So, we rise from the rubble...
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Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Judge Napolitano, "Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Is the US a Republic or an Empire?"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 8/12/26
"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson:
Is the US a Republic or an Empire?"
Comments here:
Joel Bowman, "Weights and Measures"
"Weights and Measures"
by Joel Bowman
"Economics is about how people make choices.
Politics is about how people ignore those choices.”
~ P.J. O’Rourke, "Eat the Rich:
A Treatise on Everyday Economics" (1998)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Down here at the End of the World, as elsewhere, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. From our perch, in a quaint corner café here in Recoleta, we cannot easily tell one from the other...but we’ll take a guess anyway, if only for our own amusement. To wit...
The tall blonde who just entered the scene, in the single-breasted mac with the bright red lipstick, is here to meet her boss... while hubby is out of town. Meanwhile, the elderly gentleman over by the window, drinking tea and studying the newspaper, is secretly hoping to spot his ex-wife... listed among the obituaries. And nearest to the exit, two middle-aged partners raise a glass to celebrate their good fortune... as divorce lawyers.
Sin... deception... betrayal... the world is full of sordid tales and tawdry affairs, real and imagined. Of course, not every relationship ends in salty tears and divorce papers... but in the case of Politics vs. Economics, the die was cast from the beginning.
Value vs Power: In last week’s Note, "A Messy Divorce," we looked at a few of the “irreconcilable differences” between the former paramours. To briefly review...Economics, for its part, is concerned with understanding the production of wealth. Its origins. Its formation. And the conditions that best enable it to flourish. Politics, meanwhile, focuses not on the multiplication of wealth... nor even on its division per se, as is sometimes sheepishly suggested by its pseudo-apologists and roguish practitioners...but rather on who gets to decide.
The former deals in the currency of value, in other words, the latter in the currency of power. We might go even further and say, one aims at objective truth… while the other deals in subjective narrative. One promotes voluntary exchange…the other on violent coercion… But let’s zoom out a little further, and take a look at wealth, value and what we might call “the origins of specie.”
Once considered the proper domain of moral philosophers, classical economics is very much the brainchild of Enlightenment thinking. Adam Smith did not pen his "Wealth of Nations" in a vacuum, after all, but amidst the milieu of such OG enlightenment thinkers as David Hume, Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few of his head-scratching contemporaries.
Naturally, the inquiries of the early classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, J.S. Mill et al.) were very much rooted in the prevailing ideas of the age. Which is to say, what later came to be known as the formal study of economics originally sprang from the notion that there exists discoverable laws governing our universe... and that reason is capable of uncovering them.
The Bottom Line: Economics, as a discipline, tends to concern itself with quantifiable measurements... profit and loss, supply curve fluctuations, demand curve elasticity, etc. (on the micro side)... interest rates, inflation prints, gross domestic product, etc. (on the macro side). Each of these measurements, however flawed or tortured by those fallen angels who interpret them, is an attempt to “get at reality,” to understand the world in a fundamentally objective way. The impulse to measure, to weigh, to test and to compare results is quintessentially of the Enlightenment.
And so, with their parallel rulers and compasses and proportional dividers, the proto-eggheads set about to do just that. What they soon discovered, contrary to the prevailing mercantilist orthodoxy of the day, was that wealth was not, as some still believe, a “fixed pie.” That is, through innovation, efficiency, trade, specialization and capital formation, societies could become richer over time.
Even better, they could also advance at the same time, through those very same processes. Which is to say, they found that societies that preferred peaceful trade, leveraged their comparative advantages, and accumulated capital tended, over time, to outperform those who preferred the old “tried and true” methods of empire: conquest, plunder, tribute and subjugation.
Commerce, which multiplied wealth, was ultimately preferable to conquest, which merely divided it... often at great cost to both parties. As Thomas Jefferson advocated in his Inaugural Address to the Nation, 1801: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none.”
Here, the Founding Father was likely channeling another early Enlightenment thinker, one with whom he was exceedingly well-versed, even from a young age: “Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices.” ~ Montesquieu ("The Spirit of the Laws", 1748)
Invisible Hands: In addition to arguing for reason over dynasty, a position that the author of the Declaration of Independence might readily be expected to defend, Jefferson was also arguing for the liberty of individuals to trade freely, without constant and meddlesome direction of the state.
As Enlightenment thinkers – Montesquieu, Smith, Jefferson et al. – began to shift their focus from the whims of kings, divine providence, and the accidents of history to the everyday actions of ordinary people, they began to notice that individuals respond to incentives (for better or worse)... and to understand that the resulting decisions were measurable in the aggregate.
