning, vehicles were lined up for half a mile before the sun even came up… Bill Likens stared down a half-mile-long line of cars that started forming before the sun came up over the Appalachian Mountains. He had one job: figure out how to feed them all.

Some had driven more than 30 miles in aging cars and trucks that wheezed down flood-prone roads through the steep hills. They sat silently as the temperature rose into the 80s, their vehicles turned off with no air conditioning to preserve gas, waiting hours for a few boxes of food. Aided by a cane, Likens, 51, surveyed the pallets being unloaded off a semitruck that arrived that morning. He counted cartons of eggs and sacks of potatoes to calculate how much each waiting car could get - an algorithm of hunger he is constantly trying to solve.

More Americans are seeking help from food banks because grocery prices have soared to absurd heights. If you can still afford to eat three meals a day, you should be very grateful, because there are millions of Americans that cannot.

73-year-old Joanne Girvin has lost 20 pounds during the past year because she can’t afford to buy enough food, and some nights she just sits down and cries as she tries to figure out what to eat… Girvin, 73, used to own a restaurant nearby and is now living off Social Security, which is barely enough to cover her monthly bills. Already on a tight budget, she has no extra room for $4 gallons of gas or a rising electric bill. That has left one place to cut - her food.

She said she has lost 20 pounds over the past year because she has been eating less. The night before, she’d eaten canned deer meat left over from last fall’s hunting season with rice and gravy. Some nights she eats a bag of frozen broccoli with butter. “Sometimes I just sit down and cry when I’m trying to figure out what you’re going to eat out of a can or something because you don’t have no meat,” Girvin said as her eyes welled with tears. “It’s just really bad, this economy. It’s horrible.”

This is what life is like in West Virginia in 2026, and it has been this way for many years. Of course it isn’t just residents of West Virginia that are struggling. Food banks all over the country are reporting increased demand this year… The challenges extend far beyond Appalachia. An NBC News survey of 48 of the largest food banks across 35 states and Washington, D.C., found that nearly three-quarters said more people are showing up at their doors over the past year, from workers on their lunch breaks to older adults overwhelmed with medical expenses. At the same time, more than 80% said the food and funding they received through the U.S. Department of Agriculture had dropped and they were struggling with higher fuel costs for transporting food.

In Maine, Good Shepherd Food Bank said the USDA cut the amount of food it received from 13 million pounds to 9 million pounds in one year. A Michigan food bank, Forgotten Harvest, said it’s handing out less food to make sure there is enough to go around: one bag of potatoes instead of two, two tubs of yogurt as opposed to six.

If you are like most of us, nearly all of your bills have gone up over the past 12 months. If your income has not been going up at the same rate, you are falling behind. Once upon a time, if you earned $100,000 or more a year you were living very comfortably. But now even many of those that are earning $100,000 a year are really struggling… And though $100,000 is more than double the national median salary of $46,960, financial stress remains for many six-figure earners.

In fact, those making $100,000 or more have now adopted the shopping habits of lower-income households as they struggle with affordability, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said at a recent retail conference. That remark has some consumers second-guessing the value of such a salary. “I think a lot of people got to six figures and thought, ‘Wait, why doesn’t this feel like as much money as I expected?’” Steve Sexton, owner of financial firm Sexton Advisory Group, told The Independent in an email.

For decades, our politicians have been spending way too much money and have been destroying the value of our currency. Now we are stuck with the consequences. Unfortunately, our cost of living crisis is going to get even worse because the global energy crisis is only going to intensify.

On Saturday, the Houthis hit King Khalid International Airport in Saudi Arabia really hard. 12 people died as a result of that attack, and 309 were injured…Saudi Arabia said Sunday it would “respond decisively” against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen a day after a strike on Riyadh’s international airport brought the expanding Middle East conflict home for the Saudi capital and its residents.

The attack, which left 12 dead and 309 injured and came without warning, revealed the vulnerability of the U.S. ally and the ramifications of the Trump administration’s reluctance to openly help fight the Houthis more than seven months into Washington’s war with Iran. Riyadh’s airport is the country’s second largest for civilians and is frequently used by royals and visiting dignitaries, including President Donald Trump in his last visit to the kingdom.

The United States is providing Saudi Arabia with intelligence support, analysts and U.S. officials say. But the administration has so far stopped short of the direct military assistance that officials in Saudi Arabia and its allies in Yemen’s internationally recognized government have sought.

The Saudis responded with a huge wave of airstrikes, and then the Houthis struck King Khalid International Airport again on Sunday…A passenger terminal at the international airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was attacked again on Sunday, one day after a deadly strike on the Riyadh airport killed at least 12 people, including a U.S. citizen, and wounded hundreds of others. The second attack comes as Yemen’s Houthi group said they carried out at least four operations targeting King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh since Saturday.

Saudi’s civil aviation authority said the latest Riyadh airport attack caused injuries and that damage assessments are underway. In addition to hitting the airport, the Houthis also attacked a number of Saudi Arabia’s most important energy production facilities… Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said on Telegram that the attacks are in response to “brutal Saudi aggression against our country and our people,” CBS News partner BBC News reported. He claimed Saudi Arabia launched more than 120 airstrikes in the past 24 hours in Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen.

