"Humanity is the spirit of the Supreme Being on earth, and that humanity is standing amidst ruins, hiding its nakedness behind tattered rags, shedding tears upon hollow cheeks, and calling for its children with pitiful voice. But the children are busy singing their clan's anthem; they are busy sharpening the swords and cannot hear the cry of their mothers."
- Kahlil Gibran
U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman HM1 Richard Barnett, assigned to the 1st Marine Division, holds an Iraqi child in central Iraq in this March 29, 2003 file photo. Confused front line crossfire ripped apart an Iraqi family after local soldiers appeared to force civilians towards positions held by U.S. Marines.
“My heart broke on its shame and sorrow. I suddenly knew how much crying there was in me, and how little love. I knew, at last, how lonely I was. But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no color or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.”
"The 59-year-old chimpanzee Mama was very ill and stopped taking food and drink at the Royal Burgers Zoo in Arnhem, Netherlands. Professor of Behavioral Biology, Jan van Hoof has known Mama since 1972. In the video he visits to say goodbye to her. Mama is asleep, but is slowly awakened by Jan. When she sees who is visiting, she lights up. She takes the food she has previously refused to eat. In the video, the old friends are enjoying and kidding each other before Jan finally takes one last goodbye. Mama died one week after the visit."
“Far beyond the local group of galaxies lies NGC 3621, some 22 million light-years away. Found in the multi-headed southern constellation Hydra, the winding spiral arms of this gorgeous island universe are loaded with luminous young star clusters and dark dust lanes. Still, for earthbound astronomers NGC 3621 is not just another pretty face-on spiral galaxy. Some of its brighter stars have been used as standard candles to establish important estimates of extragalactic distances and the scale of the Universe.
This beautiful image of NGC 3621 traces the loose spiral arms far from the galaxy's brighter central regions that span some 100,000 light-years. Spiky foreground stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy and even more distant background galaxies are scattered across the colorful skyscape.”
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again.”
"Caliban is talking to Stephano and Trinculo in Shakespeare's “Tempest”, telling them not to be "afeard" of the mysterious place they find themselves, an island seemingly beset with magic, strangeness, ineffable presences. And you and I, and, yes, all of us, find ourselves inexplicably thrown up on this island that is the world, and we too, if we are attentive, hear the strange music, the sounds and sweet airs, that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere
No, I'm not talking about the usual ubiquitous clamor, the roar of internal combustion, the blare of the television, the beeping of mobile phones. I'm not talking about the Limbaughs and the Becks, the televangelists, the blathering politicians, the twitterers and bloggers (including this one). I'm not even talking about the exquisite music of Mozart, the poetry of Wordsworth, the theories of Einstein.
I'm talking about the sounds we hear in utter silence, in moments of repose, in the heart of darkness, when we are a little bit afraid, disoriented, off kilter. A strange music that comes from beyond our knowing, a felt meaning. You've heard it. I've heard it. You'd have to be deaf not to have heard it.
Where we differ is how we describe it. Mostly, we give its source a name. Angels. Fairies. Gods or demons. Yahweh. Allah. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Nixies, E.T.s, shades and shadows. Naiads, dryads, Ariel and Puck. A host of invisible creatures who are, in one way or another, images of ourselves. And, in naming, we are a little less afraid.
And some of us are just content to listen, to take delight. Having woken to the inexplicable mystery of the world- the sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not- we let the music lull us back into a sweet slumber, a kind of dreamless dream, a reverie. Does reverie share a deep root with reverence? I don't know.”
“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” - Roger Waters
“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.” – Dresden James
“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill
"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.
The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.
But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.
SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.
Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”
Postman ended his book by writing: “What afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
– Fight Club
"Distractions. Blaise Pascal wrote about them in his book "Pensées," which is French and means “reflections” and is pronounced “Hamwich” because the French never properly figured out that sounds in words should be connected in some fashion to the letters used.
Pascal was a mathematician, a physicist, and invented the laptop computer, which was initially a plank of wood. In reality, he did some of the foundational work that showed that atmospheric pressure varied with altitude, even has a unit named after him. Pascal was also a philosopher, and thought a whole bunch about Christianity. This was back before the “let’s get a cappuccino and listen to Pastor Dave talk about why God wants lesbian ministers” type of church, and instead when there were debates on how salvation occurred and if free will was a thing.
Pascal wrote: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet, it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.” And, although he’s dead, Pascal was entirely correct. We see it all around us right now.