It is the basic insight behind Smith’s “invisible hand”... “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
The result of all this brewing, baking and butchering is the market determining its own outcome... setting a price, finding a level, and sending forth information for future participants to make better informed decisions. It is the market saying, “This is the will of the people, their uniquely human hopes and fears and preferences, as expressed by their millions of individual, voluntary actions.”
It is here that the moral philosopher is obliged to assume some degree of humility before an infinitely complex order… while the politician, after his own peculiar nature, sees an opportunity to exert power over it. More on the age-old tension to come…" Stay tuned for more in your next Notes From the End of the World..."
Dan, I Allegedly, "Nothing is Selling - Everything is Getting Harder"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 8/12/26
"Nothing is Selling -
Everything is Getting Harder"
"The warning signs are everywhere: real estate isn't selling, businesses are closing, consumers are cutting back, and the cost of everyday life continues to climb. In this video, Dan breaks down what's happening in the housing market, mortgage rates, inflation, grocery stores, fast-food restaurants, fitness businesses and the growing pressure on American consumers. From declining home sales and expensive property taxes to Wendy's store closures and Grocery Outlet restructuring, the economic pressure is becoming impossible to ignore. We also take a look inside Grocery Outlet and Aldi to compare discount grocery shopping, examine why fast-food chains like Wendy's are struggling while Burger King is gaining ground, and discuss the growing problems surrounding solar financing and long-term contracts. These are more than isolated stories - they are warning signs about consumer spending, business conditions and personal finances. What are you seeing in your area? Are people cutting back, and are businesses around you struggling?"
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Tuesday, August 11, 2026
"The Rocking Chair Chronicles"
Full screen recommended.
"The Rocking Chair Chronicles"
"Welcome to Gengu AI – your ultimate destination for AI-generated music and next-generation sound experiences. This channel is dedicated to creating unique, high-quality tracks powered by artificial intelligence, blending creativity and technology to deliver music that feels fresh, emotional, and immersive. AI was the tool. The story came from human feeling. If this film gave you a quiet breath, a memory, or a moment of peace, thank you for being here."
"Time Don’t Heal Nothing, It Just Teaches You to Carry It"
Full screen recommended.
Blues Masterpiece,
"Time Don’t Heal Nothing,
It Just Teaches You to Carry It"
"Time don’t fix the hurt… it just teaches you how to live with it. “Time Don’t Heal Nothing, It Just Teaches You to Carry It” is a deep, soul-cutting Blues Masterpiece about loss, memory, and the quiet strength it takes to keep going when the pain never really leaves. A slow, mournful acoustic guitar lays each note down heavy, like footsteps through old memories. The harmonica cries long and lonesome, carrying echoes of things that never truly faded. The groove moves steady and weighty - not trying to heal, just helping you bear it. This is blues for scars that never disappeared. For those who learned that healing ain’t about forgetting - it’s about surviving. You don’t get over it… you just get stronger carrying it."
"Why Time Is Going Faster Now and How to Slow It Down"
Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"Why Time Is Going Faster
Now and How to Slow It Down"
"McDonald's And Wendy's Are Collapsing: Why Customers Are Quitting Fast Food"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 8/11/26
"McDonald's And Wendy's Are Collapsing:
Why Customers Are Quitting Fast Food"
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Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Endless Horizon"
Deuter, "Endless Horizon"
Full screen recommended.
○
"I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, not any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue."
- William Wordsworth,
"Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"
○
“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that
only loneliness can help you find them again.
Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them.
Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.”
- Gregory David Roberts, "Shantaram"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (top right).
Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself is about 40 light-years across and a mere 300,000 years old. That makes it one of the youngest star forming regions in our sky, with newborn and embryonic stars embedded in its natal dust and gas clouds. Estimates of the distance to open star cluster M21 are similar to M20's, but though they share this gorgeous telescopic skyscape there is no apparent connection between the two. In fact, M21's stars are much older, about 8 million years old.”
Chet Raymo, “The (Unattainable) Thing Itself”
“The (Unattainable) Thing Itself”
by Chet Raymo
“Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations- one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.”
"Simplicity. Morning. Forty minutes till sunrise. Coffee. An English muffin. Sit on the terrace. The sky a deep violet. Then rose. Then gold. Simplicity. The senses fill to overbrimming, displacing thought. The moment is sweet and pure. Distilled. The shackles of conscience fall away. One simply is.
“Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.”
