Chet Raymo, “Awww…”

“Awww…”

by Chet Raymo

“In one of his always delightful essays, Stephen Jay Gould traced the “evolution” of Mickey Mouse from the time of his creation by Disney, in 1928, to the mouse we know today. The early Mickey was a bit of a rascal – mischievous, occasionally cruel. And he looked more or less like a real adult mouse: small head in proportion to body, pointy nose compared to cranial vault, beady eyes, spindly legs. As time passed, Mickey’s personality softened and his appearance changed. Head and cranium became enlarged, eyes grew to half the size of the face, limbs got pudgier. Gould elucidated the evolutionary principle behind Mickey’s transformation: It is called neoteny, or progressive juvenilization.

Mickey became a national symbol, and Americans like their national symbols cute and cuddly. Mickey’s chronological age did not change, but he developed babyish features. To explain these perhaps unconscious developments on the part of Disney’s artists, Gould referred to the work of animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz, who believed that juvenile facial and body features release “innate triggering mechanisms” for affection and nurturing in adult humans. The adaptive value of this response is obvious, since the nurturing of young is necessary for survival of the species. According to Lorenz, evolution has provided us with a caring response to juvenile features, a genetically-programmed reaction that apparently overflows onto other species. If Lorenz is right, teddy bears and Andy Pandas are beneficiaries of our innate nurturing response to big eyes, round craniums, and pudgy limbs. Mickey Mouse evolved juvenile features in response to our evolved preference for all things cute and cuddly.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"And I Ask..."

 

"You Know..."

"You know, we never see the world exactly as it is. We see it as we hope it will be or we fear it might be. And we spend our lives going through a sort of modified stages of grief about that realization. And we deny it, and then we argue with it, and we despair over it. But eventually, and this is my belief, we come to see it, not as despairing, but as vitalizing. We never see the world exactly as it is because we are how the world is."

- Maria Popova

"It Is Common To Assume..."

"It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge."

- H. L. Mencken

o

Several generations...

o

o

The Daily "Near You?"

Weatherford, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Linguistic Kill-Switch: Inside the Modern Propaganda Playbook"

"The Linguistic Kill-Switch: 

Inside the Modern Propaganda Playbook"

by Nick Giambruno

"The next time someone sneers “conspiracy theorist,” “anti-vaxxer,” “climate denier,” “far right,” “hate speech,” “terrorist,” or the ever-popular “racist,” understand what they are really saying: stop thinking. These words are a linguistic kill-switch—engineered to short-circuit thought by triggering a reflexive emotional spasm. If you encounter someone using these words, you can be certain you are not dealing with someone interested in a good faith effort to find the truth.

These terms are precision-guided psychological weapons, fired by unseen hands to herd the public mind. Recall the CIA’s own 1967 memo coining “conspiracy theorist” expressly to silence anyone doubting the magic-bullet fairy tale that supposedly killed JFK. Although they are a poor substitute for an actual argument, these propaganda terms unfortunately work on many people. Call someone one of these words and you no longer need to refute their ideas with facts, logic, or reason. The slur does the work like magic.

Take the granddaddy of all elastic scare-labels: terrorism. One hundred years ago the word barely existed. Today it vaporizes civil liberties on contact. Glenn Greenwald nailed it: the T-word is “simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon.” The only difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is who controls the narrative.

Greenwald elaborates: “There is this common paradox which is that the words that are most frequently used and have the greatest impact are often the words that are the most ill-defined. And therefore subject to manipulation, deceit, and propaganda.

So the word 'terrorist' for example is something that pervades countless political discussions of great significance. And we are essentially at the point, literally, where if the government points to somebody and simply utters the word 'terrorist,' and large numbers of citizens… will cheer for whatever it is that is done… No matter how lawless, no matter how little evidence has been presented to justify it, the mere fact that they have been labeled a 'terrorist' is something that will basically cause a majority of people to sanction whatever is done.

And yet what is so fascinating about the word 'terrorist' is that it really is a term that has absolutely no fixed meaning, it's simply a term that means whatever the person wielding it wants it to mean.”

Greenwald continues: “Because the word terrorism is so potent and shuts down all debate, the mere application of that label by the government, anonymously and with no evidence… has made huge numbers of people stand up and cheer the most radical power a government can seize, which is the power to target one's own citizens for death, for assassination, in total secrecy and with no due process. And that to me really illustrates the potency of how these propagandistic terms are wielded….

If we're really going to vest virtually unlimited power in the government to do anything it wants to people they call ‘terrorists,’ we ought at least to have a common understanding of what the term means. But there is none. It's just become a malleable, all-justifying term to allow the US government carte blanche to do whatever it wants. ‘Terrorism’ is really more of a hypnotic mantra than an actual word.” In short, say the magic T-word and - poof - your rights, your property, your life evaporate, all without trial, all to thunderous applause.

