“I’m sure I have referenced here before the poems of Grace Schulman, she who inhabits that sweet melancholy place between “the necessity and impossibility of belief.” Between, too, the necessity and impossibility of love.
Belief and love. They have so much in common, yet are as distinct as self and other. How strange that two people can hitch their lives together, on a whim, say, or wild intuition, knowing little if nothing about the other’s hiddenness, about things that even the other does not fully understand and couldn’t articulate even if he did. Blind, deaf, dumb, they leap into the future, hoping to fly, and, for a moment, soaring, like Icarus, sunward. The necessity of wax. The impossibility of wax. We “fall” in love, they say. Schulman: “We slog. We tramp the road of possibility. Give me your arm.”
"Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96,
On What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives"
by Maria Popova
“When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan observed as she beheld impermanence and transcendence at the foot of a mountain. “By the grace of random chance, funneled through nature’s laws,” the poetic physicist Brian Greene wrote in his beautiful meditation on our search for meaning in a cold cosmos, “we are here.” And then we are not.
We die. All of us - atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea - you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales and poems, with general relativity and Nina Simone. It is what puts into perspective just how fleeting and vacant and self-embittering all of our angers and blames and resentments are in the end - what beckons us, instead, to “leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.”
That is what the late, great Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924–February 21, 2020) - one of the most original, deepest-seeing poets of our time - explores with great subtlety and profundity disguised as levity in the poem “Immortality” from her final poetry collection, the Pulitzer-winning masterpiece "Alive Together"(public library).
"Immortality"
"In Sleeping Beauty’s castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
who don’t even rub their eyes.
The cook’s right hand, lifted
an exact century ago,
completes its downward arc
to the kitchen boy’s left ear;
the boy’s tensed vocal cords
finally let go
the trapped, enduring whimper,
and the fly, arrested mid-plunge
above the strawberry pie,
fulfills its abiding mission
and dives into the sweet, red glaze.
As a child I had a book
with a picture of that scene.
I was too young to notice
how fear persists, and how
the anger that causes fear persists,
that its trajectory can’t be changed
or broken, only interrupted.
My attention was on the fly;
that this slight body
with its transparent wings
and lifespan of one human day
still craved its particular share
of sweetness, a century later.
- Lisel Mueller
“Immortality” by Lisel Mueller (read by Maria Popova)
(Two centuries earlier, William Blake explored the same eternal subject though the same creature in his short existentialist poem “The Fly.”)
In the front matter of this altogether miraculous book, where an epigraph would ordinarily appear, Mueller offers a short poem that becomes a kind of chorus line for the entire collection, but emerges as an especially harmonizing counterpart to “Immortality” in particular:
on What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death"
“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote as she weighed what gives meaning to our mortal lives in a stunning poem - one of the hundreds that outlived her as she returned her borrowed stardust to the universe at ninety-six. And yet, by some felicitous deviation from logic - perhaps an adaptive imbecility essential for our mental and emotional survival, one of the touching incongruences that make us human - the moment something becomes precious to us, we quarantine the prospect of its loss in some chamber of the mind we choose not to enter. On some deep level beyond the reach of reason, we come to believe that the people we love are - must be, for the alternative is a fathomless terror - immortal.
And so, when a loved one dies, this deepest part of us grows wild with rage at the universe - a rage skinned of sensemaking, irrational and raw, unsalved by our knowledge that the entropic destiny of everything alive is to die and of everything that exists to eventually not, even the universe itself; unsalved by the the immense cosmic poetry hidden in this fact; unsalved by the luckiness of having lived at all against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise; unsalved by remembering that only because ancient archaebacteria were capable of dying, as was every organism that evolved in their wake, we and the people we love and the people we lose came to exist at all."
“The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can’t pretend we haven’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still, sometimes, we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug, until we can’t anymore, until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin meant: That knowing is better than wondering. That waking is better than sleeping. And that even the biggest failure, even the worst, most intractable mistake, beats the hell out of never trying.”
"In certain traditional societies, troublesome individuals who were perceived as threats to communal harmony were labeled as “witches.” To restore calm, accused witches were sometimes reintegrated into society via a ceremony of ritual cleansing. Other problematic people, particularly those whose socially unacceptable behavior persisted, were banished or killed. As a political entity, Israel is a witch. Its conduct is incompatible with 21st-century civilization. To whatever extent it ever had one, Israel no longer has a right to exist.
