Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/6/25
"The Final 7 Stages,
And No One Is Ready For This"
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o
Gregory Mannarino, PM 6/6/25
"By Either Monetary Suicide Or Monetary Homicide
This Is How It Ends"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
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Friday, June 6, 2025
Jeremiah Babe, "Elon Musk Declares Political Nuclear War On Trump"
Jeremiah Babe, 6/6/25
"Elon Musk Declares Political Nuclear War On Trump"
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Dan, I Allegedly, "Everything Has a Cost - An Economic Nightmare"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 6/6/25
"Everything Has a Cost - An Economic Nightmare"
"Get ready for a wild ride as we explore the latest proposal turning heads - limiting how far you can drive each year! Massachusetts lawmakers are floating ideas to curb travel and reduce pollution, but could it hurt local businesses? Plus, Washington’s bold speed governor plan, Pennsylvania’s $500 fines rule, and even proposals to eliminate driver's license renewals after 50 - what does it all mean for you and your freedom to hit the road? Everything has a cost, and I break it all down in this video. We also touch on some lighthearted stories, like a burning cargo ship filled with cars, dating advice you didn’t know you needed, and an update on California’s high-speed rail chaos. There’s so much happening, and I’m here to share it with you!"
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"The Rule of Idiots"
"The Rule of Idiots"
In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the
collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.
by Chris Hedges
"The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.
Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.
In “Hitler and the Germans,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler - gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar - mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact.
These idiots, who promise to recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They accelerate the collapse. Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs. They make war on universities, banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vaccines as a pretext to expand mass surveillance and data sharing, strip legal residents of their rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity. Reality, whether the climate crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become.
Hannah Arendt blames a society that willingly embraces radical evil on this collective “thoughtlessness.” Desperate to escape from the stagnation, where they and their children are trapped, hopeless and in despair, a betrayed population is conditioned to exploit everyone around them in a desperate scramble to advance. People are objects to be used, mirroring the cruelty inflicted by the ruling class.
A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic society, these attributes are despised and criminalized. Those who exhibit them are condemned as stupid; “a man [or woman] who behaves in this way,” Voegelin notes, “will be socially boycotted.” But the social, cultural and moral norms in a diseased society are inverted. The attributes that sustain an open society — a concern for the common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrifice — are ridiculed. They are detrimental to existence in a diseased society.
When a society, as Plato notes, abandons the common good, it always unleashes amoral lusts - violence, greed and sexual exploitation - and fosters magical thinking, the focus of my book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”
The only thing these dying regimes do well is spectacle. These bread and circuses acts - like Trump’s $40 million Army parade to be held on his birthday on June 14 - keep a distressed population entertained.
The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality. The population is conditioned by mass culture, dominated by sexual commodification, banal and mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, to blame itself for failure.
Søren Kierkegaard in “The Present Age” warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is, as Kierkegaard writes, a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.” In short, we became part of a herd, “unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization - and yet are held together as a whole.” Those who question the public, those who denounce the corruption of the ruling class, are dismissed as dreamers, freaks or traitors. But only they, according to the Greek definition of the polis, can be considered citizens.
Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us.
It is tempting to personalize the decay, as if ridding ourselves of Trump will return us to sanity and sobriety. But the rot and corruption has ruined all of our democratic institutions, which function in form, not in content. The consent of the governed is a cruel joke. Congress is a club on the take from billionaires and corporations. The courts are appendages of corporations and the rich. The press is an echo chamber of the elites, some of whom do not like Trump, but none of whom advocate the social and political reforms that could save us from despotism. It is about how we dress up despotism, not despotism itself.
The historian Ramsay MacMullen, in “Corruption and the Decline of Rome,” writes that what destroyed the Roman Empire was “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.” Power became about enriching private interests. This misdirection renders government powerless, at least as an institution that can address the needs and protect the rights of the citizenry. Our government, in this sense, is powerless. It is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards.
“The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,” Edward Gibbon writes. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”
The Roman emperor Commodus, like Trump, was entranced with his own vanity. He commissioned statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He fancied himself a star of the arena, staging gladiatorial contests where he was crowned the victor and killing lions with a bow and arrow. The empire - he renamed Rome the Colonia Commodiana (Colony of Commodus) - was a vehicle to satiate his bottomless narcissism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices the way Trump sells pardons and favors to those who invest in his cryptocurrencies or donate to his inauguration committee or presidential library.
