Scott Ritter, 8/8/26
"To All Americans: Brace for Armageddon!"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Saturday, August 8, 2026
"A Look to. the Heavens"
"Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident. The featured exposure, taken from Florida, USA, covers a sky area several times the size of the full moon.
Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six of the sister stars visible to the unaided eye. The actual number of Pleiades stars visible, however, may be more or less than seven, depending on the darkness of the surrounding sky and the clarity of the observer's eyesight."
"The Only Freedom They Can Never Take"
"The Only Freedom They Can Never Take"
by John Wilder
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.”
– "Dune"
"Frank Herbert wrote the opening quote for this post about a desert planet full of sand, giant worms, political backstabbing, and SpaceLSD®. He could have been describing a Tuesday on the Internet, or maybe even Elon’s plan to get SpaceX™ stop SpaceX®’s shares from crashing and carving a trillion-dollar crater into the S&P 500©.
But back to fear. Why is it used so often? It’s because emotions are potent weapons, so they get weaponized. Constantly. Every advertisement, every mainstream media news segment, every political social media post is designed to make me feel something specific so I will do something specific.
Outrage is easy to provoke, and it motivates. Fear moves product. Comfy feels gets votes. The people pushing the buttons understand this better than most philosophers ever did, I mean, have you ever read much about MK Ultra? Do you really think they ever stopped, or are they using it now through SnapBook™ and InstaFace©?
The O.G. ancient stoic philosophers wanted to believe that reason was what they used to make decisions. Marcus Aurelius sat in his tent writing notes to himself about virtue while his son grew up into the Roman version of Hunter Biden. Using reason as a source of virtue is timeless, but it’s almost completely ignored by actual humans with nervous systems and SnapGram© accounts.
Humans feel first. Only then do we invent reasons. That is really the order of operations. But it also implies that if I guard my feelings then I can guard my decisions. If I let someone else set the temperature while I’m driving and I have already handed them the steering wheel and they say, “Ha! Driver gets to choose what’s on the radio!” have I twisted the metaphor too far to include peanut butter and PEZ®?
Absurdity aside, if I hand someone the ability to control me with emotion, I cease to be anything but that MK Ultra automaton. Thankfully, I tend to run anti-trend anyway. If the herd is charging one direction, my first move is to imagine that they’re headed toward a cliff at a full gallop. That habit has kept me out of more than one mistake, like investing my 401K in Beanie Babies©. But even I, John Wilder, still have a pulse and a set of instincts. The difference, though, is whether I treat those instincts as orders or as suggestions. My decisions are my choice.
Yes, emotions matter. They can be fuel. But I still get to choose how I feel about an issue. In the end, that very well may be the only freedom that cannot be taken from me: I can only give it away. They can take my money, my job, and MySpace© page. They can take my reputation. They can take the flags and the stories I grew up believing. They can flood every screen with the approved feeling of the week from that high-fructose corn syrup of actresses, Zendaya. Why high-fructose corn syrup? No one likes it, and it’s in absolutely everything. Regardless of Zendaya, what they cannot do is reach into my skull and flip the switch. Unless I hand them the key.
I have watched people hand over that key in real time. They scroll until the algorithm has told them exactly how angry to be, what to be angry about, and how to soothe that anger. They outsourced their emotions to the loudest voice in the room and call it being informed... “tRUsTinG tHe scIENcE”.
The alternative is to be deliberate. I notice the emotion when it shows up. Turn it around in my skull, and name it while avoiding the drama. Then, and only then, do I decide whether it points toward Truth, Beauty, and Goodness or whether it is just another current trying to pull me somewhere I never intended to go. That pause is the whole game. In that pause I still own the tiller.
I can choose the things that flow from Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I can choose honor and discipline instead of convenience and shortcuts. I can choose the hard path because, as the old proverb says, calm seas do not make good sailors. Smooth water teaches me almost nothing about flip flops, pop-tops, inexplicable tattoos, or using a mixer to blend iced alcoholic beverages. Oh, wait, that’s Jimmy Buffet talking about his rough time.
My bad. But the point of Margaritaville is that it shows how a life free from discipline leads to hard lessons in the end, anyway. I want storms. I want them early. Discipline looks boring from the outside. And I am boring. Honor looks stubborn. And I’m damned stubborn. Choosing not to feel what the crowd demands can look cold. Fine.
I don’t control the storms. I do not control the media cycle, the markets, the next manufactured crisis, or the next fashionable cause. I do control whether those things dictate my next move. Everything else can be bargained, taxed, regulated, stolen, or canceled. The choice of how I feel about an issue stays mine until I surrender it. So, I guard it.
The sea will not stay calm, our lives are filled with storms. The only question is to whether I choose to hold the tiller, or if I’ve already given up for a free ride on the SpaceLSD© express. At least they have Margaritas."
o
"Americans Don't Have $500 Saved Up; 4.3 Million Are Behind On Auto Loans; Something Has To Give"
Jeremiah Babe, 8/8/26
"Americans Don't Have $500 Saved Up;
4.3 Million Are Behind On Auto Loans; Something Has To Give"
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "Degeneration and Decadence"
"Degeneration and Decadence"by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "Yesterday, in the spirit of ‘no cynicism left behind,’ we looked at a provocative hypothesis. What if the US elite has become even more ‘extractive’ than usual? And what if Donald Trump, schooled in shakedowns and extortion by Roy Cohn, is not just an unusual politician, but merely a golden leaf on a dried-out tree…a symptom, not a cause?
