"All Earthly Empires Die"

"All Earthly Empires Die"

by Bill Bonner

"'Amor fati' was Nietzsche’s famous expression. It is a Latin phrase with connections to the Stoic writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Literally translated, it means “love of fate.” It is a white shoe yearning for mud. It is a turkey looking forward to Thanksgiving. Or an investor stoically preparing for a bear market.

We use the term to describe the grace and courage you need to meet a complex, unknowable, and uncontrollable future. You don’t know whether the Earth is warming or cooling… whether it is good or bad… or whether you can do anything about it. You don’t know who’s doing “equal work.” You don’t know what equality is… how to measure it… or what to do about it. You don’t know who the bad guy is. It may even be you. It recognizes that we are all God’s fools, living in a world of ignorance, headed towards we don’t know where. Using our brains, we can make progress in our physical, material world. Technical thinking yields pyramids and Eiffel Towers.

Ignorance Everywhere: But there is another part of life, which has a mind of its own. It does not bend readily to our desires or yield to our intelligence. It is the part of life whose purposes are unknown. The first and most important Commandment, according to Jesus, was not to fight it, but to love it.

But ignorance can be a charm. You just have to take it seriously. And appreciate it. Recognizing your own ignorance will inform your newfound modesty. You will be aware of it. And fiercely proud. Nobody will be humbler than you are! And since you are so chummy with ignorance, you will see it everywhere – in every headline, every public announcement, every speech on the floor of the Senate… and every crackpot comment from every dummy voter in the empire.

In private affairs, you reduce uncertainty by getting as close to the subject as possible. That is, you avoid secondhand “news” and try to find out for yourself. The more you know about a company, for example, the more confident you can be about investing in it. That’s why the insiders always have the inside track, an advantage that is increased by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s phony “level playing field” propaganda. In public affairs – policy discussions, economics, politics – as you get closer, you become less cocksure. That is, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

In an interesting university study, people were asked to pick out Ukraine on a map… and whether they approved of military intervention in that country. Curiously, the further off they were on the geography (the average guess was 1,800 miles off), the more they favored forceful intervention. In public affairs, ignorance and confidence vary inversely.

Moral Certainty: When we first moved to Baltimore in the 1980s, we noticed this phenomenon in another context. Baltimore was a disaster. Crime, drugs, poverty, venereal disease, broken homes, unwed mothers, corruption – name a social problem; Baltimore had it. And while its leaders had been noticeably unable to solve any of these problems right in their own back yard, the city’s politically correct politicians were loud and clear on one issue: apartheid had to end… in South Africa. Had they ever visited South Africa? Could they find it on a map? Probably not. But they were sure they knew how to make it a better place.

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority,” wrote Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken. “The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”

“I am not too sure,” would eliminate many of the world’s myth-driven, self-inflicted ills – pointless wars, dumb arguments, pogroms, persecutions, and lynchings. And reckless spending of other people’s money.

Imagine a wise Hitler entertaining the idea of building Auschwitz as a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” “Hmmm… I’m not too sure that would solve it… In fact, I’m not too sure there is a problem!”

Imagine Simon de Montfort readying to attack the town of Albi to exterminate the “heretics.” When told that half the people in the town were good Catholics, de Montfort replied: “Kill them all. God will recognize His own.” Suppose he had thought twice… “Hmmm… Maybe this is not such a good idea… Maybe killing people is not what Christianity is all about… Maybe the heretics aren’t so bad… Maybe I’ll take the afternoon off.”

Unwarranted Confidence: The barroom blowhard… so sure he is right about everything… is generally the dumbest guy in the place. And the most dangerous. He’s the one who will stir up a mob… and get himself elected president. The whole system of modern public policy is built on false knowledge and unwarranted confidence. The elite claims to know what is best for you. That is how every politician can claim his proposals would “benefit the American people.” But the only program that would benefit the American people would be to let them decide for themselves what would benefit them. Give them back their money. Stop bossing them around. End the wars. Stop the empire. But who would suggest such a thing?

A book that appeared in 2018, "Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy", by political scientist Christopher Fettweis, argued that power really does corrupt, and that when a nation or an empire gets too much power, its elite develops new opinions.

Rather than seeing itself as one of many nations that must get along with each other, its elites begin to see that they have a special role to play. They become the one, “indispensable” nation, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it. They are the world’s only hope in combatting evil, which they do, as current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo elaborated, with “the righteous knowledge that our cause is just, special, and built upon America’s core principles.”

Thus endowed with a special mission and special powers, and subject to the special rules of the only nation with a trillion-dollar-per-year military/empire budget, the elite develop, in Fettweis’s judgment, a fatal combination of unrestrained hubris, unrealistic paranoia, and unrepentant ignorance. They see danger everywhere, without undertaking any serious study (they assume knowledge comes automatically with raw power). And they think they have not only the right, but the means, to do something about it, even if the danger is largely fantasy.

