“Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way. Back in the old days, back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy. Today, there are less than 200 left. Many globular clusters were destroyed over the eons by repeated fateful encounters with each other or the Galactic center. Surviving relics are older than any Earth fossil, older than any other structures in our Galaxy, and limit the universe itself in raw age.
There are few, if any, young globular clusters in our Milky Way Galaxy because conditions are not ripe for more to form. Pictured above by the Hubble Space Telescope are about 100,000 of M72's stars. M72, which spans about 50 light years and lies about 50,000 light years away, can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Water Bearer (Aquarius).”
"A visual journey into mankind's favorite pastime throughout the ages."
o
"Of Army Ants and Pit Bulls:
The Biological Roots of War"
by Fred Reed
"The biological - that is, genetic - roots of human behavior have been a disputed matter at least since The Bell Curve, most heatedly regarding race. The measure of racial intelligence has been the sharpest focus with psychometrists universally, as far as I can determine, ranking races by IQ as Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians, whites, Latinos, and blacks. While these findings have been used by demagogues, those making them are serious researchers, and the ranking parallels the levels of achievement of those ranked.
In support of these findings many have pointed out that human races are subspecies of Homo sapiens just as Border Collies and pit bulls are subspecies of dog. They differ in intelligence. So might human subspecies.
Racialists touting the superiority however defined of the white race point to achievements of whites to buttress this theory. These achievements do suggest high intellectual ability. Among the said achievements are: Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Differential geometry. Calculus: Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. The telephone. Almost every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Bearable dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Heart surgery. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Broad-spectrum antibiotics. Rubber. Nylon. Skyscrapers. X-rays. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that’s nerve gas, and maybe we didn’t really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. Telecivion. Helicopters. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key cryptography, and RSA. RISC V. EUV lithography. Field-programmable gate arrays. The EPR Paradox. Et cetera.
These examples and thousands of others leave little doubt of the intellectual abilities of whites. The rapid ascent of the Chinese in matters technological and scientific further suggests the validity of the IQ rankings.
Less studied are the biological roots of aggressiveness: Pit bulls are more aggressive than Border Collies. In explanation of extremely high levels of violent crime among blacks, racialists have pointed to levels of testosterone, highest in blacks and lowest in East Asians. Men, they note, have higher levels than women, and are more aggressive. Other biological markers that I am incompetent to judge are said to support the hierarchy.
Yet among races it is whites, not blacks, who stand out for predatory and destructive aggressiveness. They - we - exist in a constant state of hostility, attacking each other and other peoples. Just now white Americans use white Ukrainians to fight white Russians, with help from white Europeans in a pointless war. A Eurowhite coalition prepares for war with China. Similar coalitions in various combinations attacked Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, on and on, with white Russians taking part in opposition. Earlier there was the bombing of Yugoslavia and, remembered by grayhairs, the devastation of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The list could go on almost without end. Both world wars consisted of whites fighting whites for no reason of any rationality. These interalbionic conflicts often seem insane. In the Battle of the Somme in 1916, England lost 20,000 dead in one day. It continued the war. The senselessness suggests an inherent combativeness not amenable to reason.
Other races fight wars but most of them with nothing resembling the single-minded aggressiveness or scale. In China the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 was as ghastly as anybody else’s best wars. Yet on the whole China has preferred commerce, Southeast Asia is not always at war, Latin America has had wars but not with the constancy or destructiveness of those of the white world. Correlation, as they say, is not causation, but enough correlation begins to look like it.
Throughout the colonial period, Eurowhites attacked most of the earth in an orgy of aggression. All or most of South America, India, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Africa were militarily invaded and often brutally mistreated. Go to Zacatecas in Mexico and see the conditions of the Indian slaves used by the Spanish to work the silver mines. While there, check out the instruments of torture - they are in a museum - used by the Spanish. You will be sickened.
The aggression is not always military. At the moment whites try to strangle Chinese development by cutting off technology. Venezuela is sanctioned to get control of its petroleum, Cuba for no reason, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and so on. American politicians and nativists threaten Mexico with military incursion and the US President says he will sanction the country to get control of its energy sector.