The Netanyahu government’s cynical exploitation of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, raid is the last straw. With gleeful bloodlust that appears to have no limits, Israel has intentionally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians. It has reduced a bustling territory filled with high-rises and seaside resorts to rubble. It has cruelly imposed a blockade of fuel, water and food that has resulted in outbreaks of long-vanquished diseases like polio and meningitis. It has created a manmade famine a few miles away from where Israelis gather at LGBTQ-friendly restaurants to eat rich meals and drink sweet wine fermented from grapes cultivated on the soil of occupied land.
The argument that Israel, or any other nation-state, enjoys an inherent “right to exist” has always been absurd. From ancient empires like Parthia to 20th-century constructs like Czechoslovakia, countries exist so long as they are able to establish and defend their borders. When they cannot, they vanish.
Sometimes a country becomes so troublesome to its neighbors that the global community determines that it, like an alleged witch, must be excised to achieve calm. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany’s voracious expansionism was so disruptive that rivals with economic and political systems that were diametrically opposed to the point of recently having clashed militarily, including the U.S. and the USSR, formed alliances in order to destroy them. The Napoleonic Wars united powers with conflicting interests, such as Britain (a constitutional monarchy), Russia (an autocratic empire), Austria and Prussia because the defeat of Napoleon was seen as essential to curb France’s disruptive dominance and restore regional order.
Governments often act without their people’s blessing. That is true of the stateless noncitizens of Gaza. Hamas’ last election was before most Gazans were alive.
If the government of Israel did not represent the will of its people, Israel the country could be forgiven. Israel, however, is a democracy. Netanyahu, a right-wing extremist, has been prime minister for 17-plus years over multiple terms, making him Israel’s longest-serving leader. His brutal treatment of the Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank is popular with voters. A June 2025 poll found that 76.5% of Israeli Jews “think that Israel should not take the civilian population’s suffering into account at all, or should only do so to a fairly small extent” in military planning. “Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” reports The New York Times.
Considering that the Israeli public supports the genocide in Gaza, the fact that Israel Defense Forces spokesmen dismiss media photos of starving, skeletal Palestinian children as “fake” is cause for a kind of optimism. When Netanyahu says “there is no starvation in Gaza,” at least he’s aware enough of international opinion that he feels compelled to lie.
You hear about demonstrations in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu. But those protests do not agitate against the genocide of Palestinians. Israel’s few leftists, who march against Netanyahu and the war, focus on the 20 or so remaining hostages held by Hamas, and the suffering of Israeli soldiers.
It is easy for culturally isolated Israelis, whose official language of Hebrew is spoken nowhere else on earth, to ignore their country’s war crimes. “The mainstream domestic news media has rarely provided vivid coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” notes the Times. The last surviving relic of British imperialism, Israel is an apartheid state that repeatedly ignores resolutions passed by the United Nations, which it uniquely owes for its creation, and brushes off negative public opinion in the United States, upon which it is dependent for its economic, military and diplomatic survival. Like Germany in the 1930s and ’40s, it has normalized lawlessness, dehumanized and murdered people to steal their land, and committed itself to aggressive military expansion with no end in sight.
Israel is a terminally ill society. It is cruel. It is heartless.
Unlike Germany, which was decimated at the end of World War II, accepted defeat and cleansed itself via decades of atonement for Nazism, Israel is unlikely to be militarily crushed or spiritually reborn. It has little prospect of rehabilitation.
Israel is dangerous. In the last few months alone, Israel has bombed Iran, bombed and carried out the indiscriminate pager bombings in Lebanon, further emboldened murders of Palestinian civilians by fascist “settlers” in the West Bank, and overthrown the government of Syria, where it inexplicably installed a radical ex-al-Qaeda jihadi to replace a secular leader — and then bombed Syria again. Even by the standards of the Middle East, no other player is as destabilizing or violent as Israel. How long will it be before Netanyahu or his successor uses one of Israel’s illicit nuclear weapons?