Trump Shuttle, Trump Steaks, Trump Travel, Trump University, Trump Taj Mahal…all failed. He may be a ‘bad businessman.’ But nobody’s that bad a businessman. Some of these start-ups should have succeeded just by random chance. But what if he is neither a bad businessman...nor a bad POTUS...but perfectly suited to his time and place?
Let us imagine the once-proud US empire as an old lady going down the stairs. How to help her down? Gently offer an arm? Or give her a shove? Trump was the man for the job. He merely applied his extractive ‘business’ techniques to the US government.
This approach doomed Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City; but it had no such effect on Donald J. Trump. He bought the unfinished pile in 1988 - his third Trump casino in Atlantic City. It opened in 1990. It went broke in 1991. (The other two closed their doors later.) Laid-off employees demonstrated in front of the building. Contractors pressed their claims in court. All of them said they had been ripped off.
An industry analyst told Trump at the get-go that the project would fail. Trump had borrowed too much money at too-high interest rates. The place would have to generate more than a million dollars per day in order to stay solvent. No casino anywhere in the world had ever made so much money. Trump’s response to this news was pure Cohn - he went after the analyst...and tried to get him to recant, or be fired.
But what the expert didn’t realize was that Mr. Trump never intended to succeed, not in a conventional way. Real businesses - in which real services or products are offered to consumers, at a profit - are win-win. Both the customer and the enterprise come out ahead. But they take time.
No real businessman would go on a Trump-style spree of start-ups...an airline...a university...Bibles...crypto...etc. The successful serial entrepreneur is as rare as a jackalope. Normally, it takes many years to learn and develop a real business. A person is lucky if he is able to do one or two in a lifetime. Henry Ford did not sell out his automobile business and start up an enterprise making toilets. John D. Rockefeller did not pivot out of oil in the 1880s so he could invest in buggy whips. And the Rolling Stones did not switch to chamber music. The entrepreneur who wants to succeed puts his head down and sticks to his knitting.
Successful government policies are not things you want to announce on a tweet, develop on the fly, and turn on a dime either. Whether in business or in government, you need to invest time to know what you’re doing. And it takes a bit of modesty. The young entrepreneur who thinks he knows what customers should have...the rookie politician who thinks he can re-arrange the Middle East...the novice investor who believes he knows which way prices are going...the preacher with the key to Heaven...the suitor who looks in a mirror and finds an irresistible lover - all of them are inviting a ‘learning moment.’
But Trump had already learned his lessons - at the feet of the aforementioned mafia lawyer, Roy Cohn. Lenders, investors, customers, contractors and suppliers may have lost money on the Taj. But Trump made sure he got paid...and let the casino declare bankruptcy later.
In honest businesses, as in honest government, the ultimate challenge to the ‘deciders’ is to provide something worth more than it cost to produce. In business, this extra is a ‘profit.’ In government there is no profit so the real goal should be to offer a tolerable level of justice, security, and predictability at the least expense to taxpayers.
Everyone should share the same goal. Good leaders surround themselves with the best advisors and assistants they can. Success depends on the group, not on an individual. All should be treated with respect; they are all on the same team.
But circumstances change. Businesses on the way down are very different from those on the way up. Governments too. And both are subject to degeneration and decadence …and infested by jealous, stupid, lazy jackasses who will find ways to take advantage of it. They turn from looking outward - towards the customer and voters...to looking inward...at themselves. The game shifts from win-win to win-lose. The Big Man eliminates potential rivals and fills his inner circle with cronies and sycophants. They no longer care about a better product or a better world. They see the ship lying low in the water...and make sure they have a place in the lifeboat.
Some organizations - such as the mafia - function as win-lose enterprises from the start. They get wealth by taking it from others - often disguised as a payment for ‘protection.’ It is the deal that Donald Trump offered Iran...take it, or bad things will happen to you.
A couple of years ago, our hunch was that Donald J. Trump had come not to save the empire…but to kick the old lady down the stairs. Now the picture is clearer; he was trained for the job. Stay tuned..."
"What Is Hope?"
"What Is Hope?"
"What is hope? It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word. It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual; and in a miraculous and unexplained way, life is opening creative events which will light the way to freedom and resurrection. But the two - suffering and hope - must live from each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair. But hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté and drunkenness.
So let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. That is the secret discipline. It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience, and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints the courage to die for the future they envisage. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope."
- Rubin Alves
"Live All You Can..."
"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much
matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.
If you haven't had that, what have you had?"
- Henry James
"Your Dog Doesn’t See You as Human – Here’s What You Really Are to Them"
Full screen recommended.
"Your Dog Doesn’t See You as Human –
Here’s What You Really Are to Them"
"What does your dog actually see when they look at you? Scientists have spent years studying the dog-human bond - and what they found will change how you see your dog forever. In this video: Why dogs evolved specifically to understand humans; the scent study that revealed what triggers your dog's reward center; What the direction of a tail wag actually means; the oxytocin loop that connects you and your dog neurochemically."
o
Full screen recommended.
"Why God Put a Dog in Your Life"
"What if your dog didn’t come into your life by accident? Across cultures, science, and history, one truth keeps appearing - dogs are not just animals. They are protectors, emotional anchors, and beings capable of a level of loyalty and love that most humans will never experience. In this video, we explore the deeper meaning behind the human-dog bond. From ancient beliefs to modern psychology, you’ll discover why your dog feels different from every other connection in your lifeб and why they may have found you for a reason. Once you understand this, you’ll never look at your dog the same way again."
o
Full screen recommended.
