"Remember us saying to expect more propaganda than ever before? More deceptions? More lies? More distractions? Well…Here are headlines from today.
1. “Jobless claims point to steady job growth in May.”
2. “U.S. economy improves in May after slump last month, S&P PMI surveys show.”
Now, lets break this down…one at a time:
1. Jobless Claims “Steady Job Growth”: Claim. Fewer people filing for unemployment = more people getting hired.
Fact: It doesn’t mean more hiring. It means people ran out of benefits, people stopped applying. It means more people are now working multiple part-time jobs just to survive, (temp work, gig economy, no benefits).
2. “U.S. Economy Improves” Based on S&P PMI. Small upticks are seasonal noise invariably revised down. Meanwhile…
Fact: Corporate defaults are rising.
Fact: Credit card delinquencies are surging.
Fact:. Consumer savings are gone.
Fact: Mortgage applications are collapsing.
It’s like saying the Titanic is “sailing smoother” while it’s already halfway underwater.
Remember This, The Playbook of Babylon:
• Cherry pick soft data.
• Frame it as a recovery.
• Push it through media mouthpieces.
• Suppress hard truth (real wages, debt delinquencies, food insecurity).
This isn’t analysis. This is narrative management."
“What powers are being wielded in the Wizard Nebula? Gravitation strong enough to form stars, and stellar winds and radiations powerful enough to create and dissolve towers of gas. Located only 8,000 light years away, the Wizard nebula, pictured below, surrounds developing open star cluster NGC 7380. Visually, the interplay of stars, gas, and dust has created a shape that appears to some like a fictional medieval sorcerer.
The active star forming region spans 100 about light years, making it appear larger than the angular extent of the Moon. The Wizard Nebula can be located with a small telescope toward the constellation of the King of Aethiopia (Cepheus) Although the nebula may last only a few million years, some of the stars being formed may outlive our Sun.”
The most momentous and significant events in our lives
are the ones we do not see coming. Life is defined by the unforeseen.
by Jonny Thomson
"You’re in the shower one day, and you feel a lump that wasn’t there before. You’re having lunch when your phone rings with an unknown number: there’s been a crash. You come home and your husband is holding a suitcase. “I’m leaving,” he says.
Life is inevitably punctuated by sudden changes. At one moment, we might have everything laid out before us, and then an invisible wall stops us in our tracks. It might be an illness, a bereavement, an accident or some bad news, but life has a habit of mocking those who make plans. We can have our eyes on some distant shore, some faraway horizon, only to find everything come crashing down by the most unseen of events. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men. Gang aft agley” (often go wrong).
In Anton Chekhov’s remarkable play, "The Seagull," we meet a cast of characters who are all, in some way, in love with something. The young, idealistic artist Konstantin is in love with the idea of pure art. Arkadin, his mother, is in love with her fans and her celebrity. Konstantin’s girlfriend, Nina, is in love with becoming rich and famous. Everyone in the play has some kind of ambition and plan, or they live in regret over the life they chose. They rail against how misguided or mistaken their life has been, while longing for something else.
They are each like a seagull, flying over the sea or a great lake, and aiming purposefully for the shore. The view up there is wonderful. But the longer the seagull flies, the more oblivious they are to how they tire or weaken. They’re so fixated on some distant horizon that they’re at the mercy to life’s sudden changes. They’re blinkered and distracted, and the gods love nothing more than the hopeful hubris of mankind.
At one point in the play, Chekov has the character Trigorin recount a short story about a gull flying over a lake who’s, “happy and free.” But in the next moment, “a man sees her who happens to come that way, and he destroys her out of idleness.” The seagull is killed, its flight and plans annihilated, in one instant of random thoughtlessness.
Boundary Situations: While so much of our lives are spent in planning and preparation, the most transformative and significant moments are those which come at us out of the blue. These are what the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers called “boundary situations” - the ones we cannot initiate, plan, or avoid. We can only “encounter” them. These are not the mundane, everyday parts of our life - what Jaspers calls “situation being” - but rather they are things which thunder down to shake the foundations of our being. They change who we are. Although these “boundary situations” (sometimes called “limit situations”) change a bit in Jaspers’ works, he broadly sorted them into four categories:
Death: Death is the source of all our fear. We fear our loved ones dying, and we fear the moment and fact of our own death. When we know grief and despair, or when we reflect on mortality, we are transformed. We always know about death, but when it’s a boundary situation, it comes crashing into our lives like some grim scythe; an unforeseen curtain call. The awareness and subjective encounter with death transforms us.
