Bill Bonner, "Our Way of Life"

"Our Way of Life"

How will America’s confrontational, scaremongering attitudes 

affect our financial future? The age-old combination of war 

and debt are likely to be fatal to the empire and to US asset values.

by Bill Bonner

"China is a party state. The function of China is not to better 

the interests of the Chinese people - it is to promote, strengthen, and 

expand the power and influence, and reach of the Chinese Communist Party."

- Mary Kissel

Poitou, France - "You might wonder: is that any different from the Democratic Party or the Republican Party? And where did Kamala Harris come from? Does anyone know how or why this ‘DEI hire’ is now in the running for the top job in the USA?

Was the selection process for her much different from how the Soviets chose Brezhnev, or how the Chinese chose Xi? Wasn’t she selected by party honchos, behind closed doors? And isn’t her mission not to ‘better the interests’ of the American people... but to ‘promote, strengthen and expand the power and influence’ of the Democratic party’s elites?

We are exploring US foreign policy. Not for its own sake... foreign policy is not our beat. But how will America’s confrontational, scaremongering attitudes affect our financial future? In preview, the age-old combination of war and debt are likely to be fatal to the empire... and to US asset values.

The problems in themselves are easy to understand and solve. Javier Milei in Argentina turned a deep deficit into a surplus in a matter of months. In America, it should be easier. The ‘empire budget’ could be cut in half... or more... just by eliminating the ‘empire’ part. On the other hand, without substantial cuts to the military, there is little chance of preventing a financial catastrophe. Too bad, the firepower industry controls Congress!

Deeper in the Hole: The US has the most powerful empire the world has ever seen... with some seven hundred military bases all over the world... and a Pentagon budget eight times bigger than Russia and three times more than the Chinese. The total empire budget - including foreign aid and other entanglements - comes to about $1.3 trillion per year. And as long as it continues, the deeper into the hole the US goes.

Thanks to its lucky geography, America faces no danger from the land or the sea. The only plausible attack would come from the air. And the cost of maintaining a defense against it - with an Eisenhower Era level of reasonable military muscle - is probably around a quarter of the entire empire budget... or about $300 billion per year. The rest of the budget plays no real role in the defense of the fifty states.

But neither Republicans nor Democrats propose to make the obvious and essential cuts. Instead, they paint their faces and pound the drums... whooping for war. The foreigners are all out to get us, they insist.

We’ve lived among foreigners for the last thirty years, with business outposts in China, India, Australia and several other nations. Never once did we get the impression that they were ready to slit our throats.

But listening to recent congressional hearings, we felt lucky to get home alive. A supposed US foreign policy expert, Mary Kissel, said the Chinese aim to “upend our way of life and to dominate and change our way of life.” And they are “committed to destroy(ing) us.” And members of Congress - all supposedly intelligent, educated people - took it seriously.

Grinding Poverty: The Chinese want to change our way of life? How? Do they want to make our wages go up at 7% per year... as theirs have for the last thirty years (while ours have been flat)? Are they hoping to build a high-speed train between Boston and Washington... or even between LA and San Francisco... one that will travel at 373 miles per hour like China’s new maglev?

Since 1979, the Chinese have multiplied their GDP by thirty times - three times faster than the US; they’ve lifted eight hundred million people out of grinding poverty in a single generation. Is that the way they’d change our way of life? Heck, maybe we’d all learn to speak Chinese if hat were the payoff. Or maybe they’ll insist on getting the US retirement age down to just 54 years old... as it is in China?

Rep. Lisa McClain is apparently concerned that the Chinese company, Gotion, is up to something in her district. In Michigan, we have the Gotion plant... We have a Chinese-owned company and the only spot they can figure out that is feasible for them to build is next to a university and next to a military base. Anybody think that’s a coincidence? I’m not much for coincidences.

Ms. McClain may know nothing about China. But she might have realized that there are so many colleges and universities in her home state - 198, including community colleges and trade schools - being close to one of them was more than a coincidence; it was inevitable. And since the company intends to hire thousands of Americans... and pay them about 50% more than the US average... it might make sense to locate near a university where the company could find the talent it needed.

As for the military base, it is more than one hundred miles away! But on the Hill there is no need for careful, comparative analysis. Representative Tim Burchett set the tone, with this note of idiocy: ‘What if they were to develop some kind of biological entity that can, say, wipe out females of child-bearing ages or something?’

That would be just like the Chinese, right?! And what geniuses... the ‘entity’ would attack young American women - but not Chinese women. But wait. With the American women wiped out...maybe that wouldn’t be such a smart strategy for the Chinese, after all. There would still be some 160 million American men alive.

Who would fix their breakfasts? Who would darn their socks and bake their cookies? Watch out, you diabolical Chinese. They might be very angry..."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com

Judge Napolitano, "Larry Johnson: Was Trump's Assassination Attempt an Organized Plot?"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 7/24/24

"Larry Johnson: 

Was Trump's Assassination Attempt an Organized Plot?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Related:

"Doug Casey on the Trump Assassination 

Attempt and What Comes Next"

by International Man

"International Man: On July 13, there was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump. What’s your take on what really happened?