Blues Masterpiece, "Dog Stayed, People Didn't"
“The Dog Stayed, People Didn’t” is a touching blues about loyalty, loss, and the quiet comfort of a faithful companion. The singer reflects on the people who came and went through the years, while one old dog remained by the porch, through good times, bad times, and everything in between. Driven by slow, heartfelt blues guitar and the mournful cry of the harmonica, the song carries a deep sense of gratitude and bittersweet remembrance. The voice is weathered, gentle, and sincere, telling a story that many will recognize without needing many words. People made promises… The dog just stayed."
o
I miss you so much my boy...
"There Was Truth..."
"Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth
even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
- George Orwell, “1984”
Todd Hayen, "Hearsay"
"Hearsay"
by Todd Hayen
"It seems that nearly every bit of information we receive these days is hearsay, or more bluntly, a lie. I think most people do not believe that a lot of the things they hear, or read in the news, are out-and-out lies. In fact, a distinction needs to be made between conscious and intentional lies and things that are simply not true. Once we make that distinction, we find that most of what reaches us belongs to the latter category.
That fact changes things only a little bit. False information is still false. And the falsity or truth of any information remains the responsibility of the conveyor. If I tell someone something I am not personally certain of, I typically qualify the statement with “I think this is true,” or “this is what I heard,” or “so-and-so said this, not sure if it is true.”
Although I must admit that, realistically, I do not say this as often as I should. If I did, I would almost never make an unqualified statement - unless I had literally experienced it: “It is raining outside; I was just out there, and I am soaked.” That’s not hearsay, but if someone I told that to repeated it to someone else based only on my statement, then it would be hearsay.
Most everything we tell people, or even take in ourselves, is hearsay. The term is typically defined as anything learned that does not come from the person experiencing it directly. Which is nearly everything. In a world where trust has gone out the window, how is it even possible to grapple with this fact? It isn’t. So what do we do? Not much.
I think if we continue to be aware and make every effort we can to vet every bit of information that comes to us, with the resources available, that is about all we can do. Will we always be correct in our conclusions? No. Will we be close? Not necessarily. It is an educated-guess-crapshoot. What we can be pretty sure of is that the other side of humanity - the ones we used to call sheep - will do no such thing. They will continue to babble on about the people they worship and how trustworthy those people are, and how the information they convey is all truth, all correct, and all essential to understanding the world.
In Canada, Carney is the savior; in the US, Trump is the devil incarnate; in the Middle East, Netanyahu is saving the Jews; in Europe, Putin is the most evil man next to Trump. On and on. What is so frustrating about this is that some of it might be right. Hell, all of it could be. Who knows? It’s all hearsay.
I’ll say it again: shrews (do you know yet who the shrews are?) are more likely to be correct. Even though we, too, are subjected to propaganda and hearsay, we make an attempt to dig beneath the surface far more than the sheepsters do—at least the ones I know.
For one example: I have read dozens of books on Russian history - ancient (Russian history doesn’t really have an “ancient” component), Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet. I know a bit about Russia. I also read and listen to the “experts” in our current culture who know quite a bit of Russian history.
Still, all hearsay. All history is hearsay. But it is probably more accurate than the crap the mainstream media invent about Russia for their handlers’ own benefit. Sure, what I know may not be true; in fact, much of it may be at least a bit inaccurate. Yet it allows me to form an opinion that is more than just the latest offering the agenda feeds me.
Both sides of any argument will believe they are correct and that their information comes from a reliable source. It is clear to me that only one side is likely to be closer to the mark. The other relies too heavily on unvetted information from agenda-driven sources.
The deeper problem is not merely that we are swimming in second-hand claims. It is that most people have lost the capacity - or the willingness - to treat information as provisional. They treat it as identity. Once a narrative is absorbed, it becomes part of the self. To question it feels like self-betrayal. That is why the sheepsters dig in so hard. The information is no longer about the world; it is about who they are. Challenge the claim and you challenge their belonging.
Shrews live differently. We know the ground is soft. We know every source has an angle, every expert a blind spot, every historical account a selection of facts that could have been arranged another way. The point of reading the books, of listening to the dissenting voices, of cross-checking the timelines, is not to arrive at certainty. Certainty is a fantasy reserved for the faithful. The point is to keep the psyche from hardening into dogma. The effort itself is the discipline.
There is a cost to this posture. You live with more ambiguity than most people can tolerate. You become slower to speak and quicker to qualify. You watch friends and family treat provisional stories as sacred texts and realize there is little you can do about it. You also notice, over time, that the people who never vet anything still manage to feel more certain than you do. That certainty is not knowledge. It is insulation.
Yet the alternative - accepting whatever is served - is worse. It turns the mind into a passive receiver of whatever power structure is currently loudest. Hearsay becomes gospel simply because it is repeated often enough and by the right people. History shows how quickly that process can turn lethal.
The only modest safeguard is the one we already have: the stubborn, imperfect habit of checking, of reading past the headline, of remembering that almost everything we “know” arrived second-hand. We will still be wrong a good deal of the time. That is the human condition. The difference is whether we stay conscious of the uncertainty or pretend it does not exist. One path keeps the door open to correction. The other nails it shut and calls the darkness light."
Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here.
o
"10 Foods That Will Keep You Alive When the Stores Shut Down Because of the Food Crisis"
"10 Foods That Will Keep You Alive When the
Stores Shut Down Because of the Food Crisis"
by John Walter
Excerpt: "Civilization has never fallen from a height this great. Make no mistake: collapse doesn’t arrive with fanfare and televised announcements. It comes silently, in gas station lines, in empty shelves, in the darkness of your refrigerator at midnight when the power dies and doesn’t come back. Those who survive aren’t the strongest—they’re the prepared. And preparation starts with what you put between your teeth when supermarkets become cathedrals of famine.
This list isn’t for weekend warriors. This isn’t for people who think a bag of rice and a few cans of tuna are enough. These are nutritional weapons - foods chosen for caloric density, extreme durability, versatility, and the ability to keep your body functional when everything around you disintegrates. Every entry has been tested by time, by catastrophe, by those who survived when others couldn’t.
Before we dive in, understand something fundamental: the food you buy now, in abundance, is different from the food that will keep you alive. Most people die in the first 90 days of a crisis not because they have no food, but because they have the wrong food. They have chips, they have expiring cereal, they have frozen meat that rots when the power dies. They have foods requiring complex preparation, abundant water, or storage conditions that vanish when infrastructure crumbles. What follows are the ten pillars of survival nutrition. Stock them deep, stock them now, and pray you never need them."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
"Lookout Don't Look Up"
"Lookout Don't Look Up"
Phone addiction is the most powerful drug on earth.
by Nicholas Creed
"Is the art of conversation dying or dead almost those born since 2000? Does that age cohort favour emojis and digital communication over face to face human interaction and verbal dialogue? I ask these questions both rhetorically and tongue-in-cheek, because we all know the answer. I feel like I am surrounded by zombies. I am surrounded by zombies. I’ve ranted about this kind of thing before, here, here, and here.
Today I re-examine ‘smart’ dumb phone addiction through the lens of a pedestrian in mortal peril, a driver who sees 99.9% of motorists playing on their phones or watching videos in Bangkok, and as a quietly despairing man from a bygone era that values meaningful human connection. I must be old-fashioned. I was born in 1984 and now I am living through Eric Blair aka George Orwell’s "Nineteen eighty four." I have yet to turn forty years old, yet I may be called a ‘boomer’ simply by virtue of my principles and how I cling onto being human, acting human, rejecting the merging of man and machine, and quite literally detesting my own phone.
I leave my little blue screen at home most of the time. Mrs. Creed is never without hers; alas I do encourage her to spend less time on her Instagram story and more time on our story in the land of the living, within the magical, spontaneous, unpredictable realm of reality.
There are a handful of friends who I can rely on for punctuality to appear at a convened meeting point at the allotted time. It is liberating being without that little device that craves attention - even with zero anti-social media apps installed, no email account apps, *no Substack app*, no food delivery apps - only Telegram and Signal messaging - I can make do with those on my laptop desktop alone.
I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks back when I met a friend in the park for some outdoor exercise at the open-air gym, when he was despondent to my calls and messages. I reluctantly brought my phone in its little faraday cage pouch and fished it out upon arrival to check if he was nearby. He turned up and proudly announced that he’d left his phone at home, inspired by observing me having done the same so often. It was checkmate with me in the NPC crosshairs on that occasion. Nay bother. Going ‘phoneless’ is catching on. Long may it continue.
Last night I braved thunder and lightning in a torrential classic Bangkok monsoon season downpour to make a run to the local minimart. There are rarely any pavements (‘sidewalks’ in American English) around Bangkok’s little ‘Sois’ (roads). As I toddled home, I hugged the right side of the road on the final corner of the home stretch, only to be almost wiped out of the game.
A food delivery driver tore around the corner towards me, one hand on his motorcycle handlebar, the other hand holding his phone as he slouched forwards checking the map direction on his blue screen. I breathed in and darted further still into the walls atop the drains. He missed me by millimeters. I shouted in Thai “concentrate!” - to which I received an angry glare. Sorry for existing, and being in your way as you multi-tasked your journey one-handed in zero-visibility heavy rain at highspeed, Mr. Motorcyclist.
I see these near-misses daily around my neigborhood - for the most part these motorcyclists seem to have developed an extra-sensory perception via peripheral vision that allows them to remain glued to their phones as they swerve around oncoming traffic and pedestrians. Although I know from the daily death tolls on the roads involving motorcycles and pick-up trucks, that many souls are not so ‘lucky’. It really is a concrete jungle out there.
As my car’s engine idles in the dreaded Bangkok gridlocked traffic from time to time, I look around from side to side, and what do I see? Everyone is on their phone, almost all motorists are wearing a facemask, often alone in their cars, and motorcyclists are often playing games or watching YouTube videos; if they are not otherwise mesmerized by the infinite scroll of drivel via Facebook.
When the traffic lights turn green, invariably it warrants a beep of my horn to pull the driver in front of me out of their phone-induced stupor, so that they may drive forwards, whilst they ambidextrously continue tapping away on their screens, putting their automatic drive vehicles into gear.
Frightening. Insane. Normalized. The brief reprieves from being - I like to think - sane, in an insane and abnormal society, come via the rare glances of acknowledgement from fellow humans who are socially self-aware of their surroundings, and fully conscious. What a rare, beautiful sight it is to behold, truly. Especially on the public transport links - Bangkok’s underground mass rapid transit (MRT) trains, or the over-ground ‘Skytrain’ system.
