Thursday, July 18, 2024

Bill Bonner, "At the End of Empire"

"At the End of Empire"
The dots act within the patterns of history. They do not know
 where it is headed or choose its direction. But they help it get where it is going.
by Bill Bonner

"Ask Bill who he thinks was behind the assassination attempt on DJT?  Does he think a 20-year-old kid just woke up and decided to kill a former President that day? Let me grab my ladder and Dad's rifle and shoot the former, and likely, new President of the USA? The story is so preposterous..." - A Dear Reader

Poitou, France - "On the surface, the story does seem preposterous. The US has seventeen different secret service-type agencies. On or near the scene in Butler, PA were dozens... hundreds... thousands... of people on the payroll charged with protecting the government and its operatives (including aspiring Commanders-in-Chief). Local cops. State cops. FBI. Homeland Security. ATF agents. Army. Marines. The list goes on and on.

All were armed with the latest robo-cop gear... the latest intel, coming from snoops and spooks all over the country... and the latest crime-busting tactics. How could they fail to stop a callow amateur, shooting from an obvious vantage at the man who must be the most obvious target in the whole world? How could a kid with an aluminum ladder foil a billion dollars’ worth of trained, professional security?

It is so preposterous... it must be true, right? The premise - laid out by the former Chinese ambassador to the US - is that America has changed dramatically from the country we grew up in. What caused the change? Where does it lead? And the botched ‘assassination attempt’ on Donald Trump? How does that fit in?

November 22, 1963: We were fifteen years old when JFK was murdered. That assassin didn’t miss. We recall how the nation mourned... and how everyone remembered where he was when Kennedy’s death was reported. No one joked about it. And no one forgot it.

Mrs. Kennedy, still wearing the blood-stained suit she had worn in Dallas, had stayed with the body until it was brought into the White House. There it lay, for twenty-four hours, guarded by Green Berets. The next day, the casket was laid onto a horse-drawn caisson. Three hundred thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue and a whole teary world watched on television as the procession slowly marched to the Capitol. The crowd fell silent as the caisson went by... followed by a riderless horse, Black Jack. The only sounds were muffled drums and the clank of horses’ steel shoes on the pavement.

In the rotunda of the US Capitol, Jackie Kennedy took her two children in hand to kneel beside the coffin. She had asked for a closed casket; her husband’s head had been shattered. Outside, another quarter of a million people lined up in near freezing temperatures... the line was said to stretch for forty blocks... to say farewell.

One of the last mourners, at 2:30am was former heavyweight boxing champion, Jersey Joe Walcott, who said simply: ‘He was a great man.’ And then, there was the doubt... who really did it, and why? Did the dots know the pattern of which they were a part?

Kennedy had announced his clear intention to pull away from war. Dan Denning comments: "The Kennedy ‘Peace Speech’ was on June 10, 1963. At 11:45 [minutes into the speech] he makes the point you did about no nation suffering more than the Soviets in World War Two. At 19:44 he talks about the ongoing negotiations in Geneva for a 'general and complete disarmament.'

Kennedy had already noted that the CIA was out of control and vowed to break it ‘into a thousand pieces.’ Later, at American University he clearly aimed to follow through on Eisenhower’s warning and prevent the firepower industry from getting control of America’s government.

Did the secret service/CIA/military, industrial complex strike first…conspiring to kill Kennedy? Did they organize it with the Cuban mafia... or did they merely forget to report the threat from Lee Harvey Oswald, whom they had been following for years? Or, did they have no conscious involvement, none at all... maybe it was just one of those coincidences that make history – getting rid of the one the man who might have stopped America’s degeneration into a warfare state?

Was not Lenin shipped to Moscow on a special train provided by the Germans? Was not the young Stalin sent to Siberia... and allowed to escape? Did not Abraham Lincoln go to the theater, even though he might have preferred a quiet evening at home?

The dots act within the patterns of history. They do not know where it is headed or choose its direction. But they help it get where it is going.

In the mainstream media, Trump’s star has risen. He has achieved a kind of folk hero status. He survived a bullet. He survived ridicule and derision. He survived salacious reports about p#$$y grabbing and paying off a porn star to keep quiet. He survived grand juries, as well as state and federal prosecutions. He survived four bankruptcies and three marriages.

Now, he is even more likely than ever to be our next president. By contrast, Joe Biden’s election prospects are dim. Poor Joe’s brain seems to be clouding over day by day... while Trump’s brain, such as it is, is sharp and clear.