Struggle: Life is a struggle. We work for food, compete for resources, and vie with each other for power, prestige, and status in almost every context there is. As such, there are moments when we are inevitably overcome and defeated, but also when we are victorious and champion. The final outcomes of struggle are often sudden and great, and they make us who we are.
Guilt: Hopefully, there comes a moment for each of us when we finally accept responsibility for things. For many, it comes with adulthood, but for others it comes much later still. It’s the awareness that our actions impact all around us, and our decisions echo into the world. It’s seeing the damage or tears we’ve caused. It’s to recognize that, however small or big, we’ve hurt and upset someone. It’s a profound pull of the heart that changes how we live, and it often comes on unexpectedly.
Chance: No matter how neat and ordered we might want our world to be, there will always be a messy, chaotic, and unpredictable exception. We can hope for the best, and make the plans we want, but we can never take a steering handle on the facts that will affect our existence. According to Jaspers, we each prefer, “assembling functional and explanatory structures… whose central axis lies in sufficient reason” and yet, “despite this, it is not possible for man to control and explain everything. In fact, day by day he faces events that he cannot call anything else other than coincidences or hazards.” We want order, and regularity. What we get is the mercurial and capricious throes of chance.
The best laid plans: What Chekhov’s Seagull and Jaspers’ “boundary situations” get right is that we are each much more vulnerable than we might want to allow. A wedding, three years and a fortune to plan, is ruined by a stomach bug. An hour-long journey home for Christmas winds up getting you stuck in the traffic of a freak snowstorm. A lifetime achievement is overshadowed by a national disaster. Our lives are defined by the unforeseen. We have our dreams, hopes and are flying to some faraway shore. Yet life doesn’t care. Around every corner, at every flap of our wings, everything can change."
"You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything: the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothing and are raised to the rank of prince by the slippery ease of their light judgments. But what you love to see are faces that so work and feel thirst...
You have not grown old, and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret."
“Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment - not discouragement - you will find the strength there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures, followed by wreckage, were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”
"William Irvine, an author and philosophy professor I’m a big fan of, often tries to point people towards a little-discussed fact of human life: "You always know when you’re doing something for the first time, and you almost never know when you’re doing something for the last time."
There was, or will be, a last time for everything you do, from climbing a tree to changing a diaper, and living with a practiced awareness of that fact can make even the most routine day feel like it’s bursting with blessings. Of all the lasting takeaways from my periodic dives into Stoicism, this is the one that has enhanced my life the most. I’ve touched on it before in my Stoicism experiment log and in a Patreon post, and I intend to write about it many more times in the future (but who can say?)
To explain why someone might want to start thinking seriously about last times, Bill Irvine asks us to imagine a rare but relatable event: going to your favorite restaurant one last time, knowing it’s about to close up for good.
Predictably, dining on this last-ever night makes for a much richer experience than almost all the other times you’ve eaten at that restaurant, but it’s not because the food, decor, or service is any different than usual. It’s better because you know it’s the last time, so you’re apt to savor everything you can about it, right down to the worn menus and tacky napkin rings. You’re unlikely to let any mistakes or imperfections bother you, and in fact you might find them endearing.
It becomes clearer than ever, in other words, how great it was while it lasted, and how little the petty stuff mattered. On that last dinner, you can set aside minor issues with ease, and appreciate even the most mundane details. Anything else would seem foolish, because you’re here now, and this is it. It might even occur to you that there’s no reason you couldn’t have enjoyed it this much every time you dined here – except that all the other times, you knew there would be more times, so you didn’t have to be so intentional about appreciating it.
That’s an exceptionally rare situation though. Almost always, we do things for the last time without knowing it’s the last time. There was a last time – on an actual calendar date – when you drew a picture with crayons purely for your own pleasure. A last time you excitedly popped a Blockbuster rental into your VCR. A last time you played fetch with a certain dog. Whenever the last time happened, it was “now” at the time.
You’ve certainly heard the heart-wrenching insight that there’s always a last time a parent picks up their child. By a certain age the child is too big, which means there’s always an ordinary day when the parent picks up and puts down their child as they have a thousand times before, with no awareness that it was the last time they would do it.
