"27 Thoughts For Friday"

"27 Thoughts For Friday"

by John Wilder

“I thought so. You remember our business 

partner Marsellus Wallace, don’t you Brett?” 

– "Pulp Fiction"

"I’ve trotted out lists of thoughts from time to time. The lists change based on (hopefully) me getting more wisdom over time. Anyway, here’s this year’s list:

1. Be on time. Seriously, it’s simple. People notice, and people care. It’s a basic principle of respect for someone not to waste their time waiting for me.

2. Never be a little late to work or a little early to leave. Especially on a regular basis. Being late an hour once every quarter is much better than being late a minute each day for sixty work days. An hour looks like something happened. A minute looks like I don’t care.

3. Little changes at the start make big difference in the result. I’ve seen many people start their careers and become experts at the subject of their first assignment. Many of them made a lot of money by knowing a whole lot about a little.

4. Choosing not to decide is a choice. I love reminding people that “doing nothing” is always an option. But it is a choice. And it has just as many consequences as “doing something”.

5. For me, opportunities always showed up when I needed them, even if I didn’t understand it at the time. Thankfully in my case the opportunities weren’t subtle.

6. After college, in a high achieving profession, it becomes rarer and rarer to be the smartest guy in the room, and someone in the room is often an expert at something in which I’m a novice. True humility allows a good leader to understand the capabilities they need, and not have to be “right” all the time.

7. The biggest fights are over the smallest things. It seems that no one ever snaps over the house being on fire on the day the insurance payment was late – it’s that the trash wasn’t taken out on time and we have to hang on to it for another week.

8. People understand $10,000 more than they understand $10,000,000. The difference between $10,000 and $11,000 means more to most people than the difference between $10 million and $10 billion. Most people can’t understand more than seven magnitudes of anything.

9. Outcome is less important than process. When working on life, I try to not care about what the outcome will be. I go in, make the best choices I can, and do the best work that I can. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I try to adjust to be better next time.

10. Outcome is still important. Dead is dead, so sometimes the outcome is final.

11. The last outcome is always final. How many refunds?

12. No refunds.

13. Nothing breeds success like success, and nothing breeds failure like failure. I’ve been on streaks where I literally could not lose. I’ve been on streaks where I couldn’t win.

14. Corollary to 13: I’m never as bad or as good as my failures or successes. The streaks where I couldn’t win set me up with the habits I needed to win.

15. Beating myself up is a loser’s game.

16. Most people don’t think about me very much and will have a hard time remembering my name after five years. As much as I like to think I’m the center of my story (and I am) I’m only a minor player in the stories of most other people.

17. Corollary to 16: Except where I’m their personal villain. Then I live on forever and will definitely have someone who will want to be at my funeral, if nothing more than to make sure I’m dead.

18. Protect the relationships with the people that genuinely do care about me in a positive way so maybe the sad people at my funeral will outnumber the happy ones.

19. Listen to people, really listen. They tell me amazing things if I just listen. One time I was interviewing a guy and he mentioned committing a felony at a previous job. Yeah, I kept a straight face. No, he didn’t get the job.

20. If someone says I’m wrong, I need to have the humility to embrace that and see if they’re right. Especially when my first impulse is to try to defend myself. Even if I’m not wrong, I at least understand why they thought I was wrong.

21. When I’m wrong, admit it and apologize. It’s amazing how admitting error makes other think I’m more trustworthy. And apologies? Why not apologize, have some sort of problem with that?

22. Being good at several things is enough for success, if they’re the right several things. Being an expert at useless things might be fun, but mostly nothin’ times nothin’ is, hmmm, carry the nothin’ . . . nothin’.

23. If I spend my life waiting for the next thing, I’ll spend my entire life waiting and not living. The journey is the point, and rushing through it just gets me to my grave faster.

24. Past behaviors are almost always the key to predicting future behaviors. Leopards, spots, etc. When I listen to a person’s story, I realize that often they’re also telling me their future.

25. Success is based on the last thing I did, not the next. People pay to keep me around because they think I might be able to do it again.

26. Could I have done better? Could I have done worse? Yes. I did how I did. Success is based on how I change what I’m going to do to be better.

27. Power and money are not the same thing. Just ask the rich guys after Robespierre or Lenin took over.

Okay, that’s 3³ thoughts for Friday. See you on Monday!"

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Kansas City, Missouri, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/21/25

"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"It's A Mess..."

Deputy Wendell: "It's a mess, ain't it Sheriff?"

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: "Well, if it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here."

- "No Country For Old Men"

Oh, the mess is here alright...and you ain't seen nothin' yet...

Brace for impact.

Dan, I Allegedly, "We Can't Pay Our Bills"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly 2/21/25

"We Can't Pay Our Bills"

"Saks Fifth Avenue’s shocking collapse is a major wake-up call for high-end retail. In today’s video, I dive into the financial woes of Saks, why they’re struggling to pay vendors, and what this means for the luxury market as a whole. With the economy shifting and consumer habits changing, even major retailers like Saks are facing the fallout. From outrageous price tags on scarves and sport coats to the sudden announcement of delayed payments, it’s clear that high-end brands are feeling the pressure. Trust me, this story is one you don’t want to miss. We also touch on how other luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Burberry are navigating these tough times, plus the broader implications for retailers and businesses everywhere. Whether you’re in the market for a $1,900 pair of socks or just curious about what’s happening in retail, this video has something for you."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

ThisisJohnWilliams, 2/21/25

"It's Started: 

American's Enter The Greatest Debt Default in History"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Shocking Prices At Kroger"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 2/21/25

"Shocking Prices At Kroger"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Travelling With Russell, 2/21/25

"I Went to Russia's Newest Shopping Mall: 

Botanica Moscow"

"Join me on a tour of the newest shopping mall in Russia, Botanica Shopping Center, located in Moscow. It opened its doors in February 2025 under extreme sanctions in Russia."