Damned to Hell: But people always come to think what they need to think when they need to think it. “All earthly empires die,” wrote St. Augustine in 413, a few years before the Vandals destroyed his city and finally brought down the Roman Empire in the West.

The elite contribute, by taking up the myths that help it die. Certainty and ignorance vary proportionally, both on the individual and on a national level. The surer a nation is of its myths… its exceptionalism… its manifest destiny… its policies… and its position at the right hand of God… the more it is damned to Hell."

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

by Charles Hugh-Smith

"Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people. This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the Antonine Plague of 165 AD.

The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests which reduced the caloric intake of most people, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague which swept Europe in 1347.

I’ve mentioned the book "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire" a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization. It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.

In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor. The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Kondratieff and others, and Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations. All three are playing out globally in the present.

In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues: the rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.

Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma. Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 30 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.

Now the plan–for lack of any real plan–is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.

Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.

Which brings us to luck. As a general rule, historians seek explanations which leave luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and action and cycles. Yes, cycles and human action influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.

If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors, then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history. It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power in the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse. That was good judgement by Pius but also good luck.

As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs. (A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud but without the water vapor/steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of sea water, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.) That was bad luck for the dinosaurs, and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.

The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)

In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us. We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control–technology, wise investments and policies, etc. The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.

We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.

I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, "Born Under a Bad Sign" (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” The next few years might have us singing this line with feeling."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com

o

Albert King, "Born Under a Bad Sign"

"The Ice Baron's Lament"

"The Ice Baron's Lament"

by Stucky

"The drums are silent. The instruments are tarnished. The band no longer plays. Only hubris is triumphant. Once upon a time there were ice barons who made vast fortunes from Maine and Great Lakes ice. Some moved on. Others did not. The ones who did not lost everything.

Uncle Sam sits by the river, gaunt and hollow-eyed, his knees drawn up beneath threadbare clothes that once spoke of dominance. The brim of his tattered top hat curls in the wind, frayed at the edges like the promises that built him. Behind him, a shrinking block of ice melts into trickles - his fortune washing back into the eternal water that gave it birth. He was once worth millions. Certain of his vision. Master of winter itself.

He kept to his industry even as it polluted the waters, even as the ice turned dark and filthy with the same progress that made him rich, even as refrigeration arrived quietly in distant cities to render his empire obsolete. He built warehouses to hold millions of tons, employed armies of workers who cut geometric patterns across frozen surfaces, and watched his wealth compound until it seemed as eternal as the seasons. But he couldn’t see - or refused to see - that he was harvesting something temporary and calling it forever.

Now he gazes at the river with hollow eyes, defeated by life, knowing there is nothing left but the past to comfort him. His workers are gone. His warehouses stand empty. His expertise is worthless. All that remains is memory and the bitter knowledge that he was right about everything except the one thing that mattered: nothing lasts.

This is the human story. This is the story of the United States. For two centuries, he built empire after empire on extraction and innovation - each cycle making him great while containing the seeds of its own destruction. Agriculture to textiles to steel to automobiles to electronics - each wave created fortunes, employed millions, and seemed permanent until it wasn’t. Each time, something new arose to catch the falling workers, making the destruction feel creative rather than terminal.

But now he sits by the river watching the ice melt, and there is nothing left to become. The jobs being destroyed outnumber the jobs being created for the first time in his history. He polluted his own rivers - financially, politically, socially - through the same industrial ambition that built his wealth. He believed scale and dominance meant permanence. He refused to adapt when the warnings became obvious, doubling down on systems already failing, convinced that tradition and might would defeat innovation.

The drums are silent. The instruments are tarnished. The band no longer plays. Only hubris is triumphant - but it came from the gods. The Greek curse, the truth of humanity: we mistake a moment’s dominance for eternal power, build empires on shifting ice, and convince ourselves the cold will never break. We see the melting, feel the fortune trickling away, and still we sit - knees drawn up, clothes threadbare, hat brim tattered - gazing at water that once froze reliably and now barely chills.

Behind Uncle Sam, the chunk of ice that represented industrial dominance, middle-class prosperity, and global supremacy dissolves into the river. Trickle by trickle, his fortune returns to water. He built an empire on ice and refused to believe in thermodynamics. Now he sits among the ruins, and all that remains is the past to comfort him.

The ice baron’s fate is America’s fate - watching our fortune melt back into the river, knowing this time it’s not coming back, understanding too late that we harvested something temporary and called it forever. We doubled down when we should have pivoted. We polluted what sustained us. We mistook our moment for eternity.

That is the human story. That is the Greek curse. That is the truth of hubris triumphant - until the gods demand their price, and winter refuses to freeze, and empires built on ice return to water.