The aggressiveness is so consistent, so great, over so much time that a genetic component becomes plausible. We seem to be dealing with pit bulls. Or army ants.
Slavery, as pure a form of aggression as exists, has been the common practice of humanity through much of history, practiced with varying degrees of barbarity. Yet under Eurowhites it grew to be a trade of unexampled scale and enormous cruelty. Figures are shaky, but a common accounting puts the number of slaves extracted from Africa (captured by other Africans and sold to white slavers) at eleven million. It was not especially Southern in America, the trade being run by New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. It was a Eurowhite thing, as we say, with much of Europe involved - Portugal, Spain, England, Holland, most of these calling themselves Christian, and the slaves were hideously treated by white owners in the British West Indies, Latin America, and the United States. White nationalists furiously deny much of this, but the record is solid, voluminous, and undeniable. Read "The Atlantic Slave Trade," by Hervert Klein, on Amazon.)
The unrestrained aggressiveness of Eurowhites has, and has had, consequences. Eurowhites are unloved across the world. All through Mexico there are monuments to and streets named for los Niños Heroes, the Heroic Boys who died fighting the Americans invading Mexico. Mexico of course is helpless under the American boot but other Latin countries are less helpless and welcome China and Russia as the first possible alternatives they have ever had.
We now see Indian movies, very hostile to England, about the years of British occupation. India now leans toward Russia and China. The Chinese remember their ports being occupied beneath the threatening cannon of gunboats, the opium trade forced on them, American and other Eurowhite troops rampaging through the streets of Beijing, looting, raping, and killing for sport.
I was in Vietnam and Cambodia as a correspondent during the war there, and saw what Eurowhites - in this case American and French - did to those countries. Years later in Vientiane I was chatting with a young woman who mentioned in passing her father’s death. “What happened to him?” I foolishly asked. “He died fighting the Americans,” she said.
Aggression. Unending aggression. Combined with superior technology, it produced colonialism. It produces today’s wars. Is it genetic? I don’t know, but it sure looks that way. Eurowhites have done a great deal for the world, but also to it. Let us hope that they do not give us another world war that no one else wants.
"Why is it that men are better at getting their needs met than women? Maybe because they know how to keep it simple. Connie Podesta explains in this humorous yet poignant clip the five stupid questions women ask men and why. This is a very funny clip, enjoy!"
"Doom rules public discourse these days; people can’t get enough of it and there is no end of people selling it. The problem is that 90 percent of it is wrong, massively overblown or a long, slow road to nowhere. But it does have a nice dramatic arc, placing you in the role of the hero. People have been crying doom for a very long time, and while problems certainly have arisen, they’ve also fallen away. Would you rather live in today’s world or the world of 1,000 BC? Or even 1,000 AD?
Life, you see, has become consistently better for humanity, even as so many of us complain from adulthood to the grave. And so I’d like you to see that crying doom has always been a huge seller, and that pronouncing doom upon anything broader than narrow areas has nearly always been wrong. Here’s one of my favorite old passages, from Hesiod, an ancient Greek writer, from the 8th century BC:
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint. And this may be my absolute favorite, found on an Assyrian tablet from 1,800 BC: "The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching."
So, “it’s all going to hell” may sell, but it’s also a consistent failure. Many of our more insightful thinkers, on the other hand, have noticed and rejected this perma-doom. The first passage that leaps to my mind is from Montesqieu: "Horace and Aristotle told us of the virtues of their fathers, and the vices of their own time, and authors down through the centuries have told us the same. If they were right, men would now be bears. Likewise Goethe, when he was very old and his friend said something along the lines of “We can’t lose you; there’s no one else who can do your job,” replied, “The earth will bring them forth, as it brought them forth before.”
The point here is this: We are massively wasting our time and energy. And much worse, we are displacing any positive vision for the future. If you were a hyper-dimensional super-villain and wanted to crush the human future, this would be how you’d do it.
I’ll leave you with a passage from the great historian, Will Durant. You may wish to spend some time working this into your consciousness. Hopefully you’ll dare to consider the wonderful things waiting for us once we shift our energies toward creating them. This shift will take time, but please try to give these concepts some space in you mind. Thank you.
"Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts - between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks."
