“We'll know our disinformation program is complete
when everything the American public believes is false.”
- William Casey, former director of the CIA
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Saturday, July 5, 2025
Free Download: Richard Bach, "Illusions"
“Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah”
by Richard Bach
“We are all free to do whatever we want to do,” he said that night. “Isn’t that simple and clean and clear? Isn’t that a great way to run a universe?” “Almost. You forgot a pretty important part,” I said. “Oh?” “We are all free to do what we want to do, as long as we don’t hurt somebody else,” I chided. “I know you meant that, but you ought to say what you mean.”
There was a sudden shambling sound in the dark, and I looked at him quickly. “Did you hear that?” “Yeah. Sounds like there’s somebody…” He got up, walked into the dark. He laughed suddenly, said a name I couldn’t catch. “It’s OK,” I heard him say. “No, we’d be glad to have you… no need you standing around… come on, you’re welcome, really…”
The voice was heavily accented, not quite Russian, nor Czech, more Transylvanian. “Thank you. I do not wish to impose myself upon your evening…” The man he brought with him to the firelight was, well, he was unusual to find in a midwest night. A small lean wolflike fellow, frightening to the eye, dressed in evening clothes, a black cape lined in red satin, he was uncomfortable in the light.
“I was passing by,” he said. “The field is a shortcut to my house…” “Is it?” Shimoda did not believe the man, knew he was lying, and at the same time did all he could to keep from laughing out loud. I hoped to understand before long.
“Make yourself comfortable,” I said. “Can we help you at all?” I really didn’t feel that helpful, but he was so shrinking, I did want him to be at ease, if he could. He looked on me with a desperate smile that turned me to ice. “Yes, you can help me. I need this very much or I would not ask. May I drink your blood? Just some? It is my food, I need human blood…”
Maybe it was the accent, he didn’t know English that well or I didn’t understand his words, but I was on my feet quicker than I had been in many a month, hay flying into the fire from my quickness. The man stepped back. I am generally harmless, but I am not a small person and I could have looked threatening. He turned his head away. “Sir, I am sorry! I am sorry! Please forget that I said anything about blood! But you see…”
“What are you saying?” I was the more fierce because I was scared. “What in the hell are you saying, mister? I don’t know what you are, are you some kind of VAM-?” Shimoda cut me off before I could say the word. “Richard, our guest was talking, and you interrupted. Please go ahead, sir; my friend is a little hasty.” “Donald,” I said, “this guy…” “Be quiet!” That surprised me so much that I was quiet, and looked a sort of terrified question at the man, caught from his native darkness into our firelight.
“Please to understand. I did not choose to be born vampire. Is unfortunate. I do not have many friends. But I must have a certain small amount of fresh blood every night or I writhe in terrible pain, longer than that without it and I cannot live! Please, I will be deeply hurt – I will die – if you do not allow me to suck your blood… just a small amount, more than a pint I do not need.” He advanced a step toward me, licking his lips, thinking that Shimoda somehow controlled me and would make me submit.
“One more step and there will be blood, all right. Mister, you touch me and you die…” I wouldn’t have killed him, but I did want to tie him up, at least, before we talked much more. He must have believed me, for he stopped and sighed. He turned to Shimoda. “You have made your point?” “I think so. Thank you.”
The vampire looked up at me and smiled, completely at ease, enjoying himself hugely, an actor on stage when the show is over. “I won’t drink your blood, Richard,” he said in perfect friendly English, no accent at all. As I watched he faded as though he was turning out his own light… in five seconds he had disappeared.
Shimoda sat down again by the fire. “Am I ever glad you don’t mean what you say!” I was still trembling with adrenalin, ready for my fight with a monster. “Don, I’m not sure I’m built for this. Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on. Like, for instance, what… was that?”
“Dot was a wompire from Tronsylwania,” he said in words thicker than the creature’s own. “Or to be more precise, dot was a thought-form of a wompire from Tronsylwania. If you ever want to make a point, you think somebody isn’t listening, whip ‘em up a little thought-form to demonstrate what you mean. Do you think I overdid him, with the cape and the fangs and the accent like that? Was he too scary for you?”