Finally, the emperor’s advisors arranged to have him strangled to death in his bath by a professional wrestler after he announced that he would assume the consulship dressed as a gladiator. But his assassination did nothing to halt the decline. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax who was assassinated three months later. The Praetorian Guards auctioned off the office of emperor. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted 66 days. There would be five emperors in A.D. 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus.
Like the late Roman Empire, our republic is dead. Our constitutional rights - due process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and dissent - have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These rights exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are absurd.
Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war: "A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
Our decay, our illiteracy and collective retreat from reality, was long in the making. The steady erosion of our rights, especially our rights as voters, the transformation of the organs of state into tools of exploitation, the immiseration of the working poor and middle class, the lies that saturate our airwaves, the degrading of public education, the endless and futile wars, the staggering public debt, the collapse of our physical infrastructure, mirror the last days of all empires. Trump the pyromaniac entertains us as we go down."
Jim Kunstler, "What Movie Is This?"
"What Movie Is This?"
by Jim Kunstler
“MAGA is developing “tech right” fatigue.”
- Cernovich on “X”
"In this age of info overload, when everybody’s brain has become a memory hole, we’ll see how long anyone remembers Elon Musk’s epic tantrum. The latest news is that Mr. Trump and Wonderboy have scheduled a phone convo for today, Friday, supposedly to “make-up.”
The whole psychodrama looks like an episode out of the Batman movie that America has become. You could see the current plot twist from a thousand miles away. Even back in the summer, Elon’s spastic cavortings on the campaign trail looked suspiciously drug-edged. He’s reported to use ketamine, which induces mood changes from euphoria to anxiety and agitation, as well as slurred speech. Also, altered judgment and disinhibition that might provoke risky behavior. You just have to kind of wonder.
Meanwhile, the fabled Fourth Turning enters full churn. Western Civ, of which we are part, continues to go sideways into history. In case you are distracted by Mr. Musk’s histrionics, we are on a path toward World War, political crack-up, and global bankruptcy.
Among the strange doings, note former CIA Director Mike Pompeo showing up a week ago at a “Black Sea Security Forum” in Odessa, Ukraine, where - say, what? - he called for called for a "complete victory" over Russia, and advocated for Crimea to be recognized as part of Ukraine (which is not in the folder labeled “Reality”).
A call for “victory” implies that we’re at war with Russia, or seek to enter such a war. Granted, the US neocon-intel-blob sparked the Ukraine-Russia War, starting in 2014, when State Department Cookie Monster Victoria Nuland set off the Maidan color revolution. And “Joe Biden” kept stoking the conflict with cash and ammo - and inflammatory rhetoric. But Mr. Trump has been working this year to put out the fire, difficult as that is, with the EU and the rest of NATO beating war drums offstage.
What was Mike Pompeo up to in Odessa? You can make the case that he was violating the Logan Act: attempting to make freelance foreign policy outside government, and in a rather dangerous way, calling for war, however obliquely. And then you have Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal flying to Kiev to confab with the unelected coke-head running Ukraine’s war machine... and alakazam, the next day Ukraine pulls off its long-distance bombing prank deep into Russia, destroying some of its strategic nuclear force. Surely, the purpose of that was to provoke a response that could amount to a cassus belli for the EU to launch its (insane and suicidal) longed-for war against Russia.
Why were Pompeo, Lindsey Graham, and Blumenthal not arrested when they flew back to the USA? Everything they were up to in Ukraine had the odor of serious mischief. Mr. Patel of the FBI, a former US attorney who knows how to manage such things, should have personally hauled all three of them into a windowless room for depositions. Who, exactly, does Mike Pompeo purport to represent these days? Who paid for his trip to Odessa, and who went with him? And why isn’t anybody asking these questions?
Elon Musk’s bout of intemperance was supposedly provoked by his disgust over the “big beautiful bill” before Congress, not a budget, really, but a mandatory spending reconciliation package with lots of bells, whistles, and kazoos attached. Of course, you have to ask: what legislation coming out of that animal farm is not a monstrosity? Maybe it takes a monster to fight a monster.