Ultimately there will be as many last times as there were first times. There will be last time you do laundry. A last time you eat pie. A last time you visit a favorite neighborhood, city, or country. For every single friend you’ve ever had, there will be a last time you talk, or maybe there already has been.
For ninety-nine percent of these last times, you will have no idea that that’s what it is. It will seem like another of the many middle times, with a lot more to come. If you knew it was the last-ever time you spoke to a certain person or did a certain activity, you’d probably make a point of appreciating it, like a planned last visit to Salvatore’s Pizzeria. You wouldn’t spend it thinking about something else, or let minor annoyances spoil it.
Many last times are still a long way in the future, of course. The trouble is you don’t know which ones. The solution, Irvine suggests, is to frequently imagine that this is the last time, even when it’s probably not. A few times a day, whatever you’re doing, you assume you’re doing that thing for the last time. There will be a last time you sip coffee, like you’re doing now. What if this sip was it? There will be a last time you walk into the office and say hi to Sally. If this was it, you might be a little more genuine, a little more present.
The point isn’t to make life into a series of desperate goodbyes. You can go ahead and do the thing more or less normally. You might find, though, that when you frame it as a potential last time, you pay more attention to it, and you appreciate it for what it is in a way you normally don’t. It turns out that ordinary days are full of experiences you expect will keep happening forever, and of course none of them will.
It doesn’t matter if the activity is something you particularly love doing. Walking into a 7-11 or weeding the garden is just as worthy of last-time practice as hugging a loved one. Even stapling the corner of some pages together can generate a sense of appreciation, if you saw it as your final act of stapling in a life that’s contained a surprising amount of stapling.
Irvine uses mowing the lawn as an example, a task he doesn’t love doing. If you imagine that this is the last time you’ll mow the lawn, rather than consider it a good riddance, you might realize that there will be a time when you’ve mown your last lawn, and that there were a lot of great things about living in your lawn-mowing, bungalow-maintaining heyday. A few seconds later, it dawns on you that you still are.
You can get very specific with the experiences you do this with. The last time you roll cookie dough between your palms. The last time you get rained on. The last time you sidestep down a crowded cinema aisle. The last time your jeans smell like campfire smoke. The last time your daughter says “swannich” instead of “sandwich.” Virtually everything is a worthy candidate for this reflection.
It always brings perspective to your life as it is now, and it never gets old. It’s an immensely rewarding exercise, but it not a laborious one. It takes only two or three seconds - allowing yourself “a flickering thought,” as Irvine put it - to notice what you’re doing right now, and consider the possibility that this is indeed the last escalator ride at Fairfield Mall, the last time you put on a Beatles record, the last time you encounter a squirrel, or the last time you parallel park in front of Aunt Rita’s building."
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
"In this video, I discuss the disaster that left millions helpless and the critical importance of planning for unexpected events. From the Cellcom outage impacting Michigan and Wisconsin to a devastating fire that destroyed a well-loved Rhode Island restaurant, these real-world examples highlight why having a solid backup plan matters. What would you do if your phone stopped working or your workplace disappeared overnight? Let’s explore these tough scenarios together and how to stay prepared."
"Imagine a pretty spring day. You’re standing on your front porch or some other pleasant vantage point and looking out at a sunlit landscape: trees, grass, and singing birds. Then your five-year-old child or grandchild walks up to you and tugs on your hand to get your attention. You turn and the child asks, “What kind of world is this?” What do you reply?
This child deserves the truth. You won’t be able to use fancy words or long explanations, but truth doesn’t require those things. This child is ready to hear the truth about the world. This kind of moment comes along haphazardly, and you can’t be sure if or when another might show itself. Your answer may affect this child for the rest of his or her life. What do you say?
The 14 Words: As you stand on the porch, away from everything but nature and your child, the only intimidations, biases, and slogans present will be those inside of you… and your child should be insulated from such things. You have to speak truth. And as I say, it doesn’t have to be long and complex; in fact it can’t be, if you want to help a five year old. And it comes to just 14 words:
We are a beautiful species, living in a beautiful world, ruled by abusive systems.
Later – after true words have sunk into the young mind – you can explain that we’re not a perfectly beautiful species, that most people are often confused and that a few are just plain bad. You can further explain that volcanoes and hurricanes and grizzly bears exist. But if you value your child enough to tell them the plain truth, you’ll tell him or her the 14 words first and let them sink in before getting to the small print. With that said, I’ll move to some explanation for the adults.