The river flows on, indifferent and eternal. The ice shrinks behind him. Uncle Sam sits motionless, gaunt and defeated, watching his reflection ripple in the current - a ghost of glory, a monument to the illusion that dominance is destiny. The cold has broken. The empire melts. And there is nothing left but the haunting silence of drums that will never sound again."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Background: the Knickerbocker Ice Company, the Hudson Valley’s dominant ice empire. Knickerbocker controlled massive operations - three ice houses at Rockland Lake alone held nearly 100,000 tons when Thomas Edison filmed them in 1902. They hung on through the 1910s and early 1920s, watching their industry slowly die as home refrigerators replaced iceboxes and dry ice emerged as a superior transport method. By 1909, pollution had become so severe that the state Department of Health condemned 41 ice houses around Albany, Troy, and Rensselaer. Unlike Morse, who saw the writing on the wall and diversified, Knickerbocker’s owners remained committed to natural ice - and watched their empire melt into the river that had built it."

o

Full screen recommended.

"Ice Harvesting at Rockland Lake"

"Rockland Lake, near the Hudson River about 25 miles north of New York City, was the largest natural ice harvesting operation of the Knickerbocker Ice Company, which was the most prominent ice purveyor at the turn of the 20th Century, when these Thomas Edison films were shot. The three ice houses stored close to 100,000 tons of ice, which were loaded onto barges that made their way down the Hudson to New York City. Today, Rockland Lake is a New York State Park, and the home of the Knickerbocker Ice Festival."

"Alert! 'Secret Plan' To End War is a Psy-op, Major Escalation Coming"

Full screen recommended.

Prepper News, 11/20/25

"Alert! 'Secret Plan' To End War is a Psy-op, 

Major Escalation Coming"

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Bill Bonner, "Mouth of the South"

Sam Ervin, former US Senator and head

 of the Watergate Committee, 1973.

"Mouth of the South"

by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "In June 1972, a comically inept group of bunglers and incompetents - led by ex-CIA agents - broke into the Watergate building to gain intel that would be helpful to Nixon’s presidential campaign. They picked the lock and then taped over it to keep it from latching shut, intending to come back the next night. But they put the tape on wrong, horizontally, so that it showed on the outside. A security guard noticed it almost immediately and removed it.

When the burglars returned, the door was again locked. They tried to pick the lock a second time. But they failed. They had to remove the door from it hinges. The break-in then was so obvious that when a student intern returned after an hour or so he immediately called the police. A police car arrived minutes later, but the criminals’ lookout failed to notice...and failed to alert them. The police entered the building and arrested the five men in the Democratic National Committee headquarters. What a mess.

The quality of America’s public and elected officials seems to have declined sharply over the last 50 years. But is it true? Today, we take a glance back at the Watergate scandal...and wonder: will the Epstein Saga go the same way?

Many scapegoats were proposed to explain the Watergate break-in. Many were the ‘conspiracy theories’ floated up like mists from the Potomac. Fidel Castro was behind it (several of the burglars were Cuban), said some. No, it was a CIA plot to ruin Nixon, said another. Nixon himself seemed to favor this explanation; he nearly fired Bill Colby...who later became a source for one of our newsletters. Another theory suggested that Democrats themselves had set up the burglary...to entrap Republican operatives.

Two Washington Post reporters got on the case. Then the Senate set up a committee to investigate...calling witnesses to televised hearings. John Dean, White House counsel, spilled the beans to Sam Ervin’s committee in June of 1973. The following month it was revealed that Nixon had secretly recorded his phone conversations. Naturally, the public wanted to hear them. ‘The Nixon tapes’ were roughly analogous to the Epstein files. They were subpoenaed.

Note that in the ‘70s there were still many people in Washington with what might be called an Eisenhower Era sense of right and wrong. And in the wrangling over the tapes, they were much needed; there were plenty of opportunities to derail the investigation.

Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Both Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than carry out the order. Then when the tapes were delivered, some were missing. This led to further back and forth and foot-dragging. It wasn’t until July of 1974 that the ‘smoking gun’ tape - in which Nixon tried to stop the investigation, clearly obstructing justice - was released. He resigned the following month...more than two years after the original break-in.

Probably the funniest part of the whole farce was the kidnapping of Martha Mitchell. Ms. Mitchell was the wife of former Attorney General, who was then head of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (known pejoratively as CREEP). She was also known as the “Mouth of the South,” and had appeared on such popular TV shows as ‘Laugh-In.’

Martha Mitchell was, above all, a gossip. She would have a few drinks in the evening and then call reporters with what she had learned during the day. It was this that her husband tried to prevent after Ms. Mitchell found out about the Watergate break-in. One of the men arrested was none other than her daughter’s bodyguard, former CIA agent James McCord, who would connect the crime to the Mitchells and ultimately to the president’s re-election committee.