Maybe America needs to transition out of its Batman phase into something like King Kong versus Godzilla. The multitude of little folk underfoot are getting trampled, anyway. And the bankruptcy of America is already presenting itself as a sort of systemic sepsis driving ordinary people and small businesses to ruin, even while the stock and bond markets manage to levitate. No one can feel comfortable in the present situation.
The Democratic Party played the Joker the past ten Batman years, working overtime to throw the country into chaos. That movie’s over. Now, strange to relate, it’s looking more and more like the USA (King Kong) against Europe (Godzilla). Russia is the lady in peril down among the ferns watching the brutes roar at each other. China is something like Ming-the-Merciless from a distant planet (and another movie), waiting off-stage to see what happens.
Europe has a death wish. Its economy is cratering. It’s sacrificing two-thousand years of culture to a new barbarian invasion. The governments of the UK, France, and Germany, have gone full Orwell against their own citizens. The unelected EU has turned into a tyrannical machine grinding up anything that looks like enterprise. And the war drums they’re beating can only bring on a hard rain of Russian hypersonic “hazelnuts,” destroying the only thing they have left: their once-charming cities. If that’s not enough to finish Europe off, wait for the banking and bond market implosion.
Mr. Trump knows that Godzilla is fixing to fall off a cliff. He’s more inclined to take up with that lady down in the ferns and march back into the humid, welcoming jungle. If you really want to rescue what’s left of Western Civ, Russia in its current form, would be your natural ally, not your opponent. Nobody knows how we will get through this movie, but time does not stand still and some day we will be back in a world of nations that have given up acting like monsters... and maybe the next movie is something light-hearted like Carey Grant and Kate Hepburn with a pet leopard."
Bill Bonner, "Musk vs Trump: Who Wins?"
"Musk vs Trump: Who Wins?"
by Bill Bonner
Youghal, Ireland - "Poor Elon. He lost the love of the loony left when he joined forces with Donald Trump. Now, breaking up with The Donald, he is alienating the MAGA mob. Fox is on the story: "Elon Musk on Wednesday sent out a missive to the 220 million people who follow him on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) urging them to contact their members of Congress and voice their displeasure at the legislation, which the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects would add trillions of dollars to the national debt." And on Thursday he wrote: “Without me Trump would have lost the election.”
Axios adds: Ian Miles Cheong, a prominent Musk supporter and right-wing activist on X, tweeted: "President vs Elon. Who wins? My money's on Elon. Trump should be impeached and JD Vance should replace him." Musk responded to Cheong: "Yes."
When another follower suggested they could finally be honest about the stupidity of Trump's tariffs, Musk posted: "The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year." And get this, from Musk: "Donald Trump is in the Epstein Files. That’s the real reason they haven’t been released."
But then, Trump struck back. Forbes: "Shares of Tesla dropped by more than 8% on Thursday as the relationship between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s appeared to unravel, with Musk launching attacks at the president on X and Trump suggesting to telling reporters at the White House criticism of his signature bill from the world’s wealthiest person amounts to “Trump derangement syndrome.”
Isn’t this fun? The world’s richest man is now blasting away at the world’s most powerful man. Not since Louis 14th turned on his trusted lieutenant, the very rich and very successful Nicolas Fouquet, has the world seen anything like it. Jealous of Fouquet’s wealth and power, Louis had him arrested and took his property for his own, including the jewel of French chateaux, Vaux le Vicomte. Fouquet died in prison 19 years later.
And now it’s Musk vs. Trump. A Mega-Match-up. Money versus Politics. Brains vs. Brawn. Win-win against Win-lose. Ultimately, Musk is a win-win guy. He must satisfy his customers - including investors. If he fails, they will leave him. (Unfortunately for him, his biggest single customer is the US government.) Trump, on the other hand, is a win-lose guy. Even in business, he believed the way to make money was to ‘win’ - by making the other guy ‘lose.’ And when someone crossed him, he would hit back ‘ten times as hard.’
How will this turn out? In the next few days, we expect to see the battle go in Musk’s direction. Because, the current battlefield is the Big, Beautiful Budget Abomination (BBBA) in the Senate. Musk has the high ground. Trump’s position is indefensible. And Senate Republicans are having an identity crisis. Are they ‘conservatives?’ Are they RINOs? Or are they MAGA Trumpistas?