Comments here:

 - https://www.youtube.com/

"Our Natural Predators"

Samson slaying the lion.

"Our Natural Predators"

by Paul Rosenberg

"Nearly every creature upon this planet has one or more natural predators: creatures that prey upon them. Humans are a striking exception; even though we’re bereft of natural weapons – claws, ripping teeth and so on – we easily protect ourselves from even large predators. There are the occasional “bear in the woods” stories, but those come when we leave our constructed environments.

The reason we’re so able to keep ourselves safe is simply that we can think. Humans have, since long before recorded history, figured out how to master wild animals. And so we have no natural predators… or at least none of the usual type.

Our Predators Are Intellectual Predators: In case anyone is pounding a desk, screaming “war,” don’t worry, I’ll get to that in a minute. Humans are not destroyed by claws and teeth, they are destroyed by ideas. In fact, they are highly vulnerable to ideas. In particular they are suckers for authority, for idols and for promises of free stuff.

We see these vulnerabilities from one end of human history to another. Here’s just a brief explanation:Authority: A large number of humans will obey a well-presented authority without critique. The doctor in a white lab coat, the politician wearing a fine suit and podium, the monarch with a crown and a retinue… people turn off their minds when confronted with them and simply comply. The fact that so many order-givers play up their authority proves the point: they wouldn’t take pains to create such images if they didn’t work. 

People will also reflexively defend authority, if for no other reason than they’ve already obeyed it and they don’t want to look stupid.Idols: Humans find psychological comfort in holding to a great and powerful entity. It makes them feel safe. If you frighten people, then supply them with a powerful figure (Mussolini makes a nice example) and they’ll line right up. It’s no accident that the communists made giant images of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the others: It works. Free stuff: From the plunder of enemies to robbing the rich to technical incarnations of the same principle, humans are easy marks for this scam. We’ve all watched it in action, and so I won’t elaborate further.

Okay, Now I’ll Do War: War begins with the people. Genghis Khan didn’t make his own arrows, after all. No warlord is solely blamable for his slaughters. Warfare rests upon the complicity of normal people. Those people must be manipulated, in one way or another, to supply the materials and bodies required for war. (Crime can be an individual venture, of course.)

No war-seller, so far as I know, has clarified this better than Nazi boss Hermann Göring. Note from this passage that he and his Nazi brethren didn’t use bullets and swords to make people service their war machine, they used ideas:

"Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

And Göring was right that it’s the same in any country: Our entire species is vulnerable to this type of predation.

The Way Forward: Our first step forward, as the AA people rightly say, is to admit we have a problem. And we do have a problem. It’s fixable, but so long as we refuse to acknowledge it, it will remain.

We’ve already covered the basic vulnerabilities above, but our habit of chaining one thought to another, as if each were purely and unquestionably correct, is another major issue. Author Ben Hecht explained this very well, when he commented upon people who were, “unable to think, except in homage to other thoughts.”

Hecht was right, and stacking one concept upon another, and then on another, leads easily into gross errors, unless each of those thoughts are perfect, complete and ideally expressed… which they never are. Still, stacking thoughts up in this way (ever deviating from precision) yields the comfort and confidence – and the justification – of having thought.

The bottom line here is that our predators use words and emotions to make us do their will. They are, in illustrative terms, vampires, sucking our will from us. They convince us, through emotional pressures and devious logic – by using our vulnerabilities – that it’s right for them to collect our sacrifices, that failure to obey them will bring us shame, that comfort and safety require our immediate obedience, and that being restricted is the only way to be safe. All of that is predation.

Again, if we are to stop being abused, the first step is to realize… to accept… that we have a problem. We must recognize that we have vulnerabilities; then we must forgive ourselves for them. After that it’s straightforward and not terribly hard." For more, see "The Twilight of Authority."

- freemansperspective.com

"How It Really Is"

 

"Why The House GOP's Budget Resolution Hides A $4.4 Trillion Deficit Fraud" (Excerpt)

"Why The House GOP's Budget Resolution 

Hides A $4.4 Trillion Deficit Fraud"

by David Stockman

Excerpt: "What in the hell are these GOP fiscal frauds thinking? The whole point of the 1974 budget act and its mechanism of budget resolutions and reconciliation instructions was to enable elected politician to curb their propensity to spend and borrow, and to thereby put an effective lid on the public debt. A half century latter, however, the House Republicans are making a sheer mockery of the act with a resolution which actually instructs four leading House Committees to do the opposite. That is, to RAISE the deficit by $6 trillion over the next decade!

You can’t make this up! Here are the GOP’s budget resolution "instructions" for massive amounts of more red ink. House GOP’s Deficit Increase Instructions–Next 10 Years:

• Ways and Means Committee for tax cuts: +$4,500 billion.

• Judiciary Committee for crime and border control: +$110 billion.

• Armed Services Committee for Pentagon increases: +$100 billion.

• Homeland Security Committee for border control: +$90 billion.

• Implied higher interest expense: +$1,200 billion.

• Total Deficit Increase: +$6.0 Trillion.

We will get to the largely phony spending cuts and "economic growth" offsets in a moment, but the larger point here is the grotesque insanity of ordering $6 trillion more of red ink, which would come on top of the $22 trillion of cumulative deficits already built into the baseline for the next decade.