“The cape was first class, Don. But that was the most stereotyped, outlandish… I wasn’t scared at all.” He sighed. “Oh well. But you got the point, at least, and that’s what matters.”
“What point?” “Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt somebody else. He even told you he’d be hurt if…”
“He was going to suck my blood!” “Which is what we do to anyone when we say we’ll be hurt if they don’t live our way.”
I was quiet for a long time, thinking about that. I had always believed that we are free to do as we please only if we don’t hurt another, and this didn’t fit. There was something missing.
“The thing that puzzles you,” he said, “is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he’d be hurt if you didn’t let him? That’s his decision to be hurt, that’s his choice. What you do about it is your decision, your choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake of holly through his heart. If he doesn’t want the holly stake, he’s free to resist, in whatever way he wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices.”
“When you look at it that way…”
“Listen,” he said, “it’s important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.“
o
"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood,
but of respect and joy in each other's life.
Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."
o
Freely download “Illusions” here:
“Born in 1936, Richard Bach is an American author who has written many excellent books. His quotes are inspirational and motivational. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull;” “Illusions;” “The Bridge Across Forever;” to name only a few of his books."
Notice: This electronic version of the book has been released for educational purposes only. You may not sell or make any profit from this book. And if you like this book, buy a paper copy and give it to someone who does not have a computer, if that is possible for you.
"Our Natural Predators"
"Our Natural Predators"
by Paul Rosenberg
"Nearly every creature upon this planet has one or more natural predators: creatures that prey upon them. Humans seem to be 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 and 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: 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. Beside that, we all know from experience that they work. And people will 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 person. 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 had to get his arrows from somewhere, 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, we won’t repair it.
We’ve already covered the basic vulnerabilities above, and I won’t dig into further discussion on that. 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 riding upon 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.
“He was going to suck my blood!” “Which is what we do
to anyone when we say we’ll be hurt if they don’t live our way.”
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."
“There Is No Safety You Dumb Bit*h”
“There Is No Safety You Dumb Bit*h” - The Hound
By Joe Jarvis
"Take heed of The Hound’s warning, and let it free you. There is no guarantee of a job or safety net, there is no absolute security from evil doers, and there is only so much you can do to prevent accidents and illness. The silver lining is that recognizing this is the best way to cushion yourself from the vulnerabilities of an unpredictable world.
Brienne of Tarth, in "Game of Thrones", nobly intends to uphold an oath she swore to Lady Stark to keep her children safe. But she is also a bit naive about the nature of the world in which she lives. Brienne thinks she can bring Arya to a safe place, wherever that is. But as The Hound so eloquently reminds her: “There is no safety you dumb bit*h. And if you don’t know that by now, you’re the wrong one to watch over her.”
If Brienne thinks she can ever let her guard down, or relax, she will never be safe. There is no destination at which point she and Arya will be ultimately secure. It just does not exist. And Sandor Clegane - The Hound - is right; if Brienne of Tarth cannot understand this basic fact about the world, she is the wrong person to be watching over Arya.
The Hound’s negative view on the danger in the world actually leaves him less vulnerable. He never expects to be safe, and is therefore safer because he is alert to danger.
As rough as the Hound is, Arya was in fact safe the entire time she was with him. This was no guarantee, it’s just how it happened, mostly due to the fact that The Hound knows is being constantly vigilant against danger. And although Brienne’s goal is to make Arya even safer, she instead severely wounds the person protecting Arya. Brienne incorrectly judges The Hound to be a danger to Arya, and then fails to secure Arya, leaving her more defenseless than she had been previously.
Brienne’s actions actually prove The Hound’s point. Brienne’s belief that she could bring Arya to safety created a dangerous situation that could have been avoided if she only realized that safety is a constant effort, and not a destination.
But Should We Really Apply a Lesson From a Fake Story in a Mythical Setting? In the modern world we are much safer than humans were in the middle ages. And in the real world there are certain things we don’t have to worry about, like white-walkers and dragons. But unfortunately we do still have to contend with the likes of Cersi and the Lannisters, the Ramsy Boltons, and the treacherous Freys all playing their part in our world’s own “Game of Thrones”. In our lives, they are usually less murdery and slightly more subtle in their elitist desire for domination.