In the old days of the 20th century, there were liberals (Democrats) and conservatives (Republicans). Even then, there were two kinds of Republicans. There were the slick, big-city Rockefeller Republicans. And the bumpkin ‘conservatives’ of the farm belt.
The city Republicans were richer, dressed better and were more in tune with the needs of Wall Street. The country Republicans were down-to-earth, patriotic and more likely to go to church. Both were wary of Big Government. Hard headed and skeptical, they counted on family, God, the Constitution and old-fashioned self-reliance to improve the human condition (many were not so sure it could be improved). And they all hated deficits as they hated sin itself. Neither would have supported the BBBA. And by 1981, they had gotten the ratio of debt/GDP down to just 30%.
Things changed with the advent of the new money system in 1971. It took a few years for Republicans to realize it, but since the feds could now ‘print’ money, there was no longer a penalty - at least in the foreseeable future - for over-spending. In fact, the penalty went over to the other side. Vote against more spending and you might lose your seat in Congress. Vote in favor, on the other hand, and the feds would print more money to cover the costs. What’s more, from 1981 to 2020, interest rates actually went down as the Fed made more of this fake capital available. And today, the debt/GDP ratio is 120%.
There were a couple rear guard attempts, after 1990, to restore the ol’ time religion...such as ‘the Pledge’...and the Tea Party. But for the most part, Republicans became Democrats, ready to spend, spend, spend in exchange for votes. This new breed became known as RINOs - Republican in Name Only.
It fell to a life-long Democrat, however, to transform the Republican Party from a group of conservatives to a group better described as ‘Big Man socialists.’ No longer advocates for small government, they joined the Democrats in calling for a Big, Powerful, Ambitious Government. And how close are they to Democrats now? USA Today: "President Donald Trump announced he agrees with a longtime antagonist, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on the need to abolish the cap on the country’s borrowing."
Today, neither party wants a limit on how much debt it can add. But now, a penalty has returned. Musk is right; if deficits are not brought under control, a financial crisis will soon be upon us. And while the Trumpistas now dominate the Republican Party, there may not be enough of them to pass the BBBA - not without substantial changes. Stay tuned."
Thursday, June 5, 2025
"Alert! White House Implodes, WW3 Explodes, Widespread Blackouts In Iran"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 6/5/25
"Alert! White House Implodes,
WW3 Explodes, Widespread Blackouts In Iran"
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"The Painful Truth: People Are Losing Everything, Even Their Pets"
Jeremiah Babe, 6/5/25
"The Painful Truth:
People Are Losing Everything, Even Their Pets"
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Gerald Celente, "Dragflation And World War Escalation"
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 6/5/25
"Dragflation And World War Escalation"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."
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"Music For Positive Energy Healing; 528Hz Music For Meditation; Miracle Healing Frequency; Zen"
Full screen highly recommended.
Spirit Tribe Awakening,
"Music For Positive Energy Healing;
528Hz Music For Meditation; Miracle Healing Frequency; Zen"
"Sound Vibration: The most elemental state of vibration is that of sound. Everything has an optimum range of vibration (frequency), and that rate is called resonance. When we are in resonance, we are balanced. Every organ and every cell in our precious body absorbs and emits sound with particular optimum resonate frequency. 432hz and 528hz tuned music creates resonance in our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual body.
All our music (self-composed and licensed from other composers) is tuned to 432Hz and 528Hz, and contains Solfeggio Frequencies; Miracle Tones that Heal, Change and Transform low vibrational energy (negative energy). Letting go of negative thoughts and emotions. Recharging the LIGHT within you. Refueling mind, body, heart and soul with Powerful Positive Energy that aligns you with your Innate Power, Potential and Resources.
When you RAISE YOUR VIBRATION you also help to raise the collective vibration of our beautiful planet and all life on it. You are important. You are important to this planet. You are valuable. You are a beautiful expression of Life. Powerful BEYOND words."
"What you want, wants you."
- Rumi
"A Look to the Heavens"
“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.
The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
"This Is The Motive..."
"All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves."
- Blaise Pascal
Chet Raymo, “Trying To Be Good”
“Trying To Be Good”
by Chet Raymo
“A few lines from Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese":
"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."