The Antidote: Using these words is almost like casting a spell - most people who hear them become hypnotized, immediately stop thinking, and turn into easily herded automatons. Fortunately, the counter-spell is simple: demand consistent and logical definitions. Make them spell out exactly what they mean by “terrorist,” or “science denier.” Watch their argument collapse into ad hominem attacks, straw men arguments, appeals to emotion, and crocodile tears. And if that all fails they will play the "racist"card.

That’s the playbook. In short, when sophistry is all they have, facts become kryptonite. The propaganda spell breaks the moment you refuse to flinch at the linguistic kill-switch. The good news is that it's a fragile method of control; people can snap out of their hypnosis. And once they do, they never go back. It's like pulling back the curtain to see the Wizard of Oz and still being intimidated by him... that just doesn't happen.

So never stop asking questions and thinking critically. Don't be intimidated by cowards, intellectual midgets, charlatans, and petty tyrants who use propaganda words to get you to shut up and stop thinking. And when they reach for the next emotionally-charged empty label, smile and say: “Is that all you’ve got?”

- https://internationalman.com/

"One Can Make People Believe..."

“One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Of course, we know very well what to expect...

Judge Napolitano, "Aaron Maté: Netanyahu and His Prosecutors"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 8/5/25

"Aaron Maté: Netanyahu and His Prosecutors"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Deal With The Devil: End Of The Dollar, End Of U.S. Industry, End Of America"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 8/5/25

"Deal With The Devil: End Of The Dollar, 

End Of U.S. Industry, End Of America"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Our Standard Of Living Is Collapsing And 25 Percent Of U.S. Households Are Skipping Meals So They Will Have Enough Money To Pay Their Bills"

"Our Standard Of Living Is Collapsing And 25 Percent Of U.S. Households

Are Skipping Meals So They Will Have Enough Money To Pay Their Bills"

by Michael Snyder

"Are you old enough to remember when you could buy a really nice house for less than $50,000? Today, the average price of a home in the United States is more than half a million dollars. Of course everything else has become dramatically more expensive as well. I just asked Google, and I was told that the average cost of health insurance for a single person in the United States was just $2,655 in the year 2000. That was for an entire year! Our standard of living has been collapsing for a long time, but at first most people didn’t realize what was happening. But now things are so bad that YouTube and TikTok are filled with thousands of videos of normal people complaining about the cost of living. Unfortunately, I am entirely convinced that things are only going to get tougher as economic conditions continue to deteriorate all around us.

Earlier today, I came across a shocking new survey which discovered that 25 percent of U.S. households are skipping meals so that they will have enough money to pay their bills..."Twenty-five percent of respondents say they or someone in their household has skipped meals to save money in the past year—numbers that rose to nearly 4 in 10 for Hispanics (41 percent) and nearly 3 in 10 for Blacks (29 percent). The youngest Americans surveyed, ages 18–34, are by far the most likely to have skipped meals to pay bills (38 percent), and rates were similarly high for those in households with income below $50,000 per year (39 percent).

25 percent of the country doesn’t have enough food to eat! How can you possibly spin that number to make it look good? Let’s get real. In June, the average price of a pound of ground beef actually surpassed the six dollar mark…"The average price for a pound of ground beef in the Northeast rose to more than $6.05 in June, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a high point in records dating back to 2015. The price was up more than 10% from June 2024 and more than 3.4% from May. The price jump for beef from May was the biggest among a group of common grocery items that also included eggs, chicken, milk, bread and butter."

When I was growing up, my mother was constantly feeding us ground beef. Now it has become a “luxury meat” that most Americans cannot afford on a regular basis. If you can’t see that our standard of living is declining, I don’t know what to tell you.

The same survey that I quoted earlier also found that millions upon millions of Americans are spending a great deal of time worrying about their finances…"A shocking 1 in 4 Americans (24 percent) say they spend at least three hours on a typical day worrying about their finances and ability to afford basic necessities. More than 4 in 10 spend at least one hour per day. Millennials and GenZers are experiencing the greatest anxiety, with 56 percent and 50 percent, respectively spending one hour or more per day focused on financial concerns. While low- and middle-income Americans express the strongest financial concerns, one-third of those with incomes above $100,000 also spend at least an hour concerned about their finances on a typical day."

Most of us want to live the American Dream. But the American Dream is out of reach for most of the population at this stage. Back in 1975, the average price of a home in Spokane, Washington was just $22,450…"A Spokane cost of living survey showed that the average rental price of two-bedroom apartment was $135 per month, and the average purchase price for a house was $22,450, The Spokesman-Review reported on July 20, 1975."

Today, $22,450 won’t even cover the average monthly mortgage payment for one year… "Since 2017, the salary needed to buy a home in America has more than doubled. Fueled by rising unaffordability and high mortgage rates, home buyers need to shell out $2,500 on average for monthly payments. Meanwhile, this soars past $5,000 in coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego."