Mitchell was in a house in Newport Beach when she locked herself in her bedroom, picked up the phone to call UPI reporter, Helen Thomas. Steve King, however, had been hired by her husband to keep her from doing that. He broke down the door and pulled the phone from the wall. For the next few days, she was kept sedated and under control by FBI and Secret Service agents. And when she finally was able to contact Thomas, she reported that “I’m back and blue. I’m a political prisoner.” Now it was out in the open. John Mitchell then resigned. He later went to jail. Martha and he separated and never saw each other again. She died in 1975.

That is the closest parallel we have to today’s Epstein Files. But today’s circumstances...and today’s cast of characters...are very different. Will Pam Bondi do an imitation of Elliot Richardson? And who in the Senate has the stature of Sam Ervin to lead an investigative committee? And while Washington Post reporters have closely followed the tussle over how and when to release the Epstein Files, they have shown little interest in what is really in them. How will it turn out? We wait to find out."

PS: Sam Ervin’s recording “Senator Sam at Home,” with his version of ‘Bridge over troubled water,’ is a classic.

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Kroger 'Holiday Week', Thanksgiving 2025"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 11/20/25

"Kroger 'Holiday Week', Thanksgiving 2025"

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"It's All Going Down The Toilet: Stocks, Jobs, Housing, Small Businesses and America"

Jeremiah Babe, 11/19/25

"It's All Going Down The Toilet: 

Stocks, Jobs, Housing, Small Businesses and America"

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Judge Napolitano, "Col. Douglas Macgregor: War Is Coming Soon"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 11/19/25

"Col. Douglas Macgregor: War Is Coming Soon"

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Musical Interlude: 2002, "The Calling"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "The Calling"

"A Look to the Heavens, With Chet Raymo"

“The Journey”

by Chet Raymo

“Here’s a deep-deep sky map of the universe from the March 9, 2006 issue of "Nature". The horizontal scale is a 360 view right around the sky; the vertical gaps at 6 hours and 24 hours are the parts of the universe that are blocked to our view by the disk of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The vertical scale – distance from Earth – is logarithmic (10, 100, 1000, etc.) measured in megaparsecs (a parsec equals 3.26 light-years). Across the top is the Big Bang, and the oldest and most distant thing we can see, the cosmic microwave background, the radiation of the Big Bang itself. A few relatively nearby galaxies are designated at the bottom. All that stuff in the middle that looks like smoke or dusty cobwebs are quasars and galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

A smoke of galaxies! (2 trillion galaxies according to latest estimates. - CP) A universe cobwebbed with Milky Ways! Each galaxy itself a smoke of stars, hundreds of billions of stars, many or all of them with planets. My book, “Walking Zero,” is about the human journey from the omphalos of our birth into the world of the galaxies, a journey many of us are disinclined to make. Here is how the Prologue to the book begins:

“Each of us is born at the center of the world. For nine months our physical selves are assembled molecule by molecule, cell by cell, in the dark covert of our mother’s womb. A single fertilized egg cell splits into two. Then four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Ultimately, 50 trillion cells or so. At first, our future self is a mere blob of protoplasm. But slowly, ever so slowly, the blob begins to differentiate under the direction of genes. A symmetry axis develops. A head, a tail, a spine. At this point, the embryo might be that of a human, or a chicken, or a marmoset. Limbs form. Digits, with tiny translucent nails. Eyes, with papery lids. Ears pressed like flowers against the head. Clearly now a human. A nose, nostrils. Downy hair. Genitals.

As the physical self develops, so too a mental self takes shape, not yet conscious, not yet self-aware, knitted together as webs of neurons in the brain, encapsulating in some respects the evolutionary experience of our species. Instincts impressed by the genes. The instinct to suck, for example. Already, in the womb, the fetus presses its tiny fist against its mouth in anticipation of the moment when the mouth will be offered the mother’s breast. The child will not have to be taught to suck. Other inborn behaviors will express themselves later. Laughing. Crying. Striking out in anger. Loving.

What, if anything, goes on in the mind of the developing fetus we may never know. But this much seems certain: To the extent that the emerging self has any awareness of its surroundings, its world is coterminous with itself. We are not born with knowledge of the antipodes, the plains of Mars, or the far-flung realm of the galaxies. We are not born with knowledge of Precambrian seas, the supercontinent of Pangea, or the Age of Dinosaurs. We are born into a world scarcely older than ourselves and scarcely larger than ourselves. And we are at its center.

A human life is a journey into the grandeur of a universe that may contain more galaxies than there are cells in the human body, a universe in which the whole of a human lifetime is but a single tick of the cosmic clock. The journey can be disorienting; our first instincts are towards coziness, comfort, our mother’s enclosing arms, her breast. The journey, therefore, requires courage – for each individual, and for our species.

Uniquely of all animals, humans have the capacity to let our minds expand into the space and time of the galaxies. No other creatures can number the cells in their bodies, as we can, or count the stars. No other creatures can imagine the explosive birth of the observable universe 14 billion years ago from an infinitely hot, infinitely small seed of energy. That we choose to make this journey – from the all-sustaining womb into the vertiginous spaces and abyss of time – is the glory of our species, and perhaps our most frightening challenge.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"This I Believe..."