Doug Casey: The official narrative is still crystallizing, as all the government employees and bureaucrats who were supposedly responsible for Trump’s safety scurry about to ensure their careers aren’t adversely affected. Now that Kim Cheatle, the security hen in charge of the Secret Service, has resigned to collect her fat pension as a public mea culpa, the Secret Service and FBI will conduct internal investigations. A few people may be reprimanded and placed on administrative paid leave for a couple of weeks. A question will be asked as to whether it was a lone nut or part of a broader conspiracy. The odds are 99 out of 100 they’ll conclude the former, whether or not it’s true. They definitely won’t dare find there was any conspiracy within the Secret Service to take Trump out…

The only thing that I’m really sure of is that the Secret Service was ultra-incompetent in scores of separate and egregious ways. The Biden administration’s DEI policies fatally compromised SS effectiveness, starting with a diversity hire as director and using two short fat chicks as frontline security for Trump. If you have bodyguards, especially for a big, tall man like Trump, you want big, tall, muscular guys.

Many more things will come out showing how poorly managed the Secret Service has become. For instance, I understand physical qualifications used to include the ability to run a mile and a half in under 12 minutes. That’s been dropped to 20 minutes. To me, it seems certain that top Secret Service guys are going to leave. Serious professionals will find it too demoralizing to stick around as standards degrade and the ranks are filled with Wokesters.

I suspect this has already happened with the FBI. The corruption set in long ago with the CIA. And in different ways, with all of the 15 armed Praetorian agencies. I don’t take any news or analysis they put forth at face value. This is a time for critical thinking, which, as we recently discussed, is the process of questioning the validity of everything and pursuing the answers that are given until you’ve arrived at a reasonable conclusion. Regrettably, most Americans accept whatever the government tells them as fact.

The other thing that’s certain is that the blue and the red people really don’t like each other and can’t communicate. The Progressive blue people actively hate the red MAGA people. The red people have a much longer, slower fuse. But an event like this can solidify their feelings and they could wind up hating the blue people as much as the blue people already hate them.

My bottom line on the assassination attempt? There was definitely government and Deep State involvement. We’re just lucky that they’re incompetent.

International Man: If Trump had been killed, what do you think would have happened next?

Doug Casey: I’d say that the 30 to 40% of the country who are MAGAs would’ve gone wild. It’s a semi-religious movement at this point, and they won’t take losing their savior lying down.

If he’d been killed, it would’ve immanentized the Eschaton. Generally speaking, the public killing of a semi-religious figure is big trouble. You saw that with the riots that followed the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, even more so with the death of George Floyd in 2020. In an unstable country, even a worthless common criminal can be apotheosized and set off riots.

When things like this happen in stable times, the public can overlook them and go back to their lives. But when the tinder is dry like it is now, almost anything can set off a conflagration. And that’s what I expect we’re going to see.

In fact, if I put on my conspiracy theorist hat, I might say that there could be other assassination attempts on Trump and/or JD Vance. Or even Kamala. Getting rid of a highly undesirable candidate would solve all kinds of problems for the Democrats, and give them a much-needed hero while fabricating a perfect excuse to lock the country down as well as “solve” the gun problem. A narrative would be built about how everybody’s life is at risk.

I’ve said before that the Democrat Party is controlled and largely populated by people with the philosophy and psychology of French Jacobins. They really want to overturn the basis of society, and some of them will see a series of assassinations just before an election as a good way to do it.

International Man: You wrote a fiction book, "Assassin," which explores political assassinations. What did you learn writing that book, and how does it relate to what is happening today?

Doug Casey: John Hunt and I looked at, among many other things, a unique way to organize a resistance movement in modern-day America. Is it even possible to overturn the country’s entrenched rulers since “democracy” and elections are a sham? What is the morality of shooting candidates? Apart from that, is it even practical?

Guns are basically a 15th-Century technology. You might think any technology that ancient wouldn’t be something to fear in today’s high-tech world. It’s reminiscent of Biden’s comment a few years ago about how you need F-15s if you want to overthrow the US government, which, like much of what he says, makes no sense.

You might think that if people want to replace a repressive regime, they could form militias, the way the colonists did in 1776. But a repressive State will just center its force on any pockets of resistance. No matter how well-armed the individual citizens might be, they can’t stand up to an organized army. The odds are always against the rebels.

But on the other hand, guns are quite useful for excising selected bad individuals. Anyway, that’s one of the themes of "Assassin" Political assassination has a long history in the US, and that’s likely to remain true in future US elections.

International Man: The US election is approaching, but there’s still plenty of time for surprises that could sway the election. Do you have any predictions?

Doug Casey: It now looks like the Republicans will win, for lots of reasons. But the Republicans are known as the stupid party for good reason. Notwithstanding election rhetoric, they’re completely without fixed principles. Their operating principles are “do what the Democrats would do, but slower and not as thoroughly”. They love to moralize but don’t have a moral center, which actually makes them quite despicable. Everybody hates a hypocrite. The Democrats, on the other hand, do have principles - but they’re all rotten.