The state of Israel is a troublesome witch. It has to go. Let’s be clear. Abolishing Israel - ensuring that, from the river to the sea, Palestine is free - does not imply or necessitate the removal of any of its residents. Jews, Arabs, Christians and other groups lived peacefully side by side in Ottoman-era Palestine. The German people survived the end of Hitler and are thriving today. The Soviet people survived the 1991 collapse. So it will be for the people of the nation-state that ought to become the former State of Israel sooner rather than later."
''As Americans, we must ask ourselves: Are we really so different? Must we stereotype those who disagree with us? Do we truly believe that ALL red-state residents are ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying roadkill-eating tobacco juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks; or that ALL blue-state residents are godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts?''
"Civilization is produced by us, not by dominance hierarchies. Rulership survives on human vulnerabilities. Civilization survives on human virtues. No matter how much publicity equates rulership with civilization, they are fundamentally opposed.
The Fundamentals: As I noted recently, there are two primary models for attaining a civilized, humane, high-trust way of life:
• Cultivate civilization within people.
• Enforce civilization upon people.
In the best of the old days, governments contented themselves to deal with exterior threats, leaving any number of religions and philosophies free to cultivate civilization within the populace. Since the the 1970s, however, we’ve seen a hostile takeover of society by the state… the enforcement of moral norms by the state. Under this model, the state must enforce proper speech and personal choices; it must save us from one new terror after another. And we are expected to believe that by eliminating threat after threat, rulership is leading us to a promised land. Do you believe that? I certainly don’t, because I’ve watched it for more than half a century.
What, Then, Shall We Do? Our job is to teach the next generation what is good and right. The enforcement complex will not do this; they’ll portray themselves as the ultimate agent of goodness, as they have for the aforementioned half century. Our job, then, is to teach the things that actually build civilization: the golden rule, freedom of speech, tolerance, kindness and cooperation. Now, moving on to particular things to do:
Homeschooling excels as a way to teach civilization, simultaneously keeping children from the toxic dogmas being pumped through government schools. In the US, where the war on homeschooling remains at a fairly low level, more than 11 percent of American children are now said to be homeschooled. And so the fruits of this, while already visible, will be increasing Homeschooling works, and if one in nine of parents can do it, many more can do it as well.
Past all of this, we have Bitcoin. This is money with civilization encoded within it. Bitcoin is super-tolerant, in that censorship is very, very difficult and no one can be cut off because of their religion or anything else. More than that, Bitcoin has drawn to itself many of the most serious and morally-minded people.
What we need to do with Bitcoin is use it profligately. Bitcoin’s Lightning overlay (and dozens of Lightning-able wallets are available) accommodates any number of small purchases for trivial fees. We need to get this thing going. It’s money that supports civilization, rather than subverting it… and money is important. Silver and gold could be used similarly, of course.
And So… And so we have plenty to do. (And I haven’t mentioned things we should be doing on a daily basis, like talking to neighbors and coworkers.) As adults, we need to accept that we’re now on our own… as perhaps we’ve always been. So pick a spot and start."
EDITOR's NOTE: "I just got called out by a programmer who uses AI who was furious and wrote "students cheat, always have, tell us something we don't already know". I responded: "did you read the MIT paper or the other link?" Of course he didn't: TL/DR, which proves my point. Even the programmer admitted he has to check AI's work.
The point here is *those who received real educations can use AI because they know enough to double-check it, but the kids using AI as a substitute for real learning will never develop this capacity.* Those who actually have mastery can use AI and not realize the point I'm making isn't that AI is useless, the point is it fatally undermines real learning and thinking. The MIT paper is 206 pages long, the last section being the stats of the research, but the points it makes are truly important. So is the other article linked below."
"That AI is turning those who use it into dummies is not only self-evident, it's irrefutable. ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study "Of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.' Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study. The task was executed, and you could say that it was efficient and convenient," Kosmyna says. "But as we show in the paper, you basically didn't integrate any of it into your memory networks."
AI breaks the connection between learning and completing an academic task. With AI, students can check the box - task completed, paper written and submitted - without learning anything. And by learning we don't mean remember a factoid, we mean learning how to learn and learning how to think. As Substack writer maalvika explains in her viral essay compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting, digital technologies have compressed our attention spans via what I would term "rewarding distraction" so we can no longer read anything longer than a few sentences without wanting a summary, highlights video or sound-bite.