“I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein' on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin' no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin' from or goin' to or why. I'm tired of people bein' ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein' in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.”
"What is hope? It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word. It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe.
That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual; and in a miraculous and unexplained way, life is opening creative events which will light the way to freedom and resurrection. But the two - suffering and hope - must live from each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair. But hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté and drunkenness.
So let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. That is the secret discipline. It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience, and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints the courage to die for the future they envisage. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope."
"Retailers Are Panicking! The Final Black Friday?"
"You’re about to witness history - Black Friday isn’t just slowing down… it’s DYING. And the consequences are going to hit every single one of us. Is Black Friday officially over? This year might just mark the LAST Black Friday as we know it, and I’m breaking down the real reasons behind it! From economic chaos to a changing consumer landscape, retailers are struggling like never before. Deals aren’t what they used to be, and with rising debt, store closures, and layoffs, survival is the name of the game. Are you even planning to shop this year, or are you sitting this one out? Let me know in the comments!"
"The Marine Corps Birthday is celebrated every year on November 10th to commemorate its founding by the Continental Congress on November 10, 1775. Today marks the 250th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps. Traditional celebrations include a ball and cake-cutting ceremony, with the first slice of cake given to the oldest Marine present, symbolizing the passing of knowledge to the youngest."
Baltimore, Maryland - "The news this morning is that the shutdown is ending. This means the feds can get back to misgoverning in the usual way. USA Today: "Senate takes a first big step to end government shutdown." But the beauty of our democracy is that voters have a clear choice. They can choose which rip-off they want. The Republicans claim to be ripping off foreigners. The Wall Street Journal: "Revenue is why Trump loves tariffs. For years he has dreamed of charging other countries for the privilege of selling to the U.S. He has boasted of the cash his tariffs have raised, how they could replace the income tax, finance farmer bailouts and maybe fund tariff rebate checks. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who attended Wednesday’s session, has extolled tariffs’ contribution to deficit reduction."
Democrats says they will rip off the rich. USA Today: "In her unsuccessful 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris pledged to preserve most of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, with at least one notable exception: She would have raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans." Now, the newly elected mayor of New York has a similar proposal. Among other plans, Zohran Mamdani wants to raise income taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers by 2%. In the election in New York, for example, voters went for an old con. ‘Squeeze the rich until the pips squeak,’ was how British prime minister, Denis Healey, described it.
But let us begin by looking at how a major federal rip-off works. In this regard, we thank our old researcher, Joe Withrow, who provided a vivid illustration this weekend. The gist of it is that when the feds lowered interest rates in 2008, Wall Street insiders were able to borrow billions of dollars at a rate below zero, on an inflation adjusted basis. The typical family still had to put 20% down to buy a house, and pay a mortgage of 6%-6.5%. The big players got their money, essentially, for nothing. This meant that institutional buyers could easily outbid households. Which is just what they did. Withrow:
By 2015, large institutional investors like Blackstone, American Homes 4 Rent, Waypoint Homes, Cerberus Capital, and others owned upwards of 300,000 single-family homes in the US. By mid-2022, that number had ballooned up to about 574,000 homes.
Yes, the feds made the dream of home ownership a reality – for Wall Street. Backed by cheap financing provided by the Fed, the new owners could then rent the houses back to former owners...and make an immediate profit. Real wealth - ordinary houses - became financial assets, now owned by large investors who didn’t personally clean out the gutters or paint the windows.
But this was just part of a larger heist, one that has been going on for more than thirty years. Most of our stocks and bonds are owned by a wealthy elite. Even with market participation at a cyclical high, the top 10% own 95% of them. Ultra-low interest rates raised housing prices so much that 75% of Americans can no longer qualify to buy the average house. Likewise, when the Fed funds Wall Street with cheap credit, stocks and bonds go up. The rich get richer. The poor, relatively, get poorer.
One major consequence of diddling rates to the downside is that debt builds up...which will eventually cause a debt crisis and make it impossible to pay for the free stuff politicians promised. Already, the squeeze is on...with interest payments over $1 trillion per year.