Trump has my sympathy among the candidates because, although he has no moral or philosophical center, at least he’s a cultural conservative. Unlike the Democrats, he doesn’t want to overturn the nature of society. But since the Republicans are so dimwitted, even though Trump is riding a huge wave of sympathy for what happened and the admirable way he recovered from the incident, it’s entirely possible they’ll find some way to blow the election.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, the Jacobins, are desperate to retain control of the apparatus of the State and could find any number of ways to subvert the election. They’ll use the millions of migrants. They’ll make massive use of mail-in ballots. They’ll take full advantage of the electronic voting machines. They undoubtedly have lots of dirty tricks and surprises planned we can’t imagine. They’ll use the full force of the leftist media, academic, and entertainment complexes to propagandize. And don’t forget, the average American is now a leftist. They elected and re-elected Obama, among other things. They could, God forbid, win. As Yogi Berra said, it ain’t over till it’s over.

International Man: How do you recommend people prepare for the coming chaos?

Doug Casey: The coming chaos will be something very much like a civil war, which is defined as a conflict where two opposing sides attempt to gain control of the same government. Using that definition, the conflict of 1861 to 1865 was not a civil war. It was simply a secession movement.

I think that Ray Dalio, the multi-billionaire, may have put his finger on the way this is going to evolve. Dalio has recently published lots of articles and a book discussing how things are likely to evolve. He’s a rather dry writer, but let me summarize.

He sees countries generally going through six stages, the last one characterized by war, civil war, revolution, or the like. He feels we’re at the very end of stage five and right at the cusp of stage six. I generally concur with his outlook - but lots of people today have a gloomy view on the shape of things to come; that’s nothing new. What’s important here is that Dalio speaks as someone who’s worth $15 billion and is totally immersed in the current system at the Master of the Universe level.

What’s likely to be the catalyst that sets things off? He (correctly, IMO) puts his finger on the bankruptcy of the government, presumably accompanied by the collapse of the debt-based banking system and hyperinflation of the dollar. What does he suggest we do, now that we’re looking at something like a civil war, with all the trimmings?

Dalio says you have three options. One: pick your side and fight. Two: keep your head down and hide. Three: flee. Everybody has to determine which alternative is best for them. Trying to hide, especially in today’s world, is not very effective. Your neighbors will ask, to paraphrase that infamous quote from Baby Bush some years ago, “Are you with us or against us?” Don’t be sure that if you choose sides, you’ll necessarily be with the “good guys.” You might consider following in the footsteps of Rhett Butler in “Gone with the Wind”. Enough said.

Unfortunately, there’s little any individual can practically do to change the course of these trends in motion. The best you can and should do is to stay informed so that you can protect yourself in the best way possible."

- https://internationalman.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Hidden In Plain Sight: You Are Not Allowed To Know - A Black Hole Inside A Black Hole"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/24/24

"Hidden In Plain Sight: You Are Not Allowed To Know - 

A Black Hole Inside A Black Hole"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Related:

"$2.5 Quadrillion Disaster Waiting to Happen – 

Egon von Greyerz"

by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"There is sufficiency in the world 

for Man's need but not for his greed." 

- Mahatma Gandhi

"Egon von Greyerz (EvG) stores gold for clients at the biggest private gold vault in the world buried deep in the Swiss Alps. EvG is a financial and precious metals expert. EvG is a former Swiss banker and an expert in risk. He says the risk in the global markets has never been this high.

EvG explains, “Credit has increased dramatically through derivatives. All instruments being issued now by banks, pension funds, stock funds, it’s all synthetic. There is no real underlying payments in anything almost. Therefore, my estimate for derivatives would be at least $2 quadrillion, and I think that is probably conservative. Then, we have debt on top of that of $300 trillion, and we also have a couple hundred trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities. So, we are talking about $2.5 QUADRILLION, and that’s with a global GDP of $105.44 trillion. So, there is a disaster waiting to happen, and especially because all this created money has created no value whatsoever. I always knew this would collapse, and it’s taken longer than I expected, but I think we are at the end of a major era. 

These derivatives, at some point soon, will actually turn into debt. Central banks will have to cover all the outstanding liabilities of the commercial banks as we are seeing now with Credit Suisse, Bank of England and etc. This is going to happen across the board. Whether it’s called derivatives or called debt, as far as I am concerned, it’s the same thing. It will have the same effect on the world financial system, which will be disastrous, of course.”

EvG says the derivative markets were simply a way for financial institutions to carry debt and not show it on their balance sheets. In the end, everything will balance out. EvG goes on to say, “Nobody can repay the debt, and they can’t even pay interest. So, therefore, when the debt implodes, so will the assets that were financed by this debt. So, both sides of the balance sheet have to come down. Whether it comes down by 50%, 75% or 90%, I don’t know. All I think about is risk, and the financial system will not survive in its present form. Central banks only use one kind of medicine, and that is more printed money. Now, you are getting negative returns on printed money. So, that is not going to save anything. 