That is, even before counting the new flood of red ink depicted above, today’s $36 trillion public debt would be nearly $60 trillion by the end of the current 10-year budget window; and by the lights of CBO’s rosy scenario, which says the US economy will be recession-free, inflation-free, interest rate flare up-free, energy crisis-free and otherwise performance perfect for the next 25 years, the public debt would hit a staggering $150 trillion by mid-century.

In other words, we are not dealing with a tad too much borrowing or chronically lax fiscal discipline. What is built-in now is a veritable fiscal doom-loop under which soaring debt fuels an eruption of annual interest expense, which, in turn, drives the public debt and interest expense higher still.

During FY 2026, in fact, Federal interest expense will exceed $1.0 trillion and absorb 18 cents from every dollar of Federal revenue. But that interest expense ratio will hit 22 cents per dollar of revenue by 2035 and nearly 40 cents per revenue dollar by 2052.

Of course, the chart below will never happen this smoothly in the real world. Once it is clear to the bond markets that the Fed can no longer monetize massive gobs of US Treasury paper without re-accelerating inflation, bond yields will lurch skyward, far above the 3.4% average yield embedded in the chart below.

In turn, even another 250 basis points of average treasury yield (i.e. to 5.9%) would nearly double debt service to $3.3 trillion per year or to 41 cents on the dollar of revenue by 2035. And thereafter financial catastrophe would be virtually guaranteed.

What this means, of course, is that any political party with even a modicum of fiscal responsibility would write a budget resolution that unequivocally and sharply reduces these baseline deficits for each and every year during the 10-year budget window ahead, and do so through sweeping spending cuts and minimally disruptive revenue gains.

For crying out loud. In light of the debt service chart below alone, the very idea of mandating jurisdictional committees to add even one dime to the baseline deficits, to say nothing of $6 trillion, is a sign of the degree to which the House GOP has degenerated into rank foolishness and cowardice."

Full article is here:

- https://internationalman.com/

As the Mogambo Guru said, "We're so freakin' doomed!"

And we are, oh yes we are...

Greg Hunter, "Uncovering Massive Fraud & Treason Leads to Upheaval"

"Uncovering Massive Fraud & Treason Leads to Upheaval"

by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Renowned radio host, filmmaker, book author and archeological dig expert Steve Quayle continues to warn about tough times coming to America. DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is going to uncover massive fraud and treason in America. How much fraud does Quayle say they will find? Quayle says, “They are going to come close to $20 trillion to $25 trillion that’s what they can find immediately. This is just the beginning. I think it will go to $36 trillion. It’s going to $36 trillion, and it’s going to freak out everybody. You are seeing all the crybabies and the woke folk already complaining. Maxine Waters is on record as saying, ‘We don’t know what all they have on us.’ That is a pretty powerful statement. There are a lot of people flipping out over the IRS audits. The reason these people are flipping out is that some of them have become millionaires on $250,000 a year salary. AOC and others are panicked because they can’t account for how they made this money. It is interesting how many Demo-rats and Republican zombies are absolutely terrified. Those on the left and some on the right are going to lose their minds. Can you imagine getting a jeopardy assessment, and you only claimed $1 million and you made $5 million?”

Quayle says the crime and theft of taxpayer dollars is the worst in history. Quayle says, “The theft on this level and stealing of taxpayers’ funds are off the chart. All of the pirates in history nobody can match the level of theft that has happened. This is premeditated fraud. I think this is going to be the biggest upheaval in history. This will absolutely shake the foundation of the nation. This is why the weasels are complaining about Elon Musk.”

Quayle predicts, “Civil war, civil war, civil war, they want it. Every communist takeover and takedown of nations, they need armed revolution.”

Another problem is the drug cartels that the US State Department recently declared terrorist organizations. Look for US military conflict coming on the southern border. Quayle, who has excellent military sources, says, “The cartels are more well-armed than we even know. We don’t even have enough ammo for our aircraft carriers to have full missile tubes. We gave them to Zelensky (Ukraine). I believe that there were deals made in the background, that will come out, that will show our highest officers, starting with the President (Biden) and on down, were traitors. We are going into an armed conflict with the cartels. The US military has been stripped of its offensive weaponry and defensive weaponry. Biden did his best to destroy the country no matter who the puppet masters were. It’s important that people get a handle on this. We were sold out.” Quayle says, “Expect the US to be at war with the Mexican drug cartels in 2025.”

Quayle also likes gold and said, “It can easily go to $10,000 per ounce, and it might go to $100,000 per ounce.” Quayle points out that there are 150 paper contracts for every ounce of physical gold. When the supply far exceeds demand, Quayle says, “Look for a lot of people with paper gold to end up with nothing.” Quayle hates digital currency and says it is the fastest way to lose our freedom."

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes one-on-one with Steve Quayle, who talks about how exposing massive fraud and treason will lead to upheaval coming to America.

- https://rumble.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Funny Money"

"Funny Money"

by Jim Kunstler

“The revelations that are coming for America possess the potential to 

reshape our entire notion of the relationship between citizen and state.” 

- El Gato Malo on Substack

"You’ve got to wonder how the Party of Chaos thought they would get away with the Stacey Abrams grift-of-grifts. In case you forgot, Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia twice, lost, and claimed she was “real governor” for years after. In the meantime, she parlayed her celebrity persona to a $3.17-million net worth by 2022, doing nothing but running for office. She claimed it derived from giving speeches, publishing romance novels, and “wise investments.”