The Houthis said their other targets included the Shugadam gas facility, which belongs to Saudi’s national petroleum and natural gas company Aramco, the Tanajib oil refinery, and King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, the BBC reported. It could take months or even years for the Saudis to repair or rebuild all of the energy infrastructure that has been damaged by the Houthis in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, the Iranians have really stepped up the pace of tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz this month…There have been nearly a dozen attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz so far this month - as it emerged that some Western officials are sounding the alarm on Iran’s military capacity despite President Donald Trump’s insistence the country’s military has been destroyed. Iran has plenty of ballistic missiles and can speedily ramp up its stockpile, even after more than seven months of bombing by the United States, anonymous Western officials told Bloomberg.

Word that Iran’s ability to strike back is still strong comes as reports show 11 ships in Strait of Hormuz or nearby, off the coast of Oman, so far in October, according to Fox News, which cited maritime officials in the United States and the UK. Also, it appears that the Iranians have also now mined the U.S.-backed southern corridor through the Strait of Hormuz near the coast of Oman. A very large tanker traveling through that corridor hit a mine on Saturday, and another tanker traveling through that corridor hit a mine on Sunday.

Over the past couple of months tankers had snuck a lot of oil through the Strait of Hormuz using that corridor, but at this point the Iranians have decided to crack down really hard. So what this means is that global energy prices are poised to jump even higher. And that is really bad news because the price of diesel in the U.S. is already about 70 percent higher than last year…

The national average for diesel stood at roughly $6.32 per gallon Monday, according to AAA - up from about $3.69 at the same time last year, a jump of more than 70%. The surge has also eclipsed the previous record of $5.816 per gallon, set in June 2022 under former President Joe Biden as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent global energy prices soaring.

Even if you don’t have any diesel vehicles, this is going to affect you directly. Our trucks, our trains and our tractors run on diesel. It is inevitable that higher diesel prices will get passed along to U.S. consumers, and the cost of living will increase as a result. The most painful chapters of the global energy crisis are ahead of us, and the entire global economy will be thrown into a state of turmoil. A lot of people out there didn’t believe that things would ever get this bad, and those skeptics will be completely shocked by what is coming next."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"Columbus Day"

“A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.

But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:



1492


The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.



Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.

 Color was everything.



Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.



The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions"

"Economic Market Snapshot 10/12/26"

"Economic Market Snapshot 10/12/26"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

○

"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

o

Market Data Center, Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data 

○

- https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/

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Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

○

- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

Job cuts and much more.

○

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

○

"The more I see of the monied classes,

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...

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And now... The End Game...

o

"Diesel Is the Number That Will Decide November"

Click image for larger size.

"Diesel Is the Number That Will Decide November"

by Larry C. Johnson

"For four years Republicans had a simple message on energy: prices were higher under Joe Biden. It worked. Voters remembered $5 gasoline in the summer of 2022, and Donald Trump promised to bring it down. The war with Iran has turned that argument on its head, and the evidence is in the government’s own price data.

I went back through the Energy Information Administration’s monthly averages for every month since 2017. Here is what they show. Source: EIA monthly US retail averages; my calculations. Biden’s peak monthly prices were $4.93 for gasoline and $5.75 for diesel, both in June 2022.

Before the war, the Republican claim held up: in his first year back, Trump presided over cheaper fuel than Biden’s average. Since February the picture has reversed. Gasoline has jumped about $1.50 a gallon in seven months. It has not yet passed Biden’s 2022 peak, so on gasoline the two administrations are now roughly even. Diesel is a different story. September’s $6.29 average is the highest monthly figure on record, half a dollar above the worst month under Biden, and AAA’s daily average set an all-time high above $6.50 in late September. On the fuel that moves the American economy, this is now Trump’s record, not Biden’s.

Consumers feel it at the pump. Businesses feel it everywhere. A family that drives 15,000 miles a year in a car getting 25 miles per gallon burns about 600 gallons of gasoline. At September prices that works out to roughly $870 a year more than before the war. That hurts, especially for working people who commute long distances. But the larger damage is the one most voters will never see on a receipt, because diesel is the cost that hides inside every other price.

Almost everything Americans buy moves on a diesel truck at some point. Diesel was $3.71 a gallon a year ago; it is now around $6.39. Willy Shih of Harvard Business School estimates that hauling a load across the country at $6.50 diesel costs about $3,000 in fuel alone. Trucking margins are thin even in good years, and carriers cannot absorb a 70% jump in their biggest variable cost. FreightWaves counted at least eight large trucking companies filing for Chapter 11 in September, and close to 2,000 layoffs across delivery firms, manufacturers and packaging companies in a matter of weeks. Owner-operators, the one-truck businesses that are the backbone of the industry, have no cushion at all.

Farmers are getting hit at the worst possible moment: the fall harvest. A Joint Economic Committee analysis found that diesel added more than $1.4 billion to the cost of planting the country’s major crops this year, a 63% increase over 2025, with Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota hit hardest. In Minnesota, the average farmer is paying about $1,500 more each time the farm’s fuel tank is refilled. Farmer John Boyd puts the cost of filling a single combine at around $1,000. These are the same farmers already squeezed by the fertilizer shock I have written about, and who often voted for Trump.