Housing has become more unaffordable than it has ever been in our entire history, and that is the number one reason why Americans are so financially stressed right now. In the old days, we were told to always follow “the 30 percent rule”, but now that is realistic in only a handful of the top metropolitan areas in the United States…

"The 30% rule — one in which potential homebuyers limit their mortgage payment to 30% of their monthly income — is a common standard that homebuyers typically follow so that the yearly cost of a home doesn’t put too much of a strain on their finances. However, according to a new report from Realtor.com, places where homebuyers can follow that recommendation when buying a home are becoming fewer and farther between in the country’s major metropolitan areas. Affordability in just three of America’s 50 top metro areas is such that households that make the median income can scoop up a home that won’t go above 30% of their yearly earnings, the report found.

Utility bills are rapidly rising as well. In fact, it is being reported that electricity prices spiked by an average of 6 percent during the first half of this year…"According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the average price of electricity per kilowatt-hour has risen from $0.179 in January to $0.190 as of June—an increase of around 6 percent. Between January and February, prices remained steady, according to BLS data. But between February and April, prices rose slightly to $0.181, and then marginally again in May to $0.182. According to the BLS’s data, prices then jumped noticeably in June to $0.190."

Just about everything has been getting more expensive, and that explains why 83 percent of Americans are experiencing “stressflation”…"A LifeStance Health survey released today reveals “stressflation” is affecting most Americans, with 83% reporting financial stress driven by inflation, mass layoffs, the rising cost of living and recession fears. Millennials and Gen Z report the most significant mental health impacts."

And a different survey discovered that more than 80 percent of middle income Americans expect prices to continue to rise…But two-thirds of middle-income Americans are bracing for a recession within a year. More than eight in 10 expect prices to keep rising. And nearly two-thirds of middle-income Americans who recently bought a home said they are living paycheck to paycheck.

Sadly, I am convinced that things are going to get even tougher because economic activity is slowing down and employers are conducting mass layoffs all over the nation. In some cases, large employers have actually been conducting multiple rounds of mass layoffs. For example, Intel has already been through a couple of mass cullings…

"Intel this month officially began to cut down its workforce in the U.S. and other countries, thus revealing actual numbers of positions to be cut. The Oregonian reports that the company will cut as many as 2,392 positions in Oregon and around 4,000 positions across its American operations, including Arizona, California, and Texas.

To put the 2,392 number into context, Intel is the largest employer in Oregon with around 20,000 of workers there. 2,392 is around 12% of the workforce, which is a lower end of layoff expectations, yet 2,400 is still a lot of people. The Oregon reduction rose sharply from an initial count of around 500 to a revised figure of 2,392, making it one of the largest layoffs in the state’s history. Intel began reducing staff earlier in the week but confirmed the larger number by Friday evening through a filing with Oregon state authorities. Intel’s Oregon operations have already seen 3,000 jobs lost over the past year through earlier buyouts and dismissals."

Not to be outdone, there have been three waves of mass layoffs at Microsoft…"In an ongoing effort to trim its workforce, Microsoft said as much as 4%, or roughly 9,000, of the company’s employees could be affected by Wednesday’s layoffs. In Washington, 830 employees were let go, according to a regulatory filing Wednesday. The move follows two waves of layoffs in May and June, which saw Microsoft let go of more than 6,000 employees, almost 2,300 of whom were based in Washington. Since May, the company has laid off over 15,000 employees companywide and more than 3,100 in Washington."

But Disney takes the cake. Within the past ten months, they have conducted four rounds of mass layoffs…"Early this month the company pushed out several hundred workers from its marketing for both film and television, television publicity, and its casting and development departments. It was the fourth round of layoffs in the last ten months and came about a month after 200 employees were eliminated in March. The layoffs in March hit Disney’s ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks unit. That round of layoffs even included the elimination of its once popular “538” website."

A lot of people out there like to criticize me, but they can’t deny the facts that I present because I carefully document them in all of my articles. After reading all of the facts that I have documented in this article, it should be clear to everyone that our standard of living has been collapsing. And if we stay on the road that we are currently on, that collapse will accelerate significantly. No matter how hard we may try, we cannot escape the law of cause and effect. For every action that we take, there is a consequence. Unfortunately for us, the consequences for our very foolish actions are starting to catch up with us in a major way."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Oh, but give $350 BILLION to Ukraine, and God knows how 

many secret billions to the psychopathically genocidal Israeli monsters..

Bill Bonner, "Too Much of a Big Nothing"

"Too Much of a Big Nothing"

by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "Two companies - Nvidia and Microsoft - each are worth more than $4 trillion. Together, that’s more than India’s and Japan’s combined annual output. Price is what you pay, as Buffett puts it. Value is what you get. Our question for today: how much value will investors really get from the Magnificent 7?

Our Law of Conservation of Value tells us that prices cannot stray too far or too long from value. And value depends on output. Investors ought to be able to look to a future stream of income and from it earn their money back...and more. Even in the dot-com bubble in 1999 the top companies were not as valuable or as concentrated as they are today. Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple Meta, Tesla and Amazon - together, these companies make up a third of the total US stock market value, an amount roughly equal to China’s GDP.

Part of the appeal of these Mag 7 stocks is that they are widely believed to be taking advantage of AI technology. In the case of Nvidia, of course, that is the central appeal. But the others are investing heavily in AI too.