That was then, and this is now. Stacey popped up again this week in what looks like a textbook case of political scamming, uncovered by The DOGE team of forensic financial investigators. As “Joe Biden” racked up Democratic presidential primary wins in 2024, the shadowy claque behind him allocated $27-billion to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from the huge Inflation Reduction Act, ostensibly for “climate change action.” The money was stashed at Citibank, where it became a hidden slush-fund to keep payoffs flowing to party favorites no matter who won the 2024 election. An EPA “special advisor on climate action,” one Brent Efron, told a Project Veritas investigative reporter that “President Biden” was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic”.

The key to understanding how the Democratic Party works is how it uses federal grants to redistribute taxpayer money into jobs programs for its rank-and-file. As seen in the recent USAID scandal, the action revolves around the creation of countless NGOs (non-governmental orgs). They are easily created, poorly supervised, and assembled into large networks of self-serving, inter-dependent organisms whose main mission is paying staffers — and secondarily pretending to do good works, as suggested by a given group’s name is. These staffers make up the matrix of Democratic Party activists, well-paid foot-soldiers in do-nothing jobs who can be called upon to cheer-lead for the party, organize street protests and, most critically, harvest ballots when the time comes.

Stacey Abrams became a kind of field marshal for setting up NGOs around her campaigns for office and then later turned them into money laundromats for the trillions of dollars fire-hosed out of the US Treasury during the Covid-19-darkened “Biden” years. Here are some of Stacy’s NGOs:

· The New Georgia Project and its affiliated NGP Action Fund — set up for her 2018 run for governor. It was eventually fined $300,000 for failing to disclose millions in contributions, failing to register properly, and sixteen violations of campaign laws. Its main purpose was providing jobs for an army of activists. One question that might have been asked: how many of Stacey Abrams’ books were purchased by The New Georgia Project, juicing her royalties?

· The Southern Economic Advancement Project, founded in 2019 to “promote equity” in twelve southern states, paid Stacey a $700,000 annual salary.

· The Fair Fight Action group raised nearly $62 million in dark pool donations by 2022, with 96-percent from 252 large, unidentified donors.

· The Fair Count Project was created to lobby for counting illegal aliens in the 2020 US Census, in order to pad state congressional districts.

· The Third Sector Development group, created as an “incubator” for other groups (including the New Georgia Project).

· The Fair Fight 2020 group, created to “train voter protection teams” in twenty “battleground states.” That is, ballot harvesting.

Out of the $27-billion from “Joe Biden’s” Inflation Reduction Act sent to EPA in 2024, $2-billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) ended up in the Stacey-associated Rewiring America org and its offshoot the Power Forward Communities org. Stacey was listed as “senior counsel” to Rewiring America, which also happened to “partner” with her prior NGOs Fair Count and Southern Economic Advancement Project.

What you might surmise from all this is that “Joe Biden’s” green energy agenda was used as a green smokescreen for a giant patronage racketeering operation. The billions allocated would go ostensibly to innumerable corporations set up to carry-out “green” good deeds, most of which would never actually happen, but would, along the way, pad thousands upon thousands of bank accounts for favored contractors.

Stacey’s Power Forward Communities NGO was incorporated in the state of Delaware where loose corporate governance requires such orgs to pay out only five percent of the org’s funds to its stated mission recipients each year. The rest of the $2-billion not allocated to staff salaries can be socked away in safe investments garnering, say, $50-million-a-year in returns, which can be rolled back into the org and used for spinning out new NGOs with more paid staff positions. . .grift upon grift. . . .

That is what patronage is, and that, by the way, is how it became such an urgent national issue over a hundred years ago when it was openly known as the “spoils system” in electoral politics - to the victor go the spoils -  which was resolved by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Alas, in our time patronage (that is, corruption) has reinvented itself as the blob, the runaway system that almost sank the country.

Do you see how all this works now? The ever-expanding matrix of NGOs creates an army of useful idiots working hand-in-hand with an ever-expanding rogue bureaucracy that has become effectively a fourth branch of government accountable to nobody. This is how your tax dollars disappear down a rat-hole and why the US government is insolvent.

The difference now is that the Democratic Party no longer has its hands on the levers of power. Different managers are in place at the critical agencies, most particularly Pam Bondi at DOJ, Kash Patel at the FBI, Russell Vought at OMB, Lee Zeldin at EPA, and Elon Musk in the DOGE. In the past, nothing was done about these shenanigans. This time is different. The Democratic Party will lose its principal means for staying alive. That’s why senators like Chuck Schumer, Chris Coons, and Adam Schiff are out mewling and hollering in the streets. Meanwhile, the blob is getting methodically disassembled, one bureaucratic office at a time. Before much longer we are going to be a different country, and most probably a better one."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

Travelling With Russell, "I Went to Russia's Largest Food Expo: PRODEXPO 2025"

Full screen recommended.

Travelling With Russell, 2/20/25

"I Went to Russia's Largest Food Expo: PRODEXPO 2025"

"Prodexpo 2025 is the largest international show of food and drinks in Russia and Eastern Europe. It brings together more than 2,100 companies to showcase food and drinks. ProdExpo is Russia’s largest showcase of alcoholic beverages and wines from over 40 countries."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Canadian Prepper, "NATO'S Secret WW3 Plan! Putin Angry!"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 2/20/25

"NATO'S Secret WW3 Plan! Putin Angry!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "We Are Not Going Back, Politicians Have Bankrupted America"

Jeremiah Babe, 2/20/25

"We Are Not Going Back, 

Politicians Have Bankrupted America"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gerald Celente, "Market Crash, Gold Boom Coming"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 2/20/25

"Market Crash, Gold Boom Coming"

"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/watch?v=dHEHcOfBjkQ

Musical Interlude: Prelude, "After the Goldrush"

Prelude, "After the Goldrush" (Studio version)

Prelude, "After the Goldrush" (Live version)

Prelude comprise Irene Hume, Brian Hume, Ian Vardy.