A Beautiful Species: 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, humanity – perhaps five million of them – stumbled out from an ice age and began to spread across the earth, most of them having nothing in the way of science and technology. Since then, we’ve learned to fill the earth with food, build machines that race across the face of the earth, sail oceans and streams, and fly through the atmosphere at fantastic speeds. Imagine trying to explain these things to the people wandering away from their receding glaciers. And not only this, but we’ve cured the vast majority of diseases, figured out the smallest parts of the machinery of life, built compendia of human knowledge, made them available anywhere and everywhere, and landed men on the moon.
We are a magnificent species. If that triggers “Never forget the darkness!” voices in you, please hang on to “We are a magnificent species” until they subside. Here are two passages from G.K. Chesterton’s book, "The Defendant," that bear upon dark, automatic thoughts:
"There runs a strange law through the length of human history – that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility."
"Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelly, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness."
You can find the same thing in the Bible, by the way. Theologies be damned, this is what Psalm 82 says, and which Jesus repeated: "You are gods; all of you children of the most High."
A Beautiful World: This is a beautiful world. Get out and look at it: lay outside on a summer night and gaze at the stars for an hour; explore the wilderness. Don’t watch it on TV; go out and experience it. It is beautiful. Perhaps not perfectly beautiful, but one flaw among fifty beauties does not negate those beauties.
Abusive Systems: We all know the systems that rule mankind are abusive. I’m not going to itemize, since we complain about these things every day. You already know. The problem with most of mankind is not that they can’t recognize abuse; it’s that they think they deserve it.
Now, let’s be clear on another thing: Rulership requires us to stay focused on evil. They have to frighten people and portray their competitors as “evil Huns.” They have to publicize threat levels and convince people they need to be saved from impending death. And of course, their dear friends in the media promote evil-consciousness 24/7. Do you think, just maybe, that all this fear has bad effects upon us?
The Truth: The truth is that we are surrounded by people who cooperate, who assist one another, and who care about one another. But those aren’t the things we think about – those are things we’ve learned to ignore. The flashing images of evil surround us and scream at us, after all: The Russians are going to attack, the other candidate is going to destroy all you hold dear, SARS (or bird flu or swine flu or Ebola) is about to kill us all! It’s a long, dark symphony of manipulation. The truth is we’re a beautiful species, living in a beautiful world. The systems that wish to rule us are quite otherwise."
"Analyst and financial writer John Rubino has a new warning concerning Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” making its way through Congress and Moody’s downgrade of US debt. The Big Beautiful Bill is going to explode the debt by $20 trillion in the next 10 years, and the credit downgrade has people like billionaire investment fund founder Ray Dalio worries about money printing to pay the $1.5 trillion in interest on federal debt. Rubino warns, “The story with Moody’s downgrade isn’t that they did it, that they moved the US from triple A (Aaa) to one notch below (Aa1). It’s kind of insane that a government with 125% of GDP has an investment rating at all. Right? They are clearly baking a gigantic currency crisis into the cake. Ray Dalio gets it right.
The rating agencies excuse or explanation for why the US still has an investment grade credit rating is that a country with a printing press can never default because it can just print enough money out of thin air to pay interest on its bonds, and it can do that forever. So, it’s triple A credit, which does not make any sense at all because if you just print a lot of money out of thin air to pay your debts, then your currency goes down in value, and you are paying back your creditors with depreciating currency, which is a form of default. The credit rating agencies are only looking at one kind of default where we just stop paying. They are not looking at paying with cheaper currency year after year, and we stiff our creditors that way. That’s why you don’t want to own Treasury bonds. They are not going to stop paying interest, but the interest will not cover inflation going forward. So, you will have a net real loss until they just crater, and then you will have a massive capital loss.”
On top of that, interest rates have been rising and not falling. The 30-year mortgage rate is now just under 7% again. Rubino says, “We went back up to unsustainable interest rates really quickly. The Fed has promised a couple of rate cuts this year, and for interest rates to go up while the Fed is inferring easing means we are risking losing control of the financial markets. If the Fed can’t control interest rates, we are monumentally screwed as a financial system. That’s kind of what we are headed for now. In the US, interest rates are going back up, but if you want to look at an extreme case, look at Japan. They don’t just have 30-year bonds, they have 40-year and 50-year bonds and those are cratering, which is to say the interest rates on those bonds are spiking. Long term Japanese bonds used to be 0%. Now, they are 3% and change. That change is huge.