The lesson however remains: there is no guarantee of safety (you dumb bit*h). But before you think I am being gloomy and pessimistic, consider the gift of understanding this. In the pursuit of the ultimate goal of “safety” we expose ourselves and society to all sorts of dangers.
For instance, even assuming the US government had the best intentions over last two decades of drone bombing the Middle East, to supposedly make us more safe, all it really did was create more terrorists. When innocent civilians get murdered by the USA’s bombs, their friends and family become radicalized. Would there still be terrorists and crazy people without all that provocation? Yes, I’m sure. But the numbers would most likely be lower, and we could focus on actual defense.
And even if we assume, for example, that the PATRIOT Act and indefinite detainment clause in the NDAA were passed with the best intentions of targeting terrorists, they has made our own government a much greater threat with the powers they granted. The people who advocate gun control, strict Covid lockdowns, or a government safety net are like Brienne of Tarth, making us less safe because they misunderstand the inherent danger that life carries with it.
If other people take away our agency to respond decide what are the biggest threats facing us, or force us to respond to those threats in a particular way, they will inevitably put us in more danger. That is especially true if they suffer no consequences for their decisions. For example if the people who ban guns can afford to hire private security, then what difference does it make to them if you can’t protect yourself when your home is invaded?
We like to imagine a perfect society in which we are secure, safe, comfortable, and just generally all set, happily ever after. But the desire for a finish line is elusive. We can make ourselves robust against threats, or even anti-fragile so that we could gain from disorder, as Nicholas Nassim Taleb says. But even this requires maintenance and vigilance. You always have to be understanding new threats, and preparing more options which you can choose to exercise, depending on what happens next.
And this goes as much for economics as for physical safety. Don’t expect Social Security to be there for you, have a backup plan. There is no guarantee that any one currency will always stay stable, valuable, or even continue to exist. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, including streams of income, and the skills you have to earn a living.
At the end of the day, safety comes down to vigilance. Unless you are constantly on alert to those things which threaten your safety, you will be taken by surprise. It doesn’t really matter if the person making you less safe is the well meaning but naive Brienne of Tarth or the calculating power hungry Cersi Lannister.
Cersi, in a sense, is safer to be around, because you understand that she is dangerous, and can protect yourself. But how can you protect yourself from someone who thinks they have your best interests at heart, whether you like it or not?
Some people will have noble goals and try to force you into their “safe” world that they have flawlessly designed for security. Their ignorance makes you just as vulnerable as Cersi’s malevolence. Others will offer us safety, utopia, and ultimate security that we can just accept and then forget about. This will lead us down a path of vulnerability.
Whether those who lure you into the false sense of security are doing so because their goals are noble, or because their motives are nefarious hardly matters. We must each be at liberty to look after our own safety.
Arya, for example, had chosen to stick around The Hound and benefit from the safety he provided. When he was incapacitated, she could have chosen to be protected by Brienne, but instead she chose to go it alone, and protect herself. She ultimately became much more capable for it. And that is essentially the option we all need if we hope to make the world a safer place.
We should be able to choose our own government - and not just from the 200 or so very similar, subpar options currently available. And we should also be able to choose to go it alone, or create our own society, if we don’t like the options available. The ability to take our business elsewhere, without threat or force, will create a market for the best protection against various threats, which will improve the variety and quality of the services offered."
○
Strong language alert.
"We Need To Talk About Why The Dollar Is Dying And How The Employment Numbers Are Being Manipulated"
"We Need To Talk About Why The Dollar Is Dying
And How The Employment Numbers Are Being Manipulated"
by Michael Snyder
"Why can’t we just be objective about the economic numbers? When Joe Biden was in the White House, many Republicans (including Donald Trump) used the word “fake” to describe the economic numbers that the federal government was putting out. And as I documented extensively throughout the Biden administration, the rosy economic numbers that we were getting from the federal government certainly diverged greatly from reality. But now that Biden is out of the White House, we are suddenly supposed to believe that the federal economic numbers that are being calculated by the exact same people as before are somehow legit? Come on. If the government was giving us “fake” economic numbers six months ago, they are still giving us “fake” economic numbers today. As I will discuss below, the same absurd “adjustments” that were being made during the Biden administration are still being made now.