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Why isn't this ant a big sphere? Planetary nebula Mz3 is being cast off by a star similar to our Sun that is, surely, round. Why then would the gas that is streaming away create an ant-shaped nebula that is distinctly not round?

Clues might include the high 1000-kilometer per second speed of the expelled gas, the light-year long length of the structure, and the magnetism of the star visible above at the nebula's center. One possible answer is that Mz3 is hiding a second, dimmer star that orbits close in to the bright star. A competing hypothesis holds that the central star's own spin and magnetic field are channeling the gas. Since the central star appears to be so similar to our own Sun, astronomers hope that increased understanding of the history of this giant space ant can provide useful insight into the likely future of our own Sun and Earth.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150426.html

"Too Often..."

"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, 

a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, 

all of which have the potential to turn a life around."

- Leo Buscaglia

"How Could You? A Dog's Story"

"How Could You? A Dog's Story"

by Jim Willis

"When I was a puppy I entertained you with my antics and made you laugh. You called me your child and despite a number of chewed shoes and a couple of murdered throw pillows, I became your best friend. Whenever I was "bad," you'd shake your finger at me and ask "How could you?" - but then you'd relent and roll me over for a bellyrub.

My housetraining took a little longer than expected, because you were terribly busy, but we worked on that together. I remember those nights of nuzzling you in bed, listening to your confidences and secret dreams, and I believed that life could not be any more perfect. We went for long walks and runs in the park, car rides, stops for ice cream (I only got the cone because "ice cream is bad for dogs," you said), and I took long naps in the sun waiting for you to come home at the end of the day.

Gradually, you began spending more time at work and on your career, and more time searching for a human mate. I waited for you patiently, comforted you through heartbreaks and disappointments, never chided you about bad decisions, and romped with glee at your homecomings, and when you fell in love.

She, now your wife, is not a "dog person" - still I welcomed her into our home, tried to show her affection, and obeyed her. I was happy because you were happy. Then the human babies came along and I shared your excitement. I was fascinated by their pinkness, how they smelled, and I wanted to mother them, too. Only she and you worried that I might hurt them, and I spent most of my time banished to another room, or to a dog crate. Oh, how I wanted to love them, but I became a "prisoner of love."

As they began to grow, I became their friend. They clung to my fur and pulled themselves up on wobbly legs, poked fingers in my eyes, investigated my ears and gave me kisses on my nose. I loved everything about them, especially their touch - because your touch was now so infrequent - and I would have defended them with my life if need be. I would sneak into their beds and listen to their worries and secret dreams. Together we waited for the sound of your car in the driveway. There had been a time, when others asked you if you had a dog, that you produced a photo of me from your wallet and told them stories about me. These past few years, you just answered "yes" and changed the subject. I had gone from being your dog to "just a dog," and you resented every expenditure on my behalf.

Now you have a new career opportunity in another city and you and they will be moving to an apartment that does not allow pets. You've made the right decision for your "family," but there was a time when I was your only family.

I was excited about the car ride until we arrived at the animal shelter. It smelled of dogs and cats, of fear, of hopelessness. You filled out the paperwork and said "I know you will find a good home for her." They shrugged and gave you a pained look. They understand the realities facing a middle-aged dog or cat, even one with "papers."

You had to pry your son's fingers loose from my collar as he screamed "No, Daddy! Please don't let them take my dog!" And I worried for him and what lessons you had just taught him about friendship and loyalty, about love and responsibility, and about respect for all life. You gave me a goodbye pat on the head, avoided my eyes, and politely refused to take my collar and leash with you. You had a deadline to meet and now I have one, too.

After you left, the two nice ladies said you probably knew about your upcoming move months ago and made no attempt to find me another good home. They shook their heads and asked "How could you?"

They are as attentive to us here in the shelter as their busy schedules allow. They feed us, of course, but I lost my appetite days ago. At first, whenever anyone passed my pen, I rushed to the front, hoping it was you - that you had changed your mind - that this was all a bad dream... or I hoped it would at least be someone who cared, anyone who might save me. When I realized I could not compete with the frolicking for attention of happy puppies, oblivious to their own fate, I retreated to a far corner and waited.

I heard her footsteps as she came for me at the end of the day and I padded along the aisle after her to a separate room. A blissfully quiet room. She placed me on the table, rubbed my ears and told me not to worry. My heart pounded in anticipation of what was to come, but there was also a sense of relief. The prisoner of love had run out of days. As is my nature, I was more concerned about her. The burden which she bears weighs heavily on her and I know that, the same way I knew your every mood.

She gently placed a tourniquet around my foreleg as a tear ran down her cheek. I licked her hand in the same way I used to comfort you so many years ago. She expertly slid the hypodermic needle into my vein. As I felt the sting and the cool liquid coursing through my body, I lay down sleepily, looked into her kind eyes and murmured "How could you?"

Perhaps because she understood my dogspeak, she said "I'm so sorry." She hugged me and hurriedly explained it was her job to make sure I went to a better place, where I wouldn't be ignored or abused or abandoned, or have to fend for myself - a place of love and light so very different from this earthly place. With my last bit of energy, I tried to convey to her with a thump of my tail that my "How could you?" was not meant for her. It was you, My Beloved Master, I was thinking of. I will think of you and wait for you forever. May everyone in your life continue to show you so much loyalty."