Outside of the mainstream, meanwhile, opinions are more nuanced. Some analysts see the US drifting into such lawlessness and violence that a 20-year-old kid shoots a former US president. Others wonder whether the Secret Service really wanted to keep Trump alive. Still more daring is the thought that maybe the powers-that-be set him up. ‘We can’t trust the politicized FBI to handle the probe of the Trump assassination bid,’ writes Jim Bovard in the New York Post. Then, who can we trust? Where are our ‘great men’ today? Tune in tomorrow."
o
Full screen recommended.
"JFK", "A Meeting with X"

Full screen recommended.
"JFK", "Coup d'État"

And the Secret Service?
Full screen recommended.
"JFK Motorcade and Odd Secret Service Behavior"

Adventures With Danno, "Grocery Items That Are Worth Buying At Kroger This Week!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 7/18/24
"Grocery Items That Are Worth 
Buying At Kroger This Week!"
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "What Is About To Happen Is Going To Blow Your Mind On An Epic Scale"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/18/24
"What Is About To Happen Is Going 
To Blow Your Mind On An Epic Scale"
Comments here:
o
Gregory Mannarino, PM 7/18/24
"The Death Of The Dollar Is Coming From Within, 
And It's About To Get Much Worse"
Comments here:

"Scott Ritter on JD Vance, Donald Trump and the Assassination Attempt"

Dialogue Works, 7/18/24
"Scott Ritter on JD Vance, 
Donald Trump and the Assassination Attempt"
Comments here:
o
Related:
o
"Evidence continues to mount that Saturday's attempted assassination of Donald Trump by shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks was allowed to happen, despite ample warning from bystanders, local PD, and even the shooter's parents."
o
o
Full screen recommended.
"That Cow does a Better Job than Cheatle"
o

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

"A Time Of Shame And Sorrow: When It Comes To Political Violence, We All Lose"

"A Time Of Shame And Sorrow:
When It Comes To Political Violence, We All Lose"
by John & Nisha Whitehead

“Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.” - Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)

There’s a subtext to this assassination attempt on former President Trump that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown. More than 50 years after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of political violence in words and deeds.

Magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality, our politically polarizing culture of callousness, cruelty, meanness, ignorance, incivility, hatred, intolerance, indecency and injustice have only served to ratchet up the tension.

Consumed with back-biting, partisan politics, sniping, toxic hate, meanness and materialism, a culture of meanness has come to characterize many aspects of the nation’s governmental and social policies. “Meanness today is a state of mind,” writes professor Nicolaus Mills in his book The Triumph of Meanness, “the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us.”

This casual cruelty is made possible by a growing polarization within the populace that emphasizes what divides us - race, religion, economic status, sexuality, ancestry, politics, etc. - rather than what unites us: we are all Americans, and in a larger, more global sense, we are all human. This is what writer Anna Quindlen refers to as “the politics of exclusion, what might be thought of as the cult of otherness… It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.”

This is more than meanness, however. We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once. This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.

This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans. Beware, because this kind of psychopathology can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “Tyranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.” By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil. It’s not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. It’s the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.

This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.

Hitler wasn’t the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy. Why? Because “we the people” have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.

By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the world—not so different from how Trump is often depicted—historians have given Hitler’s accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass. This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass. Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that,” Martin Luther King Jr. sermonized. The darkness is winning.

It’s not just on the world stage we must worry about the darkness winning. The darkness is winning in our communities. It’s winning in our homes, our neighborhoods, our churches and synagogues, and our government bodies. It’s winning in the hearts of men and women the world over who are embracing hatred over love. It’s winning in every new generation that is being raised to care only for themselves, without any sense of moral or civic duty to stand for freedom.

John F. Kennedy, killed by an assassin’s bullet five years before King would be similarly executed, spoke of a torch that had been “passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage - and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

Once again, a torch is being passed to a new generation, but this torch is setting the world on fire, burning down the foundations put in place by our ancestors, and igniting all of the ugliest sentiments in our hearts. This fire is not liberating; it is destroying. We are teaching our children all the wrong things: we are teaching them to hate, teaching them to worship false idols (materialism, celebrity, technology, politics), teaching them to prize vain pursuits and superficial ideals over kindness, goodness and depth.

We are on the wrong side of the revolution. “If we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution,” advised King, “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.

Freedom demands responsibility. Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans. JFK was killed in 1963 for daring to challenge the Deep State. King was killed in 1968 for daring to challenge the military industrial complex.

Robert F. Kennedy offered these remarks to a polarized nation in the wake of King’s assassination: “In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.” Two months later, RFK was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.

Fifty-plus years later, we’re still being terrorized by assassins’ bullets, but what these madmen are really trying to kill is that dream of a world in which all Americans “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We haven’t dared to dream that dream in such a long time.