Just yesterday, I wrote about how non-government numbers are showing that the labor market in the U.S. is dramatically shifting. But then the BLS released their employment report for last month, and we are being told to just forget what all of the other numbers are telling us…"Job growth proved better than expected in June, boosted by government hiring, as the labor market showed surprising resilience and likely took a July interest rate cut off the table. Nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 147,000 for the month, higher than the estimate for 110,000 and just above the upwardly revised 144,000 in May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday."
The people that are running around proclaiming that this is “great news” don’t even understand what they are talking about. First of all, we need to create approximately 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So even if this report was accurate, which it is not, it would indicate that we are simply treading water. That is not exactly something to celebrate.
Secondly, it is important to understand that the “147,000 new jobs” figure was only arrived at after a number of assumptions and adjustments were applied to the raw data.I asked Google AI to tell me about how government economic numbers are manipulated, and this is what I was told…
1. Seasonal Adjustment: This adjustment removes the effects of recurring seasonal events, like weather patterns or holidays, from economic data. For example, the BLS uses the X-12-ARIMA method (and now X-13ARIMA-SEATS) to seasonally adjust many of its series. This allows for a clearer picture of underlying trends and makes it easier to compare data across different months. Seasonal adjustments are applied to various reports, including the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Current Employment Statistics (CES).
2. Birth/Death Adjustments: These adjustments account for the fact that BLS surveys primarily include businesses already in operation, and may miss new businesses (births) or businesses that have closed (deaths). The BLS uses historical data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) to estimate the impact of these births and deaths on employment and other economic measures. For example, the CES uses birth/death adjustments to better reflect the total number of jobs in the economy.
3. Population Control Adjustments: The BLS household survey uses population controls as benchmarks for its estimates. These controls are based on population estimates derived from the decennial census and are updated annually. These adjustments are made to reflect changes in the population since the last census, including births, deaths, and net international migration. For example, the January estimates for the household survey include these annual population control adjustments.
4. Quality Adjustments: These adjustments are made to account for changes in the quality of goods and services, particularly in the CPI and PPI. For example, if a new car has improved safety features, the price of the new car might be higher, but it’s also of higher quality. The BLS uses techniques like hedonic quality adjustments to isolate the price change due to the quality improvement and remove it from the price index. This ensures that the CPI and PPI are measuring “pure” price change and not changes due to quality differences.
I am particularly critical of the birth/death adjustments. Each month, the BLS simply estimates the number of jobs that are being created by new businesses and adds that to the total. Many have pointed out that the number that they come up with out of thin air is often way too high. That is just one of the reasons why it has become so difficult to get a negative number.
Conditions have to be really, really bad in order for the BLS to report that the U.S. is actually losing jobs. In fact, the last time we had a negative number was in 2020 during the early days of the COVID pandemic. It is a rigged game, and even the Washington Post is openly admitting that government statisticians are starting “to rely more on statistical estimates than hard data”…"U.S. policymakers are increasingly anxious about the integrity of certain government benchmarks, the crucial data points that help the Federal Reserve assess the economy’s health and guide interest rate decisions.
The problems have led staff at certain agencies to rely more on statistical estimates than hard data, potentially fueling volatility in benchmarks, particularly for inflation readings from the Labor Department. Falling response rates to government surveys, coupled with pandemic-driven seasonal quirks and long-standing budget strains, have made it harder to collect and analyze reliable data - including for an employment report due Thursday. Agencies have also shed staff through early retirements, deferred resignations and normal attrition."
And the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics is warning that the numbers that we are being given by our own government are becoming increasingly shaky…"Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the quality of U.S. economic data is becoming increasingly shaky just as the country faces major shifts from trade, immigration and other policy changes - a time when better investment in data is needed. Among multiple worrying trends, he pointed to the combined 95,000 downward revisions, announced last month, to job gains in April and March, an outsize number of revisions that could be at least partly driven by ongoing strains at the Labor Department. “There’s no smoking gun, yet, but there is smoke,” he said."
Personally, I lost faith in government economic numbers long ago. As I discussed yesterday, I am convinced that the economic numbers that we are getting from private sources are far more reliable. And those numbers clearly paint a picture of an economy that is crumbling.