It reminds me of that scene in the film "I Am Legend" when Will Smith’s character discovers the mutated humans underground all huddled together in silence:
Yet within the silent, huddled, phone scrolling of the public transport trains in Bangkok, I yearn to find just one person who is phoneless, without earphones, without an Ipad or device in their palms. It is extremely rare. If our eyes meet but for a moment, we might exchange a knowing smile as we glance around at the other automaton passengers. It makes for good people watching at least.
What a waste of the inherently natural beauty that used to radiate from Thai women. They just do not look up anymore. They are also still often masked. Hidden away from the world, sinking into the digital, all consuming, attention sapping succubus demon of the blue screen. Unquestionably addicted. Hopelessly dependent on their bastion of truth propaganda, spewing out attention-span diminishing ten second clips of nonsense.
I am so glad to not be a single man in this landscape which is devoid of feeling, numbed by always being connected to the internet, yet entirely disconnected from the sense of self, surroundings, and from life itself.
I met an interesting bloke at the sports hall in the local park. He has a unique job where his role comes in between physiotherapy and doctor’s rehabilitative duties for people who have suffered devastating physical injuries, often from car accidents. I can’t recall the job title, but it is something ‘activated’. He helps people to ‘get activated’ through a type of Swedish massage and stretching exercises. He ranted about phone addiction.
He casually said: “Basically, babies are born now, they learn to walk, then that’s it really. They do not progress beyond the ability to walk in terms of their physical development. The walk turns into a shuffle with poor posture. Most infants are given an Ipad by the age of two years old here. Then they are cognitively and physically stunted in terms of development.”
We mused on how across the sports centre halls of the local park - Pickle Ball, Badminton, Table Tennis, Basketball, and Volleyball - the children are absent. Teenagers are nowhere to be seen. The age demographic for the most part is 30 years old and up. We agreed, nostalgically, how our childhoods in England were spent climbing trees, building rope-swings, playing football, and generally being outdoors as much as possible.
“Piss off Creed you cringeworthy Boomer!” - I hear some youngster shout from the backrow…
As a teenager at the turn of the millennium on new year’s eve 1999, I was at a house party with the entire high school year of pupils. It was wild. I drank myself stupid and ended up throwing up all over my friend’s parent’s pretty flowerbed in their neatly trimmed suburbia garden. I was somewhat mortified. I featured heavily in Monday morning’s gossip stories around the school. It faded away. Only to be replaced by some other drunken teenager falling down some stairs or into a bush at the next week’s house party.
Nowadays, teenagers cannot afford to make such mistakes - even though such errors can be a coming of age rite of passage. Not necessarily involving alcohol, but general moments of great embarrassment when you want the ground to swallow you up and memory hole the incident.
Nowadays, a teenager would be subject to intense ‘cyber bullying’ if they put one foot wrong at a party. It would be remixed into a funky video clip to a whacky soundtrack and might go viral, if they are very unfortunate. I wonder what teenaged house parties are like now. Do they sit around on their phones showing each other videos and messaging the person sat beside them? Do some people play up to the camera phones for attention, or choregraph a little dance for TikTok?
“Shut up Creed you stupid Boomer!”
As a child, I would call my friends by landline and ask “are you playing out today?” Then we would ‘knock-on’ our friend’s front door, and off we went to explore the great outdoors, tearing around on our BMX bikes, with the only danger we put ourselves in owing to our own non-stop laughter, and perhaps foolishly cycling together side by side in a row on a main road.
Although we weren’t chased by nefarious government officials from clandestine programs like in the show "Stranger Things," we once experienced a bicycle chase from a group of much older boys after we replaced the huge log on their rope-swing with a twig, just for a laugh. I am sure they would have beaten us to a pulp if they had caught up with us - a lucky, narrow escape.
That’ll do it for glimpsing into my misspent well-spent, character building youth. We were free once upon a time. Carefree, adventurous, explorative, and curious about the big wide world. As TriTorch said to me in a direct message which I am sure he won’t mind me quoting verbatim: "They're (phones) highly weaponized poison aimed directly at mankind. Worse than drugs because the vector of attack makes so much sense ("well my son has to have his cell phone in class, what if there's an emergency") <--- there's so much evil built into that mantra it's practically inconceivable (we went on just fine for 200 years without cell phones in classrooms, but whatever eases the parents' minds paves the path to our ruin).
"The Persistence of U.S. Strategy, Anthony Fauci, and Limited Hangouts"
"The Persistence of U.S. Strategy,
Anthony Fauci, and Limited Hangouts"
by Edward Curtin
“Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. The notion of democracy is often no different than living under a plutocracy or a government by wealthy elites.”
- Oswald Spengler, "Der Untergang des Abendlandes," 1922
"Throughout all the news cycles over the years, you can count on a continuity in U.S. government/media propaganda and strategy. Make a time capsule, fill it with today’s news, hide it away, and pull it out in five, ten, or fifteen years, and while many details (tactics) will have changed, the underlying themes will remain. Or do it in reverse.
Assuming the world miraculously escapes a nuclear war of annihilation, when the criminal Donald Trump is long gone from office, replaced by a Democrat or Republican, the United States will still be waging war against Russia and China and any country that stands in its and Israel’s way in the Middle East. The people who own and run the U.S. will still be waging information war against the American people. Their tactics may have changed but not their long-term strategy. MKUltra, the CIA’s “former” mind-control and torture program, is now fully digitized and nearly co-terminus with the Internet.