But imagine…Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand up - united - for freedom. Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak out - with one voice - against injustice. Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push back - with the full force of our collective numbers - against government corruption and despotism. Tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance."
o
Too late, far, far too late... We are not those people anymore. 
We are not that country anymore. God help us...
But the responsibility and duty to do what we can is still ours...
“God grant me the courage not to give up what I
 think is right, even though I think it is hopeless.”
- Adm. Chester W. Nimitz

Canadian Prepper, "I Told You So! Biden Down; Iran 'Horror' Nuclear Prediction; Cancelled Elections"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 7/17/24
"I Told You So! Biden Down;
Iran 'Horror' Nuclear Prediction; Cancelled Elections"
Comments here:

"Historical 50-80% Housing Crash Started"

Full screen recommended.
Harry Dent, Jr.,  7/15/24
"Historical 50-80% Housing Crash Started"
Comments here:

Adventures With Danno, "10 Products That Are Going Up In Price Right Now!"

Adventures With Danno, PM 7/17/24
"10 Products That Are Going Up In Price Right Now!"
Comments here:

Jeremiah Babe, "Massive Car Repo Crisis Hits Americans As Evictions Soar, We're On The Brink Of Conflict"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/17/24
"Massive Car Repo Crisis Hits Americans As Evictions Soar, 
We're On The Brink Of Conflict"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Memory of the Sky"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "Memory of the Sky"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its more familiar outlines are seen in the brighter central region of the nebula in this impressive wide-angle view. But the composite image combines many short and long exposures to also reveal an extremely faint outer halo. At an estimated distance of 3,000 light-years, the faint outer halo is over 5 light-years across.
Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. More recently, some planetary nebulae are found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years. Visible on the left, some 50 million light-years beyond the watchful planetary nebula, lies spiral galaxy NGC 6552.”

The Poet: Langston Hughes, "Life is Fine "

"Life is Fine"

"I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.
I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.
But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!

I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby,
And thought I would jump down.
I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn't a-been so high
I might've jumped and died.
But it was High up there! It was high!

So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love -
But for livin' I was born.
Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry -
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.

Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!"

- Langston Hughes

"Lift Up Your Eyes"

"Lift Up Your Eyes"
by Paul Rosenberg

"When was the last time you tasted the sublime? When did you last feel wonder? Can you remember feeling awed by something? These are things we need, if we are to thrive. They are fuel for the higher human abilities. If we lack them, as is currently endemic throughout the West, our higher abilities will lag. For lack of better terms we can call these feelings “upward movements of the heart,” and we are diminished when there is a lack of them. Without them we fail to develop our higher capacities and insights. We slide more and more toward becoming, in one critic’s words, “mere trousered apes.”

I am certainly not the first person to notice this. Here, for example, is something Albert Einstein wrote on the subject: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

Here’s a comment from Mozart: "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

And here’s a poem from Richard Feynman:
"Out of the cradle
onto the dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe."

We need these things.

Currents to the Contrary: Sadly, the modern West has become a mad scramble to distract as many sets of eyes as possible, and to keep them – to own them – for as long as possible. And so long as professional distractors own your imagination, you won't experience much in the way of awe.

Think of Google and Facebook; these outfits bring in billions of dollars per month, based almost entirely on how much human attention they can capture. Likewise the many news networks; they get paid according to how many people watch their images for how many minutes. These people are serious about owning your brain cycles; they employ armies of employees to count, gather, plan, and improve their ownership of your eyes. Please understand the content they deliver serves only to grasp your attention.

Certainly websites like Freeman’s Perspective also want your attention but not for its own sake. I want your attention because I think we have something worthwhile to communicate, not to own your brain. Facebook and Google want to own you… the inner you.

Likewise the lords of academia; they want your mind to bear their impress... permanently. Consider, for example, the many academics who espouse cold, rationalist, materialistic philosophies: that we are no more than preprogrammed machines, that words can never really communicate anything, that humanity is ignorant and dangerous. Have you noticed that they reek of “smarter than thou”? Then if you have the opportunity, examine their lives for beautiful acts, for loving passions, for kindness and deep benevolence. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll notice a striking lack of those things.

The Contrasts: Among the greatest of all contrasts to the upward movements of the heart are those pertaining to dominance, status, and rulership. They are natural antagonists.

Think of drinking in the wonders of the universe, the beauty of nature, the glorious love between a good parent and their child… and then contrast those things with the blight of the dominator “protecting” you at the point of a sword… of the politician cultivating your fears like a gardener cultivates a garden… of the lover of status who feels pleasure when seeing you beneath her.

Dominance, status, and rulership are the drives of the people who abuse us. And they are primary causes for our elevated experiences being diminished.