Then the costs move downstream. Freight surcharges are passed to shippers, shippers pass them to retailers, and retailers pass them to the grocery shelf and the hardware store. Construction, mining, waste collection, school buses and emergency services all run on diesel. Higher diesel prices work like a sales tax on the entire economy, and that tax has gone up by about 70% since the war began.

The polls are tracking the pump: Trump’s approval numbers have fallen as fuel prices have risen. Reuters/Ipsos had him at 47% shortly after he took office in January 2025. By mid-March, two weeks into the war, he was at 40%; a week later, after gasoline had risen about a dollar a gallon, he was at 36%. In September, as diesel set its record, he hit 32%, the lowest of his political career. Only 17% of Americans approve of his handling of the cost of living, which voters rank as their top issue.

The most telling number is inside his own party. Republican approval of Trump fell from 82% to 73% in a single week in September. For the first time, more Republicans disapprove than approve of his handling of the cost of living, 51% to 44%. These are not abstractions to voters who drive a truck, run a farm or own a small business. They see the cost every week.

Rich Baris’s Big Data Poll, who I believe is the premier polling outfit, tells the same story. Its surveys found Trump’s approval recovering in June, after a peace deal with Iran was announced, then falling to a new low of 38.7% in late July once the war restarted and pump prices climbed again. Two-thirds of voters, 67.4%, said the war was not worth paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, and 27.6% would not accept paying more than the roughly $3 pre-war price. By mid-September Big Data Poll had Trump at 38.8% approval and 58.5% disapproval, the worst intensity score of his second term, and Democrats ahead by 11 points on the generic House ballot among likely voters. Democrats led by more than 10 points on inflation and the cost of living, the issue voters rank first. “Republicans are quickly running out of time to improve their outlook for November,” Baris warned.

Polls move for many reasons, and the war itself has grown less popular. But the timing is hard to miss: as gasoline and diesel climbed, Trump’s approval fell, and the steepest drops came as diesel reached record highs. Putin’s diesel will not save him The administration knows fuel prices may decide the midterms, and its answer arrived on October 9. After a call with Vladimir Putin, Trump announced that Russia would supply diesel to the United States and world markets, and his Treasury lifted sanctions on Russian diesel until April. He promised prices would fall “in record numbers.” The arithmetic says otherwise.

Trump’s own post listed 300,000 tons “immediately,” 500,000 tons in November, a million tons after that and three million more later. That is about 4.8 million tons, or roughly 36 million barrels, with no delivery dates for most of it. The United States burns about 3.8 million barrels of distillate a day, so the entire package equals about nine and a half days of American demand. The first 300,000 tons cover less than one day. Against the global shortfall of middle distillates, which analyst Karl Miller puts at a minimum of 3 million barrels a day, the whole deal covers about 12 days.

American prices are high because they are set in a world market that is short, not because American refineries lack product: the United States already produces about 5.2 million barrels a day of distillate and exports 1.6 million. Diesel futures dipped on the headline and the retail price barely moved; it was $6.28 on the day the deal was announced. Trump has also said he is “thinking about” banning US diesel exports, an idea his own Energy and Interior secretaries have criticized. These are gestures aimed at the news cycle before November 3, not at the supply problem.

Isaias: a near miss that shows how thin the cushion is: Then came Hurricane Isaias. Before it made landfall near Destin, Florida, on the evening of October 9 as a Category 2 storm, producers evacuated 129 of the 371 staffed platforms in the Gulf and shut in about 72% of offshore oil production, roughly 1.5 million barrels a day, and 59% of natural gas output. About 500,000 barrels a day of refining capacity sat in or near the storm’s path, led by Chevron’s 356,000-barrel-a-day refinery at Pascagoula, Mississippi, along with plants near Mobile and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

The country appears to have been lucky. The track stayed east of the big Louisiana refineries at Garyville, Baton Rouge and Norco, and as of Saturday there were no reports of serious refinery damage. Offshore production that was shut in as a precaution usually returns within days if the platforms and pipelines are undamaged. But the storm exposed how little room there is for error. US distillate stocks are at their lowest level for early October since the EIA began keeping records in 1982, and East Coast stocks are about 30% below normal. Diesel futures jumped about 26 cents in a single day as the storm approached. Florida, which has no refineries and no pipeline links to the Gulf refining centers, depends on trucks and barges from the very Alabama and Mississippi plants that were in the storm’s path.

In a normal year a glancing hurricane is a few days of headlines. In this market, with the Persian Gulf’s refineries damaged and inventories at record lows, any outage at a Gulf Coast refinery goes straight to the price of diesel. The hurricane season does not end until November 30, three weeks after the election.

The honest answer is that no executive order can conjure diesel out of the damaged refineries of the Persian Gulf, and the shortage will outlast the election. For years Republicans told voters that the President owns the price at the pump. They were right about the politics. Now they own it."