The continuity of agenda from one American president to the next is striking. Because Trump says and does openly what has often been done insidiously by American presidents, he shocks by his audacity. He commits crimes at home and abroad as if he were smirkingly firing some contestant on his former Reality-TV show. Some people find this perversely honest to justify their support for an obvious madman versus the covert kind. Such is the double-binding trap, the fake binary, that Simon and Garfunkel once set to music with their song, “Mrs. Robinson”:
"Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon,
Going to the candidates’ debate.
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose,
Every way you look at it you lose."
While Ronald Reagan could routinely call Nicaragua a “totalitarian dungeon,” and use the Contras to try to overthrow its legitimate government, Trump, while using similar language about Venezuela, simply bombed the country and kidnapped its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
While Reagan, like Trump, was constantly saying that the Russians were always disseminating propaganda, disinformation, and managing the news, he always failed to mention that he and his staff, with the help of an obeisant media, regularly managed the news and lied to the world. In this they were typical presidents.
People may forget that Reagan, like Trump, was a master fabricator. Such examples are legendary. On two occasions he told Israeli prime Minister Yitzak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, that he had personally assisted in the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The truth is that Reagan never left Hollywood where his war service consisted of work in the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps at the Hal Roach Studios. Reagan’s, like Trump’s, false claims were so innumerable and outrageous that only a media and a populace inured to falsity would allow him to get away with them in the 1980s.
But that’s the way it was and is and will be in the U.S.A. Trump is a flipped version of Reagan, whose great admirer was Obama, under whose aegis the U.S. intelligence carried out the coup in Ukraine in 2014, setting the stage for the ongoing U.S./NATO war against Russia via Ukraine, blah blah blah. It’s a small club, said George Carlin, of those who own and run the country, and you and I don’t belong to it. Yes, “Every way you look at it you lose.”
Now that the Chrisopher Nolan film, “The Odyssey,” has had it place in the sun dominating the news for weeks, a modern trickster named Anthony Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, a man of many Trojan Horses, pops up like a weasel from the music box to grab the headlines once again. Or I should say someone turned the crank and he was popped up.
Since the diaries that he kept during the Covid-19 days were revealed (diaries very oddly put on government servers and not on his private laptop or in a paper diary), we know from the horse’s mouth how famous and celebrated he was and how giddy his celebrityhood made him feel as he was lying to the public about Covid-19. Since the recent congressional hearings in which he was called to testify and where he pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times, we can feel good knowing that covid “probably” came from the Wuhan lab in China and not from some bat or monkey who was chasing a weasel. Maybe, or could be, or probably, as Republican Sen. Rand Paul and many commentators concluded, while Fauci was mum.
Presumed to be so smart, why did Fauci put his diaries on government servers? We know that Fauci was quite verbose back in the day when he trashed those – including the three authors of the "Great Barrington Declaration," respected doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta – who dared to offer a different take on Covid-19. Whenever anyone questioned “the science,” as he termed the official narrative of covid, its statistics, the validity of the PCR tests, the effectiveness of masks, the six foot rule, the experimental “vaccines” produced and approved at record speed, the horrible consequences of the shutdowns that were destroying economies, killing people, forcing people to despair and committing suicide, creating traumatized children and pushing along the new normal digital screen world, bankrupting small and medium-sized businesses for the sake of enriching the richest, etc.,
Fauci and his corporate media sycophants mocked such dissidents as conspiracy nuts aiding the invisible viral enemy. This was so even when the dissenters were highly respected doctors, scientists, and intellectuals who were expressing their First Amendment rights of free speech. Fauci ridiculed them all and many lost their jobs, their medical licenses, couldn’t travel, and were categorized as lunatics.
He didn’t advocate any First Amendment Bill of Rights for dissenters, as he does now for himself with the Fifth Amendment. No equal rights and no colloquy with others. And no shaking hands ever-ever-ever again as he told Time Magazine: “I don’t think we ever should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you.”
Isn’t it a shocking truth to finally know that Fauci didn’t tell the truth about the alleged origin of Covid-19? Can you believe it? That a top government official was lying to protect our “enemies” the Chinese when they really released the “virus” from their Wuhan lab? We should say – by accident. But accidents happen as everyone understands, and enemies usually work together to develop biological weapons to use on each other. Ha! Ha!
The media are going wild about this revelation that Fauci revealed in his accidently discovered dear diaries that were accidently left on government servers that revealed Fauci’s opinion that the Chinese probably accidently released a covid virus from Wuhan. Catharsis feels great. Accidents happen. Like shit.
The only problem is that this revelation tells us nothing of importance, even if true. It is what is called “a limited hangout,” an old trick of the intelligence trade where you reveal a so-called truth to conceal deeper ones when they are threatened. This happens within a framework of “deep state” trickery where even the public faces of the exposures may not know that they are being played.
If we postulate that Fauci publicly lied about his funding for gain of function research at the University of North Carolina and Wuhan, so what? So “America’s Doctor,” the most famous man in the world, a man beloved by celebrities and CNN’s Jake Tapper, et al. is a charlatan, an ego-maniac and a liar like Trump or the other presidents he served under. Is that a great surprise or important?
What the media are all agog about is a diversion. We learn nothing about Fauci’s connections to the CIA and gain-of-function research being conducted in the U.S. and all across the world with 40 or so labs in Ukraine alone. We learn nothing about why medicine has been weaponized, the use of biological weapons, the so-called vaccines, the false statistics, etc. Nothing useful. Only that Fauci lied.