Moving Past the Blockage: We need to get away from these people and beyond these foul concepts. And once we do, life will expand. Here to make that point is a final quote, this one from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: "The loss of awe is the avoidance of insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom…"

The things that contribute to our higher nature have been driven away from the Western world, and often systematically. Humans who are denuded of the higher things are far less trouble to rule, and they are far easier to manipulate… to own without their noticing. But don’t let yourself by driven away from the higher and better things:

Lay under the stars and wonder.
Look into the face of a child and experience his or her awe of the world.
Sit in the wilderness and imagine benevolence and beauty and goodness unchained.
Lie in bed and imagine yourself with a conscious sense of righteousness.
Imagine yourself with no embedded fear.
Ruminate over good things you could do in the future, over beautiful things you’d do in the right circumstances.

Politics poisons this, dominators wish to subdue it, sociopaths cannot experience it. Get as much of it as you can. Go out of your way to cultivate it.”

"Our Task..."

“We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as humans is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. “Tragedy,” D.H. Lawrence said, “ought to be a great kick at misery.” This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick.”
- Albert Camus

"Animals"

"Animals"

"I think I could turn and live with animals, they
are so placid and self contain’d;
I stand and look at them long and long,
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied - not one is demented with
the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that
lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."

- Walt Whitman

"Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old"

"Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, 
Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old"
by John Wilder

"I’ve never written anything before that made me want to go to a hospice and slap a bunch of old dying people, but this particular post led me there. I’ll explain. It’s okay, it’ll all make sense in the end. I’m a trained professional.

I have made many mistakes in my life. Most of them I don’t remember – they were small and didn’t have any consequences, or at least any consequences I’ve seen yet.

Then there were some slightly larger mistakes – let’s call them medium size mistakes. There have been consequences to these. Again, medium-sized mistakes most often lead to medium-sized consequences. A scar here (carve away from your thumb, not towards it), a stock gone to zero there (thanks a lot, Enron®) and one really bad car trade when I was 24... medium-sized. Medium-sized mistakes are big enough for a big sting, but whatever permanent impacts there might be aren’t immediately fatal.

The biggest ones – I won’t give a laundry list of those. Most of those were where either passion, inexperience, a momentary lapse of character or judgement, or (worst of all) when all three contributed to a mistake. Some mistakes lasted longer, some were short. But all stung. The biggest include a marriage that led to divorce, underestimating a sociopathic boss, and wearing that white dress to my little sister’s wedding. I mean, I look fabulous in it, but some brides just have to be the center of attention. Also a bit weird because she wasn’t really my sister.

To put it bluntly, I am the author of almost every problem I have. If I didn’t cause the problem, I’m probably complicit in creating the problem or not dealing with the problem. But I don’t regret it. None of it. Not the victories, certainly, and not the failures. Why?

Life is a one-shot deal. And life is a ratchet. It only turns one way – we can’t take anything back. Regret isn’t a one-shot deal, though. If there’s anything that will burn a hole in your soul, it’s regret. Regret never comes alone – it brings guilt along for the ride.

If I were to dig more deeply into those feelings – regret and guilt are just ways that fear manifests itself. Fear of... what? Regret is a fear that the consequences of your choices or actions will impact you negatively, and cannot be changed. Here is a list of some of the common regrets from people on their deathbed (from a former palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware, and, yes, I spelled that right – blame her parents, not me):

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Even a quick look at this list tells me one simple thing: regret is for losers. I have never seen a whinier pack of self-serving weakness since I last watched a presidential debate. Everything, absolutely everything on this “top five” list is just, well, sad.

Would you like to go to your grave worrying about any of those things? I can’t imagine doing it. I refuse to let regret rule me. And I refuse to let any decision I made twenty years ago rule me. Hell, I refuse to let any decision I made last week rule me, except for choosing that convenience store egg/muffin sandwich – I don’t need to explain why. Deal with the consequences? Certainly. But regret? No.

Let’s go down the “top five” list:

Not living a life “true to yourself”? I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. I was talking with a guy the other day who quit his job because his boss asked him to do something illegal. That’s being true to yourself – he walked away without a paycheck but with his values and beliefs intact. If you’re not being true to yourself, you’re either weak or flighty. The good news? Anyone who reads this blog is neither.

Wishing you hadn’t “worked so hard”? That’s also nonsense. A soul thrives on doing good work that matters. Doing good work excellently is hard. The Mrs. teaches, and works hard at it – I can see from her talking about her students, talking about the ones who learned and improved, the ones who keep coming back to her classroom to report on their lives that her work matters. Working hard at work that matters is what makes us the best humans we can be. If you think you worked too hard, you weren’t doing anything worth doing. The good news? Change now. You have an entire lifetime to fix that mistake.

Didn’t have the “courage to express my feelings”? Wow. This is the weakest on the list, so far. Number one: do you have feelings that matter? Most feelings are stupid – and I have stupid feelings, too. Thankfully, I’m not a five year old – I am at least twelve. I get to examine my feelings and reject those that don’t reflect my values, my virtue, my beliefs. I get to choose. If I feel slighted by something silly or petty? I get to choose to understand what a fool I’m being and ignore that feeling. Again, if you don’t express your feelings, that’s not always a bad thing. Your feelings are often stupid.