We are a nation that is absolutely drowning in debt. Meanwhile, the housing market is in a depressed state due to high interest rates, employers are conducting mass layoffs all over the nation, our cost of living crisis never seems to end, and the global trade war is causing all sorts of chaos for U.S. businesses. The rest of the world can see what is happening, and they are losing confidence in our currency.
The value of our currency has now fallen for six consecutive months, and it is being reported that the U.S. dollar is “suffering its worst start to a year in more than five decades”…"The United States dollar is suffering its worst start to a year in more than five decades, likely triggering a price hike for some everyday items and a jump in expenses faced by travelers abroad, some analysts told ABC News." The greenback has fallen more than 10% in value this year relative to a group of foreign currencies that belong to top U.S. trading partners.
Investors have fled U.S. dollars out of fear inflation could devalue the currency, especially as Congress has moved forward with a large spending bill set to worsen a decades-long trend of ballooning U.S. debt, analysts said. This is something that government statisticians cannot spin.
Our currency is steadily getting weaker, and that means that we are steadily losing purchasing power…At home, a bigger concern is inflation, and lost purchasing power for U.S. consumers and businesses, who still remain heavily reliant on imports. Until America is able to sustainably produce more goods on its own at higher volumes, purchasing power will decline as it becomes relatively more expensive to import goods from abroad.
In the meantime, analysts say, a more alarming trend may be taking root: Foreigners are no longer buying U.S. financial assets, like stocks and bonds, at the levels that have allowed the U.S. to finance its trade deficit in the first place. Don’t be fooled. The U.S. economy is definitely not in good shape. If it was, the value of the U.S. dollar would not be dropping like a rock."
Gregory Mannarino, "An Undeniable Truth: Zombies Are Real..."
"An Undeniable Truth: Zombies Are Real..."
by Gregory Mannarino
The United States Is Now The Largest Zombie Corporation On Earth: The term “zombie corporation” has been around a while, and it was once used to describe private companies that can no longer survive without constant infusions of debt. Companies that are effectively dead, but still moving… feeding only on borrowed money and artificial lifelines. But today…
This is America….It Borrows to Survive: The US government spends trillions more than it takes in through taxes every year. Like a zombie, it consumes without producing any surplus. Its lifeblood is debt issuance/expansion and not productivity. (Now we can all point fingers at a particular political party and say they did/are doing this… but how about our own accountability? Have we not allowed this to happen? And continue to do so even now?) But why do we allow this? That is the real question…
You want to know why we allow this to happen? Because we all know that It Can’t Stop or It Dies… and that means YOU lose everything. And so, we allow this to continue while at the same time allowing, and even calling upon the system itself, to slowly consume us. Make no mistake, America is dying… its rotting from the top down.
An Undeniable Truth… Zombies Are Real: The US economy is now structurally dependent on vast debt expansion. If the government were to stop borrowing, stop spending, or stop expanding credit, the illusion of prosperity would collapse instantly. Just like a zombie corporation’s stock might rise on “hope” and “perception,” the US dollar and the markets float on “hope” alone… propped up only by expanding debt. Therefore… There is no foundation to build on.
“Hope” has been sold off like a commodity as of late, and it goes like this.. “We Need A Weaker Dollar” because this will allow the US to compete in global trade. This is “hope” has been commercialized, propagandized, and sold off to an unknowing public. Even if the remaining 4% of the dollar purchasing power were removed, (as the US dollar has already lost 96% of its’s purchasing power already), the world is not going to rush out jumping for joy to buy American made products. Moreover, the mechanism of artificially suppressed rates and currency devaluation is the rot in the system which is responsible for the US industrial engine, its factories/manufacturing, falling deeper into contraction.
You want to fix this? The purchasing power must be returned to the currency! Not taken away. So what is really behind this? A weaker dollar/lower rates means more debt must be created to further zombify a system which is already dead…So who wins? The Federal Reserve. The more debt any central bank is allowed to create, or is called on to issue, (lower rates/weaker dollar), the exponentially stronger they become. (The single goal of every central bank is the same; to become both the lender and buyer of last resort, to own it all…)
Just as every zombie corporation cannibalizes resources to service their debt. Likewise, America’s fiscal machine is now predatory, pushing click - the Cantillon Effect into overdrive.