Another major consequence is inflation. Everyday prices rose more than 20% over the last five years. The combination of watching the rich get fabulously wealthy...while their own living expenses rose...must have been galling to New Yorkers. ‘Affordability’ was suddenly a campaign issue. And voters must have been driven crazy with rage and resentment; why else would they vote for policies that are proven failures? A government-run supermarket? Really?
And now that the shoe is on the other foot, the masses aim to put the boot to the richest among them. The New York Post: "Hecklers taunt Gov. Hochul with ‘Tax the Rich’ chant at Zohran Mamdani’s NYC rally featuring AOC and Sanders."
But even at rip-offs, politicians are notoriously incompetent and dishonest. Over the last two years the S&P is up 39% - thanks largely to the promised lower rates. And now the ‘radical communist’ Mamdani proposes to tax them an extra 2%! Big whoop.
The rich are protected by their own wealth. They pay most of New York’s taxes already; the city doesn’t want to lose them. And whether you are a millionaire in Manhattan or an exporter in Beijing you have alternatives. You can move elsewhere. Sell to others. Or you simply give up. Any way you go, the rip-off becomes less effective In the end, neither foreigners nor the very rich will pay for the feds’ excess spending. Instead, we all will. Stay tuned..."
"You can suppose the government will re-open this week, and then what? It could close back down in January when the latest funding patch runs out. And then what? Another shut-down and another continuing resolution? The nation hopscotches toward insolvency and breakdown. The sorrows of Mr. Trump mount as his enemies devise ever-novel punishments for the people of this land. The mutual animus of the two parties spirals upward like the vortex of a developing superstorm.
It’s the nature of crisis that the outcome is uncertain and the possibilities seem mostly dire. And so it is the nature of heroic action to overcome all that and stick a landing in some safe place out of harm’s way. Can we convert the economy of financial chicanery to an economy of purposeful production without provoking a ruinous crash of assets and debt obligations? The most thoughtful observers doubt it. It’s really only a question of time when the floor you were standing on gives way and suddenly everything is in freefall.
The precious metals are sending out a distress signal in the futures charts this morning, even while the equities markets worldwide melt up. That’s got to be a bad combo. Something is going wrong with money everywhere. The overarching question is: will money continue to be money? (That is, will it be worth anything?) Money that is increasingly worthless leads to some of the worst social and political outcomes imaginable.
The authorities of the money world only pretend to be in control of the forces behind money and its movements. Money is subject to the laws of physics like everything else: actions and reactions. . . momentum / inertia . . . entropy. As economist Herb Stein sagely observed a half-century ago: “Things that can’t go on, stop.” An awful lot of things in our world need to stop if we want to continue the project of civilization. We can see, to our distress, that many things are actually stopping: Truck shipments of goods, idle freight trains, stores closing, closed down construction sites, restaurants empty. That tends toward rents, loans, mortgages not being paid. That leads to daisy-chains of broken obligations. Inflation reverses to deflation. Money starts to disappear.
In a deflation, money will stop losing its value. The catch is, people will have less money. There will be less of it around, chasing whatever goods get produced. Some people will have no money at all. The government will almost certainly attempt to counter that by giving them money created out of nothing. It will also give money to broke institutions like banks, and perhaps to businesses deemed “critical” to society. That will cycle back into money losing more value. We’ve been through this cycle a number of times in this young and turbulent century.
You’ve probably noticed that our country is seething with pissed-off citizens. All the machinations of the money authorities pretending to manage money have produced perversities, distortions, and spooky unintended consequences. Things manifest strangely. For instance, medical care is a godawful mess, namely, the ACC, Affordable Care Act. Got an acute problem like abdominal pain? We can give you an appointment three months from now, the HMO says when you call? Are they insane? Do they not hear themselves speaking? And you’re paying, like, $20-K-a-year for the family’s health insurance, so-called. (Hey, you can always go sit in the ER for eighteen hours with plenty of illegal aliens to keep you company.)
Mr. Trump just proffered a novel gambit: take away federal subsidies and tax credits from the ACC-linked insurance companies and send the money to US citizens to spend directly on doctors, drugs, and surgeries, or on private insurance outside the orbit of Obamacare. Nobody really knows how that might work, but you could allow that sometimes horrible problems call for far-out responses. Make America Health Again (MAHA) was a major plank in the president’s campaign platform. Everybody knows that Obamacare functions as an obstacle to being healthy. The entire purpose of it was to make medicine both unaffordable and unavailable. It’s been operating for going on fifteen years, failing spectacularly in plain sight.
