"A Look to the Heavens"

“These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula left of center, and colorful M20 on the right. The third, NGC 6559, is above M8, separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant.

The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20's popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. The colorful skyscape recorded with telescope and digital camera also includes one of Messier's open star clusters, M21, just above the Trifid.”

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

•

"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged

in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams,

to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where

he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."

- Walt Whitman

The Poet: J.R.R. Tolkien, "I Sit And Think"

"I Sit And Think"

“I sit beside the fire and think

Of all that I have seen,

Of meadow flowers and butterflies

In summers that have been.

Of yellow leaves and gossamer

In autumns that there were,

With morning mist and silver sun

And wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think

Of how the world will be

When winter comes without a spring

That I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things

That I have never seen,

In every wood, in every spring,

There is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think

Of people long ago,

And people that will see a world

That I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think

Of times there were before,

I listen for returning feet

And voices at the door.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien

Chet Raymo, “The Sound And Fury”

“The Sound And Fury”

by Chet Raymo

“Not so long ago, I mentioned here Himmler and Heydrich, two of Hitler's most terrible henchmen. A friend said to me: "If there's no afterlife, no heaven or hell, then those two diabolical creatures got away with it. Their fate was no different than that of any one of their victims, an innocent child perhaps." And, yes, if there is no God who dispenses final justice, then we are left with an aching feeling of irresolution, of virtue unrewarded, of vice unpunished. Heydrich was gunned down by partisan assassins, and Himmler committed suicide a few hours before his inevitable capture, both fates arguably less tragic than that of their victims. How much more satisfying to think that the two mass murderers will spend an eternity in hell, while their victims find bliss.

This may not be a logically consistent argument for the existence of God, but it is certainly compelling. My friend says: "If there's no afterlife, then it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Of course, this emotive argument for the existence of God is balanced by another argument against his existence – the problem of evil: How can a just and loving God allow the existence of a Himmler or Heydrich in the first place. Here the argument is not just emotional, but consists of a thorny contradiction.

It comes down, essentially, to head vs. heart- what we would like to be true with all of our heart, vs. what our head tells us is an unresolvable conundrum. So each of us decides: To follow our hearts and make the blind leap of faith, or to follow our heads and learn to live with the sound and the fury. For those of us who choose the second alternative, the relevant words are that distressing coda, "signifying nothing." Our task is one of signification, of finding a satisfying meaning this side of the grave.

For many of us, that means finding our place in the great cosmic unfolding, and of recognizing that our lives are not inconsequential, that by being here we jigger the trajectory of the universe in some way, no matter how small, and preferably for the good and just. Yes, we make a leap of faith too, I suppose - that love, justice, and creativity are virtues worth living for - but at least it is a leap of faith that is not into the unknown, does not embody logical contradiction, and is consistent with what we know to be true, or at least as true as we can make it.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Here's A Question..."

“Here’s a question every angry man and woman needs to consider: How long are you going to allow people you don’t even like – people who are no longer in your life, maybe even people who aren’t even alive anymore – to control your life? How long?”

- Andy Stanley

“That goes for old wounds, too, you know. I really wish we’d had the chance to talk before this,” he says, cracking the window so the smoke can escape. “There’s a Longfellow quote I have stuck on my bulletin board at the church office – ‘There is no grief like the grief that does not speak’ – and it’s true. I’ve found that keeping pain inside doesn’t give it a chance to heal, but bringing it out into the light, holding it right there in your hands and trusting that you’re strong enough to make it through, not hating the pain, not loving it, just seeing it for what it really is can change how you go on from there. Time alone doesn’t heal emotional wounds, and you don’t want to live the rest of your life bottled up with anger and guilt and bitterness. That’s how people self-destruct.”

- Laura Wiess

"Life's Funny..."

"Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living."

- Alysha Speer

"The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool."

- Scott Turow

"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."

- Andrew Klavan

“I Can’t Wait For the Day When Life Finally Makes Sense”

“I Can’t Wait For the Day When Life Finally Makes Sense”

by Rania Naim

“I can’t wait for the day when life finally makes sense, when we find the silver lining in every tragedy, when we learn the lesson from each mistake and when we understand why our hearts needed to get broken a few times to let love in.