“This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual

human is the most valuable thing in the world.

And this I would fight for:

the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.

And this I must fight against:

any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.”

- John Steinbeck

"In Retrospect..."

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.”

– "The Fourth Turning", Strauss & Howe

"I Can Choose..."

“Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.”

- Walter Anderson

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "There Is Time Left"

"There Is Time Left"

"Well, there is time left –

fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away

from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is

the mystery, which is death as well as life,

and not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death,

and be overcome with amazement!”

~ Mary Oliver

"Viktor Frankl: When You Discover the Meaning of Suffering, Nothing Can Break You Anymore"

Full screen recommended.

The Psyche, 11/19/25

"Viktor Frankl: When You Discover the Meaning of Suffering,

 Nothing Can Break You Anymore"

"What if your greatest pain hides your greatest strength? Inspired by Viktor Frankl’s "Man’s Search for Meaning," this video explores one of life’s deepest truths - that suffering itself does not destroy us; the lack of meaning does. Through Frankl’s journey from the darkness of the concentration camps to the light of spiritual freedom, discover how to transform pain into purpose and become truly unbreakable."

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The Daily "Near You?"

Wayland, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Dan, I Allegedly, "The Economic Time Bomb No One Is Talking About"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 11/19/25

"The Economic Time Bomb No One Is Talking About"

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John Wilder, ""The Amusement Singularity""

"The Amusement Singularity"

by John Wilder

"After a meeting, a colleague and I sat down in my office. “Man, it has been a long year,” I said. “Yes, it’s like we haven’t had a moment to rest for months.” This really made me think. I chatted with several other people, and for them as well this year had been relentless as far as the pace of the year. It wasn’t necessarily bad, mind you, there was just something always going on. All the time.

I think, partially, is that we’re seeing the inevitable consequences of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – that principle that says that, given two likely outcomes, inevitably the most amusing outcome will occur. For whatever reason, I don’t think that this is an accident – I think it might be hard-coded into the fabric of the Universe by a Creator with more than a little sense of humor. I mean, propane, right?

I don’t know if amusement is hard-coded, but I do know that the amount of change, or “novelty” that we’re seeing on a regular basis is off the charts. If I were to make a comparison, many weeks during 2024 have contained more fundamental change than was seen in the lifetimes of most medieval peasants. Really.

I mean, many peasants were born and died in the same mud-hut with only change being repair on the thatched roof. Most peasants saw no meaningful changes at all to church, governance, demographics, or technology – in their entire lives. The most that they had to look forward to was to one day wear a hat made up of a very larger turnip. If they were lucky.

In the span of Pa Wilder’s lifetime, Pa went from his first rides being in a horsedrawn buggy to watching man set foot on the Moon before he was fifty. And let’s not forget that within one human lifespan Russia went from a Czarist empire to a communist hellhole to a, well, whatever it is today. I mean, they love ice dancing, right?

This change appears to be happening at a faster and faster rate. Alice Cooper (who I met, and he’s very chill) noted this back in the 1970s with the lyrics to Generation Landslide that I’ve referenced before: “Stop at full speed at 100 miles per hour, the Colgate® Invisible Shield™ finally got ‘em.” It seems like we’re on a treadmill of innovation and that treadmill keeps getting faster and faster.

Part of it, of course, is that more information is available now than at any time in history. I can look up, without leaving my writing chair, information on almost any topic and get results. This allows people to very quickly make use of the solutions that others have found to problems. I can’t count the number of times that an Internet search or a YouTube® video has provided enough information to solve a problem that only an expert could have solved even twenty years ago.

There are some problems with this – why innovate when there’s a good enough solution on the Internet? It might stifle some solutions that bright people faced with a problem and no Internet would have solved, perhaps in a better way, without the information. But, on balance, it probably has created a lot of wealth, having this information store solving problems daily. However, it certainly has sped up the world.

When I was learning how to play chess at more than a “move the pieces correctly” level, Pa Wilder took my impulsive nature and said, “Wait. Stop. Look at the board. Think.” It is probably no surprise that taking that advice made my play much, much better overnight. But it also forced me to be able to think about the game more systematically, and to find things that otherwise I would have missed.

Taking time to contemplate actually made me a better thinker. Now, I figure that (at work) I have between 700 and 1400 contact points a week, and probably 60 decisions (mostly minor) an hour. The time that I have to sit, contemplate, and plan is nearly zero due to the near-constant “urgent” stream of activity. Not only that, many people are required to be connected to their positions via cell phone nearly constantly.

Long term, I think this constant stream of connection is horrible for people and is making many of them miserable. I’ve wondered if the nearly constant stream of psychological problems and psych medications that plague kids today was related to an adversity-free upbringing where outrage was fostered by GloboLeft teachers. I think, in part, it is. But the information flow that they’re steeped into is at least an order of magnitude higher than when I was a kid, and probably two or three times that.