Distraction is seductive. I remember we were on a family vacation and stopped at a Denny’s® to get breakfast. There was a line, and about 30 people (mainly families) were waiting. As I looked, every eye was focused on a phone – 30 people sitting next to each other, yet distracted by whatever it was that they were looking at. They had escaped reality, and also escaped talking to each other, almost as if they were addicted to the distractions coming to them over their iPhones®.
They did have bills. Their jobs sucked. Their immortal soul was in peril. But that’s difficult to think about, so it’s much easier to look at pretty colors and cat videos for ten seconds before flipping to the next infotainment bite. The distraction was total.
Is it any wonder that coping skills have been drastically impacted in the generation raised on the distraction of phones? Kids can’t cope because they’re never forced to confront themselves until the stakes are high. This creates a group of victims. I hate victims. A lot. They’re whiney and they suck every bit of energy out of the room, like psychic vampires. Oh, wait, I just described "The View." Huh.
Absolutely, there are people who are in situations that are far beyond their control. And, absolutely there are people who don’t deserve what fate has given them. However, when I look at people who have self-control, who have looked fate in the eye and said, “Yeah, so what? I’m still standing here, chump,” I feel admiration.
Neil Postman was a professor and writer, but then he died. Perhaps his best-known work is "Amusing Ourselves to Death," written in 1985. The Mrs. introduced me to it not long after we met, and I knew she was a keeper. In it, Postman talks about the impact of amusement. Amusement is close enough to distraction for our purposes and both Postman and Pascal are dead, so they can’t put up too much of a fight.
Again, Postman wrote about this in 1985, well before the every distraction, every place, all at once monster of the smartphone appeared. In it, Postman identified television as a drug. If so, it’s a gateway drug like aspirin, and the Internet is heroin.
It’s a world where, “Excuse me, I’m talking” becomes a replacement for actual thought and people thinking deeply about issues like old Pascal becomes rarer and rarer. A side effect is that the information we get becomes information we can’t take action on. Want to complain to your congressman? How would you even contact them? How would you get their attention? Hell, getting the attention of an HOA is nearly impossible in some subdivisions. Instead, you’ll complain to your neighbor.
Worse, though, is the impact that’s happening to our youth. The lesson that bad crap is going to happen to them so they need to learn deal with it simply isn’t taught because they just distract themselves away from the Truth they don’t want to consider. It’s not their fault – their brain is optimized to live in villages, and we distract them with the hardest hitting drug in history: the smartphone.
Failure is an option. And failure is a teacher, but when the teacher is fired and replaced with social media? The lesson is muted or ignored. How did Pascal manage to deal with being a religious philosopher, a mathematician, and a physicist? I guess Pascal was good at avoiding distraction and dealing with pressure."
"Man: He’ll go along with just about anything. Given the right circumstances…a little programming…and enough time for it all to marinate in his soft, mammalian brain… there is almost nothing Homo Credulus will not learn to embrace. Don’t believe us?
Take a look at the historical record; you’ll soon wonder how we ever got this far. Sure, you’ll discover gizmos and flying contraptions, art and agriculture, music and mathematics. You’ll witness spectacular scientific breakthroughs, the number “0” and a man’s footprint on the moon. You’ll also find automobiles with so many cup holders, you won’t know where to holster your oversized 7/11 Big Gulp.
But you’ll also scratch your head. Perhaps you’ll even weep. And if you think hard enough, you’ll put a few things to serious question…“Central banks?” “Modern democracy?” “The Ellen DeGeneres Show?” How has mankind survived such atrocities? Self inflicted, no less! And why, moreover, does he rush so earnestly to repeat and replay his worst mistakes? (Ellen has been on air since 2003!) Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dear Reader. After all, repetition is nothing new…
You’ll recall that it was the Greeks who first gave the world democracy – from the Greek, dēmokratía, literally “Rule by ‘People’”. (And yes, it was those very same Greeks who put their own beloved Socrates to death, by a majority vote of 361-140.) Today, democracy is a cherished tenet of “the West.” It is woven into the civic religion, sewn into the social fabric. Men march off eagerly to fight for it, to proselytize it, and to die in forgotten ditches defending it.
At least, that’s what they believe they’re doing. As usual, the poor saps have been duped. Herewith, a little historical context…The phrase “Making the world safe for democracy” was actually a marketing slogan, coined back in the 1910s, as a way to sell “The Great War” to America. Weary from their own disastrous Civil War just a few decades earlier, in which hundreds of thousands of (mostly) young men gave up the ghost, Americans were mostly inward looking at the time. That is to say, they wanted little to do with what they largely saw as a “European affair.”