In 2024 and 2025, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Tesla will put more than half a trillion into AI. The revenue from these investments is expected to be around $35 billion. Amazon, for example, has invested more than $100 billion, which is thought to generate an extra $5 billion in revenue.

We don’t know how reliable or meaningful these figures are. What we do know is that they aren’t very impressive. As in the dot-com boom of the late ‘90s, AI is not paying off. This is an in-put story, with huge investments made in the hope of creating AI-based wealth. But so far, the output doesn’t measure up.

You can go to ChatGPT, for example, and pay for the service. Many people use it occasionally - including us. But few pay for it - also including us. This would be fine, except that so much investment has gone into AI development that anything less than spectacular results will look like failure. One estimate, from Goldman Sachs, for example, showed that the Mag 7 would have to produce $600 billion in extra annual revenue to make sense of their investment.

Michael Roberts: "So while the excitement of AI takes the stock market to new heights... a huge investment of money and resources, astronomical payments to AI trainers, and the construction of huge data centers [there]...so far no significant revenue has been generated and there is almost no profit. This is a steroid-friendly version of the dot-com bubble.

The appeal of the dot-com era was the idea that more information would lead to higher GDP growth rates with less need for capital investment. Costly trial-and-error expansion would be replaced by less costly, more precise, knowledge-driven growth, or so it was believed."

It didn’t work out that way. Productivity and growth rates generally softened throughout the 21st century. Capital investment went down. The Internet/Information Revolution did not compensate for the decline; it seems to have made it worse. The OECD adds detail:

"In the last half century, we have filled offices and pockets with increasingly faster computers, but the increase in labor productivity in developed economies has declined from about 2% annually in the 1990s to 0.8% in the last decade. Even the production per worker of China, which once increased rapidly, has stopped. Research efficiency has decreased. Today, the average scientist produces less groundbreaking ideas per dollar than his colleagues in the 1960s. Despite the rise of intangible assets, total investment has generally been weak since the global financial crisis, which has directly worsened the slowdown in labor productivity."

Will that change with AI? Probably not. The defining curse of the Information Revolution was too much information. It piled up. It got distorted and misinterpreted. It took time and money to store and sort. And much of it was either false or useless. Now cometh AI, adding to the too-much-info problem. Already, it generates news and reports that fill our in-boxes and waste our time. And an Israeli company just announced that it can twist and turn (distort) the news in real time.

Which leaves, at least for now, AI and the Mag 7 in an old-fashioned financial bubble. Stock prices are far higher than actual sales and profits can account for. So one way or another price and value will have to come back together. While it is not impossible that some breakthrough will lead to a big burst of productivity gains and growth, it is more likely that stock prices will fall."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "We're Not Going Back To Normal, The Collapse Is Accelerating"

Jeremiah Babe, 8/5/25

"We're Not Going Back To Normal, 

The Collapse Is Accelerating"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Corporate Greed Exposed - Stories You Won’t Believe!"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 8/5/25

"Corporate Greed Exposed - 

Stories You Won’t Believe!"

"She took over their name out of spite! In today’s video, we dive into two incredible stories of vengeance and creativity that will leave you amazed. From a woman in Ohio reclaiming a dealership’s name after a wrongful car repossession to a food blogger reviving a beloved restaurant brand, these tales highlight the power of persistence and ingenuity. Plus, we touch on topics like wage disputes, Elon Musk’s staggering pay package, Warren Buffett’s surprising advice, and the struggles facing whiskey bars and freight companies. There's so much to unpack!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Big Lots Returns! What's New And What's Changed?"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, AM 8/5/25

"Big Lots Returns! What's New And What's Changed?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Travelling With Russell, 8/5/25

"I Had Lunch in a Brand-New Russian Supermarket"

"What is it like to have lunch in a brand-new Russian Supermarket? Join me as I discover the newest supermarket in Russia. Perekrestok Select is a new format of supermarket that features an in-store cafe and dining area. Let's see how it tastes together."

Comments here: 

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

The Sheekoz Family, 8/3/25

"The Largest Mall In Russia"

"Hi, My name is Dan, I am simple Russian man. My dream is to speak English, I learn English from old American films. Now I speak English as i can. In this video I will show the biggest Mall in Russia. On July 18, 2025, Western countries introduced the 18th package of sanctions against Russia, Western companies declare in their press releases that they do not work in Russia, let's see how it really is.  Meanwhile, at the same time, China is quietly taking over the market."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Incredible!

"The Dye Is Cast for the 'Trump Plan'"

"The Dye Is Cast for the 'Trump Plan'"

by Natali Morris, Redacted

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israel will fully occupy Gaza because “the die is cast.” What does that mean - that there’s no turning back now? That since the world has condemned Israel, they’ve decided to finish the job before the cows come home? The language is chilling. It suggests inevitability - and intent. Israel’s IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has reportedly opposed a full occupation. Netanyahu’s response? “There will be operations even in areas where hostages are being held. If the IDF chief of staff doesn’t agree, he should resign.”