I can’t wait for the day that we understand why we met the right people at the wrong time or the wrong people at the right time and why our lives didn’t align to bring us together. I wonder if it’s because they’re the wrong ones for us or because we still have a lot of growing up to do and we’re meant to be with someone who understand who we’re becoming not who we were.

I can’t wait for the day that we understand the lesson behind every struggle. Why we struggled to be successful, why we struggled to find love, why we struggled to reach our dreams and why we lost people who meant the world to us. I wonder if we needed these lessons to learn how to appreciate life and feel the pain of others or we just needed to learn that there is no living without suffering.

I can’t wait for the day that we understand why we had to hate ourselves to love ourselves, why we had to destroy ourselves to build ourselves up again and why we had to start over just before we got to the finish line. I wonder who saved us or who inspired us to save ourselves.

I wonder if we are meant to be reborn a few times so we can learn how to truly live. I want to know what triggered us to change and how we can no longer recognize who we used to be.

I can’t wait for the day that we understand why we keep falling for the wrong ones over and over again, why we can’t forget those who hurt us and why we sometimes can still forgive them and take them back. I want to understand how our hearts operate, how they function, how they move us to do things we would never do and lead us to places that we know we shouldn’t go to. I’m curious to know why we listen to it, why we follow it blindly like it never got us lost before, why we trust it even though it left us broken and why do we always go back to it for questions when it keeps giving us the wrong answers. I wonder if there will come a day when we stop listening to it and if we’ll ever be truly alive without it.

They say everything happens for a reason and I truly believe that, but I also want to know what this reason is and why it chose us. Why some reasons keep recurring and why some reasons leave us even more perplexed. I want to understand why we go through certain things, what’s the message behind it and what if we never respond to this message, what if we just ignore it and keep living, what will happen then? Will our lives get lost in translation? 

I can’t wait for the day that life makes sense – some days I understand why certain things happened and others I’m not so sure, but all I know is that somehow we’ll connect the dots and someday we’ll complete the puzzle, until then, we have to learn how to live our lives without trying to understand it and we have to learn how to be comfortable with the irony and uncertainty of life; otherwise we’ll lose our common sense trying to make sense of the life we’re living.”

- http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

○

"Maybe we accept the dream has become a nightmare. We tell ourselves that reality is better. We convince ourselves it's better that we never dream at all. But, the strongest of us, the most determined of us, holds on to the dream or we find ourselves faced with a fresh dream we never considered. We wake to find ourselves, against all odds... feeling hopeful. And, if we're lucky, we realize in the face of everything, in the face of life - the true dream is being able to dream at all."

- "Dr. Meredith Grey", "Grey's Anatomy"

The Daily "Near You?"

San Antonio, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Great Thing About The Internet..."

"The great thing about the internet is that you get to meet people you

would otherwise only meet if you were committed to the same asylum."

- Robert Brault

"Dare..."

 

“Societal Collapse”

“Societal Collapse”

by Hardscrabble Farmer

“Anyone interested in understanding the mechanics of human history must first and foremost understand the cycles of Nature and the nature of living things. There exists a balance in every closed system; creation and dissolution, growth and decay, life and death. There is no escape from this dynamic, no means by which one can exist without the other. Sometimes societies ascend, but eventually, over time, they collapse.

For a very long time America has benefited from exploiting the reserves of other nations – their labor, their resources, and their environments in a form of cultural strip mining. It has given the appearance of a sustainable system that required no effort to store surpluses or to build reserves for the future. There has been a perpetual live for the moment feel to our experience that was based on such illusory systems as credit and fiat.

These things are not real. They are manifest realities, things that exist only because a critical mass of people agree to believe in them rather than what is reflected by actuality. When such time occurs that a large enough number of people abandon their participation in that system, reality rushes in to the void left behind.

A large part of what we are seeing – as described to us by experts or media – is occult in nature, hidden not by design or subterfuge, but due to the ignorance or stupidity of the mass of men. They no longer recognize that a large part of what is taking place on the streets of American cities is simply a mating ritual for a generation that was so atomized and dissolute that they had no opportunity to make real life connections with the opposite sex except through electronic devices. Living beings cannot exist by proxy.