Polls might have indicated no appetite for battle, but the nation’s politicians were nonetheless starved for military misadventure. They sensed big profits abroad, both in manufacturing armaments and making onerous bank loans to foreign lands. Sure, “the nation” would have to fill tank and trench with warm young bodies, but very few soldiers would carry senatorial surnames along with their rifles. And so, after a public relations campaign of truly epic proportions, America marched off to war, wrapped in the delusion they had freshly been sold.
Eddie Bernays, the man who coined the phrase and, thus, peddled the war to America, made a fortune for his efforts. He was even invited by Woodrow Wilson to attend the Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, as a show of gratitude for his services. There, Bernays learned the full impact of his “democracy” slogan. An obviously bright fellow, the surreal experience caused him to think. If people will line up to kill one another under the influence of a mere marketing campaign they could surely be convinced to do, say and buy just about anything!
Bernays was right. In fact, he wrote a series of books, detailing his insights. They included "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923), "A Public Relations Counsel" (1927) and a neat little number titled "Propaganda" (1928), in which Bernays laid out the blueprint for mass social and psychological manipulation. The collected works went on to become a huge success, and the favorite of none other than Joseph Goebbles, Reich Minister for Propaganda in Nazi Germany between 1933-45.
Bernays himself, writing in his 1965 autobiography, recalls a dinner at home in 1933 where… "Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Wiegand his propaganda library, the best Wiegand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Wiegand, was using my book "Crystallizing Public Opinion" as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. […] Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign."
It is indeed chilling to think of such a heinous undertaking as being engineered, blueprinted, premeditated and carried out according to some kind of script. And yet, there it is, in Bernays’ own words, the “Father of Propaganda.” Having acquired somewhat of a tainted reputation-by-association, propaganda, itself, underwent a “strategic rebranding” after WWII. But make no mistake, the very same métier thrives to this day, under the more socially palatable designation, “Public Relations.” Still, a ruse by any other name…
“Could we be so stupid again?” wonders the gentle reader. “Might the mob still be swayed by what Charles Mackay termed ‘extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds?’” Why, of course! That’s the nature of the mob! Whether in love, finance, politics or any other matter, man is wont to be convinced, assured, persuaded, often against his own best interests. Few are the absurdities in which he will not take refuge, invest his hard-earned capital or squander his morality. All he needs is a good story, something to arrest his imagination and cauterize his capacity for reason. A distraction from his lonely, quotidian existence. That, and a few crumbs to pass his lips.
The Roman poet, Juvenal, recognized as much when he mocked the panem et circenses (bread and circuses) stratagem almost two millennia ago. In his "Satire X", he referred to the Annona (a kind of grain dole) and the famous circus games, held in the Colosseum and elsewhere, as designed to keep the unthinking population fed and happy.
Look around you today, Dear Reader. What do you see, two millennia later, in the Year of Their Lord, 2024 AD? We’ve got reality television and stadium sports matches, food stamp programs and an Everest of transfer payments, we’ve had mask mandates at schools and the whole pretense of safety and security, there’s $35 trillion in national debt and government spending out the wazoo., plus a collapsing workforce, an opioid epidemic (out-killing COVID-19 in < 65s) and Whoopi Goldberg in the sin bin...
And behind it all, the greatest bread and circuses show ever: modern representative democracy. Now, as then, the show goes on!"
"Cause and effect: In California, home of big tech, minimum wage is raised so much, that fast food joints can’t afford to hire low wage workers (primarily teens, in their first job). So, expedited development of robotics capabilities for automated fast food joints happens. Being developed in the same state that has raised minimum wages to $20 an hour. Planned?"
"In an honest money system, people earn money by providing goods and services
often, labor) to others. So, the more they earn, the more ‘things’ they produce."
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "The secret, dear reader, is the money itself. Real money comes from output, not from the feds’ printing presses. As we keep saying, when the money goes, everything goes. So today we wonder why….
Federal debt was 32% of GDP under Jimmy Carter. Now it is 125% of GDP. So what? The total value of the stock market (Wilshire 5000) was about 40% of GDP during the Carter years. Now it is almost 200%. Why not? But it’s not enough just to look at the numbers. The data is meaningless without context. What we are looking for is patterns. And analogies.