- http://www.crean.com/jimwillis/

○

"If there are no dogs in Heaven,

then when I die I want to go where they went."

- Will Rogers

The Poet: David Whyte, "A Stranger's Love"

David Whyte, "A Stranger's Love"

David recites his poem ‘Refuge’ and reflects on finding shelter, meeting

 the stranger in another, Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Postscript’, 

allowing transformation to happen, and vulnerability.

Learn more at www.davidwhyte.com

"Refuge"

"Sometimes a nook, a wall half down,

a swerve in the path where the breeze

can’t catch you; other times a made shelter,

a shepherd’s build up of flat stones curved

to keep the wind off. Once, at the top of the pass,

it was a cave in the mountain rock taking you in

from the swirl and eddy of snow and the killing cold

so you could live to the grey blank dawn.

Then in Galicia, it was a breath of warmth

from a kitchen door, palatial with light

and a daughter’s smile, the family behind,

asking you in, as if to say, of all shelter,

traveler, you’ll ever find on the road,

even with those you know,

the stranger’s love is best of all."

- David Whyte

- https://welcomingsoul.com/

"Maddest Of All..."

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams - this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness - and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!"

- Miguel de Cervantes, "Man of La Mancha"

The Daily "Near You?"

Brainerd, Minnesota, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"They Don't Always Do That..."

"When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once. They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford. They are saying, less obviously, that their present wants are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty. But in making that bargain they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they’ll figure it out. They don’t always do that.” 

– Michael Lewis, “Boomerang”

“Rescreening Dr. Strangelove”

“Rescreening Dr. Strangelove”
By Hugh Iglarsh

"A friend of mine saw Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” when it first opened in Paris in 1964. He and his American army friends were rolling on the floor throughout. The French audience, however, sat in stony silence. It wasn’t a comedy to them; it was a documentary. What is it now? In general, Hollywood is America dreaming – but Strangelove is something different, a “nightmare comedy,” in Kubrick’s words. It is prophecy disguised as farce – the finest dramatic analysis we have of the paradoxes of deterrence, that strange world of interpenetrated enmity and overriding common interest. What follows is a look at Kubrick’s masterpiece as satire, history and cultural critique.

Watching the film today, one realizes that Kubrick was exaggerating only the details and personality quirks, not the fundamentals. Peter George’s somber novel "Red Alert", upon which the film is based, evolved into a comic script of its own deeper nature, almost without intervention. As Kubrick said, “The most realistic things are the funniest.” In the Strangelove universe, the serious constantly morphs into the humorous, which then reveals itself as deadly serious.

Historian Margot Henriksen, author of "Dr. Strangelove’s America," describes the movie as a kind of expose – a frontal assault on “the cherished seriousness and rationality of America’s nuclear ethos and establishment Strangelove showed the previously disguised cold war reality for what it was: immoral, insane, deadly – and ridiculous. Distinguished critic Lewis Mumford defended the film’s blackly humorous take on nuclear holocaust as an example of deadpan Swiftian wit: “It is not this film that is sick: What is sick is our supposedly moral, democratic country which allowed this policy to be formulated and implemented without even the pretense of public debate.”

Strangelove’s literary antecedents go back even further, to the Old Comedy of Aristophanes – the comedy of Periclean Athens, which was ribald and irreverent and deeply political. It’s a theater of living, participatory democracy, of a citizenry involved in every matter of state. Also, it’s a comedy grounded in the body and nature, as for instance in Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens bring the bloody and stupid Peloponnesian War to an end through a brilliantly organized sex strike, or in other plays, where the chorus of frogs or wasps or birds comments on human affairs from an ironic inter-species distance. The film’s insistent “strange love” sexual subtext places it firmly in the Aristophanic tradition.

The characters in Strangelove embody social hierarchies; they are flattened, if highly compelling, and command a very different kind of response than does the typical Hollywood character – a critical reaction, rather than an emotional identification. It is similar to what Bertolt Brecht describes as the alienation effect, forcing the viewer to see characters in terms of what they represent, coloring the subjective perception of objective reality, and creating the psychological conditions for both detachment and enlightened re-engagement.

Historically, 1963 was a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and a couple of years after the Berlin Wall crisis. It was the last moment that some Pentagon brass and nuclear strategists believed that the USA would have a significantly superior strategic position vis-à-vis the Soviets, allowing the possibility of a first strike. President Kennedy was surrounded by such thinking. From the book "JFK and the Unspeakable," by James Douglass, regarding events in 1961: “His military advisors continued to ride hard toward the apocalypse. Kennedy was appalled by Generals Lemnitzer and LeMay’s insistence at two summer meetings that they wanted his authorization to use nuclear weapons in both Berlin and Southeast Asia. His response was to walk out of the meetings. After one such walkout, he threw his hands in the air, glanced back at the generals and admirals left in the Cabinet Room, and said, ‘These people are crazy.’ ”

Only one month after the terrifying Cuban Missile crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested a buildup of strategic forces to the level of a disarming first-strike capability. On November 20, 1962, they sent a memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stating, “The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable.” Their studies showed that a first strike would kill at least 140 million Russians – but that American casualties could be kept down to a “manageable” 10 or 12 million. This is almost exactly what General Turgidson says in the movie. (“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say… no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh… depending on the breaks.”) In September 1963, Air Force General Leon Johnson said to Kennedy, “I have concluded from the calculations that we could fight a limited war using nuclear weapons without fear that the Soviets would reply by going to all-out war.”