"I've quoted these lines before, if not here, then elsewhere. When I first read them back in the late 80s, they resonated with what I felt at the time. I had spent part of my earliest adulthood walking on my knees, both literally and metaphorically, seeking to tame what I took to be the animal within. Saint Augustine was whispering in my ear, and Bernanos' gloomy country priest walked at my side. I was ready to follow Thomas Merton into the desert; indeed, I once took myself briefly to the monastery at Gethsemane, Kentucky, where Merton was in residence.
That was a journey of more than a hundred miles, and I was busy repenting, although of what I don't know.
As I read those lines from Mary Oliver in old age, I had long been cultivating the "soft animal" within, immersing myself in the is-ness of things, the flesh and blood, the gorgeously sensual. No more walking on my knees, repenting. I walked proudly upright, with my sketchbook and my watercolors, my binoculars and my magnifier, sniffing the world like an animal on the prowl. I was letting my body learn to "love what it loves." Those were the years I wrote "The Soul of the Night" and "Honey From Stone" - the most intensely creative years of my life. The world offered itself to my imagination, if I may borrow another line from "Wild Geese."
And now, another half-lifetime has passed. The soft animal dozes, the body seeks repose. And I think of the first line quoted above: "You do not have to be good." What could the poet have possibly meant by that? Of course one has to be good. In a cell at Gethsemane or on the bridge over Queset Brook, one has to be good. And so one tries, one tries. The soft animal of the body that nature has contrived for us is not fine-tuned for goodness.”
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
•
“Wild Geese”
"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."
- Mary Oliver
The Poet: Wendell Berry, “Leavings”
“Leavings”
“In time a man disappears
from his lifelong fields, from
the streams he has walked beside,
from the woods where he sat and waited.
Thinking of this, he seems to
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there.
But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.”
- Wendell Berry
"We Are All Like Elephants "
"We Are All Like Elephants "
by Marc Chernoff
"In many ways, our past experiences have conditioned us to believe that we are less capable than we are. All too often we let the rejections of our past dictate every move we make. We literally do not know ourselves to be any better than what some opinionated person or narrow circumstance once told us was true. Of course, an old rejection doesn't mean we aren't good enough; it just means some person or circumstance from our past failed to align with what we had to offer at the time. But somehow we don't see it that way - we hit a mental barricade that stops us in our tracks.
This is one of the most common and damaging thought patterns we as human beings succumb to. Even though we intellectually know that we're gradually growing stronger than we were in the past, our subconscious mind often forgets that our capabilities have grown. Let me give you a quick metaphorical example.
Zookeepers typically strap a thin metal chain to a grown elephant's leg and then attach the other end to a small wooden peg that's hammered into the ground. The 10-foot tall, 10,000-pound elephant could easily snap the chain, uproot the wooden peg and escape to freedom with minimal effort. But it doesn't. In fact the elephant never even tries. The world's most powerful land animal, which can uproot a big tree as easily as you could break a toothpick, remains defeated by a small wooden peg and a flimsy chain.
Why? Because when the elephant was a baby, its trainers used the exact same methods to domesticate it. A thin chain was strapped around its leg and the other end of the chain was tied to a wooden peg in the ground. At the time, the chain and peg were strong enough to restrain the baby elephant. When it tried to break away, the metal chain would pull it back. Sometimes, tempted by the world it could see in the distance, the elephant would pull harder. But the chain would not budge, and soon the baby elephant realized trying to escape was not possible. So it stopped trying.
And now that the elephant is all grown up, it sees the chain and the peg and it remembers what it learned as a baby - the chain and peg are impossible to escape. Of course this is no longer true, but it does't matter. It doesn't matter that the 200-pound baby is now a 10,000-pound powerhouse. The elephant's self-limiting thoughts and beliefs prevail.
If you think about it, we are all like elephants. We all have incredible power inside us. And certainly, we have our own chains and pegs - the self-limiting thoughts and beliefs that hold us back. Sometimes it's a childhood experience or an old failure. Sometimes it's something we were told when we were a little younger. The key thing to realize here is this: We need to learn from the past, but be ready to update what we learned based on how our circumstances have changed (as they constantly do)."
"Some Oddities..."
"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
- Douglas Adams
"Mass Formation Psychosis, Or... Mass Hypnosis - The Madness Of Crowds"
"Mass Formation Psychosis,
Or... Mass Hypnosis - The Madness Of Crowds"
by Robert W Malone MD, MS
"As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.
What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.
These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.