If you say, the current market capitalization/ GDP ratio is 191%, the number is meaningless…until you add the context. Then you see a pattern. And you can make an analogy ‘Oh…this is like 1999…or 2021…’ Now you can guess that there may have been things going on back then that are analogous to what is going on now. And at least you can make a plausible forecast about what happens next. You have a pattern.
Here’s another one. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Boy and girl get married. They have more boys and girls.How often has that happened? Billions of times. So, a boy meets a girl today. They fall in love. Will they marry and have children? We don’t know. But we wouldn’t bet against it.
And stocks? For the last 100 years, the typical stock has sold for between 12 and 15 times its company earnings. Why not 30 times? Or only 2 times? And why does Buffett believe the stock market should worth only about 100% of GDP…and not 200%? And total debt? It averaged only about 30% of GDP during the Carter years. Today, it is three times as high. What’s wrong with that?
Natural things have natural limits. Tomika Itooka is the world’s oldest living person. She is only 116 years old. Not 300 years old. And financial indicators, such as debt and market prices, have their limits too. Because they do not exist in a world of numbers alone. They are part of a system, more like a living thing than a theoretical, numerical notation. Ultimately, debt, GDP, and prices - all represent real things. And those real things are weighed out, measured, valued …in money.
To make a long story short, in an honest money system, people earn money by providing goods and services (often, labor) to others. So, the more they earn, the more ‘things’ they produce. Prices tend to be stable. No inflation – neither of consumer prices nor of the stock market. Nor of debt. That’s why price levels in 1913 were not much different from what they were 100 years before.
But wait. People can borrow money in an honest money system too. Can’t they lend too much? Can’t debt still get out of hand? Unlikely. Because borrowed money comes from savings. And savings must be earned before they can be lent out. So, credit represents goods or services that already exist.
In a dishonest system, on the other hand, the feds ‘print’ more money and lend it out at artificially low interest rates. No additional goods or services are added. Then, prices rise with the increase in the money supply. People who own assets get richer as asset prices rise. People who don’t own assets – in the large, ‘working class’ – get poorer as the things they buy become more expensive. And the whole system gets distorted and enfeebled by false money signals.
Want a financial history of the US from a guy standing on one leg? That was it. The US money system was fairly honest. Then, it became progressively more dishonest in three major steps -- the creation of the Fed in 1913, the introduction of fake, credit-based dollars in 1971, and then the Fed’s active manipulation of interest rates, post-1987. And now, the very rich are richer than ever. Debt is approaching $100 trillion. Stocks have never been more expensive. And we await the reckoning. Already, since 1913, the dollar has lost 98% of its value. In the years ahead it will lose the rest. Stay tuned."
“The lies then and now are mind boggling. The people who continue to lap up the lies are beyond reach. The poison unleashed into the population will be with us a long time.”
- Edward Dowd
"How is it that our country turned into some kind of theme park spook ride, a cheesy-looking haunted house of programmed frights, howling holograms, phantoms with their hair on fire, doors slamming open on glimpses of hell, ill-winds and foul odors, climaxing in a tableau vivant of death-in-life never ending?
I’m sure that this will surprise you, but you can choose to be sane. How? You take care of your business conscientiously; you steer in the direction of what is true and away from what is false; you find purpose in your existence by discovering your talents and using them in ways that do not bring harm to other people; you seek the company of kindred spirits...love the one you’re with...work hard so you can rest easy... express your gratitude for being here. That’s a start.
If you prefer being insane, there’s always the current incarnation of the Democratic Party, dedicated to gaslighting the nation into ruin. Of course, at this point - the point of extreme desperation - the Dems are just running interference for the distraught intel-Globalist blob. The blob’s agenda has been thwarted, overwhelmed by runaway debt and drinking too much of its own propaganda Kool-aid. A great deal of that has entailed the commission of crimes, which always implies the possibility of having to pay for them.
Russia is about to roll up on what’s left of Ukraine. Our State Department neocon division thought it was wicked-smart to start a little action there in 2014, to provoke Russia into a ruinous war against NATO (the game: “Let’s You and Him Fight”) in order, theoretically, to wreck Russia and depose Mr. Putin. Didn’t work. Do you know why? I will tell you (it’s really simple): Russia’s leadership is more intelligent than ours, and far less psychopathic. They perceived correctly that we were only wrecking ourselves.
Ten years later, the Ukraine caper draws to a humiliating end for our neocons, and a ruinous end for NATO and the EU. So far this year, it appears that “Joe Biden’s” party has ceased paying attention to Ukraine. The pretty yellow and blue flags have all but disappeared - except in Massachusetts, we noticed, the most highly “educated” and most deeply insane state in the union. I’ll be interested in how Kamala Harris explains our Ukraine war policy in Tuesday’s presidential debate. Defending democracy, I suppose.