They must eat, sleep, perform some activity during their waking hours, seek companionship, etc. These drives can be sublimated or suppressed either by societal controls or chemical dependencies, but they cannot be removed from our core drive. This is what happens when humans are thwarted from fulfilling their animal destinies – the drives of their particular species. If you eliminate the family, you do not stop fornication. If you eradicate healthy foods and a connection to its production, you do not eliminate hunger. Thus the dramatic rise in obesity and the ubiquity of pornography.

Everything exists in context, there is no way to eliminate the void left behind in a fatherless home without a corresponding flow of the feminine. A mind that has no reason will seek to replace it with an equal measure of emotion.

The Western Cultural experience that gained prominence and near global hegemony over the past several centuries is in terminal decline, accelerated by the opportunistic interference of competing cultural spheres, but predominantly by its own senescence. We are, in short, spent. What we are seeing is not a political or ideological struggle – again, manifest realities – but the natural process of a cultural expiration. The West is dying and with it all of the ideals and symbols that were attached to its rise.

Just as an elderly family member in their last days makes a point to give away their possessions, America is passing its treasures on; freedom of speech, the iconic symbols of Manifest Destiny like the statues of its heroes, even its own birthright to the rising of a new cultural expression, one that is less concerned with things like honor, nobility, truth and justice. None of those things exist in Nature, but rather are created and used like iron tools to achieve an end. Now that its energy is spent they serve no purpose, especially to the multitudes of others who share a far more dynamic and exuberant expression of collective identity.

This is a natural event, no different from a forest fire, but one which applies to the human species specifically. This is how we clear the ground for whatever is to replace us and we will serve as its fertilizer.”

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"O You..."

"Life passes like a flash of lightning, whose blaze barely lasts long enough to see. While the earth and sky stand still forever, how swiftly changing time flies across mans face. O you who sit over your full cup and do not drink, tell me, for whom are you still waiting?" 

- Hermann Hesse

Dan, I Allegedly, "America Is One Big Yard Sale Now! Is This the End?"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 4/14/25

"America Is One Big Yard Sale Now!

 Is This the End?"

America is turning into one giant yard sale, and I’m here to break it all down for you! From used cars to designer jackets, thrift shops to Poshmark, people are ditching new purchases and opting for second-hand savings. The economy is shifting fast - mall closures, defaulted loans, and EV vans sitting unsold… it’s all connected. If you’re not ready for this ‘yard sale economy,’ you’re going to be left behind. I’ll share real stories, like scoring a $1,750 Valentino jacket for 90% off or how you can pick up boats, trucks, and even delivery vans for a song. Plus, we’ll discuss why Portland’s luxury real estate market is a disaster, and how scams like bogus PPP loans are catching up with people. It’s all happening right now, and this is your chance to stay ahead of the curve!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

Bill Bonner, "Gold's Rules"

Jesus enters Jerusalem

"Gold's Rules"

by Bill Bonner

‘Would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?’

- Jesus, to Judas Iscariot

Youghal, Ireland - "When we left you last week, word had just come that China responded to Trump’s ‘reciprocal’ tariff salvo, with reciprocity of its own. Reuters: "Beijing on Friday increased its tariffs on U.S. imports to 125%, hitting back against U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to hike duties on Chinese goods to 145%, raising the stakes in a trade war that threatens to up-end global supply chains.

The hike comes after the White House kept the pressure on the world's No.2 economy and second-biggest provider of U.S. imports by singling it out for an additional tariff increase, having paused most of the "reciprocal" duties imposed on dozens of other countries. "The U.S. imposition of abnormally high tariffs on China seriously violates international and economic trade rules, basic economic laws and common sense and is completely unilateral bullying and coercion," [said China's Finance minister.]"

The best tactic for trade negotiators seems to be to pucker up and kiss Donald Trump’s derriere. As unpleasant as that must be, it is worth the shekels…or so they believe. But the Chinese, so far, have shown no intention of doing it. They are also considered a threat, because they are the most likely candidate to take America’s place as the world’s leading power.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday. It commemorates Christ’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, riding a donkey - a sign of humility and peace. We recalled Rep. Thomas Massie’s formula for US foreign policy: just follow the ‘Golden Rule,’ he said. Do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

In the year of our Lord, 2025, the US jefe doesn’t ride on a donkey. He is our Augustus, the Big Man in Washington. And the Chinese are probably right; even a quickie look at history, shows that neither China nor trade barriers have much to do with America’s loss of domestic manufacturing.