To understand the context - and indeed, the ultimate point of the research - we must start by understanding the structure of learning and thinking which is a complex set of processes. Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is a framework that parses out some of these processes.
Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), developed by John Sweller, provides a framework for understanding the mental effort required during learning and problem-solving. It identifies three categories of cognitive load: intrinsic cognitive load (ICL), which is tied to the complexity of the material being learned and the learner's prior knowledge; extraneous cognitive load (ECL), which refers to the mental effort imposed by presentation of information; and germane cognitive load (GCL), which is the mental effort dedicated to constructing and automating schemas that support learning.
Checking the box "task completed" teaches us nothing. Actual learning and thinking require doing all the cognitive work that AI claims to do for us: reading the source materials, following the links between these sources, finding wormholes between various universes of knowledge, and thinking through claims and assumptions as an independent critical thinker.
When AI slaps together a bunch of claims and assumptions as authoritative, we don't gain a superficial knowledge - we learn nothing. AI summarizes but without any ability to weed out questionable claims and assumptions because it has no tacit knowledge of contexts. So AI spews out material without any actual cognitive value and the student slaps this into a paper without learning any actual cognitive skills. This cognitive debt can never be "paid back," for the cognitive deficit lasts a lifetime.
Even AI's vaunted ability to summarize robs us of the need to develop core cognitive abilities. As this researcher explains, "drudgery" is how we learn and learn to think deeply as opposed to a superficial grasp of material to pass an exam.
"In Defense of Drudgery: AI is making good on its promise to liberate people from drudgery. But sometimes, exorcising drudgery can stifle innovation." "Unfortunately, this innovation stifles innovation. When humans do the drudgery of literature search, citation validation, and due research diligence - the things OpenAI claims for Deep Research - they serendipitously see things they weren't looking for. They build on the ideas of others that they hadn't considered before and are inspired to form altogether new ideas. They also learn cognitive skills including the ability to filter information efficiently and recognize discrepancies in meaning.
I have seen in my field of systems analysis where decades of researchers have cited information that was incorrect - and expanded it into its own self-perpetuating world view. Critical thinking leads the researcher to not accept the work that others took as foundational and to spot the error. Tools such as Deep Research are incapable of spotting the core truth and so will perpetuate misdirection in research. That's the opposite of good innovation."
In summary: given that AI is fundamentally incapable of performing the tasks required for authentic innovation, we're de-learning how to innovate. What we're "learning" is to substitute a superficially clever simulation of innovation for authentic innovation, and in doing so, we're losing the core cognitive skills needed to innovate. In following the easy, convenient path of AI's simulations of innovation, we are indeed "carefully falling into the cliff." But since this is all TL/DR, and there's no summary, highlights video or sound-bite, we don't even see it. So here's the TL/DR "dummies" summary of AI: AI is turning us into dummies."
"Americans are skipping car payments and the auto market collapse is accelerating fast. With $847 billion in unsold cars rotting on lots, 45% of dealerships are closing permanently. Auto loan delinquencies just hit 15-year highs as average car payments reach $750/month. The used car bubble has burst, leaving millions with underwater auto loans. Car prices are dropping but nobody can afford them anyway. US car sales are crashing, repossessions are surging. This car market crisis is just getting started. Here's what's really happening in 2025."
"We Have Zero Privacy - All Your Secrets Exposed!"
"AI is changing everything - and it’s exposing your secrets online! In this video, I break down how AI, from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to industry-specific bots, is impacting privacy, interviewing, and even your everyday life. Did you know that some AI queries containing personal details are being indexed on Google? Wild, right?! I also share insights on industries thriving with AI, like cybersecurity and health tech, while discussing the potential dangers of data misuse and even lawsuits stemming from AI's integration. From driverless cars to corporate interviews run by AI, we’re living in a rapidly evolving world."