So, Japan, the US, Europe, the UK and China, all of these big countries are basically making the same mistakes, and they are all headed in the same direction. We are in the early stage of a currency death spiral where interest rates start to go up and the government can’t control that and then their debt goes parabolic and this goes until everything breaks down. We are in the third inning of that game, and the last couple of innings are going to be hair raising. There are going to be currency crises, which we have never seen in our lifetimes. It will be fun times if you are a gold bug.”
Rubino thinks gold will go up in price way over $10,000 per ounce, and he also expects silver to take off too. Rubino says, “Silver is a great story because it is an industrial metal that is in deficit. Industrial uses are taking more silver off the markets than what they are producing, and that is going to lead to a shortage. Even if you don’t look at silver as a monetary metal, the industrial demand makes it a buy right now.”
Rubino does not think the US will be in a civil war, but Europe is going authoritarian, and civil war is most likely there if Russia does not blow them up first. Rubino thinks America will do better than Europe, but we will still have trouble, chaos and a financial reset to work through." There is much more in the 46-minute interview.
"Generational politics is one of the cruder forms of politics as it generally reduces to members of one age cohort hurling slurs at other cohorts. Ironically, the origin of this form of politics is the baby boomer generation, who were the first group of Americans to form an identity around their birth cohort. Baby boomers have since been synonymous with the post-war cultural trends and the radical politics that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.
These days, of course, “boomer” has become an epithet due to their children using it to describe degenerate or materialistic culture. Boomers are selfish old people who only care about their stock portfolios and their lawns. They are the “greedy geezers” of this age, which is ironic in that the term first gained traction decades ago as the baby boomers started to take over politics. This is another example of how the universe has a sense of a humor and cruel streak.
Of course, thirty years ago when terms like “greedy geezer” were getting tossed around, the culture was undergoing a generational shift. The WW2 Generation was giving way to the baby boomers. Bill Clinton came to be seen as the typical boomer, ushering in a new set of morals and sensibilities to politics. For the last thirty years, baby boomer politics have been American politics. Now they are seen the out of date politics of a quickly fading era.
We are about to experience another generational culture shift as the children of the baby boom generation begin to push their parents over the side. This is why the term “boomer” has become an epithet. The derogatory use of the label is a signal that the user is not into conventional culture and politics. To reject “boomer politics” is to reject the old-fashioned dichotomy of left-versus-right, as is defined by cable news programs, talk radio and the mainstream media.
We are getting a glimpse of this in the Trump administration. Donald Trump is technically not a baby boomer. This must be said because otherwise you get six million messages explaining that the baby boomer generation starts with those born after noon on June 30th, 1946, and Trump was born on June 17, 1946. It is this sort of hairsplitting that makes generation politics so mind-numbingly stupid. It makes the blue pencil crowd seem stable minded by comparison.
That aside, Trump is emblematic of the politics and culture that we generally associate with the baby boomer generation. He is materialistic, hedonistic, and jarringly superficial in his politics. For example, his main interest in ending the Ukraine war is so we can do business deals with the Russians. The history and geopolitical import of what he is doing is never mentioned by him. For Trump, it often seems like that the only thing that matters is the acquisition of stuff.
Contrast this with J.D. Vance, the millennial man in waiting. His story is centered on his cultural journey from the underclass into the managerial class and then as a critic of the managerial system that made him possible. He is the most articulate critic of managerialism to ever hold office in Washington. It remains to be seen if he wins the White House on his own, but he is clearly setup as the heir to Trump. He will take the baton on behalf of his generation from the boomers.
Despite the millennial disdain for baby boomer culture, they are the results of it due to the fact they were raised in the product of it. Things like helicopter parenting and structured play time were boomer creations. Millennials are the first generations raised by people who used the word “parenting”, so it is no surprise that the millennials are the first to use the word “adulting.” They were raised to expect a highly structured and safe environment where everything is clearly labeled.
There is far greater cultural intensity with millennials than prior generations. For the boomers, generational politics was mostly about marketing cultural items like clothing, lifestyle choices, and music. For millennials, culture is tangled up in the structure of life, so they are more keenly aware of themselves as a cohort. They are the first generation to sense that their identity is entirely exogenous. Individually and collectively, they are who they are because of taxonomical reasons.