I’m sorry that “staying in touch with your friends” was so hard. But it’s really not. The people you care about, that care about you, are there. They always have been, they always will be. I don’t Facebook® much – why? I call my friends, on an actual phone. I text my friends. Am I often the one that calls first? Sure. Do we develop different lives, does life pull us away for a while? Do hundreds or thousands of miles separate us? Maybe. But I make quite a few phone calls. And mostly my friends pick up. Sure, it’s true that the biggest miracle Jesus exhibited in the Bible was having 12, 11 close friends (thanks, Judas) after the age of thirty – but you just need a few – a few that will have your back. A few you can share with.

Seriously – number five on the list is a wish for “letting themselves be happier.” Happy is easy ("All You Will Ever Need To Read About How To Be Happy* (*Most of the Time")), being significant is hard. It requires hard work while being true to yourself. It requires expressing those feelings that your virtue allows to exist. Friends? The good ones will be with you forever, and you can restart your conversations with the slightest hint of time passing, even if you haven’t talked regularly in a decade, if they’re true friends.

I’ve never thought about going to a hospice and slapping someone, but this list made me want to do it. I know, I know, it’s too late for them. And this is the list of people who had regrets. People like me? I don’t have a single regret at this moment of my life. Not one. In a hospice, I hope I’d be the, “Regrets? No. More clam chowder, please,” guy.

To be clear – it’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I’m not blameless. It’s not that I was always right. Not one of those things is true. But I have done the most important thing I can think of: When I do something I regret, I’ve changed myself so that I won’t ("Clintoncide", "John Bolton’s Waifu", and "October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood") do that thing again. I cannot change the past. But if I have learned, if I can help others not make the same mistakes while not repeating my own mistake? Like an algebra teacher for the soul, I have taken something negative and turned it into something positive. The bonus is I get to end the dreams of high school freshmen in the process.

And I’m not planning on having any regrets tomorrow. If you have regrets? Fix them now or recognize them for the dead weight they are and cut them loose. The alternative? Trust me, you don’t want to have me chasing you down in a hospice and slapping you silly."

The Daily "Near You?"

St. James, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Don't Wonder..."

"Don't wonder why people go crazy. Wonder why they don't.
In the face of what we can lose in a day, in an instant,
wonder what the hell it is that makes us hold it together."
- "Grey's Anatomy"

"Wars And Rumors Of War"

Full screen recommended.
Times of India, 7/17/24
"Hezbollah Boss Nasrallah's Chilling Warning To Israel:
 'Palestinians Will Finish Cancerous Tumor'"
"Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah has issued a chilling warning to Israel. He vowed that the Palestinian resistance fighters will remove 'cancerous tumour' Israel. His warning came at a time when Hezbollah hammered Israeli military positions in Kiryat Shmona and Meron with nearly 100 Katyusha rockets."
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Full screen recommended.
Crux, 7/17/24
"Iran Warns Netanyahu Of "Hell With No Return", 
Hezbollah Threatens To Destroy All Israeli Tanks"
"Two drones were launched against a base in Iraq where US-led coalition forces are stationed. A police official said “an attack using two drones” targeted Ain al-Assad base in Anbar province on July 16. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu drew fierce criticism from families of hostages following a report about his remarks at a meeting. Former IDF Major General Amos Gilad  accused the Israeli PM of preventing Hamas military chief Mohd Deif from being harmed in a strike. Hezbollah leader threatened to target Israeli towns that have not yet been subjected to Hezbollah’s attacks if Israel continues to “target civilians”. Iran's interim foreign minister has warned that Lebanon will “definitely be a hell with no return” for Israel, if it dares expand its brutal war. Israeli leader Benny Gantz slammed Netanyahu’s war management and accused Netanyahu of delaying necessary operations in Gaza. Watch the video to find out more."
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Danny Haiphong, 7/17/24
"Pepe Escobar: Russia & NATO On Brink Of All Out War,
And Putin Isn't Bluffing With This Move"
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“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”

“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”
by MN Gordon 

“In 1976, economist Herbert Stein, father of Ben Stein, the economics professor in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, observed that U.S. government debt was on an unsustainable trajectory. He, thus, established Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Stein may have been right in theory. Yet the unsustainable trend of U.S. government debt outlasted his life.  Herbert Stein died in 1999, several decades before the crackup. Those reading this may not be so lucky.

Sometimes the end of the world comes and goes, while some of us are still here. We believe our present episode of debt, deficits, and state sponsored economic destruction, is one of these times.. We’ll have more on this in just a moment. But first, let’s peer back several hundred years. There we find context, edification, and instruction.