- https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/

"A Thimble for a Flood: Trump’s Russian Diesel Deal… Why The

 Announced Volumes Barely Register Against The Global Distillate Shortage"

"The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Destroyed"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 10/11/26

"The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Destroyed"

"Almost every American dreams of a comfortable middle-class life. The problem is that for years now, prices have been climbing faster than paychecks, and holding on to a middle-class standard of living has started to feel like a cruel game of musical chairs: every time the music stops, there are fewer seats left. And the next major economic downturn is coming at us fast. 

Owning a home has always been at the heart of the middle-class dream, yet homes have never been this far out of reach. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average sales price of a new home hit $502,700 in the second quarter of 2026, while 30-year mortgage rates sit well above 7%. For most young families, those numbers simply do not work anymore. Today, 25.2 million adults under the age of 35 are living with their parents, and roughly 7 out of 10 of the 25 to 34 year olds who are still at home actually have jobs. They are working, but they still cannot afford a place of their own. Renters are being squeezed just as hard. A record 22.7 million renter households are now cost-burdened, and 12.1 million of them are spending more than half of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. Over the past decade, the number of apartments renting for less than $1,000 a month has collapsed from 8.3 million to just 5.8 million. When there is nowhere left to go, people start living in their vehicles. About 486,000 Americans now live full-time in RVs, more than double the number from 2021, and estimates suggest that somewhere between 1 and 3 million Americans regularly sleep in cars, vans or campers. 

Meanwhile, the paychecks are not keeping up. Real average hourly earnings are lower than they were a year ago, wage growth has slowed to its weakest pace since 2021, and the September jobs report showed just 29,000 new jobs. Consumer confidence has plunged to its lowest level since 2014, and the expectations index has been sitting in recession territory for well over a year. Only 63% of American adults could cover a surprise $400 expense with cash, 47.9 million Americans live in food-insecure households, and total household debt is hovering near $18.8 trillion, with credit card balances alone at $1.26 trillion and delinquencies rising. Economist Peter Schiff has been warning that the middle class is being taxed far more heavily than anyone was ever supposed to tax the rich, and that every time the government is handed more power in the name of fairness, it is the middle class that ends up paying the price. In this video, we go through the hard numbers behind the systematic destruction of the American middle class, what they mean for your family, and what you can do right now to protect yourself before the next downturn hits."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"An Enormous Triple Bubble Bust Has Begun"

"An Enormous Triple Bubble Bust Has Begun"

by David Haggith

Excerpt: "The three most overinflated bubbles in history are all about to break at the same time. Stocks, primarily due to AI stocks, have never been priced so high above the stratosphere to where one analyst says they are clear up in the “thermosphere.” They are at a level above total GDP that has never been seen before. Housing is priced higher above wages than at any time in history, dwarfing even the huge housing bubble that busted us all into the Great Recession, bringing down banks around the world. And the biggest bond market in world history is now blowing out interest rates all across the bond spectrum at a highly unusual velocity of rising rates while containing the largest national debt ever seen and while funding a huge part of that stock bubble. It’s all going to blow up when the Big Bond Bubble explodes, and that is the one that is already fracturing all over its surface.

US budget deficit jumps to nearly $2 trillion: "Washington -The U.S. budget deficit climbed to nearly $2 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office, deepening the federal government’s persistent red-ink trend. The $1.993 trillion deficit was 12% above the 2025 level in nominal dollars, reaching the highest level since 2021. The U.S. spent $7.4 trillion last year, up 6%, and it collected $5.4 trillion in revenue, up 3%."

The US deficit has been on track with the trend of recent years. The only times we ever ran notably bigger deficits were during the historically massive bailouts of the Great Recession, and the even larger bailouts required by the ill-conceived economic lockdowns of the Covid crisis when Trump and then Biden forced most of the US population to stop working and, so, stop producing. So did most of the rest of the world.

We pretty well run on crisis budgets now. The anomalous budget surplus years were the Clinton-Gingrich years, which George Bush entirely destroyed with his Bush Tax Cuts that saved lots of money for the wealthy and a little bit for the rest of us by choosing not to pay for what we were buying, but to go back to letting future generations buy it for us. That tax-cut bill caused years of deficits under Bush and then years of massive deficits from bailing out the failed economy, which began in Bush’s final year. Those huge deficits were approved and scheduled during Bush’s final term to continue under Obama, which they did; and Obama, then, added extensions to those programs. We finally got down to more “normal” deficits but then blew that up entirely during all the Covid economic lunacy that started under Trump and continued with Biden.

It makes no difference which side of the Uniparty is in charge of government, except that we do marginally better when neither side is fully in charge, so that, at least, they are fighting each other, as happened in the Clinton-Gingrich years. Under either party’s full control, we choose to run massively irresponsible deficits until now we have a total national debt that is wobbling around like a drunkard, ready to do a face plant on the pavement."

Full, highly recommended article is here:

- https://www.thedailydoom.com/

'A Journey Through the Moonlit Kingdom"

Full screen recommended.