• Money creation benefits the 1% first.
• The working class pays through inflation.
• Wealth is extracted from the bottom up.
•The people themselves feed the zombie.
As a result of planetary debt expansion, stock markets further disconnect from reality… not because of strength, but because debt expansion acts as artificial stimulus. Spending bills, rate cuts, backdoor liquidity, dollar devaluation. These aren't signs of life they’re symptoms of decay.
• No political party will reverse course.
• No candidate will shrink the debt.
• No treasury secretary will pull back spending.
This zombie, the longer it walks, the more it destroys… Whatever is left of the USA, its economy, its industrial engine, its middle class will be consumed by this zombie. The United States of America is no longer a functioning sovereign entity. It is the largest zombie corporation on Earth."
Musical Interlude: Johnny Cash, "Battle Hymn Of The Republic"
Johnny Cash, "Battle Hymn Of The Republic"
Friday, July 4, 2025
Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Along The High Ridges"
Full screen recommended.
Deuter, "Along The High Ridges"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth's sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula's central regions.
In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light."
"When We Walk To The Edge..."
“When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take a step into
the darkness of unknown, we must believe one of two things will happen.
There will be something solid to stand on, or we will be taught how to fly.”
- Patrick Overton
Adventures With Danno, "Aldi Drops Prices On 100's Of Items"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/4/25
"Aldi Drops Prices On 100's Of Items"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Different Russia, 7/4/25
"What Does A Typical Russian Shopping Plaza Look Like?"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "Stopping At BUC-EE'S In Texas Today; Business Is Booming; Government Jobs Boom, Private Sector Plunge"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 7/4/25
"Stopping At BUC-EE'S In Texas Today; Business Is Booming;
Government Jobs Boom, Private Sector Plunge"
Comments here:
The Poet: Rolf Jacobsen, "When They Sleep"
"When They Sleep"
"All people are children when they sleep.
There's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
God, teach me the language of sleep."
- Rolf Jacobsen,
"The Roads Have Come to an End Now"
"Whiskey And Car Keys..."
"Giving money and power to government is like
giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
- P.J. O'Rourke
Jim Kunstler, "The Fourth of July"
"The Fourth of July"
by Jim Kunstler
"I can negotiate with a man who wants to make money.
I can't negotiate with a communist who wants to kill me."
- Josh Lippincott on "X"
"O, Norman Rockwell, where are you when we really need you? Forgive us, Emma Lazarus, our second thoughts about those huddled masses yearning to breathe free...the wretched refuse of your teeming shore(s). That was then and this is now. O, beautiful for spacious skies (but, why so many contrails criss-crossing overhead from the New York Island to the gulf stream waters?). O, land of tattooed grandmas, hostages of the tiny screens, the sexually confounded, the illiterate and innumerate, the lawless and the feckless, brainwashed youth marinated in Marx, the deranged, befuddled, the bought-off, the bug-eyed and bewildered, the lame, the halt, the addicts, grifters, hustlers, porn-stars, drugstore cowboys, alpha dogs, beta boys, shrieking Karens, and sundry victims of future-shock - wither, this hallowed experiment in nationhood?
Wouldn’t you like to know? In the meantime, husk that corn and flip them burgers! Turn them wieners! Mash your guacamole, pop another frostie, pass the Jack, lock-and-load, and mind those hovering drones! It is the 249th birthday of what remains of our country! Respect and thanks, ye ancestors!
At least, there is Mr. Trump in command now, not Norman Bates’s mother (or whatever decrepitating thing pretended to rule from the White House those previous four years of anarchy and agony). Daddy’s in da house - finally! - and things are being put in order against all odds. Yeah, you’re gonna clean up your damn room, or else! For many, this is a yuge relief. The rest of you, with your “No Kings” fake revolution, your Antifa monkey business, your mean girl psychodramas, your trans psychosis, your childless despair, your occult Gramscian schemes of destruction - please report back to the margins, where you belong.