The US was at the peak of its manufacturing glory in the days after WWII. Small wonder. Japan was in smoking cinders - and occupied by the US Army. Germany was a smoldering ruin too - occupied by the US, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union. Britain was pretty much bankrupt. And France was settling scores from years of occupation and collaboration. It was inevitable that the US share of manufacturing would decline as these nations got back on their feet.

In 1948, approximately one of every three employed Americans was working in a factory. By 1978, only one of every five had a manufacturing job. This decline took place before China had exported a single gadget… before it took the ‘capitalist road’ and 22 years before it joined the World Trade Organization.

In this period - 1948-1978 - another reason for the decline in US manufacturing employment was probably just that fewer hands were needed. More and better machines meant less of a role for human labor. Machines became more powerful… more efficient… and more specialized.

Even in our limited experience, we went from small square bales of hay that we manually tossed onto a hay-wagon and then ricked up in the barn…to large round bales that human hands never touch. They are rolled onto the fields and then picked up by large tractors with telescopic loaders.

After the mid-‘70s came a different period. The US devalued the dollar in 1971 - refusing to pay its debts in gold. And then, it continued to devalue its currency for the next half century. A dollar in 1975 is worth only about 14 cents today - officially. In terms of gold, the decline was even greater. The price of an ounce of gold went from $160 in 1975 to more than $3,000 today. In other words, the dollar lost 94% of its purchasing power.

During the whole post-war period - roughly equal to our lifetimes - America’s manufacturing base contracted. China benefited from it; it didn’t cause it. And today only one in twelve American workers is in manufacturing.

If the US wanted to end its trade deficits…and boost domestic output… it could do so easily. It would simply go back to the ‘Golden Rule.’ An honest, gold-backed dollar would force the feds to balance its federal budget. . Thereafter, Americans couldn’t ‘print’ their way to wealth. They’d have to earn it…by producing things they could sell. And Thomas Massie’s ‘Golden Rule’ foreign policy would go a long way to making both the trade war and the trade deficit disappear."

https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Adventures With Danno, "What's New At Walmart?"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, AM 4/14/25

"What's New At Walmart?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Get Out Of The Dollar, I Repeat, Get Out Of The Dollar Now"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/14/25

"Get Out Of The Dollar, I Repeat, 

Get Out Of The Dollar Now"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Systemic Considerations"

"Systemic Considerations"

by Jim Kunstler

“Every western society is confronted by an internal cultural conflict between those who 

wish to distance society from its civilizational legacy and those who wish to renew it.” 

- Frank Furedi

"Whatever else you think is happening in our world, contraction is the reality-based order-of-the-day, and everything else is downstream of that. The world has to get by with less. Nothing is going to fix this for everybody, though any number of schemes for redistributing what’s left will preoccupy the political mojo.

Right now, it’s tariffs, which are an attempt to restore industry ceded to the formerly left-behind people elsewhere in the world - taking back what we used to do. You are correct to wonder if this is even possible. The wish is surely understandable, if a bit fuzzy and over-simplified: to be again a nation of people occupied purposefully in the service of a bright future. Redemption stories are deeply appealing.

Many of us are aware that the hour for this is late. We’ve already lived through our decades of pumping cheap oil out of American ground, extracting the ores, fashioning the metal into I-beams and rails, raising the skyscrapers, laying the asphalt ribbons of highway, and strewing the landscape with split-level houses and strip-malls. Let’s not try a re-run of that.

What have we got to work with? An overly-complex matrix of systems and subsidiary systems operating on the verge of failure at excessive scale. For example, our cities and their asteroid belts of suburbs. The rot is already well-advanced in many of them from their centers outward, and we can see the process underway of strip-mining the remaining assets on-the-ground. Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore... all occupy important geographically strategic sites. All are populated by dwindling societies of the cope-less, floundering their way out of existence. The geographies will abide without them. Others will come along and make something of these places’ virtues.