Aurora Everdream,

'A Journey Through the Moonlit Kingdom"

"Step into a magical world beyond the clouds, where moonlight, enchanted gardens, golden palaces, waterfalls, floating kingdoms, and endless stars create a peaceful celestial dreamscape. Let the gentle sound of soft violin melodies, ethereal angelic choir, delicate harp, dreamy ambient textures, and soothing celestial sounds carry you through this beautiful fantasy kingdom. Relax, breathe slowly, and let yourself drift through the Moonlit Kingdom."

Incredibly beautiful...

Delta King's Blues, "Pain Ain't Gonna Stop Me"

Full screen recommended.

Delta King's Blues, "Pain Ain't Gonna Stop Me"

"The aches got louder… but so did my determination. “Pain Ain’t Gonna Stop Me” is a powerful, resilient Delta King’s Blues anthem about pushing forward through hard times, worn-out bones, and every challenge life throws your way. A gritty, determined acoustic guitar drives the groove like boots marching through mud without turning back. The harmonica cries bold and defiant, carrying the spirit of someone who refuses to surrender to the years. The rhythm rolls slow but relentless, built for folks who know that strength isn’t about feeling no pain - it’s about moving anyway. This is blues for fighters. For people who wake up sore, tired, and weathered… yet still get up and face another day.  Pain may ride beside me… but it sure ain’t driving."

Native American Elder, "5 Hidden Marks on the Body of People With Strong Spirits"

Full screen recommended.

Native American Elder,

"5 Hidden Marks on the Body

 of People With Strong Spirits"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musican Interlude: 2002, "Breathing Light"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Breathing Light"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can appear quite thin. Some spiral galaxies appear even thinner than NGC 3717, which is actually seen tilted just a bit. Spiral galaxies form disks because the original gas collided with itself and cooled as it fell inward. Planets may orbit in disks for similar reasons.

The featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a light-colored central bulge composed of older stars beyond filaments of orbiting dark brown dust. NGC 3717 spans about  100,000 light years and lies about 60 million light years away toward the constellation of the Water Snake (Hydra)."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191112.html

Canadian Prepper, "AI Expert Just Ruined My Day With This Warning"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 10/11/26

"AI Expert Just Ruined My Day With This Warning"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Asking the AI doomsday questions to one of the worlds foremost AI critics/experts. 

Check out Roman Yompolskiys Youtube channel here ‪@RomanYampolskiy‬

"I'm In For A Rude Awakening; We're Gonna Pay A Severe Price For All This Debt"

Jeremiah Babe, 10/11/26

"I'm In For A Rude Awakening;

We're Gonna Pay A Severe Price For All This Debt"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "We Are Not Waiting Around... Get Ready For Winter"

Adventures With Danno, 10/11/26

"We Are Not Waiting Around... 

Get Ready For Winter"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Eyesore, October 2026"

"Eyesore, October 2026"

by Jim Kunstler

“There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.”

 - Lon Chaney

"Every year the displays get more extravagant, as if they are tracking the national zeitgeist exactly, fright upon fright. You also have to wonder how much cash money is going into these displays of morbid anxiety, in many cases a hefty percentage of the annual household income plus who-knows how many hours of labor... to put out the message “Be scared, be very scared.”

Halloween traditionally brings a dissolution of the boundary between the real world and whatever you suppose lies beyond it: the abode of dead souls, restless spirits, sinister ancestors, demons, circles of hell, eternal damnation, Netflix. Is it strangely and ironically possible that daily life has become so comfortable that some cultural mechanism is required to prompt an artificial reminder that hazard, horror, and death even still exist in this world? Well, maybe that’s a stretch, with mass murders here, there, and everywhere week after week. And so many still struggle to put baloney sandwiches on the table and pay the light bill, they must live in a nonstop cortisol fog. The headshrinkers might have a clue.

One thing for sure: the average American neighborhood is hideous enough without all the life-size inflatable mummies, blood-beasts, werewolves, wookies, witches, rotted corpses, dancing skeletons, botched science projects, and severed heads cluttering up the dooryards. Imagine everyone putting that money and energy into cleaning up the property, pressure-washing the layers of auto-emissions out of the soffits, truing-up the saggy porches, painting the front door. Then, maybe get yourself a pumpkin, carve a smile on it and pop a candle inside so the kids will understand the message, “Candy here!” Or maybe the whole population has decided subconsciously that the country is going to hell and if we take enough drugs, the journey there will, at least, be amusing."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Thanks for stopping by!

Dan, I Allegedly, "You Can Predict the Future - It's Not Pretty"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 10/11/26

"You Can Predict the Future - It's Not Pretty"

"Can you predict where the economy is heading? On today's iAllegedly, Dan Golka connects the dots between inflation, wages, rising household debt, fuel prices, mortgage rates, housing affordability, and declining consumer confidence. From the cost of groceries and gasoline to rising HOA fees, home insurance, retirement expenses, and health insurance, the financial pressures facing Americans are connected. We also look at artificial intelligence and jobs, bank earnings, the bond market, interest rates, gold and silver, and what these economic changes could mean for your personal finances."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Divide and Conquer"

"Divide and Conquer"

by Martin Armstrong

"Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you."