How many people have contracted Lyme Disease and ever made a connection to U.S. biological and animal warfare research and its connection to a Nazi scientist ?
Covid-19 was a con-job from the start. The official operation was launched on March 11, 2020 with worldwide lockdowns that destroyed economies while enriching the super-rich and devastating regular people. It was a propaganda achievement carried out by intelligence and military apparatuses in conjunction with Big Pharma, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, etc. and promulgated by a vast around-the-clock corporate media disinformation campaign.
It was the third fundamental turning point – following the 1963 CIA assassination of President John Kennedy and the attacks of September 11, 2001 with their connected anthrax attacks originating from a U.S. government bioweapons lab – in destabilizing the economic, social, and political life of all nations while undermining their sovereignty. It was based on false science in the interests of further developing a biosecurity state. The intelligence agency planners who had conducted many germ wargame simulations leading up to COVID-19 referred to a future arising out of such “attacks” as “The New Normal.” A close study of these precedents, game-planning, and players makes this evident. The aim was to militarize medicine and concentrate power. Check the 2010 Rockefeller Report, the October 18, 2019 Event 201, and Agenda 21, among other places.
The use of the PCR test to detect the virus and create cases and death numbers was a lie from the start. The American Nobel Prize winning scientist who developed the test, Kary Mullis, made it clear before his sudden death in December 2019 that “the PCR is a process. It does not tell you that you are sick.” It is a process “to make a whole lot of something out of something,” but it cannot detect a specific virus..
The belief that it can so test began with the unscientific PCR Corona protocol created by Christian Drosten (Fauci’s colleague) in Germany in January 2020 that became the standard method for testing for SARS-CoV-2 worldwide. I am sure this was preplanned and part of a high-level conspiracy. This protocol set the cycle threshold (amplification) at 45 which could only result in false positive results. These were then called cases: An act of fraud on a massive scale. If one had been diagnosed as “a case” via the PCR test, and subsequently died of any cause – a heart attack, cancer, old age, etc. that person was recorded as having died from Covid. Fauci, Drosten, and others engaged in a game about the origin – animals, the wild, perhaps a lab, etc., all the while knowing how the biological disease weapons were being tested and funded.
And why? Which is of course the fundamental issue. Biological and germ weapons of war and the medical establishment’s part in it are the crux of the matter. This involves their use over the past decades, now, and in the future. There is no doubt that they have, along with nuclear weapons and space based weapons, been at the forefront of U.S. research and development.
The late Professor Francis Boyle, the man who authored the 1989 "Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act" for the U.S. government, claimed that the covid vaccines (mRNA injections) were “bioweapons” and “Franken-shots” – “synthetic biological weapons of mass destruction.” His expertise on biological weapons research and development was vast but few have heard of him. Here is an introduction that should induce one to explore his work and claims.
The continuity of agenda from one American president to the next is striking. For media commentators to focus their attention on whether Fauci lied about the origins of Covid-19 is to miss the deeper issue, whether “accidently” or on purpose. It is a limited hangout used to avoid something truly evil and rotten at the heart of the government of the United States, a diabolic continuation of business as usual."
Simon And Garfunkel, "Mrs. Robinson"
Col. Douglas Macgregor, "America Is Walking Into A Disaster"
Col. Douglas Macgregor, 8/8/26
"America Is Walking Into A Disaster"
Comments here:
o
Col. Douglas Macgregor, 8/8/26
"The U.S. Faces a Dangerous New Phase"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Jobs Are Gone! The Prices Aren't!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 8/8/26
"The Jobs Are Gone! The Prices Aren't!"
"The job numbers are in, and Americans are facing a growing affordability problem. Jobs are being lost, job fairs are slowing down, companies are cutting back, and AI is changing the employment landscape. At the same time, inflation continues to squeeze household budgets, with grocery prices, gas, restaurants and everyday necessities becoming harder to afford. The buying power people had just one year ago is disappearing. In this iAllegedly report, Dan breaks down the latest job numbers, inflation, the rising cost of living, $15 bags of chips, grocery store warnings, shrinking employment opportunities, AI job cuts and what consumers can do to protect themselves financially. We also look at the changing real estate market, falling home contract prices and the opportunities appearing in recreational markets like boats. This is about personal finance, the economy, jobs, inflation and the financial warning signs affecting Americans right now."
Comments here:
"This Is Getting Out Of Control, We're In Trouble"
Adventures With Danno, 8/8/26
"This Is Getting Out Of Control, We're In Trouble"
Comments here:
Friday, August 7, 2026
Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Bad Things Are About To Happen"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 8/7/26
"Alert! Bad Things Are About To Happen"
Comments here:
"A Loyal Dog’s Story"
Full screen recommended.
Yusha, "A Loyal Dog’s Story"
"Have you ever met someone who stayed beside you not when life was easy, but when everything fell apart? True loyalty is one of the rarest things in this world. Most people stay when it is comfortable. Most people leave when it gets hard. But every once in a while, you meet a soul, human or animal, that simply does not know how to abandon you. In this powerful motivational story, you will follow the journey of a lonely old man and a wounded stray dog that nobody wanted. Two forgotten souls who found each other. And what happened next will change the way you think about love, friendship, and devotion forever. Because sometimes the most loyal heart you will ever find is the one the world threw away. In this story you'll learn: Why true loyalty is so rare today, what real devotion looks like beyond words, How the most overlooked souls often love the deepest, why loyalty is measured not in good times but in hard ones, what it means to wait for someone without giving up. Have you ever experienced true loyalty from a person or an animal? What happened, and what did it teach you about life? Share in the comments. Your story might be exactly what someone else needed to read today."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Is this one galaxy or two? The jumble of stars, gas, and dust that is NGC 520 is now thought to incorporate the remains of two separate disk galaxies. A defining component of NGC 520 - as seen in great detail in the featured image from the Hubble Space Telescope - is its band of intricately interlaced dust running vertically down the spine of the colliding galaxies. A similar looking collision might be expected in a few billion years when our disk Milky Way Galaxy to collides with our large-disk galactic neighbor Andromeda (M31).