Sadly we are looking at a situation when this system will start to implode. The rich are still rich, but the poor are really poor. Overall in the UK, Germany and most European countries, people don’t have enough money to live. This is a human disaster already. With food costs going up 25% and energy going up the same and gasoline, interest rates and rents, people don’t have enough money, and that is happening now. It’s a human disaster of mega proportions. It’s so sad, and governments will have no chance of doing anything about it. The risk is increasing exponentially,  and it is going to get worse.” There is much more in the 43-minute interview.

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with Egon von Greyerz

 of Matterhorn Asset Management, which can be found on GoldSwitzerland.com. 

- https://rumble.com/

o

"Five Wall Street Banks Hold $223 Trillion in Derivatives - 

83 Percent of All Derivatives at 4,600 Banks"

Adventures With Danno, "Massive Price Increases At Walmart! This Is Ridiculous!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, AM 7/24/24

"Massive Price Increases At Walmart! 

This Is Ridiculous!"

In today's vlog, we are at Walmart and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices on many grocery items and some empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Canadian Prepper, "Alert: Nuclear War Drill, WW3 Plan"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 7/23/24

"Alert: Nuclear War Drill, WW3 Plan"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

"World War 3: The Catalyst for a New World Order"

o

"NUKEMAP"

by  Alex Wellerstein

"We live in a world where nuclear weapons issues are on the front pages of our newspapers on a regular basis, yet most people still have a very bad sense of what an exploding nuclear weapon can actually do. Some people think they destroy everything in the world all that once, some people think they are not very different from conventional bombs. The reality is somewhere in between: nuclear weapons can cause immense destruction and huge losses of life, but the effects are still comprehendible on a human scale. 

The NUKEMAP is aimed at helping people visualize nuclear weapons on terms they can make sense of, helping them to get a sense of the scale of the bombs. By allowing people to use arbitrarily picked geographical locations, I hope that people will come to understand what a nuclear weapon would do to places they are familiar with, and how the different sizes of nuclear weapons change the results. There are many different political interpretations one can legitimately take away from such results. There is not intended to be a simple political "message" of the NUKEMAP."

Access NUKEMAP here:

- https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

o

Full screen recommended.

Times Of India, 6/13/24

"'Ready To Use Nuclear...': 

Russia Openly Brandishes Nukes After NATO's New 'Trigger'"

"Russia has pulled out its nuclear weapons as NATO nations permit attacks on its soil. Russian and Belarusian troops have started the second stage of tactical nuclear drills. Moscow said the drills were aimed at ensuring that the two countries' military personnel and equipment were ready to protect their sovereignty and territorial integrity."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

RS-28 Sarmat

The Sarmat is an underground silo-based missile that Russian officials say can carry up to 15 nuclear warheads, though the United States military estimates its capacity to be 10 warheads. Known to NATO military allies by the codename “Satan”, the missile reportedly has a short initial launch phase, which gives little time for surveillance systems to track its takeoff.

Weighing more than 200 tons, the Sarmat has a range of some 18,000km (11,000 miles) and was developed to replace Russia’s older generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICMBs) that dated from the 1980s. Russia test-fired the Sarmat missile in April 2022 in the Plesetsk region of the country, located some 800km (almost 500 miles) north of Moscow, and the launched missiles hit targets on the Kamchatka peninsula, in Russia’s far east region."

- https://www.aljazeera.com/

15 warheads per missile, 11,000 mile range, hypersonic speed of 15,880 mph.

One Sarmat can destroy an area the size of Texas or France.

Do we really want to do this? Pray to God we don't...

o

Full screen recommended.

Click image for larger size.

Russians do not bluff, ever...

"Complexity Theory: the Avalanche and the Snowflake"

"Complexity Theory: the Avalanche and the Snowflake"

by James Rickards

"One of my favorites is what I call ‘the avalanche and the snowflake’. It’s a metaphor for the way the science actually works, but I should be clear: it’s not just a metaphor. The science, the mathematics and the dynamics are actually the same as those that exist in financial markets.

Imagine you’re on a mountainside. You can see a snowpack building up on the ridgeline while it continues snowing. You can tell just by looking at the scene that there’s danger of an avalanche. It’s windswept… it’s unstable… and if you’re an expert, you know it’s going to collapse and kill skiers and wipe out the village below. You see a snowflake fall from the sky onto the snowpack. It disturbs a few other snowflakes that lie there. Then, the snow starts to spread… then it starts to slide… then it gains momentum until, finally, it comes loose and the whole mountain comes down and buries the village.

Question: What do you blame? Do you blame the snowflake, or do you blame the unstable pack of snow? I say the snowflake’s irrelevant. If it wasn’t the one snowflake that caused the avalanche, it could have been the one before, or the one after, or the one tomorrow. The instability of the system as a whole was the problem. So when I think about the risks in the financial system, I don’t focus on the ‘snowflake’ that will cause problems. The trigger doesn’t matter.

A snowflake that falls harmlessly – the vast majority of all snowflakes - technically fails to start a chain reaction. Once a chain reaction begins, it expands exponentially, can ‘go critical’ (as in an atomic bomb) and release enough energy to destroy a city. However, most neutrons do not start nuclear chain reactions, just as most snowflakes do not start avalanches.