It turns our perception of time into an eternal now – with one novel event following another in rapid succession as we head to a singularity of amusement. An assassination attempt on a presidential candidate is rare, a presidential candidate “nominee in all but name” dropping out happening in the same month while a billionaire shitposts about it and X® posts and engagements reach an all-time high? As A.I. generated content is now likely surpassing human-created written content, and will likely soon surpass human illustration content. In a year or two? Maybe it surpasses human-generated video. Yeah. The amusement is accelerating. Until it can’t.

The solution is simple, unplug, turn it down, and relax in contemplation. The next time I have a problem? I’ll figure out how to do it myself and skip YouTube® and end up with another comical tale of how not to remove bodily hair with propane."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

Bill Bonner, "In Thrall To Foreign Gods"

Roman Emperor Elagabalus, reigned from 218-222, infamous for 

attempting to place a Syrian Sun god above Jupiter in the Roman Pantheon, 

was reportedly also Rome’s first ‘gender fluid’ Emperor

"In Thrall To Foreign Gods"

by Bill Bonner

"This is far more than a case of institutional betrayal. It is a vivid window into the decadence of a depraved American elite, a later Roman empire with dozens of tiny Caligulas committing dozens of heinous crimes. It is a story of money, and what it can buy, and power, and what it can conceal. As allies, they can make anything happen, or not happen, as the case may be."

 - Esquire Magazine

Baltimore, Maryland - "Lighting up the wires is the Epstein Saga. AP: "House votes overwhelmingly to force release of Epstein files, sending bill to Senate."

The Hill: "Senate unanimously approves bill to force release of Epstein files."

Donald Trump has backed down from his earlier position; now he says he will sign it. And now we will see how far we have come since those days of the Watergate Scandal, when White House counsel John Dean told a Senate committee that there was “a cancer within, close to the presidency.”

We follow the story only to try to figure out where we are in the larger story - the degeneration of the US empire and the likely devaluation of US dollar assets. Where are we? At Caligula...Nero...or Elagabalus?

Already, the days of consensual democracy are clearly over. Now, we are in some kind of Banana Republic/Strongman phase. This was highlighted yesterday in a news item that showed the strongman signing yet another proclamation. "Trump has now signed 212 Executive Orders. In a signing ceremony, POTUS was surrounded by his smiling lackeys, congratulating him for signing so many. “This makes it twice as many as Biden signed in his whole four years in office,” said one sycophant. “It’s more than Obama signed in eight years,” said sycophant number two.

The crucial lesson of history - that ‘the government that governs best, governs least’ — has not reached the White House. Instead, the Trump Team has succumbed to the ‘fatal conceit;’ it thinks it knows what is best for everyone."

These EOs (executive orders) cover everything from...

EO 14357: "Modifying Duties Addressing the Synthetic Opioid Supply Chain in the People’s Republic of China."

to EO 14355: "Unlocking Cures for Pediatric Cancer With Artificial Intelligence."

But despite the weight and breadth of the issues before him, POTUS still has time to worry about the everyday problems we face:

EO 14264: "Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads."

Some people spend their entire careers designing, manufacturing and marketing shower heads. How come they didn’t think of the water pressure problem? Thank God for POTUS.

But how could one man have the intellectual juice to consider so many complex issues, a new one almost every day? The answer was on the videotape. As the president signed the EO, his flunkeys explained what he was signing; he hadn’t even read it. Congress is AWOL. POTUS rules by decree.

Most of these decrees are just blah blah...setting up committees and commissions or, such as EO 14276, ‘Restoring America’s Seafood Competitiveness.’ But some are loaded with explosives. EO 14353, for example, seems to obligate the US to defend Qatar (the country that gave Trump a Boeing 747). Another EO attempts to put a Democratic-leaning law firm out of business by denying it federal contracts.

Yes, the big man is large and in charge. No moth can singe its wings on a streetlight in Calcutta without drawing his concerned attention. Alas, into this happy fantasy barges the ghost of Jeff Epstein, dragging behind him approximately 20,000 documents, 1,608 of which mention none other than the man who is now president of the USA.

According to the New York Times: "In a series of emails with friends and associates - surfacing first in a few messages selected by House Democrats and then in full by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee - Mr. Epstein described Mr. Trump as a “dirty” businessman who was “borderline insane,” untrustworthy and worse in “real life and up close” than the image he sought to portray to the public." In other words...nothing new.

And now what? We’ll take a guess. More emails will come out...showing that the president is the person everyone knows he is. Many people would like to see Trump brought down by a salacious sex story. But the most important documents - the ones that show a foreign government manipulating both Democrat and Republican leaders - will be kept under wraps. At this point in the empire’s descent, any information the political class chooses to keep from voters is classified as a ‘national security risk.’"