It is with those souls in mind that I included a discussion of the mass formation theory of Dr. Mattias Desmet during a recent talk I gave in Tampa, Florida to an audience of about 2,000. As I looked out into the audience and spoke, I could see relief on many faces, and even tears running from the eyes of stoic men.
"What Is Mass Formation Psychosis?"
An overview of Mass Formation, which was developed by Dr. Mattias Desmet. He is a psychologist and a statistician. He is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. I think Dr. Mattias is onto something about what is happening and he calls this phenomena:
Mass Formation Psychosis: So, when he says “mass” formation, you can think of this as equivalent to “crowd” formation. One can think of this as: crowd psychosis. The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible "object of anxiety" and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.
As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view. Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong.
Left unabated, a society under the spell of mass formation will support a totalitarian governance structure capable of otherwise unthinkable atrocities in order to maintain compliance. A note: mass formation is different from group think. There are easy ways to fix group think by just bringing in dissenting voices and making sure you give them platforms. It isn’t so easy with mass formation. Even when the narrative falls apart, cracks in the strategy clearly aren’t solving the issue, the hypnotized crowd can’t break free of the narrative. The solution for those in control of the narrative is to produce bigger and bigger lies to prop up the solution. Those being controlled by mass formation no longer are able to use reason to break free of the group narrative.
Of course, the obvious example of mass formation is Germany in the 1930s and 40s. How could the German people who were highly educated, very liberal in the classic sense; western thinking people… how could they go so crazy and do what they did to the Jews? How could this happen? To a civilized people? A leader of a mass formation movement will use the platform to continue to pump the group with new information to focus on. In the case of COVID-19, I like to use the term “fear porn.” Leaders, through main stream media and government channels continuously feed the “beast” with more messaging that focus and further hypnotize their adherents. We're seeing the exact same process with Ukraine now.
Studies suggest that mass formation follows a general distribution:
● 30% are brainwashed, hypnotized, indoctrinated by the group narrative.
● 40% in the middle are persuadable and may follow if no worthy alternative is perceived.
● 30% fight against the narrative.
Those that rebel and fight against the narrative, become the enemy of the brainwashed and a primary target of aggression. One of the the best ways to counter mass formation is for those against the narrative to continue to speak out against it, which serves to help break the hypnosis of some in the brainwashed group as well as persuade the persuadable middle to choose reason over mindlessness."
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Related:
"Mass Psychosis - How An Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill"
Full screen recommended.
"Mass Psychosis -
How An Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill"
by After Skool
"In this video we are going to explore the most dangerous of all psychic epidemics, the mass psychosis. A mass psychosis is an epidemic of madness and it occurs when a large portion of a society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions. Such a phenomenon is not a thing of fiction. Two examples of mass psychoses are the American and European witch hunts 16th and 17th centuries and the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century. This video will aim to answer questions surrounding mass psychosis: What is it? How does is start? Has it happened before? Are we experiencing one right now? And if so, how can the stages of a mass psychosis be reversed?"
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Related:
"Every Human Decision..."
"Except for totally impulsive or psychotic behavior, every human
decision comes down to the choice between two alternatives."
- Jeff Duntemann
"Why?"
"Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people? The response would be… to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened."
- Harold S. Kushner
"Signs In The BBB"
"Signs In The BBB"
by The ZMan
"Most of the week has been talk about the “Big Beautiful Bill” that is winding its way through the gauntlet that is Congress. The hold up, as is always the case, is the Republicans are devoting their time to how best to use this opportunity to screw over their own voters. To be a Republican means looking for opportunities to remind your voters that the political system is hopeless. It is now looking like the Republican Senate will hand their president a major loss.
While many of the oligarchs have swung to the side of angels, the donor class in general remains locked into the old nation wrecking model where both parties are focused on undermining and destroying the majority population. The cultural atmosphere in Washington is radioactively hostile to the average American. The broad support for Trump and his policies is simply seen as proof that the people opposing Trump are the good guys in this long twilight struggle.
At some point, the effort will shift to peeling off some Democrats in the Senate to get the votes for the bill, which means giving even more away to the forces of darkness than was already in the bill. The end result will be something that has a few crumbs for the majority and mountains of stuff for the bad guys. The result of the “sausage maker” that is Congress will be a mighty turd sandwich with those few crumbs for the majority sprinkled on top like sesame seeds.