The struggle to get normal again is epic and harsh. And, of course, many will deny that there ever was such a state of being, of minding your business in the purest sense of the phrase, acting like responsible, self-respecting, autonomous adults. In the immortal words of Aimee Mann, better wise-up. Childhood ends; something else begins. Take yourself seriously for a change, but keep your heart light, ready for the jokes that travail always presents. After all, nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
To get back to normal, to shed the burden of absurdities we’ve been heaped with, requires an accounting. You know this. Matter of fact, the absence of such an accounting has been bugging you no end. A whole lot of pain and suffering was inflicted across this land in recent years and barely a soul has had to do any ‘splainin’. It rankles badly. When, if ever, will these vicious, seditionist goons who turned the nation inside-out and upside-down be compelled to sit at the defendant’s table in a court of law?
I have a theory. The right dawgs, you well-know, have been in position for months. They understand the conspiracy hatched ten years ago through-and-through. Mr. Patel, remember, ran Chairman Devon Nunes investigation of the nascent RussiaRussiaRussia hoax in 2017 as senior counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and helped draft the “Nunes Letter,” much abused by the perfidious news media, that laid out the plot by Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Obama & Company to smother Donald Trump’s newborn presidency in its crib.
Through some alchemy of mass political psychosis, that conspiracy has rolled on for a whole decade, one malice-driven prank after another. It continues to this day, an evermore rearguard action conducted by Deep state rogues and their public mouthpiece, Norm Eisen of Lawfare, Inc. Dan Bongino, now at Mr. Patel’s right-hand, chronicled that long march of treason in several books while he conducted daily podcast discourses on the workings of it all. “Remember the names,” he always said. Danny Boombatz remembers the names.
Normality, with all its own problems and hazards, demands that accounting for crimes and insults against the people of this sore-beset Republic. That fateful accounting is the one element missing in all of Mr. Trump’s implacable “winning” of the past five months. Those remembered names fester like an abscessed wound in America’s body politic. That wound must be cleaned, irrigated, debrided, and dressed in judicial process that restores the probity and honor of our much-abused law.
My theory is that a whole lot of other matters had to be cleared out of the way first. And now, that is pretty much where we’re at. Mr. Ratcliffe, formerly Director of National Intelligence (in Trump One) and now Director of the CIA, also knows all the names. He’s been as quiet as a tick on a wild hog lo these many months, but on Wednesday he issued quite a squawk, in the public arena of X, no less, along with a report by trusted agency colleagues titled (nontoxically) Tradecraft Review 2016 ICA on Election Interference 062625.
 |
This fateful report, which lays out the originating crime, should commence the more general institutional accounting so overdue. It’s coming. Cases are being laid and made quietly in the background. Cases will be brought. The insults will be redressed. Derangement will slip away like that quicksilver mirage on a desert highway. The inordinate division of recent years will go with it. We will allow ourselves to be a people again, one nation under God, as the old chestnut goes. Next year, on our country’s 250th birthday, there will be a special reason to celebrate. For now, patience and fortitude."
Bill Bonner, "Scott Bessent's Big, Beautiful, Budget Abomination"
US Treasury Department, Washington DC
"Scott Bessent's Big, Beautiful, Budget Abomination"
by Bill Bonner
"We are going to have to have some kind of a grand global
economic reordering.I'd like to be a part of it. I've studied this."
- US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
Youghal, Ireland - "The die is cast. The deal is sealed. We’re on our way to national bankruptcy - whee! "Trump Wins Broad Economic Policy Shift as House Passes Tax Bill." It’s deficits as far as the eye can see...followed by money-printing, inflation, and chaos - practically guaranteed.
But wait. Scott Bessent is the ‘adult’ in the financial room. He supported John McCain. He supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Now, he supports Donald Trump. Why? What’s he up to? We don’t know, but the stated reasons for the Big, Beautiful Budget Abomination (BBBA) are nonsense. It is supposed to ‘stimulate’ the economy into producing so much growth that debt won’t matter. We’re going to see ‘growth like we’ve never seen growth before,’ says POTUS. We know that won’t work. The US economy got more stimulus in this century than ever before. But GDP growth rates are still only half those of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
We’ve already established that spending by the government decreases real wealth. Bessent must know that. And today, we’ll look at what happens when the feds try to boost GDP - by stimulating growth in the private sector.