In 1696, William Whiston, a protégé of Isaac Newton, wrote a book. It had the grandiose title, “A New Theory of the Earth from its Original to the Consummation of All Things.” In it he proclaimed, among other things, that the global flood of Noah had been caused by a comet. Mr. Whiston took his book very serious. The good people of London took it very serious too. Perhaps it was Whiston’s conviction. Or his great fear of comets. But, for whatever reason, it never occurred to Londoners that he was a Category 5 quack.

Like Neil Ferguson, and his mathematical biology cohorts at Imperial College, London, Whiston’s research filled a void. Much like today’s epidemiological models, the science was bunk. Nonetheless, the results supplied prophecies of the apocalypse to meet a growing demand. It was just a matter of time before Whiston’s research would cause trouble…

Judgement Day: In 1736, William Whiston crunched some data and made some calculations. He projected these calculations out and saw the future. And what he witnessed scared him mad. He barked. He ranted. He foamed at the mouth to anyone who would listen. Pretty soon he’d stirred up his neighbors with a prophecy that the world would be destroyed on October 13th of that year when a comet would collide with the earth.

Jonathan Swift, in his work, “A True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London on a Rumour of the Day of Judgment,” quoted Whiston: “Friends and fellow-citizens, all speculative science is at an end: the period of all things is at hand; on Friday next this world shall be no more. Put not your confidence in me, brethren; for tomorrow morning, five minutes after five, the truth will be evident; in that instant the comet shall appear, of which I have heretofore warned you. As ye have heard, believe. Go hence, and prepare your wives, your families, and friends, for the universal change.”

Clergymen assembled to offer prayers. Churches filled to capacity. Rich and paupers alike feared their judgement. Lawyers worried about their fate. Judges were relieved they were no longer lawyers. Teetotalers got smashed. Drunks got sober. Bankers forgave their debtors. Criminals, to be executed, expressed joy.

The wealthy gave their money to beggars. Beggars gave it back to the wealthy. Several rich and powerful gave large donations to the church; no doubt, reserving first class tickets to heaven. Many ladies confessed to their husbands that one or more of their children were bastards. Husbands married their mistresses. And on and on…

The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, had to officially deny this prediction to ease the public consternation. But it did little good. Crowds gathered at Islington, Hampstead, and the surrounding fields, to witness the destruction of London, which was deemed the “beginning of the end.” Then, just like Whiston said, a comet appeared. Prayers were made. Deathbed confessions were shared. And at the moment of maximum fear, something remarkable happened: the world didn’t end. The comet did not collide with earth. It was merely a near miss.

The experience of Whiston, and his pseudoscience prophecy, shows that predictions of the end of the world come and go while people still remain. Sometimes the fallout of these predictions, and the foolishness they provoke, is limited. Other times the foolishness they provoke leads to catastrophe. Here’s what we mean…

“In the long run we are all dead,” said 20th Century economist and Fabian socialist, John Maynard Keynes. This was Keynes rationale for why governments should borrow from the future to fund economic growth today. Of course, politicians love an academic theory that gives them cover to intervene in the economy. This is especially so when it justifies spending other people’s money to buy votes. Keynesian economics, and in particular, counter-cyclical stimulus, does just that.

U.S. politicians have attempted to borrow and spend the nation to prosperity for the last 80 years. Over the past decade, the Federal Reserve has aggressively printed money to fund Washington’s epic borrowing binge. Fed Chair Jay Powell confirmed that the Fed will pursue policies of dollar destruction to, somehow, print new jobs.

The world as it was once known – where a dollar was as good as gold – has come and gone. Today, in life after the end of that world, we are witnessing the illusion of wealth, erected by four generations of borrowing and spending, crumble before our eyes. Moreover, contrary to Keynes, in the long run we are not all dead. In fact, in the long run we are all very much alive. And we are all living with the compounding consequences of shortsighted economic policies.”
R.E.M., "It's The End Of The World As We Know It 
(And I Feel Fine)"

"How It Really Is"

Dan, I Allegedly, "100% Chance of a Interest Rate Cut"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 7/17/24
"100% Chance of a Interest Rate Cut"
Wow. The economy is not doing well. With what Jerome Powell just said 
there is a 100% chance that we will have a rate cut between now and September.
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "The Fall Of America... Things Just Took A Massive Turn For The Worst!"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/17/24
"The Fall Of America... 
Things Just Took A Massive Turn For The Worst!"
Comments here:

Adventures With Danno, "Strange Prices At Target! Grocery Options & Price Decreases!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 7/17/24
"Strange Prices At Target! 
Grocery Options & Price Decreases!"
Comments here

Bill Bonner, "Manifest Debt"

"American Progress," 1872, by John Gast
"Manifest Debt"
It is unusual, exceptional, when a country becomes vastly more powerful 
than all others. It happens. But then, its own people help it to un-happen.
by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "In the news, the dots come in torrents. But the patterns are unmistakable. It is the way the world works. Down... then up... then down again. From average to excellence... then, like a drop of water headed to the sewer, the exceptional thing is drawn to mediocrity. The molecules, within the water, ask no questions. The caterpillar doesn’t choose to become a butterfly. And people adjust their attitudes and thoughts to play their roles in the great drama. We are parts of the pattern…not masters of it.