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

o

"Larry Summers Goes Into Hiding; Messages 

Sought Epstein's Advice On Cheating With Daughter Of CCP Official"

"Jeffrey Epstein and the Pedophocracy"

"How It Really Is"

 

"I Know Why You Did It..."

“Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance, and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well, certainly, there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. They were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.” 

Full screen recommended.

"V For Vendetta Speech - Seeds of Revolution!" 

"And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?"

"Fighting For An America That Long Ago Ceased To Exist"

"Fighting For An America That 

Long Ago Ceased To Exist"

by Hardscrabble Farmer

"My childhood was a series of toy soldiers, G.I.Joe’s, and child sized rifles, playing army with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood. I still have a photograph of my six-year-old self with my friend Butch Lewis, me dressed in my uncle’s paratrooper gear and him wearing his father’s Marine Corps helmet, smiling broadly on the driveway, miniature versions of our future selves. A little more than a decade later I was in the 82nd Airborne as an infantryman and Butchy was a jarhead.

My whole family line was polluted with one legged men, battle scarred veterans and the walls of the houses hung with photographs of young, uniformed men who never came back at all. And still I joined.

Looking back as an old man now I can only hang my head in shame for having been so stupid, so gullible, so easily led to do things I can never make right because of a flag, or the dream of an America that has long ago ceased to exist. Whenever someone tells me thanks for your service, it stings.

There is a reason the system continues to run no matter how corrupt, how broken, how disreputable it becomes and that is the misapplied intentions of the young who want more than anything to simply be like the men in their own families and to defend the good lives their people made for them."

Please do view the comments here:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

This is not the country I proudly enlisted to serve in the United State Marine Corps in 1968. We are a disgraceful socially, politically, economically and morally degenerate society in every possible way. I'm ashamed to call myself an American... And I earned the right to say that! 

                                                                         - CP

"12 Things That AI Says The Middle Class Won’t Be Able To Afford Soon"

"12 Things That AI Says The Middle Class 

Won’t Be Able To Afford Soon"

by Michael Snyder

"The middle class in the United States is being systematically destroyed. I know that this may sound like an obvious statement to many of you, but when I first started writing about this more than a decade ago it wasn’t an obvious statement. For years, the middle class was slowly eroding, but now the decline of the middle class has become an avalanche. Even the mainstream media is talking about America’s “K-shaped economy” these days, and nobody can deny that the poor are steadily getting poorer.

Recently, a reader that has been following my work for many years sent me a very sobering email. I asked him if I could share some of the content of that email in one of my articles, and he gave me permission. He is one of the millions of Americans that is barely scraping by from month to month, and I think that his story will really resonate with most of you…

"My Pickup Insurance went up $17 this month.

My Real Estate Tax went up $187.

I had to get rid of my Landline Phone because I couldn’t afford it anymore.

I drive a 41 year old Pickup with 221,000 miles. I would love to buy a better used Pickup for $7,000 but just don’t have the cash.

Last month I had $17 in my Checking Account when I got my SS Check. The month before that it was $5.

Michael, you have been writing about the vanishing Middle Class. I don’t think there will be a Middle Class in 1 or 2 more years!!! Like I said in a previous email, I don’t know where else I can cut back. And I live a very, very frugal, less materialistic, simple lifestyle compared to the average American. If I didn’t inherit a small farm with a livable house, I would be homeless!!!"

I know that many of you can identify with this. For a very long time, the cost of living has been rising faster than paychecks. Now we have reached a stage where a very large proportion of the population is desperately trying to survive from month to month.

A lot of people out there have cut down to one or two meals a day because reducing food expenses is one of the easiest ways to save money. In fact, one study has found that 2.6 million people that live in New York City “reported facing food hardships this last year”…"According to an alarming study to be released on Tuesday, 2.6 million New Yorkers in the city reported facing food hardships this last year. “On the worst end, 550,000 New Yorkers actually said that they ran out of food before they had money to buy any more. And to put that in perspective, that’s as if the entire city of Baltimore ran out of food,” Jason Cone with Robin Hood said."

We are not “the land of plenty” anymore. I realize that this is not welcome news, but it is the truth. During a recent interview with Fox News, Jade Warshaw laid out some of the facts that show that we are in the midst of a very painful cost of living crisis…"We’re in a cost of living crisis, Dana. I think everybody knows it. We speak to more than 18 million Americans every single week on The Ramsey Show and I am hearing firsthand, yes, the price of housing, rent, mortgages, they’re a problem. Obviously, we know that health care has gone up 6%-7%. I spoke to a woman the other day, the price of her health care is going from $400 to $900. Of course, that’s more than 6%-7%. And then of course, we’re finding things like daycare, obviously food, it’s so expensive. The average American, as a result, is going into debt. And we’re seeing more debt on consumers than ever. $103,000 of consumer debt is what Americans are paying, because these big three are still continuing to eat at our wallets: credit cards, student loans, car payments, Dana. It really is a crisis."