Kennedy understood the real but unstated objective. Knowing that the Pentagon was gaming him, he responded, “I have been told that if I ever released a nuclear weapon on the battlefield, I should start a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union, as the use of nuclear weapons was bound to escalate and we might as well get the advantage by going first.” Again, it’s precisely the gambit attempted by General Turgidson in the War Room regarding the “unpublished study” about the correct (i.e., murderous) response to a nuclear “accident” – a study apparently not shared with the president.

Kubrick’s mind was legendarily omnivorous and retentive. He subscribed to the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" and had read just about every book ever written on deterrence and thermonuclear war. His imagination is so rooted in hard fact that he could intuit what was taking place behind closed doors. Lyman Lemnitzer, Curtis LeMay, Edwin Walker, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, so many others – like Kennedy, Kubrick realized it was a cast of maniacs that kept the nuclear show going. Kubrick and co-screenwriter Terry Southern encapsulate that insanity in the characters of Ripper, Turgidson and Strangelove – an alliance of the psychotic, the narcissistic and the psychopathic, each bizarre in his own way, but all ultimately collaborating in a genocidal groupthink.

Good satire goes directly for the insoluble contradictions, and Kubrick hits so many of them – for instance:

  • Only those with a superhumanly developed self-restraint and sanity could be trusted to be in control of nuclear weapons – but only a madman could create and support the logic of mutual assured destruction and its associated concepts of “overkill” and “megadeath.”

   • Also: The effectiveness of nuclear deterrence depends on a hair-trigger response to attack – so a system ostensibly intended for preventing war is constantly provoking fear, creating a spiral of suspicion in which defense and aggression become indistinguishable.

   • Also: To deter, the system must be rigid and flexible at the same time, robotic and humanly controllable. An engineer will tell you that any system designed around fundamentally opposed qualities is an accident waiting to happen. It is a doomsday machine, an idiot system of world-destroying power.

  • Also: While the rhetoric is that of war avoidance – “Peace is our profession” – the underlying mentality is that of total victory over an evil enemy. So “accidents” are programmed in, as the pretext for a first strike with “acceptable” American losses. But the extent to which the possibility of a first strike is countenanced gives the lie to any ethical superiority over the other side. The system is morally bankrupt.

  • And finally: The bomb supposedly exists to protect freedom and democracy, but at moments of crisis (which in a balance of terror means every moment), we see how the system actually functions – as the ultimate expression of elitism, accepting the very real possibility of human annihilation as the cost of dominance and control. It is the apotheosis of what C. Wright Mills, writing a bit earlier, described as “crackpot realism,” the thought process of a paranoiac. The system is politically self-deconstructing, reducing itself to rubble here before our eyes, in 90 real-time minutes.

All of these contradictions are embodied in the character of Dr. Strangelove, the crippled, fragmented machine-man who hovers like a dark angel in the corner of the War Room and our consciousness. He is the ultimate accomplishment of the film: a rich and open-ended symbol – a key to understanding both an aspect of human nature and a specific moment in time. He has become a permanent part of our culture, graphically revealing the surreal, fascistic energy that permeates the inner workings of the military-industrial complex.

In the end, Strangelove walks – he regains his potency – because this Nazi technocrat has finally become the voice of authority in the putative democracy that helped defeat his first fuhrer. He no longer needs to conceal his nature and desires. These boil down to a sadomasochistic scenario of female sexual slavery, in which the sickest members of the military-industrial patriarchy are given exclusive right to the most nubile women. It is a eugenics-inspired rape fantasy, out-Hitlering Hitler. And the gathered War Room crowd salivates over the prospect.

We realize that the narrative arc of the movie is that of coitus interruptus, which begins with Turgidson’s painfully suspended tryst with his secretary and is consummated with the final orgasm of destruction. At last, with the end of the world, the sexual suspense is broken and we can breathe; the relief is palpable. The only kind of sexual satisfaction that can exist within the mechanized and disembodied world portrayed in the film involves violence and the projection of power, which compensates for the inner emptiness and lack of feeling in a militarist wasteland.

This is the crux of Kubrick’s and Southern’s irony in Dr. Strangelove: that the higher the stakes, the greater the megatons and megadeaths wielded by these nuclear warriors, the more diminished and enfeebled and grotesque they become. A system that grants godlike powers simultaneously denies real humanity. In the end, loving the bomb means losing the soul.

Strangelove reveals the nuclear standoff as more than a political problem – it is also a symptom of self-alienation, of an imbalance between life and death, Eros and Thanatos. Underneath the antic surface – for instance, in the close-ups of General Ripper’s lined face and haunted eyes – there’s a tragic half-awareness of something terribly wrong. Something that may have to do with communists or fluoride or precious bodily fluids, or maybe something deeper that we no longer have the spiritual or emotional capability to understand or confront. The film is an attempt to regain that capability by seeing the situation as a whole, from a comically human perspective. The belly laughs that the movie elicits come from our core and bring us back into our full, social selves, away from the isolated, phobic, hyper-rationalized world of General Ripper and his compatriots.

Dr. Strangelove offers no solutions to the nuclear quandary. It just shows us where the logic of the system points, in terms of both origins and outcomes. By casting the nightmarish absurdity of the system in a comical light, he strips it of its metaphysical terror. Once we have seen Dr. Strangelove – the ghost in the war-making machine – as he is, we can begin the process of freeing ourselves from him."

- http://counterpunch.org/iglarsh02042011.html

•

Bomb run sequence...

Major Kong Rides The Bomb...