In fairness, some of those crumbs are good crumbs. There is $46 billion to build the wall Trump promised a decade ago. Given how incensed both parties were over this idea when it was proposed, this should be viewed as progress. There is a bunch of money in the bill to expand the forces and facilities needed to expel the invaders. The claim is that the additional resources will let the government expel up to one million invaders every year, not including the people nabbed at the border.
That is one of the many lies Washington has fed us over the years. They claimed that every year one to two million people were deported, when the number was actually around three hundred thousand. The additional million or so were people refused at the border for any reason. If Boobingo from Ghana did not have the right stamp on his passport and was rejected at the airport in Ghana, then that was counted in the deportation numbers.
There are tax cuts that actually favor people who work for a living. There is the “no tax on tips” change, which is a big deal. It also rolls back the reporting requirements from services like PayPal. Currently, if you get more than $600 through PayPal, you get a 1099 and then it is up to you to prove to the IRS that the money sent to you from a friend was not income. The “gig economy”, people who make money a few bucks at a time, will get serious tax relief.
One thing not mentioned in the media, because it requires a high school education to understand, is the planned rollback of energy regulations. The point of these changes is to allow the administration to kill off the Gaia nonsense in the energy sector to pave the way for new energy production. In one of his pressers, Trump casually mentioned the goal to add 400 GW from nuclear by 2050. That would mean quadrupling the amount of electric we get from nuclear power.
Along with the immigration measures in the bill, this is where you get a hint of what is vexing the oligarchs who are backing Trump. They look at AI and see the cubicle farms in their businesses being filled by robots instead of humans. That means they will need vastly more electricity than they currently have, and it means they need to find something to keep these unemployed people busy. The army of Indians stashed around the country will have to go back.
It is a bit ironic, in a way, as for decades people have argued that we do not need more people as automation is reducing the value of labor. Normal people in the regular world could see it, but the oligarchs did not see it. Instead, they saw the need for armies of Hindus to cheaply write code and administer the vast financial skimming models used by the financial sector. With AI, they can now see what automation means in their lives, so they are swinging around to the moral position.
Of course, the fact that even with oligarch support this bill is struggling speaks to the problems of the political system. The massive amounts of new spending and the failure to include the savings found by DOGE is a good reminder that the system cannot be reformed though the normal means. It will take a fiscal crisis and then emergency powers to fix the government’s finances. Most likely it will require a Robespierre to pave the way for genuine reform.
In the end, despite the Republican perfidy and conservative cuckery, the existence of this bill hints that some powerful people are serious about avoiding disaster. It is one of those tiny steps in the sane direction on some issues that will either be viewed as too little too late or the start of the great reordering. Of course, either way, there will be a great reordering no matter what. The question that hangs over all of this is whether it comes by the pen or by the sword."
"Imports Crater: U.S. Factory Orders Crash, Expect Mass Layoffs!"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 6/5/25ez
"Imports Crater: U.S. Factory Orders Crash,
Expect Mass Layoffs!"
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"30 Trillion Dollars In 30 Years – The Greatest Party In The History Of The World Has Destroyed America’s Future"
"30 Trillion Dollars In 30 Years – The Greatest Party In
The History Of The World Has Destroyed America’s Future"
by Michael Snyder
"When you spend 30 trillion dollars that you do not have, it is easy to create an illusion of prosperity. In 1995, the nation was obsessed with the O.J. Simpson trial, “Toy Story” was the biggest movie of the year, the Sony Playstation made its debut in the United States, and Bill Clinton was in the White House. At that time, the U.S. national debt was right on the verge of crossing the 5 trillion dollar mark. Today, the U.S. national debt is sitting at 36.2 trillion dollars. That means that we have added more than 30 trillion dollars to the national debt in just 30 years.
So what did we get for 30 trillion dollars? We got the greatest party in the history of the world. Over the past three decades, we have been enjoying an obscenely inflated standard of living that we did not deserve. When the government spends money, it provides a short-term boost to the economy. Those that get their hands on the money that the government spends end up using it to go shopping, repair their vehicles, eat at restaurants, etc.
If we could go back and pull 30 trillion dollars of extra government spending over the last 30 years out of the economy, we would be in a rip-roaring depression right now. So for those of you that wish to avoid economic pain at all costs, you should thank our Congress critters for spending money like drunken sailors all these years. But in the process, our leaders have destroyed America’s future.