On Friday, “gold signaled war” by exploding up $73 an ounce, up more than 2% in a matter of hours. Is the gold market seeing this nuke war talk and responding? Armstrong says, “Oh, yeah! You look at gold, and you see what is happening. Oil is pointing more towards September. Gold keeps trying to get through the highs. This is not the major high. Hate to tell you, it’s not. Gold is showing, Up. Every market I look at, it’s the same thing. We have a panic cycle, and it’s not just for war in 2026. Go to our site and look at the euro, and there is a panic cycle for 2026. It’s everywhere. Why the computer has been correct is you cannot forecast any market in isolation. You can’t. It’s all connected.”
Armstrong says you won’t have to wait until 2026 for his “Panic Cycle” to begin. His computer has long pointed to August 18, 2025, and that is about two short weeks away. Armstrong says, “Honestly, this is turning into a grade school fight. I don’t know what Trump expects. He’s hurling insult after insult, and there is no possibility of peace anymore. It’s one thing to do tariffs and sanctions against Russia. Now, he is saying we are going to put sanctions on anybody that even deals with Russia. This is economic war. It’s as simple as that. We don’t even have anyone to negotiate on behalf of the West. It’s dead, completely dead.”
Armstrong thinks neocons have built a wall around President Trump so nobody with different advice regarding NOT starting a nuke war can get through. Is Martin Armstrong being blocked by the neocons surrounding President Trump now? Armstrong says, “I believe so. I even wrote to AG Pam Bondi, and I did not get a response. I have written to presidents and heads of state, and I get responses. Not this time. This is escalating, and he (Trump) is not in a good position. I don’t know what the hell he is doing. He seems to have crossed to the other side.” There is much more in the 48-minute interview.
“The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (top right).
Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself is about 40 light-years across and a mere 300,000 years old. That makes it one of the youngest star forming regions in our sky, with newborn and embryonic stars embedded in its natal dust and gas clouds. Estimates of the distance to open star cluster M21 are similar to M20's, but though they share this gorgeous telescopic skyscape there is no apparent connection between the two. In fact, M21's stars are much older, about 8 million years old.”
Rarely, very rarely, do you stumble upon something so exquisitely well done, so astonishingly beautiful you can't believe what you're seeing. This is one of those times. Be kind to yourself, take a break from it all, view the many short works and savor this exquisitely beautiful website. Sound on for the music. Incredibly wonderful...
Stunning Meditation on Walking into the Questions of Our Becoming”
by Maria Popova
“The role of the artist, James Baldwin believed, is “to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” This, too, is the role of the forest, it occurs to me as I walk the ferned, mossed woods daily to lose my self and find myself between the trees; to “live the questions,” in Rilke’s lovely phrase – to let the rustling of the leaves beckon forth the stirrings and murmurings on the edge of the psyche, which we so often brush away in order to go on being the smaller version of ourselves we have grown accustomed to being out of the unfaced fear that the grandeur of life, the grandeur of our own untrammeled nature, might require of us more than we are ready to give.
Those disquieting, transformative stirrings are what the poet and philosopher David Whyte explores with surefooted subtlety in his poem “Sometimes,” found in his altogether life-enlarging collection “Everything Is Waiting for You” and read here by the poet himself as part of a wonderful short course of poem-driven practices for neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” meditation toolkit (which I can’t recommend enough and which operates under an inspired, honorable model of granting free subscriptions to those who need this invaluable mental health aid but don’t have the means).
"Have the official employment numbers finally achieved peak fakeness? We just got another perfect example of why so many of us have completely lost faith in the fake figures that government bureaucrats have been feeding us. For months we were told that employment was booming, but now we are being told that just the opposite is happening. So what is the truth? If you want the truth, you need to look at the numbers coming in from private sources, because the government numbers are a load of bunk.
How in the world do 258,000 jobs suddenly disappear into thin air? The BLS just revised the employment numbers for May and June by a combined total of 258,000 jobs, and this completely shocked a lot of the experts…"Nonfarm payrolls added 73,000 in July, far lower than the 100,000 expected by analysts. The unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.2 percent. The report also sharply revised down the figures for May and June by a combined 258,000 jobs from the previously released figures. Following the revision June’s total was left at just 14,000 and May’s at 19,000 - effectively flat. Analysts say July’s figure is also likely to be revised lower, possibly into negative territory."
The U.S. needs to add approximately 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. Even if these numbers were accurate, they would still be horrible.