The BBBA program is similar to Japan’s ‘Three Arrows’ scheme that went live in 2013. It was Bessent who proposed it and designed it. Japan’s three arrows were meant to stimulate the Japanese economy out of its 20-year funk. The arrows - increases in government spending, lower interest rates (more debt) and Quantitative Easing (more printing press money) - went flying in 2013. Since then, in dollar terms, Japan’s economy has lost nearly a third of its GDP.
(A little mentioned detail. Scott Bessent, now US Secretary of the Treasury, used to work as a fund manager for George Soros. In 2013, he made a big bet that the yen would go down. The trade reportedly made $1.2 billion in profit in 90 days.)
Economists wondered how Japan could continue borrowing, spending and building up the world’s biggest pile of government debt as the economy shrank. Now we know; it couldn’t. Japan faces a credit crack up. It has government debt two and a half times greater than its GDP…and the cost of borrowing is going up. Global Financial Market Review: "Japanese Bond Yields Reach 16-Year High As Global Sell-Off Intensifies."
When the feds try to stimulate the economy by spending more money (running deficits) the result is wealth destruction, not wealth creation. Resources are thrown away on unproductive, unprofitable and unwise expenses. The feds don’t know or really care whether or not their programs have real value. And even when the goals are laudable, they can’t control costs and can’t operate efficiently.
And, the more of a society’s resources that are spent on the feds’ projects, the less is left for everything else. Government borrowing in the US now ‘crowds out’ private borrowing almost completely. Private savings are about 7% of GDP; US government deficits - also around 7% of GDP - take up almost all of it.
The result is a lack of capital investment, with a general softening of useful output throughout the whole economy. Government spending doesn’t make us wealthier, even when the actual work is done by private companies. Private enterprises can deliver goods and services at a profit. No doubt, Krupp, BMW, and I.G. Farben made good money during WWII. But doing the devil’s work does not exactly make people better off, even when it is done well.
But in addition to more spending, Scott Bessant’s BBBA has two other arrows - less government regulation and lower interest rates Turning to his second arrow, lowering .barriers to output ought to boost ‘growth.’ Private industry ought to flourish, producing things people really want...at a profit. But there’s a catch.
It is already late in the empire cycle. The elites have more power than ever; they don’t want to give it up. Democrats and Republicans now both favor the ‘supply side/abundance’ creed, but only insofar as it helps them get what they want. They are not taking away regulations that free up the economy, generally.
Instead, they favor certain industries and punish others. Republicans reduce regulations on the oil industry, for example, so it can ‘drill baby drill.’ But then they want to regulate who sells oil, to whom, and at what price. Democrats say they will reduce the regulations that keep them from putting in railroads, ‘sustainable’ power plants, and “affordable housing.” But they want to tighten up rules on the environment, housing, and employment.
The Wall Street Journal illustrates how this degenerate ‘government of men,’ as opposed to a ‘government of laws,’ operates: "Trump and his advisers said they would explore new tariffs on parts used in wind turbines, and potentially slow permitting for some renewable-energy projects, according to lawmakers. The offer was aimed at placating Republicans who were angry that the Senate gave wind and solar-energy projects more time to start construction before becoming ineligible for tax credits."
In other words, the feds are still at it - central planning; they are regulating/deregulating to achieve specific outcomes, not to let ‘The People’ pursue happiness in their own way with their own money. Next week, we’ll look at the third arrow in Bessent’s Big Bet quiver – lower interest rates. Stay tuned. And Happy Fourth of July!"
"The Secret Plan to Control Your Money While You Were Distracted"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 7/4/25
"The Secret Plan to Control Your
Money While You Were Distracted"
"Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are set to change everything, and not for the better. In this video, I break down how CBDCs could destroy your freedom, offering proof with real examples and stories. From regional banks struggling to keep up with technology to companies like Circle Internet Group aiming to control the digital dollar, I lay it all out for you. Imagine a future where your spending, travel, and even diet are dictated by centralized systems. Scary, right? This isn’t just a theory, it’s happening now."
Comments here:
"How It Really Is"
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete
when everything the American public believes is false."
- CIA Director William J. Casey.
Happy 4th Of July!
Have a safe and happy 4th of July folks!
Full screen recommended.
John Philip Sousa, "The Stars And Stripes Forever"
o
Ray Charles, "America The Beautiful"
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)