This shift in generational identity can be seen in how millennials react to generalizations versus how baby boomers react. Make a generalization about baby boomers and you get flooded with boomers telling you that they are not like that. Make a generalization about millennials and they will agree and amplify it. Because conformity has always been a part of millennial cultural awareness, conforming to generational stereotypes does not bother them. It is their normal.
This is another thing with millennials that is different from boomers. They expect the systems they inherited to work as described on the box. The two sides of millennial politics are from those raised on the mother’s milk of post-Marx culturalism and those raised on civic nationalism. The former is perpetually angry that things are not fair, and the latter is determined to make things work as described to them. Vance versus AOC is a duel between competence and anxiety.
That brings up something else about millennial culture. It is focused on the present, but in the context of what was promised. This makes it backward looking. The Vance side is determined to remake things, so they are what he expected, rather than something new that is a break from the past. The AOC side is similarly determined to remake the present to fit the promise, but the promise came from the New Left politics that sunk roots in the culture when her parents were kids.
Generational politics can only take you so far in getting a sense of what lies ahead for the culture and politics. Reality is the great restraint, and the millennials are inheriting an enterprise in decline, while their parents inherited one that was at its peak. This is the heart of the millennial critique of the boomers. They see their parents as living off the profits of the past and they see themselves as tasked with cleaning up the mess after a long generational party.
This is why the millennial age could turn out to be quite conservative. Necessity will mean relegating luxury beliefs to the fringe. No one has time for the hysterical and childish politics of the AOC side when there is work to be done, debts to be paid and institutions to be restructured. Millennial politics could be the domination of the organizational men, who take pride in making the machine operate and have no tolerance for throwing sand in the gears."
Look at this chart below. This is the projected U.S. Federal Debt and Deficits (2025–2034). Further breakdown below. This is based on current estimates and assuming only a 5% annual increase in the deficit.
"We are not makers of history. We are made by history."
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Gualfin, Salta Province, Argentina - “This can’t go on much longer.” This was the judgement of a local rancher. Like so many other Argentines, he was ready for a change and voted for the chainsaw wielding, genuine kook - Javier Milei. Milei’s approach to Argentina’s addiction to deficits and inflation is to go cold turkey. Cut spending. Balance the budget. Fire government employees. Reduce giveaways and handouts. Liberate the economy.
It may be the only thing that works. John Dienner: Milei quickly eliminated a raft of government departments, terminated tens of thousands of government workers, produced the first budget surplus in many decades and reduced the inflation rate by over 80% - all in the first year of his presidency.
Of course, the entrenched government bureaucracy and its many beneficiaries opposed his every move... Despite their resistance, he proved that reform of a deeply corrupt and inefficient government is, in fact, possible. But it’s not easy. And it’s not over.
“Buenos Aires is as expensive as New York,” continued our informant. “But our salaries are much, much lower. I don’t know how much longer the people will put up with it.” Prices can rise quickly to international levels. But wages take more time. Capital needs to be accumulated...then, put to work in new businesses, new ventures... people hired, etc. Sales increase. GDP goes up. Wages rise.
Eventually, Milei’s program should create a freer, richer economy. But it doesn’t happen overnight. And in the meantime, the activists and something-for-nothing politicians regain their footing. They organize. They whine. They undermine. They appeal to the masses with promises of relief.
Most likely, before long, there will be mass demonstrations in the city streets of the capitol. The widespread support, now enjoyed by the Milei government (his party won by solid margins in Monday’s midterms), could soon disappear. And the liberation of the Argentine economy may not survive infancy.
History gives people what they need. Argentina, near rock bottom and facing a Venezuela-style blow-up, needed a real reformer. America, meanwhile, still near the top and beginning a long decline, needed someone who would stay the course. So, don’t expect marches down Pennsylvania avenue, protesting as the free stuff is taken away. Because it’s still coming.
How much has federal spending been cut since the Great Disruptor took office? Not a single penny. And now, the Big, Beautiful Bill cuts some domestic budgets…increases ‘security’ spending…and leaves the country going in the same direction -- with Bigger Deficits... and a Big, Bulging, Bombola of Debt!