- Benjamin Franklin

"This strategy includes the termination of free speech which is what we are seeing. For example, a letter of self-proclaimed 270 experts wanted the Swedish audio streaming service to terminate “The Joe Rogan Experience” show, claiming he was spreading disinformation. I do not listen to his show, but the very idea of a free society means that we must tolerate those opinions we disagree with. To demand silence from the opposition leads only to communism.

Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratieff (1892-1938) was a Russian economist. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, Kondratieff, an economics professor, was called upon by the new government to create the first Soviet Five-Year Plan. Kondratieff was thus given the opportunity to draw the economic plan for Russia, he assumed, upon a blank slate. He explored the past to gather empirical data upon which to construct the new economy. What he observed was the cyclical nature of society through its booms and busts, and that knowledge would later cost him his life.

In 1926, Kondratieff published his conclusions after investigating history, entitling his work "Long Waves in Economic Life". Kondratieff discovered that there were progressive wave formations running spans of 50 to 60 years in length. He had reviewed historical events beginning in 1789 up to the date of his publication in 1926 and described three great waves, with highs of around 1820, 1864, and 1920 that were closely linked to wars. During this time period, the economy, even in the United States, was largely about 70% agrarian. By 1929, the United States’ economy was still about 40% agrarian, and this naturally provided an undertone to his work.

Even without war, adding the maximum time span of one of Kondratieff’s cycles of 60 years to 1920 brings us to 1980, the peak in OPEC oil and gold. Kondratieff effectively reached the conclusion that the economy was driven by cyclical activity, and thus this was implicitly against Hegel and Marx to the extent that no government would be able to reach some perfect state of synthesis. For this reason, Kondratieff’s work was seen as a criticism of Stalin’s goals. He was arrested in July 1930 and accused of being a member of the non-existent “Peasants’ Labour Party,” and was imprisoned for eight years. Stalin wanted him dead and expressed this in a letter dated August 1930. When his eight-year sentence was complete, he was put on trial again under new charges during the Great Purge and sentenced to ten years in prison.

However, upon his sentencing on September 17, 1938, he was taken outside and shot at the age of 46. Kondratieff died as a political prisoner, the government has done its best to destroy his research and to prevent its influence.

The powers in New York already tried to exterminate me. I have no doubt at some point they will think assassinating ANYONE or imprisoning them on fake charges will silence their opposition to the Great Reset. They will assume that silencing anyone who opposes them ensures their success. It will not. What they are doing is exterminating human rights. This is a standard agenda that has been played out countless times throughout history. It is what Patrick Henry explained: “Give me liberty or give me death!” Indeed, I saw the world they are creating behind the Berlin Wall. Death is preferable to living like that and being afraid to speak to anyone. There is no other way to judge the future than to look at the past."

- https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/

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"The Fourth Turn, Turn, Turn"

"The Fourth Turn, Turn, Turn"

by Charles Hugh Smith

Excerpt: "The cycles of The Fourth Turning, Fischer and Turchin are all in alignment at this point in history. The 1997 book "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy" proposed a cyclical pattern of four 20-year generations which culminate in a national crisis every 80 years. The book identifies these dates as Fourth Turnings: 1781 (Revolutionary War), 1861 (Civil War) and 1941 (global war). add 80 years and voila, 2021.

I use the term Fourth Turning generically to describe an existential crisis that decisively changes the course of national identity and history. In other words, we don't have to accept the book's theory of generational dynamics to accept an 80-year cycle. There are other causal dynamics in play that also tend to cycle: they credit (Kondratieff) cycle, for example. While each of the previous existential crises were resolved positively, positive outcomes are not guaranteed: dissolution and collapse are also potential outcomes.

David Hackett Fischer's book "The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History" proposes another cycle: humans expand their numbers and consumption until they've exploited and depleted all available resources. As resources become scarce, societies and economies unravel as humans do not respond well to rising prices generated by scarcities.

The unraveling continues until consumption is realigned with the resources available. In the past this meant either a mass die-off that drastically reduced human numbers and consumption (for example, The Black Plague), a decline in fertility that slowly reduced population to fit resources, mass migration to locales with more resources or the discovery and exploitation of a new scalable energy source that enabled a new cycle of rising consumption.

The 14th century Black Death reduce Europe's population by roughly 40%, enabling depleted forests to regrow and depleted agricultural land to restore fertility. Once the human population regained its numbers and consumption in the 17th century, wood was once again under pressure as the key source of energy, shipbuilding, housing, etc.

The development of steam power and the technologies of mining enabled the exploitation of coal, which soon replaced wood as the primary energy source. Oil and natural gas added to the energy humans could tap, followed (at a much more modest level) by nuclear power. Despite gargantuan investments, the recent push to develop solar and wind energy has yielded very modest results, as globally these sources provide about 5% of total energy consumption. (See chart below)

It's self-evident that despite breezy claims of endless expansion of consumption, the global human population has now exceeded the resources available for practical extraction. Energy, fresh water, wild fisheries and fertile soils have all been exploited and the easy/cheap-to-extract resources have been depleted. So once again it's crunch-time: either we proactively reduce consumption to align with available resources, or Nature will do it for us via scarcities."