Now I wait with my eyes fixed on that place along the horizon where the Sun will rise. The sky itself holds its breath, anticipates the flash of green. I try, I try to empty myself, Zenlike, to become an empty vessel for nature to fill. A gathering vessel, brilliant edged. To exist entirely in the moment, outside of time, this moment, just now, now, as the disk of the Sun bubbles up on the sea horizon, that orb of of molten gold.
“There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.”
It's no use, of course. No way to obviate the conscious mind. Perhaps a Zen master might do it, a mystic in transport, a drunken sailor who walks into a lamppost. Even as the Sun's disk inflates, swells, unaccountably huge, the mind parses, frames, construes. I close my eyes to shut out thought and the words fill up the space behind my eyelids. The thing itself is out of reach, the moment adulterated by mind. The blessing of consciousness. And the curse."
(The three stanzas are Wallace Stevens' "The Poems of Our Climate.")
"That's Where It All Begins..."
"That's where it all begins. That's where we all get screwed big time as we grow up. They tell us to think, but they don't really mean it. They only want us to think within the boundaries they define. The moment you start thinking for yourself - really thinking - so many things stop making any sense. And if you keep thinking, the whole world just falls apart. Nothing makes sense anymore. All rules, traditions, expectations - they all start looking so fake, so made up. You want to just get rid of all this stuff and make things right. But the moment you say it, they tell you to shut up and be respectful. And eventually you understand that nobody wants you to really think for yourself."
- Ray N. Kuili, "Awakening"
"America Is Ruled By A Uniparty That Operates Like A Death Cult"
"America Is Ruled By A Uniparty
That Operates Like A Death Cult"
by Leo Hohmann
"Both of the two major American political parties are part of a death cult. Each worships death in their own distinct way. The Republican Party, which I have focused on over the last 18 months only because they are the party in power, has membership rolls filled with bloodthirsty warmongers. The older Republicans especially, as a whole, will support any war that official Washington tells them needs to be fought. No questions asked.
The reason for the war doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to benefit America in any way. It doesn’t have to square with the facts on the ground. They will believe whatever false narrative Washington and its media lapdogs put out against the foreign boogeyman. Before you jump on me, I know there are exceptions. Not all boomers are warmongers. I myself am part of the baby boomer generation and I detest war. I believe wars should be fought for national defense of the homeland and that’s it. All else is corrupt scheming for the benefit of foreign interests and billionaires in the U.S. military-industrial-security complex.
Even the bombing of an elementary school in which 165 young girls and their teachers were killed on the first day of the Iran war, on March 1, did not move them. They have zero compassion or concern about the women, children and families killed by American and Israeli bombs. Their hearts and consciences have been seared and they are driven by a hatred for people they see as an inconvenient obstacle to a particularly ruthless brand of political Zionism. Yet, many of them call themselves Christian.
But let’s turn our focus now to the equally corrupt bloodlust of the Democrat liberal wing of the Washington Uniparty. These folks rarely speak out against the endless foreign wars either, but it gets worse. They also never met a baby they didn’t think deserved to be a candidate for abortion.
This was evidenced Monday, August 10, when Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed a bill legalizing abortions up to birth. The signing ceremony was a joyous occasion marked by disgusting Democrat women who could not contain their jubilance. Watch them smile and clap here as the governor signs this murderous bill into law.
There are now 10 states, along with Washington, D.C., that allow abortions in all nine months of pregnancy. They say they want more “options” to kill babies. They call it “healthcare” and “a
All they need is for a doctor to say it’s OK and they can abort a fully formed baby in the ninth month of pregnancy. And they celebrate. They’re just “making decisions about their own bodies,” they say, an argument that falls flat when you consider these are the same people who tell us we should NOT have a choice about what gets injected into our bodies, including the bodies of children and pregnant women.
Celia Farber reports in her August 11 article on fetal mRNA atrocities, including babies that literally had heart attacks in the womb after their mother was “vaccinated” against Covid. Farber is the co-author, with obstetrician Dr. James Thorpe, of the book, Sacrifice: How the Deadliest Vaccine in History Targeted the Most Vulnerable.
Click image for larger size.
In several Democrat-run states, including California and New York, they have even moved in recent years to eliminate the religious exemption for childhood vaccines.
The Amish have been fighting in court since 2019 to preserve their rights to reject childhood vaccine mandates. They send their children to their own private schools and yet the state of New York is trying to force them to vaccinate their kids against their will. Whatever happened to “my body my choice?” For more than 300 years, when government made it impossible for the Amish to live according to their faith, they packed up, sold their farms, and moved somewhere they would be left alone.