"Where Did All Of That Money Go?"

"Where Did All Of That Money Go?"

by Michael Snyder

"Apparently our government cannot explain how 4.7 trillion dollars was spent. Are you kidding me? A stack of 4.7 trillion one dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon and part of the way back. This is yet another example of why we desperately need the Department of Government Efficiency. I realize that my articles about DOGE have caused some confusion in recent weeks, and so let me try to explain. On the one hand, I have been arguing that we must crack down on waste, fraud and abuse, but on the other hand I have been arguing that what DOGE is doing is going to cause a great deal of pain. Some readers think that I have been contradicting myself, but I have not been contradicting myself at all. There are times when we must do things that are necessary even though we know that they will cause a tremendous amount of pain. 

We have piled up the largest mountain of debt in the history of the entire planet, and it really is an existential threat to the future of our nation. But cutting down the size of the federal government and greatly reducing the flow of cash that is being spewed out of the giant money machine that we call the U.S. Treasury is going to cause immense chaos. Honestly, I do not know if our society will be able to handle it.

On Monday, DOGE revealed that 4.7 trillion dollars in payments that have come through the U.S. Treasury are basically impossible to trace because they lacked a very important tracking code…"The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that some $4.7 trillion in payments from the Treasury Department were missing a critical tracking code which made tracing the transactions “almost impossible.” The transactions were reportedly missing the Treasury Account Symbol, or TAS, an identification code which links a Treasury payment to a budget line item, according to DOGE, which described the use of such code as a “standard financial process.” “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” read an X post from DOGE."

This is inexcusable. We should be able to trace how every single penny has been spent. As Eric Daugherty has aptly pointed out, if you do not accurately account for every single penny of income the IRS can come after you big time…"The government will audit you, track every single dollar that went into your bank account, and hunt you down to squeeze every last penny. But once they get hold of YOUR money – they chuck it into a black hole of their choice with little to no accountability."

Two standards. If you tried to tell the IRS that you have no idea what happened to $4,700, you would not get one inch of mercy. But now we are being told that the government has no idea what happened to $4,700,000,000,000.

The good news is that from now on all government payments that flow through the U.S. Treasury will be traceable thanks to DOGE… “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE said, thanking the Treasury Department for its “great work” implementing the change. Musk touted the change as a “major improvement in Treasury payment integrity.” “This was a combined effort of [DOGE, Treasury and the Federal Reserve],” Musk tweeted. “Nice work by all.” This is a very positive change. And when good things happen in Washington D.C., we should all applaud.

Overall, reforms implemented by DOGE have saved U.S. taxpayers a grand total of 55 billion dollars…"Elon Musk’s DOGE revealed Tuesday that President Donald Trump has saved taxpayers a staggering $55 billion in less than a month. It said the savings were found through a combination of detecting and deleting fraud, canceling contracts and leases, and selling assets. The group – nicknamed the ‘nerd army’ – also ended grants, fired federal employees, changed some programs, and saved money with regulatory reforms."

So far, the biggest contract savings have come from USAID and the Department of Education…"So far, the DOGE lists the United States Agency for International Development as the number one agency for “total contract savings,” followed by the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Agriculture."

Sadly, the left is not applauding these efforts. In fact, many on the left are acting like it is the end of the world. Could it be possible that the reason why they are so upset is because they are the ones that are primarily benefitting from all of the waste, fraud and abuse? Billions of dollars in payments have already been cut off, and DOGE insists that this is just the beginning.

And now it appears that Ft. Knox will be one of the next targets for DOGE…"Tech billionaire Elon Musk has his sights set on an audit of the U.S. gold reserve at Ft. Knox through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after it was revealed there is no yearly review for the world-renowned stash. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who invited Musk to review the gold reserve on X over the weekend, joined “FOX & Friends” to discuss the need for greater transparency about the massive reserve after trying to verify it himself for a decade."

If the DOGE team actually visits Ft. Knox, what will they find? I don’t know, but I find it very interesting that “somebody” in the U.S. has been purchasing a massive amount of physical gold. This is something that Glenn Beck recently commented on…“Somebody here in the United States is buying a crapload of gold. We think (I hope) it’s the Treasury or the Central Bank,” he says. Whoever is behind the purchases - “somebody with very deep pockets” - isn’t just collecting gold notes, either. Whoever this mysterious somebody is, they’re “taking huge physical deliveries, and it’s causing shortages in London,” says Glenn."

I am just speculating here, but could it be possible that this physical gold is being used to replenish the reserves at Ft. Knox before an audit happens? Hopefully we will soon get some answers. Personally, I would love for the mystery of the missing gold at Ft. Knox to be solved after all these years. Under previous administrations, the transparency that is happening now would never have been possible. But now some of the U.S. government’s deepest and darkest secrets are being laid bare, and that is a wonderful thing."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Wars And Rumors Of War"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 2/20/25

"Alert! Russian Forces On Highest Alert, 

Putin Nervous, Moscow Burns, 30,000 EU Troops"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

The Face Of War,  2/20/25

"US Loses Control In Middle East, 

Iran And Russia Forge Alliance Trump Can't Stop"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Times Of India, 2/20/25

"Shocking! '170,000 Israeli Soldiers Suffering From...'  

War Takes Toll On IDF" 

"The Israeli military is grappling with a severe mental health crisis. Tens of thousands of soldiers are seeking psychological treatment after months of service in Gaza and Lebanon. A report reveals that 170,000 Israeli soldiers have enrolled in a government program, but the military is struggling to meet the growing demand due to a shortage of therapists."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/