A full ground invasion, even where Israeli hostages are held - and open calls for military leadership to step aside if they don’t comply. That’s not just escalation. That’s a purge of restraint. Netanyahu also released this video arguing that the current global backlash against Israel is part of a historic pattern of “vilification” that precedes Jewish massacres. This is a calculated rhetorical pivot — reframing condemnation of his government’s actions as antisemitism, and casting the aggressor as the eternal victim.

And what role is the U.S. playing in all of this? Israeli media report that President Trump has given Netanyahu the “green light” for full occupation. Why? I thought “we” were going to “own” Gaza. By “we,” did he mean Israel? Maybe he did - because, according to Antiwar.com, Netanyahu and his government have been clear about their ultimate goal: The removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza. They now call this the “Trump Plan.” It is, in no uncertain terms, a plan of ethnic cleansing." (Trump of course is being blackmailed into cooperating by Epstein videos and pics he'd rather not be disclosed. - CP)

No Boycott, No Relief: FEMA Funds Tied to Support for Israel

On Monday, it was reported that the Trump administration would deny FEMA funds to any city or state that boycotts Israel. Later that day, the Department of Homeland Security issued a denial — but the denial was an outright lie. The policy is spelled out clearly in this official DHS document, page 6, Section C, XVII, 1d: “Recipients must comply with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws material to the government’s payment decisions... Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.”

That is the federal government openly declaring that FEMA relief can be denied if a U.S. city or state exercises its right to boycott Israel. You can boycott the United States, the U.K., Saudi Arabia, France, or God himself - but if you boycott Israel, your community may lose access to disaster aid that your own tax dollars funded.

Maybe they walked it back because there was such outrage but pretending it was never there is insulting. To have put it there in the first place was clearly illegal. It wasn’t legal when the Biden administration denied FEMA assistance to North Carolina homeowners with Trump signs on their lawns. It wasn’t legal when Trump threatened to withhold FEMA aid from California over a political feud with Governor Newsom. And it’s not legal now.

Federal aid is not a political loyalty test. The First Amendment and the Stafford Act both forbid withholding emergency funds based on viewpoint, political association, or ideological expression. This policy would never hold up in court - if anyone would take it to court. But what politician in either party is willing to challenge it?"

- https://redactedstore.com/

This newsletter is written and researched by Natali Morris. Please feel free to reach Natali at natali@redacted.inc for any editorial feedback.

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Koyasan: Reiki Sound Healing"

Full screen recommended.

Deuter, "Koyasan: Reiki Sound Healing"

"A Look to the Heavens"

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

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

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

"Everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes towards the stars? Why?"

- Mikhail Bulgakov, "The White Guard"

"Major Breaking: Israel Announces Full Gaza Occupation"

Full screen recommended.

Kulinski Show, PM 8/4/25

"Major Breaking: 

Israel Announces Full Gaza Occupation"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Owen Jones, 8/2/25

"Gaza Doctor Nick Maynard: 

Israel Is Shooting Babies In The Head"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

MSNBC, 8/3/25

"10-year-Old Palestinian Boy ‘Gunned Down’ 

After Receiving Food Aid"

"Anthony Aguilar, a former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation contractor, describes what he saw on the ground in Gaza while trying to distribute aid to hungry Palestinians, including meeting a young 10-year-old boy, Amir, who thanked him and his colleague for the aid he was able to retrieve. Moments later, he says Amir was “gunned down” and killed. "We have no excuse as a nation...as a world to look at this and say we didn't know," he says."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

If I said what I think and feel they'd delete this blog in a second...

Comments?

The Daily "Near You?"

Bound Brook, New Jersey, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Life..."

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

- Alysha Speer

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

- Scott Turow

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

- Andrew Klavan

"Video Zionists Don't Want You To See"

Full screen recommended.

The Daily Reminder, 8/3/25

"Video Zionists Don't Want You To See"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Dawn News English, 8/2/25

"Israeli Officer Told Me to Shoot Starving Kids, 

Says Former US Contractor"

"Former US contractor Anthony Aguilar, a retired Green Beret, alleged that an Israeli officer ordered him to shoot starving Palestinian children attempting to reach aid in Gaza."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

"All of Gaza, and every child in Gaza should starve to death"

- Israeli Rabbi Ronen Shaulov

THIS is what YOU, Americans, support and pay for?!

"No Ways Tired On A Sea of Lies"

"No Ways Tired On A Sea of Lies"

by Chris Floyd

"I think we are living in a world of lies: lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are the children and grandchildren of lies. One of the hardest things to accept is that the reality of our world is buried under so many layers of official deception and well-cultivated public ignorance about our history and our political system. Even if you break through somehow, momentarily, and hold up a fragment of the truth, most people have no context for dealing with it. It's like a bolt from the blue, they can't process the information. And so the sea of lies closes over us again, and again, and again. And yet the reality of our future appears on the horizon, denial be damned, an irresistible tsunami of destruction, changing all our lives forever.

These are the facts, and they can't be altered. But how to respond to this catastrophe? Shall we weep, moan, rend our garments, cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of republics? Shall we cower in the shadows and sing glamorous dirges for the Lost Cause, for vanished glories and broken dreams?

Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads high, laughing fools to scorn, rejecting at every turn the moral authority of murderers and thieves to rule our lives, determine our reality, act in our name? Let's dispense with lamentation - give not a single moment to that emotional indulgence - and get right back to work, more determined than ever to bear down harder, dig deeper and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still glowing beneath the slag-heap of ruin.

Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist - without violence, the weapon of the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary backsliders in thrall to the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing up their ape-lust for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant. Let's fight these pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands on our world and rape it like beasts in a mindless rut. Fight them with the truths we find, exposing their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people they've suckered, perverted and betrayed.

This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how impervious the Machine - that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen, Congressional rubber stamps, psychopathic media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, sex-crazed theocrats, war profiteers, think-tank bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, and woman-haters - might appear at the moment.

I don't know what else we can do, except to keep on telling as much of the truth as we can find, to anyone who will listen: reclaiming reality, fragment by fragment, one person at a time. It's an endless task - maybe a hopeless task - but the alternative is a surrender to the worst elements in our society - and in ourselves. It's worth the fight. Let's take it on. In the words of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to sanity starts now."

- http://chris-floyd.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"A Real Life Economic Nightmare: How Would You Feel If You Had Applied For 900 Jobs Without Any Success At All?"

"A Real Life Economic Nightmare: How Would You Feel 

If You Had Applied For 900 Jobs Without Any Success At All?"

by Michael Snyder

"If you have applied for hundreds of jobs and still find yourself out of work, you are certainly not alone. In many industries, it is absolutely brutal out there right now. U.S. employers have been laying off hundreds of thousands of workers in 2025, and there is immense competition for any good jobs that do happen to be available. So if you have a good job that you highly value, I would hold on to it as tightly as you can, because you don’t want to end up among the desperate hordes that are scrambling for work in this very harsh economic environment. For example, a 46-year-old woman in Florida that was laid off last September has applied for 900 jobs without any success at all…

"Jennifer Smith, 46 years old, says she has applied for 900 jobs since being laid off last September from a financial-services provider in the Tampa, Fla., area, where she led the user-experience department. She has landed just one interview and no offers. This has left Smith, who has three children, increasingly anxious about her finances. Smith decided this past week to sell her five-bedroom home and trade down to a smaller house. While severance pay has helped, it is about to run out, and Smith has been paying soaring premiums to keep her health insurance."

I feel so badly for her. Searching for work in this environment can be just as exhausting as a full-time job, but you don’t get paid for it. If she doesn’t find a job soon, she could potentially lose everything. Of course there are countless others that are in the exact same boat.

On the other side of the country, 61-year-old John Comber says that he has applied for about 500 jobs since late 2023 with no success…"Some older, out-of-work Americans are wondering if they will find jobs again. "I’m considering myself semiretired at this point,” says John Comber, 61, a software quality engineer in Sandpoint, Idaho. He hoped to work another decade and thought he would easily pick up more work when his last contract work wrapped up in late 2023. Instead, he estimates he has applied for 500 jobs with no hits." This isn’t a bum with no skills that we are talking about. Comber is a highly skilled software engineer. But this is the economic environment that we live in now.

It is being reported that the number of Americans that have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks is now at “the highest level since 2017, not counting the pandemic’s unemployment surge”…"Job seekers are out in the cold this summer. Especially the ones who have been hunting for a while. Beyond the headline-grabbing top-line numbers in the jobs report for July was another striking piece of data: The number of people unemployed for at least 27 weeks topped 1.8 million, the highest level since 2017, not counting the pandemic’s unemployment surge. The median length of unemployment in the U.S. has also ticked up, from a seasonally adjusted 9.5 weeks in July 2024 to 10.2 weeks last month."

Wow. And that figure is only going to go higher, because employers all over the nation are feverishly laying off workers right now. I shared this on Friday, but I feel like I should share it again in this article. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. employers have announced 806,383 job cuts so far in 2025. Compared to the same time period in 2024, that is a 75 percent increase…"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."

How are you going to spin those numbers to make them look good? You can’t. This reminds me so much of what we witnessed in 2008 and 2009.

Most of the country is living on the edge financially, and so a job loss can be absolutely catastrophic. Once you are out of work, it can be so tempting to turn to debt to bridge the gap. Of course these days many Americans are piling on tremendous amounts of debt without even being out of work. As a result, U.S. households are now more than 18 trillion dollars in debt. Take a moment and think about how crazy that is. When you break that down, that is approximately $53,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

We are literally drowning in debt, and one recent study discovered that about two-thirds of all U.S. adults “lie about or hide their financial struggles from family and friends”…

• Two-thirds of Americans with debt lie about or hide their financial struggles from family and friends.

• The average American carries $42,000 in debt but understates the amount by $6,565 when discussing it.

• Shame drives the secrecy, with nearly 30% citing embarrassment as their main reason for hiding debt.

• Financial deception damages relationships for 73% of people with debt, often causing arguments and isolation.