In the end, it’s not about the snowflakes or neutrons. It’s about the initial critical state conditions that allow the possibiity of a chain reaction or an avalanche. These can be hypothesized and observed at large scale, but the exact moment the chain reaction begins cannot be observed. That’s because it happens on a minute scale relative to the system. This is why some people refer to these snowflakes as ‘black swans’, because they are unexpected and come by surprise. But they’re actually not a surprise if you understand the system’s dynamics and can estimate the system scale.

It’s a metaphor, but really the mathematics behind it are the same. Financial markets today are huge, unstable mountains of snow waiting to collapse. You see it in the gross notional value of derivatives. There is $700 trillion worth of swaps. ($2.5 Quadrillion by other reputable estimates. - CP) These are derivatives off balance sheet, hidden liabilities in the banking system of the world. These numbers are not made up. Just go to the IS annual report and it’s right there in the footnote.

Well, how do you put $700 trillion into perspective? It’s ten times global GDP. Take all the goods and services in the entire world for an entire year. That’s about $70 trillion when you add it all up. Well, take ten times that, and that’s how big the snow pile is. And that’s the avalanche that’s waiting to come down."

- https://caperebel.com/blogs/

"Banks Facing Massive Crisis As Over $520 Billion in Bank Losses Threaten Wipeout"

Full screen recommended.

The Atlantis Report, 7/23/24

"Banks Facing Massive Crisis As Over $520 Billion 

in Bank Losses Threaten Wipeout"

"The global financial situation is heading towards another crisis, similar to the 2008 recession that affected economies worldwide. This time, the problem is even more serious and has disastrous consequences. The banking industry is facing a crisis with over $520 billion in losses, which has led to significant instability. Unrealized losses refer to the decline in the value of a bank's assets that have not yet been recognized in the bank's financial statements. These losses become realized when the assets are sold for less than their original purchase price. Currently, U.S. banks are sitting on over $520 billion in unrealized losses."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal: We Called It In 2022; Harris In, Biden Out In 2024 Election"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 7/23/24

"Trends Journal: We Called It In 2022; 

Harris In, Biden Out In 2024 Election"

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.

- https://trendsjournal.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "Off Road Vehicle Sales Collapse, More Proof Of Severe Economic Trouble"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/23/24

"Off Road Vehicle Sales Collapse, 

More Proof Of Severe Economic Trouble"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"The Car Market Collapse Of 2024 Will Economically Eviscerate 50 Million Americans"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 7/23/24

"The Car Market Collapse Of 2024 Will 

Economically Eviscerate 50 Million Americans"

"When good news is bad news, you know something is going terribly wrong. While car prices are finally falling, offering some relief for buyers, for millions of U.S. motorists, this is the beginning of a financial nightmare. Do you remember the subprime borrower crisis? Homeowners saw the value of their homes sharply collapsing in 2008. Overnight, millions of U.S. households have gone underwater on their mortgages as they owed more on their loans than their properties were actually worth.

The same is happening to auto loans in 2024. Some may say this is a very tough time to be a car owner in the United States. About 50 million drivers who bought their vehicles at inflated prices over the past few years are currently upside down on their loans, with many facing high negative equity, which occurs when the price of a car falls a lot faster than the owner can pay off their debt with auto lenders.

At the moment, car prices are facing a much expected correction after reaching a peak during the pandemic, with some models experiencing price declines of up to 60%. According to Bloomberg News, one in four consumers, or roughly 25% of those who financed a new vehicle with a trade-in, were underwater on their loans in the second quarter of 2024 – the highest level since 2020."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Chrysalis"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Chrysalis"

“Oceans of strings and choirs, flutes and keyboards lift us 

out of the trials and tribulations of our daily lives as though 

we were on a ship with gossamer sails, sailing on the moonlight.” 

– Steve Ryals

"A Look to the Heavens"

“In visible light the stars have been removed from this narrow-band image of NGC 281, a star forming region some 10,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. Stars were digitally added back to the resulting starless image though. But instead of using visible light image data, the stars were added with X-ray data (in purple) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared data (in red) from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The merged multiwavelength view reveals a multitude of stars in the region's embedded star cluster IC 1590. The young stars are normally hidden in visible light images by the natal cloud's gas and obscuring dust. Also known to backyard astro-imagers as the Pacman Nebula for its overall appearance in visible light, NGC 281 is about 80 light-years across.”

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

Chet Raymo, “Moments of Being”

“Moments of Being”

by Chet Raymo

“A passage from the "Pensees" of Teilhard de Chardin: "Though the phenomena of the lower world remain the same- the material determinisms, the vicissitudes of chance, the laws of labor, the agitations of men, the footfalls of death- he who dares to believe reaches a sphere of created reality in which things, while retaining their habitual texture, seem to be made out of a different substance. Everything remains the same so far as phenomena are concerned, but at the same time everything become luminous, animated, loving..."