America’s Frontline Doctors reports that New York’s school vaccine law is forcing them toward that same terrible choice: violate their faith or abandon the homes and communities they have built. Now the Second Circuit has made that threat even more immediate. In Miller v. McDonald, Amish families challenged a 2019 New York law that eliminated religious exemptions from school vaccine mandates. Their private schools, built on Amish land and funded entirely by their own communities, refused to obey the mandate. The state responded by imposing more than $118,000 in fines on a peaceful religious community. Their crime? They refused to violate their faith.
These families are educating their own children, on their own land, according to their faith. According to evidence presented in the case, none of the 168 unvaccinated Amish children has been diagnosed with any of the chronic health conditions common among American children.
Simone Gold, founder and president of America’s Frontline Doctors, writes: “Yet New York insists that these healthy children threaten the public. In December, the Supreme Court vacated the Second Circuit’s ruling against the families and ordered the lower court to reconsider the case under the stronger parental-rights and free-exercise protections recognized in Mahmoud v. Taylor. The instruction was clear: apply the correct constitutional standard. The Second Circuit refused.
It once again allowed New York to preserve medical exemptions while categorically denying religious exemptions. The message to this peaceful religious minority could hardly be clearer: abandon your beliefs or leave.” Attorney Aaron Siri, who represents the Amish families, described New York’s objective plainly. Government officials want the Amish to “abandon their beliefs” and “bend the knee.”
That’s always the message from these technocratic psychopaths: Bend the knee to the death cult, or else. Support our wars or be called a traitor. Support our baby-killing machines or you must be against female “healthcare.” Support our death shots and give them to your children or be called a threat to society. Democrat. Republican. Right. Left. It’s all part of the same cult.
Mother Teresa summed it up when she said, “Abortion is murder in the womb… A child is a gift of God. If you do not want him, give him to me.” She also said that “any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use violence to get what it wants.”
Isn’t that the same thing Republican neocons do? Use violence to get what they want in terms of foreign policy? Democrats would rather see a child murdered than given up for adoption. Republicans would rather see Gaza razed, Lebanon flattened, Iran bombed and looted, than to lean into diplomacy to solve differences. In Canada, the elderly and disabled are being murdered in record numbers since that country legalized doctor-assisted suicide masquerading as “end of life care.” Abortion care. End of life care. Are these our rightful caretakers?
War is peace. Death is life. Freedom is slavery. Murder is healthcare. They can’t stop telling us how much they “care” about those they exterminate. All life is precious. Life inside the womb. The lives of civilians caught up in wars. All life is of value in the eyes of God and should be treated with the utmost respect.
But the Republicans have no respect for innocent civilian lives in places like Gaza, Lebanon or Iran. And Democrats have no respect for innocent lives in the womb or in its last stages. Morally, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two. Both are death cults. Both are anti-human and against God. They may place the focus of their lust for killing on different segments of humanity, but does that make one any less murderous than the other?"
"Socialism: A System Where The Government Uses Your Money To Solve Everyone Else’s Problems"
by Michael Snyder
"They are coming for your money, and they have a ton of momentum right now. Democratic Socialists are winning election after election by promising free stuff, but of course free stuff is never actually free. Somewhere along the way, someone has to pay for it. If you find yourself protectively reaching for your wallet as you read this, I don’t blame you one bit. Socialism is a system where the government uses your money to solve everyone else’s problems. Unfortunately, it is also a system that is becoming increasingly popular among our young adults.
In a previous article, I noted that a poll that was taken in 2025 found that a whopping 62 percent of U.S. adults under the age of 30 now have a positive view of socialism. That should chill you to the core. Meanwhile, Americans view capitalism less favorably than they once did…Fewer than half of Americans say capitalism is working even “somewhat” well - down from 60% about a decade ago, according to a June Wall Street Journal-NORC poll.
61% of Americans said they were bothered “a lot” by the feeling that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share in taxes, per a Pew Research Center poll in January. That included 41% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. The same poll showed another 60% overall - and 42% of Republican-inclined voters - said the same about some corporations paying their fair share. And views of big business went from 19 points positive in 2012 (58%-39%) to 25 points negative last year (37%-62%), according to the Gallup data.
This is crazy. So why is this happening? Well, the truth is that a large portion of the population is very frustrated with the economy. The rising cost of living has been absolutely eviscerating the middle class, and many young adults consider homeownership to be completely out of reach because home prices are so absurdly high. When someone comes along and starts promising all sorts of free stuff in this very harsh economic environment, it can be very seductive.
But if the Democratic Socialists of America were actually able to implement their entire agenda on the federal level, it would more than triple federal spending… The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) propose new spending that could more than triple federal outlays. They propose the government pay for health care, housing, higher education, and electricity. Jobs are government-guaranteed, retirement benefits are expanded, paid family leave is universal, fossil fuels are eliminated, and reparations are paid.