The collision that defines NGC 520 started about 300 million years ago. Also known as Arp 157, NGC 520 lies about 100 million light years distant, spans about 100 thousand light years, and can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Fish (Pisces). Although the speeds of stars in NGC 520 are fast, the distances are so vast that the battling pair will surely not change its shape noticeably during our lifetimes."
Jeremiah Babe, 'Buying Time Before The Worst Economic Crash In History"
Jeremiah Babe, 8/7/26
'Buying Time Before The Worst Economic Crash In History"
Comments here:
"Universal Truth, Facts & Life"
"Universal Truth, Facts & Life"
Past happenings, History, facts about life and long living.
By Shiv Tandon
"In the Middle Ages, there were no toothbrushes, perfumes, deodorants, and much less toilet paper. Human excrements were thrown out of palace windows. On a holiday, the palace kitchen was able to prepare a feast for 1500 people, without the minimum hygiene. The explanation is not in the heat, but in the foul odor emitted under the skirts. It was also not customary to shower due to the cold and the almost non-existence of running water. Only the nobles had lackeys to fan them, to dispel the bad odor that exhalated the body and mouth, as well as to scare away the insects.
Those who have been to Versailles have admired the huge and beautiful gardens that, at that time, were not only contemplated, but used as a toilet in the famous ballads promoted by the monarchy, because there were no bathrooms.
In the Middle Ages, most weddings took place in June. The reason is simple: the first bath of the year was taken in May; so, in June, the smell of people was still tolerable. However, as some odors were already beginning to bother, the brides carried bouquets of flowers near their bodies to cover the odor. Hence the explanation of the origin of the bridal bouquet. The baths were taken in a single massive tub filled with hot water. The head of the family had the privilege of the first swim in clean water. Then, without changing the water, the others arrived in the house, in order of age, women, also by age and finally, children. The babies were the last ones to bathe.
During the 1600s and 1700s, the Palace of Versailles, like many other European royal residences, did not have modern bathrooms or sanitation facilities.
1. No bathrooms: The Palace of Versailles, built during the reign of Louis XIV (1638-1715), did not have dedicated bathrooms. Instead, chamber pots and commodes were used in private quarters.
2. Medieval hygiene: During the Middle Ages, personal hygiene was not a priority. Toothbrushes, perfumes, deodorants, and toilet paper were not widely used or available.
3. Waste disposal: Human waste was often disposed of by throwing it out of windows or into streets, a practice known as "chamber pot emptying." This was common in many European cities, including Paris.
4. Palace specifics: Versailles had some primitive sanitation facilities, like latrines and cesspits, but they were not connected to a modern sewage system. Waste was often collected in cesspits and emptied manually.
5. Royal exceptions: Royalty and nobility used decorative commodes and chamber pots, sometimes with aromatic herbs or perfumes to mask odors. However, these were not connected to drainage systems.
6. Modernization: It wasn't until the late 18th and early 19th centuries that modern plumbing and sanitation systems were gradually introduced in European royal palaces, including Versailles.
These practices were common during that time period and not unique to Versailles. The palace has since undergone significant modernization and now features modern bathrooms and sanitation facilities."
"The Kill List: The 10 Events That Could Wipe Out Humanity (And Why We May Already Be Too Late)"
"The Kill List: The 10 Events That Could Wipe
Out Humanity (And Why We May Already Be Too Late)"
by Milan Adams
Excerpt: "Beneath veneer of normalcy - stock markets humming, coffee brewing, children laughing - something ancient stirs. Not metaphorically. Literally. Systems constructed over centuries teeter upon thresholds invisible to those who trust the evening news. You sense it already, don’t you? That tightness in chest before thunder cracks. That whisper suggesting tomorrow might not resemble today.
Civilization stands upon precipices most cannot perceive. Not one precipice. Ten. Each capable of severing threads connecting humanity to tomorrow. Some approach slowly, glaciers of inevitability grinding forward. Others lurk in laboratories, boardrooms, fault lines, waiting only for trigger fingers. All share common trait: once initiated, reversal becomes impossible. Survivors, if any emerge, will inhabit planet unrecognizable to current inhabitants.
You believe preparation possible. Bunkers, canned goods, ammunition. Delusions comforting until understanding dawns: certain catastrophes transcend individual preparation. They alter physics, biology, atmosphere itself. When these arrive, your supplies become archaeology for whatever evolves next.
What follows represents compilation of scenarios keeping researchers awake, analysts medicated, military strategists staring at ceilings. Some derive from leaked documents. Others from patterns visible only through cross-referencing disciplines. All possess capacity to render human experience extinct - not immediately, but through slow strangulation of hope, resources, breathable air, edible food, survivable temperatures.
Read completely before dismissing. Dismissal itself constitutes luxury these scenarios intend to eliminate."
Full, highly recommended article is here:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)