A former Chinese ambassador to the US: "America was very different back then compared to now. In the 1980s, America was confident. It identified the Soviet Union as its main rival and boasted about "Star Wars"; it viewed Japan as an economic threat, attacking its financial and manufacturing sectors. By the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, America became the only superpower, proudly promoting the so-called "Washington Consensus" and even declaring the "end of history."

Later, things changed. America instigated several regional wars around the world, orchestrated several "color revolutions," and caused chaos in many places. American-led financial capitalism triggered a global financial crisis. People worldwide, including many Chinese, gradually realized that America's strategic focus is its global hegemony, not the welfare of all humanity, especially people in developing countries. The so-called "Pax Americana" does not necessarily benefit world peace, stability, and development; modernization does not equate to Westernization or Americanization. Their methods cannot navigate us to our goals, and their grand teachings often come with double standards in practice.

In recent years, many unexpected and perplexing events have occurred in America itself. People worldwide, including Americans, are re-evaluating the United States. Now, even Washington no longer believes in the old "Washington Consensus," and the "end of history" theory has itself ended. A few years ago, when I gave a speech at Harvard University, I posed a question: "What happened to the confident America?" No one answered me. In the summer of 2021, when I returned to China, I told Dr. Henry Kissinger and other Americans that the America I saw in 2021 seemed different from the one I arrived in back in 2013. They surprisingly agreed with me, making it feel like an entirely different world."

Americans appear to have lost their swagger. They are eager to ‘make America great again,’ but not by doing what made it great in the first place. Where they were once optimistic, confident and unafraid of the future... now, they see bogeymen everywhere. It is unusual, exceptional, when a country becomes vastly more powerful than all others. It happens. But then, its own people help it to un-happen.

Jefferson sent ships to quiet the Barbary Coast, in the Mediterranean, very early in America’s march to full-fledged empire status. Afterward, the US quickly went back to minding its own business. By the 1880s, the US had the world’s biggest economy; the temptation to hegemony was irresistible. It was our ‘manifest destiny,’ said our early homeland Caesars. And by the 20th century, the Caribbean was a ‘mare nostrum’ for the USA. The Wilson Administration used it to ferry US troops to anywhere the United Fruit Company or the US Department of State wanted to meddle.

Pax Americana: America achieved its truly exceptional status after WWII... and went on to do what no nation before it ever had - gaining ‘full spectrum dominance’ over the whole planet. No sparrow could fall, anywhere on the planet, without setting off alarm bells at the CIA and countdown codes at the Pentagon. America’s warships ruled not just its own two coasts - where they might conceivably block an enemy attack - but coasts and inlets far from home where they had no special interest, no knowledge, nor any purpose.

Today there is apparently no business anywhere that is not America’s business. US fleets patrol the far reaches of the Atlantic and the Pacific... the Gulf of Aden... the coast of the Levant (where they apparently assist Israel in its slaughter of terrorist toddlers)... the Java Sea... the Red Sea... the Indian Ocean. Naive or merely curious readers might wonder what all this surveillance, patrolling, and garrisoning costs. Closely related is the question... where does it lead?

We wrote a book about it (with Addison Wiggin) nearly twenty years ago. In Empire of Debt we suggested that “an empire is a rare thing... nature will tolerate it for a while, but sooner or later the imperial people must revert to becoming a normal race.” How does nature go about ‘un-happening’ an empire? The dot patterns from history are clear enough. It encourages rivals to challenge, invade, and harass... and turns the imperial people themselves into morons. They spend too much... stretch too far... and line up behind incompetents and dumbbells.

Currently, the cost of the empire agenda is about $1.3 trillion per year. Looking back through the whole 21st century, so far, the price of being the Big Man on the Earth’s campus is about equal to the entire national debt. Back in 2000, the US national debt was only $5 trillion. We controlled it. Now, at $35 trillion, it controls us. More to come.

“The Inevitability of Snollygosters”

“The Inevitability of Snollygosters”
by Jeff Thomas

“Snollygoster is an archaic term for, “A fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force monumental talknophical assumnancy.” All right, that’s a rather antiquated definition, but then, “snollygoster” is a very antiquated term. It hasn’t been in use since the mid-1800’s. Another definition is, “A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.”