The DSA platform claims that the bill for all this will be sent to “the richest individuals and corporations.” Tally up that bill, and it ballparks between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new spending over the next decade. Confiscating every dollar of high-end wealth and corporate profits would cover only a fraction of those costs. The DSA agenda necessitates high taxes on middle-class Americans.
If you took every penny from every billionaire in America, that would only account for 8.4 trillion dollars. So where is the rest of the money going to come from? They don’t have an answer to that question, but they have been winning major races all over the country.
And now a 37-year-old Democratic Socialist named Francesca Hong is favored to win Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary… "The 37-year-old restaurateur and chef-turned-member of the state Assembly is leading in polls by relatively wide margins ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who represents the famously liberal state capital of Madison, comes equipped with politically problematic tweets covering everything from abolishing the police to the racist origins of Thanksgiving."
It is hard to believe that someone like that could actually become the next governor of Wisconsin. I wouldn’t even hire her to run a Dairy Queen.But this is where we are at as a society, and it appears that lots of Democratic Socialists will be heading to D.C. after the midterm elections. In 2026, Democratic Socialists have been repeatedly winning primaries in deep blue congressional districts…
ͦ Claire Valdez (New York – 7th District): Won the Democratic primary in an open congressional race.
ͦ Darializa Avila Chevalier (New York – 13th District): Defeated a 30-year progressive incumbent in a highly publicized upset.
ͦ Melat Kiros (Colorado – 1st District): Defeated long-time incumbent Representative Diana DeGette in the Denver-based Democratic primary.
ͦ Christopher Rabb (Pennsylvania – 3rd District): Won the open Democratic primary race for this Philadelphia-based congressional seat.
ͦ Donavan McKinney (Michigan – 13th District): Unseated incumbent Representative Shri Thanedar in the Michigan Democratic primary.
What will D.C. look like if the Democrats take back both the House and the Senate? Some of the Democrats that are running for seats in Congress appear to be absolutely psychotic. If there is a major progressive wave in the fall, that could potentially make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez one of the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.
As Ben Shapiro has aptly pointed out, she seems to be pushing a new version of “woke” that is more palatable to many Americans… Woke 1.0 forced Americans to say, “Am I racist or am I not?” Woke 2.0 is, “Is American capitalism inherently corrupting and bad? Is the West’s system of freedoms and free markets inherently imperialistic, colonialist, genocidal, and racist?”
It’s easier to pitch woke 2.0 than woke 1.0. Why? Americans have been convinced over the course of the last 25 years or so that America is the bad guy, that we and our allies are fundamentally evil, that our foreign policy decisions of the past two decades and maybe longer, going all the way back to World War II, according to some, are actually terrible and horrible, and we’re the bad guys in the world. Add the economic angst right now, combine those two things, and you get woke 2.0, Ocasio-Cortez’s new program. It is about hatred of America. But no matter how AOC may want to market it, the content is still the same.
In so many ways, the socialists want to turn our country completely upside down and make it the exact opposite of what it once was. They intend to do this by taking over the Democratic Party. Democratic Socialists always run for office as Democrats, and most of them openly identify themselves as Democrats… Self-identified democratic socialists do not see socialism as being mutually exclusive and continue to identify with other terms on the left, including more mainstream Democratic labels. Of Socialist Democrats, 92% consider themselves to also be Democrats, 84% consider themselves to also be Obama Democrats, and 80% consider themselves to also be progressive.
We are being told that there is a civil war in the Democratic Party, but the truth is that the differences between “mainstream Democrats” and Democratic Socialists are not actually that significant these days. They are all heading in the same direction. Mostly, their disagreements are about how far to go and how fast it will take to get there. We already have the biggest government in human history, but they want to make it even bigger.
But socialism doesn’t work. As Margaret Thatcher once warned, the problem with socialism is that the socialists always eventually run out of other people’s money to spend. Considering the fact that we are nearly 40 trillion dollars in debt, our country is rapidly approaching that point too."
"More Proof Americans Are Broke - Wake Up And Prepare For The Greatest Depression In History"
Jeremiah Babe, 8/11/26
"More Proof Americans Are Broke -
Wake Up And Prepare For The Greatest Depression In History"
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Gerald Celente, "Trump Card... The Joker's Wild"
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 8/11/26
"Trump Card... The Joker's Wild"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What's Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
Comments here:
"Real Courage..."
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."