Whatever we think of Teilhard's Christocentric phenomenology, however much we are baffled by his vague and gushy prose, it is clear from his writing that he was a man who was in love with the world and experienced it as luminous, animated, and loving. Certainly, the experience he describes is not restricted to "he who dares to believe," by which Teilhard means a specifically Christian faith, or at least a faith which for him involved an image of the "cosmic Christ." No, I would suggest that the interior experience of the world he describes- as luminous, animated, and loving- is an predisposition of the human condition, part of our evolutionary makeup. It finds expression in religion, certainly, but also in art, music, poetry, scientific discovery, and in even in the quiet contemplation of a single flower or grain of sand.

It is an experience we all consciously or unconsciously seek, with varying degrees of success. For certain people- an artist like Kandinsky or a mystic like Teilhard- the interior rhapsodic state seems more or less permanent. For most of us, its achievement is a struggle against the humdrum and superficial, the "habitual texture" of things.

The challenge is not to abjure the world of immediate sensation, but to experience the world as fully as our present knowledge allows- not just earthworms and nematodes, wind and weather, Sun, Moon and stars, but also the ineffable flow of atoms, the ceaseless dance of the DNA, the whirling of the myriad galaxies, the infinite and the infinitesimal- to see in the mind's eye and feel in the mind's heart the fire and the flow that animates all things. We may not experience the universe as "loving," but we might certainly find it lovable.

"The whole universe is aflame," wrote Teilhard. His vision was partly informed by his science and partly by his religious faith. And partly, surely, because he was born with a particularly acute sensitivity to the ineluctable wholeness of things. Those of us of a less sensitive nature will settle for the occasional moments when the gates of our senses unaccountably fling themselves open to the unspeakable and unspoken mystery of the world."

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"I Remember..."

"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more, the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort, to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires,and expires, too soon, too soon, before life itself."

- Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, English writer

Free Download: Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell To Arms”

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.”

- Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell To Arms”

○

Freely download “A Farewell To Arms”, by Ernest Hemingway, here:

- https://ia801509.us.archive.org/

"No Ways Tired in A Sea of Lies"

"No Ways Tired in A Sea of Lies"

by Chris Floyd

"I think we are living in a world of lies: lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are the children and grandchildren of lies. One of the hardest things to accept is that the reality of our world is buried under so many layers of official deception and well-cultivated public ignorance about our history and our political system. Even if you break through somehow, momentarily, and hold up a fragment of the truth, most people have no context for dealing with it. It's like a bolt from the blue, they can't process the information. And so the sea of lies closes over us again, and again, and again. And yet the reality of our future appears on the horizon, denial be damned, an irresistible tsunami of destruction, changing all our lives forever.

These are the facts, and they can't be altered. But how to respond to this catastrophe? Shall we weep, moan, rend our garments, cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of republics? Shall we cower in the shadows and sing glamorous dirges for the Lost Cause, for vanished glories and broken dreams?

Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads high, laughing fools to scorn, rejecting at every turn the moral authority of murderers and thieves to rule our lives, determine our reality, act in our name? Let's dispense with lamentation - give not a single moment to that emotional indulgence - and get right back to work, more determined than ever to bear down harder, dig deeper and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still glowing beneath the slag-heap of ruin.

Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist - without violence, the weapon of the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary backsliders in thrall to the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing up their ape-lust for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant. Let's fight these pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands on our world and rape it like beasts in a mindless rut. Fight them with the truths we find, exposing their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people they've suckered, perverted and betrayed.

This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how impervious the Machine - that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen, Congressional rubber stamps, psychopathic media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, political money-whores, sex-crazed theocrats, war profiteers, think-tank bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, and woman-haters - might appear at the moment.

I don't know what else we can do, except to keep on telling as much of the truth as we can find, to anyone who will listen: reclaiming reality, fragment by fragment, one person at a time. It's an endless task- maybe a hopeless task- but the alternative is a surrender to the worst elements in our society- and in ourselves. It's worth the fight. Let's take it on. In the words of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to sanity starts now."

- http://chris-floyd.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Port Dover, Ontario, Canada. Thanks for stopping by!

"I'm Only Human..."

And, of course, the universal and inevitable excuse…

“A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably

excuses himself to himself by saying, “I’m only human, after all.”

- Sydney J. Harris

Rag'n'Bone Man, "Human"

I've always wondered...

Everyone says “I'm only human…” compared to what?

The Poet: William Stafford, ”Today”

”Today”

“The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere

a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays

come down. A tomorrow has come. Open

your hands, lift them: morning rings

all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.

Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,

you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

And it is already begun, the chord

that will shiver glass, the song full of time

bending above us. Outside, a sign:

a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,

“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant

has passed through town, widening streets, touching

the ground, shouldering away the stars.”

- William Stafford

"In Three Words..."

 

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard,"

I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"

- Sydney Harris

“Mirror Neurons: Mirrors In Your Brain”

“Mirror Neurons: Mirrors In Your Brain”

by Casey Kazan

“A recent paradigm-shattering discovery in neuroscience shows how our minds share actions, emotions, and experience - what we commonly call "the monkey see, monkey do" experience. When we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing.

Only recently, however, with the discover of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerful sharing of experience is realized within the human brain. In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action. These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the the world's leading experts to predict that 'mirror  neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'.

Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" writes that "Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma has elegantly explored the properties of neurons- the so-called "mirror" neurons, or "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. His research indicates that any given cell in this region will fire when a test monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, picking up, grasping, etc. In addition, it appears that different neurons fire in response to different actions."

The astonishing fact is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action. "With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: imitation learning, intentionality, "mind reading," empathy- even the evolution of language." Ramachandran writes.

"Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."

Mirror neurons may also help explain the emergence of language, a problem that has puzzled scholars since the time of Charles Darwin, he adds. "Is language ability based on a specially purposed language organ that emerged suddenly 'out of the blue,' as suggested by Noam Chomsky and his disciples? Or did language evolve from an earlier, gesture-based protolanguage? No one knows for sure, but a key piece of the puzzle is Rizzolatti's observation that the ventral premotor area may be a homologue of "Broca's area"- a brain center associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language. Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California suggest that mirror neurons may also be involved in miming lip and tongue movements, an ability that may present the crucial missing link between vision and language."

To test his idea, Ramachandran tested four Broca's aphasia patients - individuals with lesions in their Broca's areas. He presented them with the sound of the syllable "da," spliced to a videotape of a person whose lips were actually producing the sound "ba." Normally, people hear the "da" as "ba" - the so-called "McGurk effect" - because vision dominates over hearing. To his surprise, he writes, "we found that the Broca's patients did not experience this illusion; they heard the syllable correctly as 'da.' Even though their lesions were located in the left frontal region of their brains, they had a visual problem- they ignored the lip movements. Our patients also had great difficulty with simple lip reading. This experiment provides a link between Rizzolatti's mirror neurons and the evolution of human language, and thus it calls into question the strictly modular view of language, which is currently popular."

Based on his research, Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: "they will provide a unifying framework and possibly even explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."

- http://www.dailygalaxy.com/

"Know What's Weird?"

"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,

but pretty soon... everything's different."

- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"

"How It Really Is"

George Galloway, "The People of Yemen Are Unvanquishable"; "Honey Badgers"

George Galloway, 7/23/24

"The People of Yemen Are Unvanquishable"

"One of my earliest memories was watching Scottish soldiers murdering 

Yemenis in the Crater district of Aden. We’ve been trying for 

hundreds of years to vanquish them, unsuccessfully."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Times Of India, 7/23/24

"Israel-Yemen War: Houthis To Rain Missiles On 

These Israeli Cities Next, 'Sky Will Melt Like Metal'"

"Houthi rebels has issued a series of chilling warning to Israel, cautioning the warring nation in the Middle East to be ready for more surprises. A politburo member of the Ansarullah movement claimed that Israel had opened 'gates of hell' with its attack on Houthi-controlled Hodeidah port."

Comments here:

https://www.youtube.com/

o

"Honey Badgers"

Full screen recommended.

"Scott Ritter has humorously described the Yemeni Houthis as "the honey badgers of the Middle East, absolutely fearless and relentlessly ferocious." They just simply don't care. They've declared war on Israel while all the other Muslim states except Algeria just talk, and daily send missiles and drones to attack Israel and attack any ships connected to Israel in any way. They totally control the 12 mile wide Bab-el-Mandab ("Gate of Grief") strait connecting the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, which transits 40% of the world's oil. Closing that is having catastrophic consequences on global economies, and the Houthis know it. And so it is..."

"Honey Badger Takes Savagery to a Whole New Level"

"Honey badgers are the Italian mafia of the animal kingdom. No one, and I mean no one, wants to mess with these savages. They literally woke up and chose violence as the daily routine. They are regarded as the most fearless animal in the wild and they back that up every day, all while looking like a ferret on steroids.

Honey badgers woke up and chose violence. They'll combat anything from lions, leopards, hyenas and even cobras and pythons. But how did they become so fearless? How do these compact sized danger-weasels take on the deadliest predators like it was a regular Sunday’s brunch with the girls? These are moments of honey badgers being straight up savages. Let's get into it."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Fake Biden Death Rumors?! US Vulnerable To Nuclear Attack

Canadian Prepper, 7/22/24

"Alert! Fake Biden Death Rumors?! 

US Vulnerable To Nuclear Attack; Poland Builds Nuclear Bunkers"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "Where is Joe Biden? They Kicked Him Out"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, AM 7/23/24

"Where is Joe Biden? They Kicked Him Out"

We have been told for years that Joe Biden is the man and in charge. 

Where is he? He recently stepped down from running for real election. 

Now there’s tons of speculation.

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Bill Bonner, "Appetite for Destruction"

"Appetite for Destruction"

Since Colin Powell lied to the world about Iraq, the US dug such

 a deep hole of debt it can no longer get out. The increase -

$29 trillion - is almost exactly equal to the amount spent on the Empire.

by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "The dots don’t matter. It’s the pattern that counts. Harris? Trump? One, full of bile and bald-faced untruths. The other... empty as a beer can... hollow as a rotten log. They are on different trains, with different dumbbell slogans and different egregious lies... but both are headed to the same destination, a rendezvous with a perverse and unpleasant destiny. And yet, the American people will stand in line - even in the cold and rain of November - and vote for them.