The governments of the major EU nations stupidly followed the bidding of America’s psychopathic neocons and now they ‘ll have to answer for it as their people awake to the destruction of the EU nations’ economies. Early elections will be called and globalist stooges will be swept away. The turmoil will rhyme with the chaos of 1848, a year of revolution. NATO, finding itself not just purposeless but toxic to Europe’s well-being, must dissolve as members on the periphery withdraw, some seeking to join the BRICs economic bloc. Germany, France, and the UK get sucked helplessly into a new great depression and social turmoil as they contend with many millions of hostile migrants.
Here in America, you can already hear the fake anguished cry of “Russia, Russia, Russia” echoing out of Merrick Garland’s fake Justice Department. We’re to understand that the Russians are coming for our election - more gaslight - when it’s actually the Democratic party, led surreptitiously by its lawfare cadres, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, et al. Their many courtroom pranks have failed against Mr. Trump. Judge Chutkan was bloviating in the DC federal court this week to generate a little heat on MSNBC, but her case has a wooden stake through its heart and Xs where its eyes used to be.
Up in New York, Judge Juan Merchan pretends to wrassle with whether or not to start Civil War Two by remanding Mr. Trump to Rikers Island on September 18 (I doubt that happens). In the event, though, I believe Mr. Trump might simply say, “No thank you,” and go about his business running for president. That would be a counter-prank I’d be eager to see. Who gets in the act then? Federal marshals? The FBI (ha!)? The Supreme Court term begins the first Monday in October. They could have something to say about the steaming pile of horseshit that was Alvin Bragg’s and Mathew Colangelo’s case. (Also, Weissmann’s, Eisen’s, Monaco’s, and McCord’s.)
Gawd knows where things might stand after next Tuesday’s great debate. The rules are pretty stringent. No candidates questioning each other. No audience. No confab with staff during commercial breaks. The mute buttons will be on. Without her “I’m speaking” routine, Ms. Harris has... zotz. All Mr. Trump really has to do is be polite for 90-minutes.
More than a few people, meanwhile, are beginning to ask who is running the country, since “Joe Biden” is mostly off-duty, beaching it, not attending cabinet meetings, and probably not being consulted on any number of matters being carried out in his name. Are you comforted to know that the US government is on auto-pilot, a colossal, menacing machine run by ghosts?"
"Take a look inside Russia's first-ever weapons shopping mall. The Babylon Mall is a new space in Moscow, with an area of more than 1000 m2. This mall is the first weapons center in Russia. What is sold inside, what can you buy and how simple is it to buy a weapon in Russia?"
"We're diving into a hidden crisis - the Dollar Store Meltdown! With people feeling more broke than ever, even the go-to bargain spots like Dollar Tree are seeing a massive drop in sales. The CFO admits they can't stop this decline, and it's affecting everyone, from cheap shampoo to your favorite toothpaste deals. And yes, they're closing 1,000 stores! Catch all the details and more in today's video."
"The United States is grappling with an unprecedented financial crisis, with up to 50 million Americans defaulting on their debts. This has triggered significant disruption in the nation’s credit system, causing widespread economic instability. Lenders are scrambling to contain the fallout, while consumers are overwhelmed by growing debt. Although the American economy has weathered numerous challenges in recent years, the current credit crisis stands out as the most severe. With more than 50 million people halting payments to creditors, the situation has progressed from early warnings to a full-scale emergency. As consumer debt surges, the impact is becoming painfully clear."
"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."
“Planetary nebula Abell 78 stands out in this colorful telescopic skyscape. In fact the colors of the spiky Milky Way stars depend on their surface temperatures, both cooler (yellowish) and hotter (bluish) than the Sun. But Abell 78 shines by the characteristic emission of ionized atoms in the tenuous shroud of material shrugged off from an intensely hot central star. The atoms are ionized, their electrons stripped away, by the central star's energetic but otherwise invisible ultraviolet light.
The visible blue-green glow of loops and filaments in the nebula's central region corresponds to emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms, surrounded by strong red emission from electrons recombining with hydrogen atoms. Some 5,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Cygnus, Abell 78 is about three light-years across. A planetary nebula like Abell 78 represents a very brief final phase in stellar evolution that our own Sun will experience... in about 5 billion years.”
“How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.”
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