View this complete, illustrated, article here:

- https://www.oftwominds.com/

"I Have Accepted The Fact..."

“One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless… I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.”

“There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.”

- Henry Miller

'Don't Wonder..."

"Don't wonder why people go crazy. Wonder why they don't.

In the face of what we can lose in a day, in an instant,

wonder what the hell it is that makes us hold it together."

- "Grey's Anatomy"

"Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization"

"Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization"

by International Man

"International Man: The decline of Western Civilization is on a lot of people’s minds. Let’s talk about this trend.

Doug Casey: Western Civilization has its origins in ancient Greece. It’s unique among the world’s civilizations in putting the individual - as opposed to the collective - in a central position. It enshrined logic and rational thought - as opposed to mysticism and superstition - as the way to deal with the world. It’s because of this that we have science, technology, great literature and art, capitalism, personal freedom, the concept of progress, and much, much more. In fact, almost everything worth having in the material world is due to Western Civilization.

Ayn Rand once said "East minus West equals zero." I think she went a bit too far, as a rhetorical device, but she was essentially right. When you look at what the world’s other civilizations have brought to the party, at least over the last 2,500 years, it’s trivial. I lived in the Orient for years. There are many things I love about it - martial arts, yoga, and the cuisine among them. But all the progress they’ve made is due to adopting the fruits of the West.

International Man: There are so many things degrading Western Civilization. Where do we begin?

Doug Casey: It’s been said, correctly, that a civilization always collapses from within. World War 1, in 1914, signaled the start of the long collapse of Western Civilization. Of course, termites were already eating away at the foundations, with the writings of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. It’s been on an accelerating downward path ever since, even though technology and science have been improving at a quantum pace. They are, however, like delayed action flywheels, operating on stored energy and accumulated capital. Without capital, intellectual freedom, and entrepreneurialism, science and technology will slow down. I’m optimistic we’ll make it to Kurzweil’s Singularity, but there are no guarantees.

Things also changed with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Before that, the US used gold coinage for money. "The dollar" was just a name for 1/20th of an ounce of gold. That is what the dollar was. Paper dollars were just receipts for gold on deposit in the Treasury. The income tax, enacted the same year, threw more sand in the gears of civilization. The world was much freer before the events of 1913 and 1914, which acted to put the State at the center of everything.

The Fed and the income tax are both disastrous and unnecessary things, enemies of the common man in every way. Unfortunately, people have come to believe they’re fixtures in the cosmic firmament. They’re the main reasons - there are many other reasons, though, unfortunately - why the average American’s standard of living has been dropping since the early 1970s. In fact, were it not for these things, and the immense amount of capital destroyed during the numerous wars of the last 100 years, I expect we’d have already colonized the moon and Mars. Among many other things.

But I want to re-emphasize that the science, the technology, and all the wonderful toys we have are not the essence of Western Civilization. They’re consequences of individualism, capitalism, rational thought, and personal freedom. It’s critical not to confuse cause and effect.

International Man: You mentioned that the average American’s standard of living has dropped since the early 1970s. This is directly related to the US government abandoning the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971. Since then, the Federal Reserve has been able to debase the US dollar without limit. I think the dollar’s transformation into a purely fiat currency has eroded the rule of law and morality in the US. It’s similar to what happened in the Roman Empire after it started debasing its currency. What do you think, Doug?

Doug Casey: All the world’s governments and central banks share a common philosophy, which drives these policies. They believe that you create economic activity by stimulating demand, and you stimulate demand by printing money. And, of course, it’s true, in a way. Roughly the same way a counterfeiter can stimulate a local economy.

Unfortunately, they ignore that, and completely ignore that the way a person or a society becomes wealthy is by producing more than they consume and saving the difference. That difference, savings, is how you create capital. Without capital you’re reduced to subsistence, scratching at the earth with a stick. These people think that by inflating - which is to say destroying - the currency, they can create prosperity. But what they’re really doing, is destroying capital: When you destroy the value of the currency, that discourages people from saving it. And when people don’t save, they can’t build capital, and the vicious cycle goes on.

This is destructive for civilization itself, in both the long term and the short term. The more paper money, the more credit, they create, the more society focuses on finance, as opposed to production. It’s why there are many times more people studying finance than science. The focus is increasingly on speculation, not production. Financial engineering, not mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineering. And lots of laws and regulations to keep the unstable structure from collapsing.

What keeps a truly civil society together isn’t laws, regulations, and police. It’s peer pressure, social opprobrium, moral approbation, and your reputation. These are the four elements that keep things together. Western Civilization is built on voluntarism. But, as the State grows, that’s being replaced by coercion in every aspect of society. There are regulations on the most obscure areas of life. As Harvey Silverglate pointed out in his book, the average American commits three felonies a day. Whether he’s caught and prosecuted is a subject of luck and the arbitrary will of some functionary. That’s antithetical to the core values of Western Civilization.

International Man: Speaking of ancient civilizations like Rome, interest rates are just coming off the the lowest levels they’ve been in 5,000 years of recorded history. Trillions of dollars’ worth of government bonds trade at negative yields. Of course, this couldn’t happen in a free market. It’s only possible because of central bank manipulation. How will artificially low interest rates affect the collapse of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: It’s really, really serious. I previously thought it was metaphysically impossible to have negative interest rates but, in the Bizarro World central banks have created, it’s happened.