What has happened to us all? Did we suddenly awake, one dark and woebegone morning, and decide to be stupid? Or, is it just part of the pattern? The dots come to think what they need to think when they need to think it. And as an empire ages, its people — both leader and followers — become paranoid delusionals.

How else to explain it? The general level of dumbness is breathtaking. Americans think they can improve their economy by banning imports... cutting taxes and interest rates... and spending money they don’t have on things they don’t really need. Their national debt approaches the critical ‘meltdown’ level... and they just spend more. And neither Republicans nor Democrats even mention it. But it is on foreign affairs - and the relentless drive for confrontation - that the stupidity is most obvious... and most dangerous.

It was surely no coincidence that the day Donald Trump was in the sights of a loopy 20-year-old from Butler, PA, the press delivered a bombshell report, CNN: "Secret Service ramped up security after intel of Iran plot to assassinate Trump." “Secret Service learned of the increased threat from this threat stream,” [an] official told CNN." No evidence was presented. No motive proposed. Instead, the ‘news’ item merely reinforced the idea of a ‘threat stream’... that foreigners are behind it... and that the Iranians (whose annual military spending represents just 4 days of the Pentagon budget) are ‘bad guys’ who need to be kept under control.

Secretary of State Blinken continues to beat the war drum: "Iran is one or two weeks away from reaching capacity of producing fissile material for Nuclear Weapons" he claims. Blinken seems to have taken Colin Powell for his model. Twenty-one years ago, Powell had this to say: "We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he's determined to make more."

In the years since Colin Powell lied to the world about Iraq, the US dug such a deep hole of debt it can no longer get out. The increase - $29 trillion - is almost exactly equal to the amount spent on the empire adventure. Between the two of them - war and debt - the US is stuck. It desperately needs to cut spending to avoid going bust... but you don’t count the pennies when you’re up against an ‘axis of evil!’

Colonel Douglas Macgregor, talking to Tucker Carlson: ‘Over and over, we’ve been told that the Russians are evil... that their army is incompetent... that we’re winning the war. None of it was true.’

Among the most obvious untruths was that Vladimir Putin was a modern-day Hitler intent on conquering Europe. Putin explained the situation many times, urging a negotiated settlement that would guarantee Ukrainian independence and neutrality. American warmongers — notably Victoria Nuland, wife of arch neo-con Robert Kaplan — preferred war, betting on the superior power of NATO forces to defeat Putin. It didn’t work out that way. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died playing Ms. Nuland’s war game... and it now appears that Putin has won anyway.

But nobody in US power circles seems much interested in the history of the Ukraine, its complex ethnic make-up, or the legitimate national interests of the Russians. No learning, no understanding, no historical perspective necessary. They just need fuel for their war machine.

And now, China provides a useful enemy. Foreign policy hack, Mary Kissel explained that China aims to “upend our way of life and to dominate and change our way of life.” They are “committed to destroy(ing) us.”  Really? Is it the Chinese... the Russians... or the Iranians who will destroy us? Or, can we do the job ourselves? Stay tuned... "

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Do Not Be Surprised When This Happens... Expect It!"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/23/24

"Do Not Be Surprised When This Happens... Expect It!"

- https://traderschoice.net

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "One Dollar Grocery Items At Meijer! Stock Up Now!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, AM 7/23/24

"One Dollar Grocery Items At Meijer! Stock Up Now!"

"In today's vlog, we are at Meijer and are noticing many one dollar grocery items! 

 Get your notepad ready as you do not want to miss out on these deals!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "Systems Down, Businesses Only Taking Cash"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/22/24

"Systems Down, Businesses Only Taking Cash; 

Americans Surviving On McDonald's $5 Meal Deal"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Soothing Relaxation, "Beautiful Relaxing Music for Stress Relief"

Full screen recommended.

Soothing Relaxation,

 "Beautiful Relaxing Music for Stress Relief"

"Beautiful relaxing music for stress relief, composed by Peder B. Helland. This instrumental music ("The Hidden Valley") works well as sleep music, ambient study music, meditation music or relaxation music."

Magnificent...

"A Rousing Musical Interlude: Outlaws, “Green Grass And High Tides”

Outlaws, “Green Grass And High Tides”

Turn it up!

"A Look to the Heavens"

"A gorgeous spiral galaxy, M104 is famous for its nearly edge-on profile featuring a broad ring of obscuring dust lanes. Seen in silhouette against an extensive central bulge of stars, the swath of cosmic dust lends a broad brimmed hat-like appearance to the galaxy suggesting a more popular moniker, the Sombrero Galaxy. This sharp optical view of the well-known galaxy made from ground-based image data was processed to preserve details often lost in overwhelming glare of M104's bright central bulge.

Also known as NGC 4594, the Sombrero galaxy can be seen across the spectrum, and is host to a central supermassive black hole. About 50,000 light-years across and 28 million light-years away, M104 is one of the largest galaxies at the southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. Still the colorful spiky foreground stars in this field of view lie well within our own Milky Way galaxy. "

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210514.html