Agri-business is a method for strip-mining the value from what remains of our fruited plains. Everything about it is on an arc of failure, mortgaged to a futureless giantism. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and now that time has passed. The remaining soil itself can probably be rescued with heroic ant-like peasant labor over generations, which is to say a long and rather desperate project with no quick resolution. Even if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., hadn’t come along to read America the riot act on food, anyone can see that the age of Froot Loops is drawing to a close.

Town and country, what human society at its best was composed of, has got to be rearranged. This is something that MAGA is not talking about. MAGA looks like it is seeking a reenactment of the years 1950 to 1964. That isn’t going to happen. What then? The tech broz propose something that looks like an A-I printed robotic future. They are drunk on their own Stanford University brand Kool-Aid, hallucinating a future that is little more than math dressed in spandex.

It is nearly impossible to grok the size of their vast fortunes, their billions. Thousands upon thousands of millions. From what? From marshaling squadrons of lawyers to draw up ownership documents for this and that venture enabling idiots with nose-rings to lecture each other about sexual etiquette on cell-phone screens? Warning: don’t become infatuated with singularities, journeys beyond biology and the ecology of planet earth. That’s a story for saps, cargo-cultists, the mentally ill.

Speaking of all that money, one thing you can surely depend on is a violent unwinding of global finance. The vast bottom of humanity already has plenty of nothing, and their abundance will abide. The hedge fund broz and related broz in the shared hallucinations of capital can make some provision for wealth preservation if they have half-a-brain. It’s the great wad in the middle that has the worst problem: they get wiped out and then they discover they have no Plan B. That’s when the fun really kicks off in America (and other sovereign lands, of course.)

Things are breaking ‘out there.’ The financial world’s feedstock is promises. In a trusting world, promises are a splendid technology. Promises allow you to borrow hamburgers from next Tuesday to have a hamburger today...and all else that follows from that. In a not-so-trusting world, promises go up in a vapor with the morning dew.

The folks in charge will attempt to manage the manifest contraction that is upon us by doing everything possible to pretend that it isn’t happening and to deflect from any signals that happen to get through the muzak they broadcast about blue skies and staying on the sunny side. If you are serious - even serious about the comedy sure to arise out of this - you will be prepared for all kinds of trouble: shortages, hunger, civil strife, cold, darkness, the absence of TikTok. Your number-one job is to stay sane. Now, go forth and revel in today’s fine spring weather, mindful of the many more fine days to come as history spools out."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

"Economic Market Snapshot 4/14/25"

"Economic Market Snapshot 4/14/25"

○

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

○

"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

o

Market Data Center, Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data 

○

- https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/

○

Comprehensive, essential truth.

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

○

Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

○

- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

Job cuts and much more.

○

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

○

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

○

- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

○

- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

○

- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

○

Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

○

"The more I see of the monied classes,

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

○

Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...

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And now... The End Game...

o

Jeremiah Babe, "I'm Seeing Symptoms Of A Bad Economy"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 4/13/25

"I'm Seeing Symptoms Of A Bad Economy"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musial Interlude: Alan Parsons Project, “Ammonia Avenue”

Full screen recommended.

Alan Parsons Project, “Ammonia Avenue”

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident.

The featured exposure covers a sky area several times the size of the full moon. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six of the sister stars visible to the unaided eye. The actual number of Pleiades stars visible, however, may be more or less than seven, depending on the darkness of the surrounding sky and the clarity of the observer's eyesight."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/

"The Cost of Living in America Is Making People Give Up"

Full screen recommended.

Michael Bordenaro, 4/13/25

"The Cost of Living in America

 Is Making People Give Up"

"The cost of living in America is making people give up because wages have not been keeping up with inflation and the spike and the cost of living. We have seen over the past five years. And the most recent consumer sentiment survey from the university of Michigan is confirming that people are giving up. We are now seeing the lowest reading that we saw since the pandemic when the world was in complete turmoil and every day was unknown."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"A Wave Of Panic Buying Has Suddenly Erupted At Retailers All Over America"

Full screen recommended

Epic Economist, 4/13/25

"A Wave Of Panic Buying Has Suddenly

 Erupted At Retailers All Over America"

"Do you remember the panic buying that we witnessed during the early days of the pandemic? It’s back, and I have a feeling that it is only going to intensify in the days ahead. As more Americans begin to realize that products made in China will soon more than double in price and that some may no longer be available at all, there will be a feverish rush to purchase Chinese-made goods. Ironically, this may actually give a short-term boost to the U.S. economy, and the economic numbers for the first half of this year may end up looking better than they otherwise would have."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: This Will Be The Next Shoe To Drop"