But they aren’t accurate. I have always felt that the Household survey is at least somewhat more accurate, and it showed a loss of 260,000 jobs last month…The number was even uglier in the Household survey, which showed a drop of 260K workers in July, the 3rd biggest monthly drop of 2025.
So which is it? Did the U.S. gain 73,000 jobs last month or did we lose 260,000 jobs? I can understand why President Trump is so frustrated. The numbers are all over the place. Shortly after the employment report was released, Trump announced the firing of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics…"Hours after disappointing jobs data reflected cracks in the U.S. economy, President Trump said Friday that he planned to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, and implied on social media that she had manipulated the monthly data for political reasons."
Wow. We have never seen a president do that before. On Truth Social, Trump explained his reasoning for firing her…"I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records - No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!"
Personally, I believe that the numbers that we get from private sources give us a much truer picture of what is really going on in the economy. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. employers announced 62,075 job cuts in July. That figure is 140 percent higher than it was in July 2024…"U.S.-based employers announced 62,075 job cuts in July, up 29% from June’s 47,999. It is up 140% from 25,885 announced in the same month last year, according to a report released Thursday from global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. July’s job cuts are well above average for this month since the pandemic. From 2021 to 2024, job cut announcements in July averaged 23,584. Considering the past decade (2015-2025), last month’s announced cuts are still above the average of 60,398."
As I have been warning for months, we really are seeing widespread layoffs all over the nation. Overall, U.S. employers have announced 806,383 job cuts during the first seven months of 2025. That is a 75 percent increase over the first seven months of last year…"So far this year, companies have announced 806,383 job cuts, the highest YTD since 2020 when 1,847,696 were announced. It is up 75% from the 460,530 job cuts announced through the first seven months of last year and is up 6% from the 2024 full year total of 761,358."
Challenger, Gray & Christmas doesn’t have a political agenda to push. They are just reporting the facts. The tech industry has been getting hit particularly hard by layoffs, and many of those layoffs are “directly tied to the advent of AI”…"Of those layoffs, the technology industry wielded the sharpest axe — private companies in the sector have announced more than 89,000 job cut, up 36% from a year ago. Since 2023, more than 27,000 job cuts have been directly tied to the advent of AI, according to the firm. “The industry is being reshaped by the advancement of artificial intelligence and ongoing uncertainty surrounding work visas, which have contributed to workforce reductions,” Challenger, Gray & Christmas said."
Other numbers also confirm that the economy is rapidly moving in the wrong direction. For example, factory activity in the United States just contracted “at the fastest pace in nine months”…"US factory activity contracted in July at the fastest pace in nine months, dragged down by a faster decline in employment as orders continued to shrink. The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index decreased 1 point last month to 48, according to data released Friday. The gauge has been below 50, which indicates contraction, for five straight months.
A measure of factory employment slid to the lowest level in more than five years, suggesting producers are stepping up efforts to control costs amid higher tariffs and softer demand. Government figures this week showed sluggish consumer spending and business investment in the first half of the year."
We really do have a growing crisis on our hands. Unfortunately, what we have experienced so far is just the beginning. I fully expect economic conditions to deteriorate significantly by the end of 2025. So hold on tight and don’t let go, because things are about to get a lot crazier."
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
- Vishnu, the Bhagavad-Gita
"Bhagavad-gita is knowledge of five basic truths and the relationship of each truth to the other: These five truths are Krishna, or God, the individual soul, the material world, action in this world, and time. The Gita lucidly explains the nature of consciousness, the self, and the universe. It is the essence of India's spiritual wisdom, the answers to questions posed by philosophers for centuries. In translating the Gita, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada has remained loyal to the intended meaning of Krishna's words, and thus he has unlocked all the secrets of the ancient knowledge of the Gita and placed them before us as an exciting opportunity for self-improvement and spiritual fulfillment. The Gita is a conversation between Krishna and His dear friend Arjuna. At the last moment before entering a battle between brothers and friends, the great warrior Arjuna begins to wonder: Why should he fight? What is the meaning of his life? Where is he going after death? In response, Krishna brings His friend from perplexity to spiritual enlightenment, and each one of us is invited to walk the same path."
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