So, of what interest is this bygone nomenclature to us today? Well, the definitions are exactly in keeping with our present-day politicians. When we look at our senators, parliamentarians, presidents and prime ministers, we see that, even with the passage of considerable time, the term snollygoster is applicable today.

And, we, the constituents, could be referred to as “grumbletonians,” a word common in England in the 1600’s for those who are angry or unhappy with their government. And we’re just as likely to be so exasperated with our political leaders that we resort to a “whipmegmorum” – a Scottish word from the 1700’s for a noisy quarrel about politics.

These ancient and forgotten terms may be entertaining, but they may additionally raise a question in modern minds. We may ask ourselves, “Do you mean that it isn’t just that our present leaders are virtual cartoons – and destructive ones at that? Do you mean that (gulp) it’s always been this way?

’Fraid so. But, how is this possible? How is it that, regardless of the times we’re in, and regardless of whether we have literally hundreds of millions of citizens to choose from (in the larger countries), we end up with literal cartoon characters as leaders? Is it that we’re so bad at making a selection that we always choose the worst person?

Well, actually, there, the answer would be, “No.” Voters don’t actively seek out the worst. The problem is that they’re presented with the worst. In the UK, we can complain about how useless someone was; that she continually dropped the ball and repeatedly acted with foolhardy overconfidence. But, if asked, “Would you rather have had him?” those of us who grumble are likely to respond vehemently in the negative. (We don’t wish to jump from the pan into the fire.)

So, the problem is not that the voters “get the leader they deserve.” The problem is that the game is rigged – that there are no good choices. In a small country, it’s easy to introduce a candidate whom the electorate actually believe in, then to push him forward to victory. But, the larger the country, the more impossible it is for anyone who deserves a leadership position, to actually achieve it. (The system promotes its own kind.) But, this notion presupposes that the majority of people within the political structure are already “contaminated,” that they, too are, for all practical purposes, undesirable. Can this actually be the case?

Again… ‘fraid so… But how is this possible? Well, as long as we’re discussing definitions, there are two more that we might want to investigate. Let’s look at this one: “A long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others’ feelings. People affected by it often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power or success.”

Well, that certainly fits virtually all political leaders and political hopefuls. This definition is used to describe “narcissistic personality disorder.” A fuller description is: “Persistent grandiosity, excessive need for admiration, and a personal disdain for, and lack of empathy for other people;  Arrogance, a sense of superiority; actively seeks to establish abusive power and control over other people; openly disregards the feelings and wishes of others, and expects to be treated as superior, regardless of their actual status or achievements; usually exhibits a fragile ego, an inability to tolerate criticism, and a tendency to belittle others in order to validate their own superiority.” Take a moment and ask yourself whether the above describes a leader near you.

And, here’s another interesting definition: “A pervasive and persistent disregard for morals, social norms, and the rights and feelings of others. Individuals with this personality disorder will typically have no compunction in exploiting others in harmful ways for their own gain or pleasure and frequently manipulate and deceive other people, achieving this through wit and a facade of superficial charm.”

This is a definition for sociopathy, or “antisocial personality disorder.” To expand, sociopaths demonstrate a “Disregard for right and wrong, persistent lying or deceit to exploit others, callous, cynical and disrespectful of others, using charm or wit to manipulate others for personal gain or personal pleasure, arrogance, a sense of superiority and being extremely opinionated… repeatedly violating the rights of others through intimidation and dishonesty, impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead, hostility, significant irritability, agitation… lack of empathy for others and lack of remorse about harming others, unnecessary risk-taking or dangerous behavior with no regard for the safety of self or others… failure to consider the negative consequences of behavior or learn from them.”

Initially, we may be tempted to say to ourselves, “Surely, it’s not as bad as all that.” But, if we really want to get an accurate picture, a useful exercise might be to picture a specific leader whose behavior we’ve witnessed repeatedly and then read the above descriptions once again, whilst picturing his face. The surprising truth is that many political leaders and political hopefuls display these characteristics exactly. Many are clearly narcissists, sociopaths, or both.

But, why should this be? Well, the easy answer is “obsessive behavior.” Those who have the above disorders will literally do anything to achieve superiority over others and will have no remorse or regret whatever. Therefore, it’s perfectly predictable that, over time, any government will become populated by pathological individuals.

This is not a new occurrence. ‘Twas ever thus. The snollygosters have been a chronic dominant presence in governments for millennia. And they’ll continue to be dominant. However, there is a positive takeaway here. If we recognize that this syndrome is in fact the norm, in any age, in any country, we can stop hoping for a hero to arise and save us from the parasitical dominance of governments. We can accept that, if we’re to thrive, this may only be accomplished through our own independence of mind and action, not through the empty promises of pathological leaders.”
https://www.theburningplatform.com/

“The barbarian hopes, and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.“ 
- Hilaire Belloco