CBS News: "The Republican-backed tax and spending bill that's now moving forward in the House is getting a reality check from Wall Street. That's because the proposed tax breaks are projected to far outstrip any savings in the bill, potentially leading to mounting U.S. debt and a worsening fiscal outlook, according to economists and policy experts. Over the next decade, the GOP bill could cost the U.S. $3.8 trillion, according to a report earlier this month by the Joint Committee on Taxation that examined the impact of the tax measures versus spending cuts."
The new bill could “add $4 trillion to the federal primary deficit” said Moody’s, the last major rating agency to downgrade US debt. But “add to the federal deficit” needs clarification. What this means is that these amounts are in addition to the $22 trillion in deficits already loaded on the train, more than $2 trillion per year scheduled to be added to federal debt over the next ten years.
We now have $37 trillion in federal debt. If this budget is passed, we will not have $3.8 trillion more...or just $40.8 trillion total. Instead, we will have a total of around $60 trillion. Or maybe $70 trillion.
Rep. Thomas Massie, one of the very few honest and intelligent members of Congress: "There’s another huge problem: it will increase the price of the $36 trillion of debt we already have, as bond buyers realize we aren’t fiscally responsible. We’re approaching $1.5 trillion of annual interest payments...over $4,000 per US citizen per year."
Perspective: the part of the Big Beautiful Bill that renews the TCJA (Trump tax cuts) will benefit each family on average by $1600, but the policies changed or left in place by the BBB will be obligate [sic] each family of 4 to $16,000 of interest payments on behalf of the federal government. And so, the march to bankruptcy continues. The Great Disruptor has done nothing to disrupt it...and nothing to prevent the obvious and inevitable consequences - inflation, chaos and crisis.
Historically, we believe the US is still in the early stages of a huge decline - one that began around 2000. It will take many years of misery before it hits bottom. Trump is merely helping the inevitable to happen. And today, we pause...with a sigh...and think about how nice it would be if we had a real disruptor in the White House, someone like Javier Milei. No, he need not take up Milei’s eccentricities - tantric sex...and taking advice from dead dogs...but perhaps he could pay more attention to the basics.
“Look,” he might have said on inauguration day. “This is a beautiful country. The people are beautiful. Beautiful people. We love them. And we’re doing beautiful things for them. Wonderful things. Incredible things. Things like nobody ever did for them. But when you’re in the hole, the first thing you have to do is stop digging. And today, we’re taking away the shovels. I’ve just signed an Executive Order. I don’t know if it is legal or constitutional, but what it says is that I’m not going along with anything that involves spending more money until the budget is balanced. We’ll worry about deporting the rapists, murderers….really bad people, who’ve been eating our pets…later.” If only."
"People often hold “celebrations of life” for someone after they died. I think that’s a shame, really. I get it – you don’t want to hold the funeral for someone who is sitting right there. Besides, when I die, if anyone shows up at the funeral, it will probably be to make sure I’m dead. I’d hate to rob them of that opportunity.
However, The Mrs. indicates that eulogy is the wrong word, since tribute would be better. I’ll contest that at least one online source that I edited indicates that a eulogy is usually for someone who recently died, so I’m technically correct, which we all know is the best kind of correct, right?
Regardless, I think it’s fitting to spend some time talking about Scott Adams since he has announced he’s dying. Whereas with a relative it would be weird to talk about them getting ready to leap off the mortal coil while they have a heart beat and are still in the room, I think Mr. Adams might appreciate it.
Speaking of that, Scott was the first place I became familiar with affirmations. He’d write down what his goal was 15 times each day. And then? His goal would be met. I’ve even written about that here.
Now, there are two ways to look at this: first, Mr. Adams just bent the Universe to his will, or second, the very act of creating the affirmation made him look at the world and look for places where he could bring his goal into existence. Regardless, like most things, it worked out pretty well for him: I imagine that the last time he had money issues was back in 1997, and that’s a pretty good run.
But that was just his first act. His second was more profound. Having had success with the media, he moved on to philosophy, and his biggest book along that line is probably "How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big," which I’ve written about as well. Great ideas, and presented well.
In the mid-2010s, he moved into P&P: podcasting and politics. His prediction of Donald Trump’s victory was early, and his support of Donald Trump cost Mr. Adams a lot of money. I’m not sure he cared, since by that time he had multi-generational FU money.