~ "Harper Lee", "To Kill a Mockingbird"
“The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease”
“The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions
Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease”
by Maria Popova
"I had lived thirty good years before enduring my first food poisoning - odds quite fortunate in the grand scheme of things, but miserably unfortunate in the immediate experience of it. I found myself completely incapacitated to erect the pillars of my daily life - too cognitively foggy to read and write, too physically weak to work out or even meditate. The temporary disability soon elevated the assault on my mind and body to a new height of anguish: an intense experience of stress. Even as I consoled myself with Nabokov’s exceptionally florid account of food poisoning, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming malaise that had engulfed me - somehow, a physical illness had completely colored my psychoemotional reality.
This experience, of course, is far from uncommon. Long before scientists began shedding light on how our minds and bodies actually affect one another, an intuitive understanding of this dialogue between the body and the emotions, or feelings, emerged and permeated our very language: We use “feeling sick” as a grab-bag term for both the sensory symptoms - fever, fatigue, nausea - and the psychological malaise, woven of emotions like sadness and apathy.
Pre-modern medicine, in fact, has recognized this link between disease and emotion for millennia. Ancient Greek, Roman, and Indian Ayurvedic physicians all enlisted the theory of the four humors - blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm - in their healing practices, believing that imbalances in these four visible secretions of the body caused disease and were themselves often caused by the emotions. These beliefs are fossilized in our present language - melancholy comes from the Latin words for “black” (melan) and “bitter bile” (choler), and we think of a melancholic person as gloomy or embittered; a phlegmatic person is languid and impassive, for phlegm makes one lethargic.
And then French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes came along in the seventeenth century, taking it upon himself to eradicate the superstitions that fueled the religious wars of the era by planting the seed of rationalism. But the very tenets that laid the foundation of modern science - the idea that truth comes only from what can be visibly ascertained and proven beyond doubt - severed this link between the physical body and the emotions; those mysterious and fleeting forces, the biological basis of which the tools of modern neuroscience are only just beginning to understand, seemed to exist entirely outside the realm of what could be examined with the tools of rationalism.
For nearly three centuries, the idea that our emotions could impact our physical health remained scientific taboo - setting out to fight one type of dogma, Descartes had inadvertently created another, which we’re only just beginning to shake off. It was only in the 1950s that Austrian-Canadian physician and physiologist Hans Selye pioneered the notion of stress as we now know it today, drawing the scientific community’s attention to the effects of stress on physical health and popularizing the concept around the world. (In addition to his scientific dedication, Selye also understood the branding component of any successful movement and worked tirelessly to include the word itself in dictionaries around the world; today, “stress” is perhaps the word pronounced most similarly in the greatest number of major languages.)
But no researcher has done more to illuminate the invisible threads that weave mind and body together than Dr. Esther Sternberg. Her groundbreaking work on the link between the central nervous system and the immune system, exploring how immune molecules made in the blood can trigger brain function that profoundly affects our emotions, has revolutionized our understanding of the integrated being we call a human self. In the immeasurably revelatory "The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions" (public library), Sternberg examines the interplay of our emotions and our physical health, mediated by that seemingly nebulous yet, it turns out, remarkably concrete experience called stress.
With an eye to modern medicine’s advances in cellular and molecular biology, which have made it possible to measure how our nervous system and our hormones affect our susceptibility to diseases as varied as depression, arthritis, AIDS, and chronic fatigue syndrome, Sternberg writes: "By parsing these chemical intermediaries, we can begin to understand the biological underpinnings of how emotions affect diseases… The same parts of the brain that control the stress response play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also play a role in depression, we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives.
Rather than seeing the psyche as the source of such illnesses, we are discovering that while feelings don’t directly cause or cure disease, the biological mechanisms underlying them may cause or contribute to disease. Thus, many of the nerve pathways and molecules underlying both psychological responses and inflammatory disease are the same, making predisposition to one set of illnesses likely to go along with predisposition to the other. The questions need to be rephrased, therefore, to ask which of the many components that work together to create emotions also affect that other constellation of biological events, immune responses, which come together to fight or to cause disease. Rather than asking if depressing thoughts can cause an illness of the body, we need to ask what the molecules and nerve pathways are that cause depressing thoughts. And then we need to ask whether these affect the cells and molecules that cause disease.
We are even beginning to sort out how emotional memories reach the parts of the brain that control the hormonal stress response, and how such emotions can ultimately affect the workings of the immune system and thus affect illnesses as disparate as arthritis and cancer. We are also beginning to piece together how signals from the immune system can affect the brain and the emotional and physical responses it controls: the molecular basis of feeling sick. In all this, the boundaries between mind and body are beginning to blur."