We are broke, and we are absolutely drowning in debt. The only way that we can meet our obligations is to go into ever larger amounts of debt. Unfortunately, that cycle can only go on for so long before we reach a point where nobody wants to lend us money anymore.
If you have been paying attention to the bond market, you already know that there have been all sorts of red flags in 2025. The clock is ticking. But instead of getting our spending under control, Congress seems determined to ramp our spending up to a much higher level…"The package of tax-and-spending measures sent to the Senate, now officially called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, could act like budgetary wolf bait. It would add around $3 trillion to debt levels over the next decade compared with existing estimates and $5 trillion if certain temporary features were made permanent, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget."
For perspective, federal interest this fiscal year already will be more than the defense budget and more than Medicaid, disability insurance and food stamps combined. If you are one of those that want to keep the party going for as long as possible, you probably support this bill. But for those of us that want our children and grandchildren to actually have a future, we are absolutely horrified by what we are witnessing. In fact, Elon Musk just called this bill a “disgusting abomination”…
Elon Musk is right. Rand Paul has also spoken out against this bill, and he is right too. What we have been doing to future generations of Americans over the past 30 years is beyond criminal. It must stop. If it doesn’t stop, it is just a matter of time before the entire system collapses.
We have been able to defy the laws of economics for many years, but now economic reality is catching up with us in a major way. And even though we continue to spend giant mountains of money that we do not have, the illusion of prosperity that we have created is rapidly starting to crumble anyway.
This week, we learned that Disney is conducting “major layoffs”…"Major layoffs are underway Monday the Walt Disney Company, with several hundred employees impacted globally, Deadline has learned. The bulk of them are across divisions of Disney Entertainment, including marketing for both film and television as well as television publicity, casting and development. Also affected are Disney’s corporate financial operations."
Microsoft is even bigger than Disney, and they are conducting mass layoffs as well…"Microsoft Corp. cut hundreds more jobs just weeks after its largest layoff in years, underscoring the tech industry’s efforts to trim costs even as it plows billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. More than 300 employees were told their positions had been eliminated on Monday, according to a Washington state notice reviewed by Bloomberg."
These latest layoffs by Microsoft are on top of the 6,000 job cuts that were revealed last month…"A Microsoft spokesperson said the latest headcount reduction is in addition to the 6,000 job cuts announced last month. “We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” the spokesperson said."
If you have a job that you value, hold on to it as tightly as you can, because a lot more people are going to be losing their jobs in the months ahead. And that is really bad news, because we already have a major employment crisis in this country.
As I discussed the other day, nearly 1 out of every 4 Americans is “functionally unemployed” at this point. Things are really tough out there right now. In fact, things are so tough that Americans are eating meals at home at the highest level we have seen since the early days of the pandemic..."More Americans are cooking at home as growing economic concerns are forcing households to cut back, according to Campbell’s CEO Mick Beekhuizen. Beekhuizen told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Monday that consumer sentiment continued to soften throughout the quarter, with shoppers becoming even more deliberate about how they were spending money on food. “A key outcome is a growing preference for home-cooked meals, leading to the highest levels of meals prepared at home since early 2020,” Beekhuizen said."
One way or another, we are going to have to take our medicine. Either our leaders will have to get our financial house in order, or the bond market will force us to change. But no matter how it plays out, nobody can deny that the party is ending. It was fun while it lasted, but everybody knew that the wild spending would eventually have to come to an end. Needless to say, the adjustment to our standard of living that we will soon experience will be exceedingly painful, and our society is not prepared for that at all."
Adventures With Danno, "Massive Changes at Kroger"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 6/5/25
"Massive Changes at Kroger"
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Dan, I Allegedly, "Buy Now, Pain Later - This Could Ruin Your Life"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 6/5/25
"Buy Now, Pain Later - This Could Ruin Your Life"
"Buy now, pay later" might sound like a good deal, but it’s becoming the hidden scam costing millions in fraud. In today’s video, I’m breaking down how companies like Klarna and Visa’s new "flex credential" cards are trapping people in debt and why it’s more crucial than ever to live debt-free. From financial pitfalls to shocking fraud stories, we’re covering it all. Plus, I’ll share real-life stories about job losses, economic upheavals, and creative ways people are surviving in these chaotic times."
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