So what is our country going to look like as this cost of living crisis continues to intensify? I asked Google AI to tell me some of the things that the middle class would be unable to afford soon, and this is what I was told…

1. Homeownership: The traditional cornerstone of middle-class wealth, owning a home, has become an elusive dream for many, especially in urban and high-demand areas. Skyrocketing home prices, high down payments, and increased mortgage rates have made it so that in many markets, fewer than one in five homes are within reach for typical middle-income households.

2. Higher Education: A college education is increasingly a financial burden, with tuition and expenses soaring. Middle-class families often earn too much to qualify for significant financial aid but not enough to pay out of pocket, leading to massive student debt that can delay other life goals for decades.

3. Retirement Savings: Due to other financial pressures and the shift from pension plans to 401(k)s, many families struggle to save enough for a comfortable retirement. The inability to put away sufficient funds for the future means many may face the prospect of working longer or a reduced standard of living later in life.

4. Healthcare: Even with insurance, the costs of premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses for medical care and prescriptions can lead to substantial financial strain, making specialized medical treatments unaffordable for some.

5. Childcare: Quality childcare expenses can rival or exceed college tuition in many areas, forcing many parents (often mothers) to leave the workforce because the cost effectively erases the benefit of a second income.

6. New Cars: The average price of a new car has surged, partly due to advanced technology features becoming standard. This, combined with higher insurance and maintenance costs, means many families are holding onto older vehicles longer or forgoing car ownership altogether.

7. Groceries and Everyday Essentials: Persistent inflation means essentials like food, utilities, and gas are significantly more expensive, stretching paychecks and leading many families to worry about affording daily needs.

8. Comprehensive Insurance Plans: The rising cost of maintaining adequate health, home, and auto insurance coverage is becoming a major concern, potentially leading families to opt for limited coverage and increased financial risk.

9. Leisure and Vacations: Rising costs of living mean that family vacations and leisure activities, considered essential for a balanced life, are becoming luxuries many cannot afford.

10. Personal Fitness and Wellness Services: Personalized services like personal trainers or boutique fitness classes are increasingly seen as luxuries for only the upper class.

11. Organic and Specialty Foods: The higher price tag associated with organic and specialty foods may put these healthier options out of reach for average middle-class budgets.

12. New Technology and Eco-Friendly Upgrades: Keeping up with the latest tech gadgets or investing in eco-friendly home improvements (like solar panels or energy-efficient appliances) often requires a substantial initial investment that can be prohibitive.

I want to say a little bit more about the first item in that list. Soaring prices and high mortgage rates are not the only reasons why home ownership has become so expensive. Insurance rates have been steadily escalating for years, and property taxes have risen to insane levels in many parts of the country…"The hidden costs of homeownership are reaching nearly $16,000 per year nationwide, underscoring the ongoing affordability crisis crippling potential buyers.

A new analysis from real estate marketplace Zillow and Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, found that insurance, maintenance and property tax can cost the average homeowner $15,979 per year. Maintenance costs account for $10,946 of that, while about $2,003 goes toward homeowners insurance and $3,030 toward property taxes, according to the November analysis."

I have a confession to make. I really detest property taxes. In fact, if I could permanently ban property taxes on a nationwide basis, I would do it. All over America, elderly people are being forced out of homes that have been completely paid for because they can no longer afford the property taxes. Do we really own our homes if we have to keep shelling out thousands of dollars a year just for the privilege of continuing to live in them?

Home maintenance has also become an increasingly burdensome expense, but many homeowners are trying to cut corners wherever they can in this very challenging economic environment, and that is having a direct impact on Home Depot’s bottom line…"The Home Depot is a bellwether for the US economy and housing market. It’s latest quarter isn’t sparking much confidence. On Tuesday morning, the home improvement chain said it served fewer customers in the past three months than expected. Its earnings come as Wall Street hits a concerning stretch of losses. In the past week, all three major stock indexes are in the red as investor confidence in AI begins to slide."

I know that things seem bad now, but what is coming in 2026 and beyond will be even worse. The employment market is really tightening up, and mass layoffs are happening from coast to coast. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the number of WARN notices filed during the month of October was one of the highest ever recorded…"Impending layoff notices across much of the U.S. surged in October, highlighting signs of stress in the job market. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland shows that 39,006 Americans last month in 21 states received a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN, notice informing them of an upcoming layoff. U.S. labor law requires employers to provide these written warnings 60 days ahead of plant closings or mass layoffs.

It represents one of the highest numbers of WARN notices since Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland researchers started tracking the data in January 2006, although the tally remains below the spikes recorded during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic."

Over the last several years, we have witnessed a steady deterioration of the U.S. economy. But curling up into a fetal position and crying about it isn’t going to help anything. If you understand what is happening, that will help you to make wise decisions. And wise decisions lead to wise actions. The road ahead is going to require all of us to be strong and courageous, because things are starting to move very rapidly now."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/