Indeed, the relationship between memory, emotion, and stress is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Sternberg’s work. She considers how we deal with the constant swirl of inputs and outputs as we move through the world, barraged by a stream of stimuli and sensations: "Every minute of the day and night we feel thousands of sensations that might trigger a positive emotion such as happiness, or a negative emotion such as sadness, or no emotion at all: a trace of perfume, a light touch, a fleeting shadow, a strain of music. And there are thousands of physiological responses, such as palpitations or sweating, that can equally accompany positive emotions such as love, or negative emotions such as fear, or can happen without any emotional tinge at all. What makes these sensory inputs and physiological outputs emotions is the charge that gets added to them somehow, somewhere in our brains. Emotions in their fullest sense comprise all of these components. Each can lead into the black box and produce an emotional experience, or something in the black box can lead out to an emotional response that seems to come from nowhere."
Memory, it turns out, is one of the major factors mediating the dialogue between sensation and emotional experience. Our memories of past experience become encoded into triggers that act as switchers on the rail of psychoemotional response, directing the incoming train of present experience in the direction of one emotional destination or another.
Sternberg writes: "Mood is not homogeneous like cream soup. It is more like Swiss cheese, filled with holes. The triggers are highly specific, tripped by sudden trails of memory: a faint fragrance, a few bars of a tune, a vague silhouette that tapped into a sad memory buried deep, but not completely erased. These sensory inputs from the moment float through layers of time in the parts of the brain that control memory, and they pull out with them not only reminders of sense but also trails of the emotions that were first connected to the memory. These memories become connected to emotions, which are processed in other parts of the brain: the amygdala for fear, the nucleus accumbens for pleasure - those same parts that the anatomists had named for their shapes. And these emotional brain centers are linked by nerve pathways to the sensory parts of the brain and to the frontal lobe and hippocampus - the coordinating centers of thought and memory."
The same sensory input can trigger a negative emotion or a positive one, depending on the memories associated with it. This is where stress comes in - much like memory mediates how we interpret and respond to various experiences, a complex set of biological and psychological factors determine how we respond to stress. Some types of stress can be stimulating and invigorating, mobilizing us into action and creative potency; others can be draining and incapacitating, leaving us frustrated and hopeless. This dichotomy of good vs. bad stress, Sternberg notes, is determined by the biology undergirding our feelings - by the dose and duration of the stress hormones secreted by the body in response to the stressful stimulus. She explains the neurobiological machinery behind this response:
"As soon as the stressful event occurs, it triggers the release of the cascade of hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal hormones - the brain’s stress response. It also triggers the adrenal glands to release epinephrine, or adrenaline, and the sympathetic nerves to squirt out the adrenaline-like chemical norepinephrine all over the body: nerves that wire the heart, and gut, and skin. So, the heart is driven to beat faster, the fine hairs of your skin stand up, you sweat, you may feel nausea or the urge to defecate. But your attention is focused, your vision becomes crystal clear, a surge of power helps you run - these same chemicals released from nerves make blood flow to your muscles, preparing you to sprint.
All this occurs quickly. If you were to measure the stress hormones in your blood or saliva, they would already be increased within three minutes of the event. In experimental psychology tests, playing a fast-paced video game will make salivary cortisol increase and norepinephrine spill over into venous blood almost as soon as the virtual battle begins. But if you prolong the stress, by being unable to control it or by making it too potent or long-lived, and these hormones and chemicals still continue to pump out from nerves and glands, then the same molecules that mobilized you for the short haul now debilitate you."
These effects of stress exist on a bell curve - that is, some is good, but too much becomes bad: As the nervous system secretes more and more stress hormones, performance increases, but up to a point; after that tipping point, performance begins to suffer as the hormones continue to flow. What makes stress “bad” - that is, what makes it render us more pervious to disease - is the disparity between the nervous system and immune system’s respective pace.
Sternberg explains: "The nervous system and the hormonal stress response react to a stimulus in milliseconds, seconds, or minutes. The immune system takes parts of hours or days. It takes much longer than two minutes for immune cells to mobilize and respond to an invader, so it is unlikely that a single, even powerful, short-lived stress on the order of moments could have much of an effect on immune responses. However, when the stress turns chronic, immune defenses begin to be impaired. As the stressful stimulus hammers on, stress hormones and chemicals continue to pump out. Immune cells floating in this milieu in blood, or passing through the spleen, or growing up in thymic nurseries never have a chance to recover from the unabated rush of cortisol. Since cortisol shuts down immune cells’ responses, shifting them to a muted form, less able to react to foreign triggers, in the context of continued stress we are less able to defend and fight when faced with new invaders. And so, if you are exposed to, say, a flu or common cold virus when you are chronically stressed out, your immune system is less able to react and you become more susceptible to that infection."