The Democratic Party proposed to fix it, via their shut-down stunt, by enrolling onto Obamacare the millions of illegal aliens they ushered into the country at the cost of a trillion-plus dollars. Some fix. This is why they are known as the Party of Chaos. You can depend on the Democratic Party to always make a bad situation worse. The shut-down has even led to chaos within the Democratic Party itself as members now denounce their own leadership.
This would be a good time for President Trump to beat them with a stick as hard as possible. Ending the silent filibuster would be a good start - since the Democrats aim to do it anyway. Of course, that is up to Mr. Thune, the Senate Majority Leader. A fire needs to be lit under his well-tailored ass. Then, pass some really juicy legislation starting with election reform entailing proof-of-citizenship to vote, paper ballots, end of mail-in ballots (except for traditional absentee voting), and do away with the janky vote-counting machines). That would be an excellent start. Proceed from there.
As for those troubled financial markets and shaky money venues, they will do what they will do. If they wobble and crater, great opportunities will open up to decisively fix so much that has gone wrong in our country. You might not know it, considering the drift of recent years, but there are still a lot of capable people in this country ready to roll up their sleeves and go to work repairing what is broken."
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI)is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding,safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.
Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”
"Some people center the universe around themselves; while making other people nothing but decorations to their existence. "I will do this and then I will do that and then people will think this about me and then people will think that about me, and then I will add that person to my life when the convenient time arrives, and this person over here would make a very convenient addition as well..." They build their own thrones for themselves, and add decorations all around their thrones. The problem with that is: it does not bring happiness. A throne must be built for you; it must not be you who builds your own throne. If so, everything that you think you are is only an illusion! And illusions dissolve one day. Poof!"
"People Are Lining Up At Food Banks As Early As 2:30 In The Morning
As The Food Stamp Crisis Forces Millions Of Americans To 'Starve'”
by Michael Snyder
"We are less than two weeks into the month of November, and the mainstream media is telling us that millions of Americans are “starving”. If our society is this vulnerable to a temporary disruption in food stamp benefits, what is it going to be like when global events really start hitting the fan and there is no food in our grocery stores at all? Much of the population is just a few missed meals away from going completely haywire. For now, at least those that have not received their food stamp benefits this month can rely on local food banks. But would you be willing to line up at 2:30 in the morning just to get some free food? That is precisely what just happened in the Bronx…
"In the Bronx, throngs of desperate locals lined up as early as 2:30 a.m. at food banks because of disruptions in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance benefits caused by the shutdown. Carmen Verona told The Post she was there for the time ever because her mom and brother had their benefits cut. Her own $459 monthly SNAP benefits aren’t enough. “Without the food stamps, it’s a lot … and that’s not even enough because I always got to put out of pocket like $200, $300 because it’s too expensive,” said Verona, 58, as she picked up fruit, vegetables, and apple juice."
The reason why people line up so early is because there might not be enough food for everyone. In Indianapolis, one elderly woman that thought that she had gotten in line at her local food bank early enough ended up leaving empty-handed…"On Saturday morning, bundled in a coat, hat and gloves, Alicia Engel waited in a line outside Fountain Square Church of Christ for a cart of free groceries. An hour before the city-sponsored event was scheduled to end, volunteers ran out of food - and Engel left empty-handed."
This is how badly our economy has deteriorated. If the food stamp program permanently disappeared, millions upon millions of desperate Americans would suddenly be absolutely destitute. At one food bank in Cleveland, hordes of hungry people lined up in the rain to get some free food. When Fox News posted footage of the line on X, it got hundreds of thousands of views…"A video of a large line outside a food bank in Cleveland has gone viral amid the ongoing freezing of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) during the government shutdown. Fox News posted footage showing long lines of people queuing outside a food bank on its X account. At the time of writing, the video had accrued 599,000 views."