I was a regular listener of Mr. Adams podcasts. I missed his blog, which I enjoyed more, but his podcasting style was engaging as well. "Coffee with Scott Adams" was a regular for me when I used to hit the gym at lunch, and became a once in a while treat for those days I had road miles ahead of me for work. Since 2021, not so much, but mainly due to time constraints.
What I enjoyed the most about Adams was his ability to consistently look at the world from multiple viewpoints, and set up different frames of reference. Some of them had already occurred to me, but many hadn’t. For a person who likes ideas as much as I do, it was always fun to get a fresh perspective so different from the rest of the world.
Was he always right? Certainly not. His predictions about the Vaxx™ were quite off, but to be fair, he did admit that he had been wrong when evidence proved that to be the case. It wasn’t personal. It was factual.
Then, there was his third act, which I’m betting happened around the time he knew his days were numbered in triple digits counting downwards. That is, of course, on his "Coffee with Scott Adams" podcast on February 22, 2023 when Adams discussed the result of a survey where many black Americans indicated that they didn’t like white people so much. Adams famously stated: “If nearly half of all blacks are not ok with white people, that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
People called that racist. The backlash was immediate. His comic strip was cancelled. His books were cancelled and the rights reverted to him. All of the merch? Cancelled. (FYI, if you try to buy his stuff “new” on Amazon™ today, it’s almost certain that it is being sold by vultures who are selling unauthorized versions.) Result? He could draw what he wanted to draw.
I am certain that Mr. Adams knew what he was doing, and, oddly, that just might be saving black Americans. Mr. Adams had always been very accommodating and supportive of black American. I think, however, post George Floyd, he realized what was happening, and realized a reckoning against black Americans was rapidly coming.
By taking the bold step to criticize black opinion about whites at a time when whites had just had the biggest outpouring of sympathy in history towards blacks, he was signaling to blacks: you can’t act like violent, entitled, spoiled people, nor can you support your racial brethren when they act like that.
Even now, the backlash against the worst of black behavior is growing due to the ubiquity of body cams and uncensored streams. And that’s okay, because the behavior has to change. I’m pretty sure that everyone, even blacks, are tired of the nonsense.
Yet, the narrative since 1965 has been “there must be a cause and we have to fix the cause and everything will be fine.” That’s been sixty years. If the root cause hasn’t been fixed over three generations, it hasn’t been found or the actions to fix it have made it worse. And absolutely no one in the mainstream would admit it or even talk about it. Until Adams spoke.
Now? There is a realization that behavior simply has to stop. People don’t care why anymore. It’s not about root causes, it’s about swift, certain, and severe justice and the outrage when that’s short-circuited. The irony is that with comments that got Adams cancelled as a racist, he may have saved many blacks.
It’s too early to tell. The backlash is large, and growing, and people are talking about it in the open, which in the end is the only way to solve a problem. You don’t solve the problems of an alcoholic by getting them more vodka, and you don’t solve the problems of a brat by giving in to them when they throw an antisocial tantrum. And if you subsidize poverty and single motherhood, you just get more of it. Does he have another act? Does he need one? He has entertained, he has been a fountain of ideas, and he has helped shape what is perhaps the most crucial social narrative of our time in the most crucial manner.
Regardless, Mr. Adams has my respect, and I wish him the very best in his last days. If he reads this, I hope that he knows that I am certainly celebrating his life. He will be missed."
“The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its more familiar outlines are seen in the brighter central region of the nebula in this impressive wide-angle view. But the composite image combines many short and long exposures to also reveal an extremely faint outer halo. At an estimated distance of 3,000 light-years, the faint outer halo is over 5 light-years across.
Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. More recently, some planetary nebulae are found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years. Visible on the left, some 50 million light-years beyond the watchful planetary nebula, lies spiral galaxy NGC 6552.”
“You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence. But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.”
"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.
"In this video, Tom O’Bedlam reads W.H. Auden’s poem “If I Could Tell You”. The poem is a villanelle that reflects on the passage of time and the fragility of human emotions and knowledge. The speaker begins by reflecting upon how time often reveals very little apart from the costs humans must pay. The poem uses simple language and refrains typical of the villanelle lyric form to meditate upon mankind’s endless search for love and meaning in spite of the relentless march of time. Above all, it is a wistful reflection on the impossibility of truly understanding and knowing the world and its purpose. Tom O’Bedlam’s heartfelt reading adds a layer of emotion to the poem that is sure to leave a lasting impression on the listener."
"One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference."