Most of us try to hide our financial struggles because we are ashamed. But it shouldn’t be that way. If we could just be open and honest with one another about what is going on, we would find that there are countless others that are going through the same thing. The entire economy is failing, and if we can get people to understand that they won’t be so quick to blame themselves for their troubles. Unfortunately, right now conditions are moving in the wrong direction very rapidly.

Residential investment was down during the first quarter of 2025, and it was way down during the second quarter of 2025…In May, Citi Research recalled that the late economist Ed Leamer famously published a paper in 2007 that said residential investment is the best leading indicator of an oncoming recession. “We would be wise to heed his warning,” Citi said.

In fact, residential fixed investment shrank 4.6% in the second quarter, according to data released Wednesday, after contracting 1.3% in the first quarter. One of the primary reasons why residential investment is way down is because home sales are way down. In fact, during the second quarter home sales were the lowest that we have seen in 13 years…"America’s spring homebuying season just hit its weakest point in over a decade - marking the slowest market since 2012 and sparking fears that a full-blown price collapse could be next. Spring is traditionally the hottest time for pending home sales but that’s no longer the case in the in the now struggling US housing market. In 2025, April through June brought the lowest sales in 13 years, according to Redfin."

Let’s get real. The housing market is in a depressed state. And if we stay on the path that we are on, the rest of the economy will be in a depressed state soon too. Decades of very foolish decisions have brought us to this point, and more Americans are falling out of the middle class with each passing day. If you still have your spot in the middle class, you should be very grateful. Because soon even more Americans will be applying for hundreds of jobs without any success at all."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Bill Bonner, "Fire and Ice"

"Fire and Ice"

"Central planning is always a mistake, in the sense that it makes

 most people worse off. It is not a mistake for those who do the planning. 

The feds and their cronies get more money and more power."

by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "Last week, the US began Crackpot Financial Experiment Number Two. CFEN2. CFEN1 was the move, in 1971, to a ‘paper’ currency…with nothing to connect it to real output. It greatly increased the amount of credit available, leading to a long (but largely fake) boom from 1982-2021 and to $37 trillion in government debt. CFEN2 should have an almost opposite effect. It discourages trade and should depress the world economy. Today, we take a guess about what happens next.

As we closed out the week, we got this. From Spencer Hakimian via X: "My friend is in the business of buying wholesale steel rebar, steel beams, steel sheets, etc. from inexpensive overseas producers and then selling it downstream to American homebuilders who build budget homes. He got an email from his customs broker this afternoon that their order from Hanoi, Vietnam will be subject to either 50%, 70%, 110%, or 135% tariff tomorrow. 50% penalty for foreign steel. Another 20% penalty for Vietnam. Another 40% transshipment penalty if U.S. customs believes the steel is not truly Vietnamese. And another 25% fentanyl penalty if CBP thinks China is involved with this steel in any way whatsoever. The customs broker told him to assume he’s paying the full 135%, just to be safe. They won’t know for sure for a few months, and the penalties of being wrong are too severe."

Central planning is always a mistake, in the sense that it makes most people worse off. It is not, however, a mistake for those who do the planning. The feds and their cronies get more money and more power.

The latest trade deals are counted as a ‘win’ for Mr. Trump. They show he can get what he wants. He’s a deal maker par excellence, after all. And he can prevail against almost the entire world. Against the English, the French, the Swiss, the Brazilians, South Koreans, Japanese...etc. etc. Didn’t he win everywhere...against everyone? Maybe. But in a trade dispute, the real winner is usually the loser - the one whose borders remain most open, not the one who has raised the drawbridge and closed his doors.

Imagine that we live on opposite sides of a river. On our side, we raise chickens. On your side, you raise wheat. We trade. But then, we notice that we are buying more of your wheat than you are of our chickens. “Unfair,” we shout. We impose a tariff of 30% on wheat imports. “We won!” we say. ‘We won, too,’ you say, ‘cause it could have been worse.’

But in this world of winners, on our side of the river we pay 30% more for bread. You may not pay more for the chickens, but now you have less money to buy them; your wheat now costs us more, so we can’t buy as much. And you, with less income from your wheat sales, buy fewer chickens. We are both poorer.

But wait. There’s more to the story. On our side of the river, our government collects the 30% tariff. It is the only real winner...having taken its ‘tax’ out of the chicken/wheat trade. As to what happens next, in today’s real-world economy, we were put the question by a young woman at a wedding reception. Over the noise of a blaring band, we answered as best we could: “There are two possibilities - fire or ice...a whimper or a bang.

The US stock market is now in a bubble. We’re talking 1929 or 1999 levels. Something is going to happen to bring those prices down and crash the whole bubble economy. Tariffs could do the job...just as the Smoot/Hawley tariffs sent the whole world into a depression in the ‘30s. Sharp price increases for consumer products, for example, might panic investors. Or, since none of these ‘deals’ is actually final...we could still see a trade war break out...which might cause a stampede out of stocks.