Extended exposure to stress, especially to a variety of stressors at the same time - any combination from the vast existential menu of life-events like moving, divorce, a demanding job, the loss of a loved one, and even ongoing childcare - adds up a state of extreme exhaustion that leads to what we call burnout.
Sternberg writes: "Members of certain professions are more prone to burnout than others - nurses and teachers, for example, are among those at highest risk. These professionals are faced daily with caregiving situations in their work lives, often with inadequate pay, inadequate help in their jobs, and with too many patients or students in their charge. Some studies are beginning to show that burnt-out patients may have not only psychological burnout, but also physiological burnout: a flattened cortisol response and inability to respond to any stress with even a slight burst of cortisol. In other words, chronic unrelenting stress can change the stress response itself. And it can change other hormone systems in the body as well."
One of the most profound such changes affects the reproductive system - extended periods of stress can shut down the secretion of reproductive hormones in both men and women, resulting in lower fertility. But the effects are especially perilous for women - recurring and extended episodes of depression result in permanent changes in bone structure, increasing the risk of osteoporosis. In other words, we register stress literally in our bones.
But stress isn’t a direct causal function of the circumstances we’re in - what either amplifies or ameliorates our experience of stress is, once again, memory. Sternberg writes: Our perception of stress, and therefore our response to it, is an ever-changing thing that depends a great deal on the circumstances and settings in which we find ourselves. It depends on previous experience and knowledge, as well as on the actual event that has occurred. And it depends on memory, too.
The most acute manifestation of how memory modulates stress is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. For striking evidence of how memory encodes past experience into triggers, which then catalyze present experience, Sternberg points to research by psychologist Rachel Yehuda, who found both Holocaust survivors and their first-degree relatives - that is, children and siblings - exhibited a similar hormonal stress response.
This, Sternberg points out, could be a combination of nature and nurture - the survivors, as young parents for whom the trauma was still fresh, may well have subconsciously taught their children a common style of stress-responsiveness; but it’s also possible that these automatic hormonal stress responses permanently changed the parents’ biology and were transmitted via DNA to their children. Once again, memory encodes stress into our very bodies. Sternberg considers the broader implications: "Stress need not be on the order of war, rape, or the Holocaust to trigger at least some elements of PTSD. Common stresses that we all experience can trigger the emotional memory of a stressful circumstance - and all its accompanying physiological responses. Prolonged stress - such as divorce, a hostile workplace, the end of a relationship, or the death of a loved one - can all trigger elements of PTSD."
Among the major stressors - which include life-events expected to be on the list, such as divorce and the death of a loved one - is also one somewhat unexpected situation, at least to those who haven’t undergone it: moving. Sternberg considers the commonalities between something as devastating as death and something as mundane as moving: One is certainly loss - the loss of someone or something familiar. Another is novelty - finding oneself in a new and unfamiliar place because of the loss. Together these amount to change: moving away from something one knows and toward something one doesn’t. An unfamiliar environment is a universal stressor to nearly all species, no matter how developed or undeveloped.
In the remainder of the thoroughly illuminating "The Balance Within", Sternberg goes on to explore the role of interpersonal relationships in both contributing to stress and shielding us from it, how the immune system changes our moods, and what we can do to harness these neurobiological insights in alleviating our experience of the stressors with which every human life is strewn.”
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Related:
"Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song
"Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song
Reduces Anxiety by Up to 65 Percent"
By Melanie Curtin
By Melanie Curtin
Full screen recommended.
"Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves. So here's a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth. Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one's health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.
Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck. The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.
According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date. In fact, listening to that one song- "Weightless"- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates. That is remarkable.
Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created "Weightless", Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener's heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn't be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer's, or influenza.
In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you've got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.
Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, "'Weightless' was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous." So don't drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:
10. "We Can Fly," by Rue du Soleil (Café Del Mar)
9. "Canzonetta Sull'aria," by Mozart
8. "Someone Like You," by Adele
7. "Pure Shores," by All Saints
6. "Please Don't Go," by Barcelona
5. "Strawberry Swing," by Coldplay
4. "Watermark," by Enya
3. "Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix)," by DJ Shah
2. "Electra," by Airstream
1. "Weightless," by Marconi Union
I made a public playlist of all of them on Spotify that runs about 50 minutes (it's also downloadable)."
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