You have to be really committed to stand in the rain for hours. In other parts of the country, people are able to wait in their vehicles. For example, on one recent morning in Tallahassee “hundreds of cars lined up outside a shopping mall for emergency food assistance”…"On a cold Saturday morning in Tallahassee, hundreds of cars lined up outside a shopping mall for emergency food assistance. Among them was Joe Elliott, a newly retired man with liver disease, whose rising medical costs and lapsed SNAP benefits left him in need, per Chronicle Online. The food distribution, organized by Second Harvest and supported by United Way of the Big Bend and WTXL, aimed to serve 1,500 families. CEO Monique Ellsworth said calls for help have surged as nearly 100,000 residents in the region face uncertainty over food aid."
We are seeing similar scenes all over the nation. In northern California, demand at local food banks has absolutely exploded…"Within its service area of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, more than 168,000 people rely on CalFresh, the state of California’s version of SNAP, Bacho says. On Monday alone, over 1,500 unique users visited the bank’s online food locator tool, which connects people to nearby food distribution sites, according to Bacho. That’s nearly double the usual volume. Their hotline has also experienced a 200% increase in requests for referrals, she says."
I was surprised to learn that California is not even among the top 10 states that are most heavily dependent on the food stamp program. It turns out that New Mexico, Oregon and Louisiana lead that list…
• New Mexico -21.5 percent
• Oregon – 18.1 percent
• Louisiana – 17.5 percent
• Oklahoma – 16.9 percent
• W. Virginia – 15.5 percent
• Nevada – 15.2 percent
• Massachusetts – 15.1 percent
• Pennsylvania – 15.0 percent
• New York – 14.9 percent
• Illinois – 14.8 percent
There were a few states that began paying out full food stamp benefits last week, but the Trump administration is ordering those states to “immediately undo” what they have done…"The Trump administration has instructed states that they must “immediately undo any steps” that were taken to provide full SNAP benefits to low-income Americans, saying states were “unauthorized.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in a late-night Saturday memo obtained by CBS News, also threatened to impose financial penalties on states that did not comply with the government’s new orders.
“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized,” Patrick Penn, deputy undersecretary of Agriculture, wrote to state SNAP directors. “Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025.”
What a colossal mess. And the fact that this crisis has erupted just before Thanksgiving is making a lot of recipients even more upset… “Nothing, I didn’t get nothing this month,” Anthony Miller said. Miller said he was supposed to see nearly $300 on his link card on November 1. “It’s confusing and Trump don’t want to release it, and that’s why he’s taking it to court, and it don’t make no sense at all that we got to starve out here, and he did it at the time of Thanksgiving,” he said."
Did you notice that he used the word “starve”. We are suddenly hearing that word at lot. In fact, one female EBT recipient that claims that she is “starving” has been getting a tremendous amount of attention online…
A brutally truthful must-view!
Needless to say, that woman is not starving. If you go without food for a few days, that is not going to hurt you. In fact, for most of the population going without food for a few days would actually be quite beneficial for their health. If you have a chronic disease, fasting is one of the best things that you could possibly do for your body.
The reason why we are hearing the word “starve” so much is because the mainstream media is constantly using it and many top Democrats are constantly using it… “Donald Trump and his administration have made the decision to weaponize hunger, to withhold SNAP benefits from millions of people, notwithstanding the fact that two lower courts, both the district court and the court of appeals, made clear that those SNAP benefits needed to be paid immediately,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said on CNN Saturday, calling the actions “shameful.”
“Donald Trump is literally fighting in court to ensure Americans starve. HE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU,” echoed California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential contender, on X."
Nobody in the United States is starving. If you want to see real starvation, just look at what is happening in Africa right now. People are literally dropping dead from a lack of food, but that hardly gets any attention from the western media. So let’s put all of this into perspective.
This food stamp crisis is just temporary, and the good news is that it looks like a deal to end the government shutdown may be within reach. We shall see. But even if this government shutdown ends, there are a couple of things that we all need to remember.
Number one, demand at U.S. food banks was at record levels even before the government shutdown started.
Number two, if there is some sort of a major emergency someday and the federal government is no longer able to feed tens of millions of Americans, things will get very bad in this country very rapidly."
.jpeg)