Gregory Mannarino, 4/13/25

"Markets, A Look Ahead: 

This Will Be The Next Shoe To Drop"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"America’s Economic Meltdown Has Begun - We’re Not Safe"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 4/13/25

"America’s Economic Meltdown Has Begun - 

We’re Not Safe"

"America’s financial crisis is here, and it’s hitting harder than ever! In today’s video, I’m diving into the shocking realities we’re facing - from fake student scams stealing billions to banks like Solid collapsing without warning. We’re seeing massive fraud, failing institutions, and layoffs across major sectors, and it’s just the beginning. Are your savings safe? What’s next for the economy? Let’s talk about it all! Plus, California’s out-of-control community college scandal, major data breaches at Bank of America, and the growing concerns around fintech companies like Chime and Solid. And yes, even the summer of 2025 is shaping up to be a nightmare with layoffs predicted to skyrocket. It’s time to prepare, protect yourself, and stay informed."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Valley Center, Kansas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Grace Schulman, “Blessed Is The Light”

“Blessed Is The Light”

“Blessed is the light that turns to fire, and blessed the flames 

that fire makes of what is burns.

Blessed the inexhaustible sun, for it feeds the moon that 

shines but does not burn.

Praised be hot vapors in earth's crust, for they force up

mountains that explode as molten rock and cool like

love remembered.

Holy is the sun that strikes sea, for surely as water burns

life and death are one. Holy the sun, maker of change,

for it melts ice into water that bruises mountains, honing 

peaks and carving gullies.

Sacred is the mountain that promises permanence but

changes, planed by rockslides, cut by avalanche,

crushed, eroded, leeched for minerals. 

Sacred the rock that spins for centuries before it shines,

governed by gravity, burning into sight near earth's

orbit, for it rises falling, surviving night.

Behold the arcs your eyes make when you speak. Behold 

the hands, white fire. Branches of pine, holding votive

candles, they command, disturbed by wind, 

the fire that sings in me.

Blessed is whatever alters, turns, revolves, just as the gods

move when the mind moves them.

Praised be the body, our bodies, that lie down and open 

and rise, falling in flame.”

~ Grace Schulman

"So..."

"That life. This life. It looks as if you can have both. I mean, they're both right there, one on top of the other, and it looks as if they'll blend. But they never will. So, you take this thing. You take this thing you want, and you put it in a box and you close the lid. You can let your fingers trace the cracks, the places where the light gets in, the dark gets out, but the lid stays on. You don't look inside. You don't look at this thing you want so much, because you Can. Not. Have. It. So there's this box, you know, with the thing inside, and you could throw it away or shoot it into space; you could set it on fire and watch it burn to ashes, but really, none of that would make a difference, because you cannot destroy what you want. It only makes you want it more. So. You take this thing you want and you put it in a box and you close the lid. And you hold the box close to your heart, which is where it wants to go, and you pretend it doesn't kill you every time you feel yourself breathe."

- Megan Hart

"Contact"

"You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You are capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone. Only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing that we've found that makes the emptiness bearable... is each other."  - "Contact"

Full screen recommended.

"Contact"

Ellie meets her long dead father after travel across space 

via an intricate transportation system of wormholes.

"Contact"

"We are not alone..." Two-time Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster Matthew McConaughey shine in this spellbinding drama of a dedicated astronomer's quest to make first Contact. Despite scorn from her colleagues, "Ellie" Arroway devoutly eavesdrops on the universe. And then, one fateful morning, she hears a cryptic signal. As the world's scientists scramble to decode "the message," Ellie must struggle to become Earth's single emissary on a journey beyond theory or experience. Seeking support, she turns to top-level government advisor, Palmer Joss . Separated by very different beliefs, they reunite in their passion for knowledge and truth. From Academy Award-winning director Robert Zemeckis and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan's best-seller comes the story of a visionary scientist's unshakable conviction that somewhere in this boundless universe an intelligence yearns for Contact."

Watch on YouTube, full screen recommended. 

Full movie free with ads:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How it Really Is"