Negative interest rates discourage saving. Once again, saving is what builds capital. Without capital you wind up as an empty shell - Rome in 450 A.D., or Detroit today - lots of wonderful but empty buildings and no economic activity. Worse, it forces people to desperately put their money in all manner of idiotic speculations in an effort to stay ahead of inflation. They wind up chasing the bubbles the funny money creates.

Let me re-emphasize something: in order for science and technology to advance you need capital. Where does capital come from? It comes from people producing more than they consume and saving the difference. Debt, on the other hand, means you’re living above your means. You’re either consuming the capital others have saved, or you’re mortgaging your future.

Zero and negative interest rate policies, and the creation of money out of nowhere, are actually destructive of civilization itself. It makes the average guy feel that he’s not in control of his own destiny. He starts believing that the State, or luck, or Allah will provide for him. That attitude is typical of people from backward parts of the world - not Western Civilization.

International Man: What does it say about the economy and society that people work so hard to interpret what officials from the Federal Reserve and other central banks say?

Doug Casey: It’s a shameful waste of time. They remind me of primitives seeking the counsel of witch doctors. One hundred years ago, the richest people in the country - the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and such - made their money creating industries that actually made stuff. Now, the richest people in the country just shuffle money around. They get rich because they’re close to the government and the hydrant of currency materialized by the Federal Reserve. I’d say it’s a sign that society in the US has become quite degraded.

The world revolves much less around actual production, but around guessing the direction of financial markets. Negative interest rates are creating bubbles, and will eventually result in an economic collapse.

International Man: Negative interest rates are essentially a tax on savings. A lot of people would rather pull their money out of the bank and stuff it under a mattress than suffer that sting. The economic central planners know this. It’s why they’re using negative interest rates to ramp up the War on Cash - the push to eliminate paper currency and create a cashless society.

The banking system is very fragile. Banks don’t hold much paper cash. It’s mostly digital bytes on a computer. If people start withdrawing paper money en masse, it won’t take much to bring the whole system down. Their solution is to make accessing cash harder, and in some cases, illegal. That’s why the economic witch doctors at Harvard are pounding the table to get rid of the $100 bill. Take France, for example. It’s now illegal to make cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting them properly.

Negative interest rates have turbocharged the War on Cash. If the central planners win this war, it would be the final deathblow to financial privacy. How does this all relate to the collapse of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: I believe the next step in their idiotic plan is to abolish cash. Decades ago they got rid of gold coinage, which used to circulate day to day in people’s pockets. Then they got rid of silver coinage. Now, they’re planning to get rid of cash altogether. So you won’t even have euros or dollars or pounds in your wallet anymore, or if you do, it will only be very small denominations. Everything else is going to have to be done through electronic payment processing.

This is a huge disaster for the average person: absolutely everything that you buy or sell, other than perhaps a candy bar or a hamburger, is going to have to go through the banking system. Thus, the government will be able to monitor every transaction and payment. Financial privacy, even what’s left of it today, will literally cease to exist.

Privacy is one of the big differences between a civilized society and a primitive society. In a primitive society, in your little dirt hut village, anybody can look through your window or pull back the flap on your tent. You have no privacy. Everybody can hear everything; see anything. This was one of the marvelous things about Western Civilization - privacy was valued, and respected. But that concept, like so many others, is on its way out…

International Man: You’ve mentioned before that language and words provide important clues to the collapse of Western Civilization. How so?

Doug Casey: Many of the words you hear, especially on television and other media, are confused, conflated, or completely misused. Many recent changes in the way words are used are corrupting the language. As George Orwell liked to point out, to control language is to control thought. The corruption of language is adding to the corruption of civilization itself. This is not a trivial factor in the degradation of Western Civilization.

Words - their exact meanings, and how they’re used are critically important. If you don’t mean what you say and say what you mean, then it’s impossible to communicate accurately. Forget about transmitting philosophical concepts.

Take for example shareholders and stakeholders. We all know that a shareholder actually owns a share in a company, but have you noticed that over the last generation shareholders have become less important than stakeholders? Even though stakeholders are just hangers-on, employees, or people who are looking to get in on a shakedown. But everybody slavishly acknowledges, "Yes, we’ve got to look out for the stakeholders." Where did that concept come from? It’s a recent creation, but Boobus americanus seems to think it was carved in stone at the country’s founding.

We’re told to protect them, as if they were a valuable and endangered species. I say, "A pox upon stakeholders." If they want a vote in what a company does, then they ought to become shareholders. Stakeholders are a class of being created out of nothing by Cultural Marxists for the purpose of shaking down shareholders."

Editor’s Note: This is going to be the most turbulent decade in US history…The 2020s ​will be more ​dangerous than the 1930s, the 1940s, and even the 1860s. That's because severe crises are brewing on multiple fronts and converging. The whole system will have a complete reset, and soon. It could be the BIGGEST thing since the founding of the USA."

- internationalman.com