Or, maybe there won’t be a panic. The economy will simply slow down as consumer prices rise. Some form of stagflation, in other words. Over a number of years, adjusted for inflation, real stock prices would go down, as they did in the 1970s. GDP would go down. People would earn less real money...and have less to spend. But it would be less obvious what was going on.

Either the fragility and complexity of the tariff regime tip the economy into a major crisis. Or, economies adapt without fireworks, absorbing the tariffs as they would any other tax hike. The going rate for tariffs was less than 4%; now, it will be about 18%. One way or another, the economy must adjust to the much higher taxes. Was that helpful?”, we asked? She looked doubtful."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "It's Far Worse Than You Think - Are We on the Brink of Collapse?"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, AM 8/4/25

"It's Far Worse Than You Think - 

Are We on the Brink of Collapse?"

"The shocking truth is out - America’s real debt isn’t $37 trillion as we’ve been told, but a staggering $151 trillion when factoring in unfunded liabilities like pensions, veteran benefits, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Hey, it’s Dan from I Allegedly, and in today’s video, I’m breaking down how this financial crisis goes far deeper than most realize, why it’s time to face the reality of bankruptcy, and what it means for all of us. Plus, I’m covering the latest in business news, the state of the auto market, and privacy issues tied to smart meters and AI surveillance. It’s a jam-packed episode you don’t want to miss!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Suspicious Minds"

"Suspicious Minds"

by Jim Kunstler

"It was a coup, and I'm using that term literally...

One egregious felony after another."

- Stephen Miller

"America is tired of being driven insane, of having absurdities crammed into our collective consciousness. Reality is an agreement about what is going on in the world. That act of faith requires such an agreement be based on what is demonstrably true. Without it, society dissolves into chaos and failure.

The RussiaGate psychodrama is about an agreement based on lies. It started with Hillary Clinton’s desperate ploy to save her foundering 2016 election campaign. Her emails somehow got sent to Wikileaks, a radical news org dedicated to revealing government secrets, implicating misconduct. It was easy to declare the Russians did it, by hacking - when it was much more likely, in fact, proven by a forensic audit, that a Clinton campaign insider downloaded the info on a thumb drive, perhaps one Seth Rich, found murdered on a DC sidewalk soon thereafter.

Every lie after that met the kind of skepticism among the public that generates heat, controversy, scandal, and fire. Hillary managed to enlist President Barack Obama and his executive agencies into her project, and the party apparatus with it, because the Clinton Victory Fund had paid the DNC’s debts and took over its management. Soon, the Russia collusion project grew into a gigantic scaffold of flaming lies. The big newspapers and the TV news networks bought the story, and came along for the ride. They were all sure Hillary would win the 2016 election. All the heat and fire would get flushed away. The polls all said so. The agencies and the parties would pick up and go on as before, run the show, make careers, get wealthy, be important!

They miscalculated. They lost. But they decided to keep building the scaffold of lies in order to protect themselves from the danger it represented - because they lived in that scaffold, it was the party’s house. And the scaffold of lies needed massive fortification. The house that the party lived in had to be protected at all costs, or they would all be cast out, homeless, a whole party on street, lost, broke, ruined, dying, like the pitiful tweakers bent over out on Kensington Avenue in Philly, in every Democrat-run city, really.

And so, they undermined the winner of the election at every turn, worked furiously to drive him from office, made a plague happen, subverted the 2020 election, and spent four years under a fake president jamming absurdities into the public arena, turning it into a freak show, one drag-queen story hour after another, from seas to shining sea. All to defeat the return of a public consensus about reality based on what is demonstrably true - starting with the fact that there are men and there are women, and that the primary interaction between them keeps society going by producing offspring.

This enormous, drawn-out insurrection, composed of serial felony crimes, amounts to the greatest insult against the republic - the res publica, in Latin, the public thing - in the nation’s history. And now it is coming apart as an overwhelming majority of citizens, including now many Democrats, can’t avoid discovering what has happened in the country. Because lies are weak and the truth is sturdy and eventually truth prevails, even after an arduous struggle.

The old news media complex, the networks and the papers, are not reporting the recent disclosures by the Directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intel. What will it take to get their attention? Arrests and perp-walks of formerly important officials? And then, do they acknowledge and atone for their disgraceful participation in the events? Or pretend they couldn’t figure any of it out for years and years? Poor us, we didn’t know! Suddenly, it looks like many of these “legacy” news outfits are going out-of-business. They’re throwing their performers over the side like sinking ships casting off so much useless ballast.

You knew this was coming, right? Now, here you are: the hour that consequence finally returns from its wanderings in a wilderness of institutional failure. There’s no evading it anymore. The scaffold of lies has collapsed, and trying to add additional lies will amount to throwing a few twigs on a heap of smoldering wreckage.

The institutions themselves are under new management, and they show every sign of returning to regular operation, doing what they were designed to do in the first place: deliver a truthful account of what has happened and determine a just consequence for the people who made it happen. It’s going to happen, and then we can rebuild a coherent public consensus about what is really real, who we really are, and where we go from here."

- https://www.kunstler.com/