Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 2/8/26
"Companies Are in Panic Mode Over Job Cuts"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 2/8/26
"Job Openings Collapse As
Top Spenders Start To Pull Back"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Monday, February 9, 2026
"Economic Market Snapshot 2/9/26"
"Economic Market Snapshot 2/9/26"
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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
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Market Data Center, Live Updates:
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Financial Stress Index
"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."
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Job cuts and much more.
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
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And now... The End Game...
o
Sunday, February 8, 2026
"It's Coming: Highly Active Sunspot Group About To Face Earth - Is This The Next G4 Storm?"
Full screen recommended.
The Quiet Archivist, 2/8/26
"It's Coming: Highly Active Sunspot Group
About To Face Earth - Is This The Next G4 Storm?"
"Just days after unleashing one of the strongest flares of the solar cycle, the most dangerous sunspot we’ve seen in years is rotating out of view… and something even more volatile appears to be taking its place. A massive X8.1 flare wasn’t the finale - it may have been the warning shot. In this investigation, we track what happens when solar danger doesn’t disappear, but moves. We follow the handoff from Sunspot Group 4366 to a newly emerging active region exploding on the far side of the Sun, now turning directly toward Earth. With high-energy solar winds inbound and the magnetosphere already saturated, even a moderate eruption could trigger outsized effects - from extreme auroras to serious stress on power grids, satellites, and global infrastructure.
But this video goes further than headlines. We examine overlooked anomalies, uncomfortable correlations, and the growing possibility that the Sun is operating in a regime our models weren’t built to handle. Why are recovery times getting longer? Why does activity seem to pulse rather than decay? And why do periods like this keep coinciding with broader instability across Earth’s systems? This isn’t a prediction. It’s a pattern-hunt - and the next 48 hours may tell us whether the X8.1 flare was the end of a cycle… or the opening move of something much bigger. Stay until the end, because the real risk may not be the storm itself - but how confident we are that we’d see it coming."
Comments here:
Correction: The narrator incorrectly says "May" instead of "January."
"Super Bowl Sunday Looks Like A Warzone; WW3 Could Happen At Any Time"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 2/8/26
"Super Bowl Sunday Looks Like A Warzone;
WW3 Could Happen At Any Time"
Comments here:
"Musical Interlude: Marios Frangoulis and Justin Hayward, "Nights In White Satin"
Full screen recommended.
Marios Frangoulis and Justin Hayward,
"Nights In White Satin"
Musical Interlude: Yanni, “Standing in Motion"
Full screen recommended.
Yanni, “Standing in Motion"
Live At The Acropolis 1993
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The massive star that created the bubble, a Wolf-Rayet star, is the bright one near the center of the nebula. Wolf-Rayet stars have over 20 times the mass of the Sun and are thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova phase of massive star evolution.
Fast winds from this Wolf-Rayet star create the bubble-shaped nebula as they sweep up slower moving material from an earlier phase of evolution. The windblown nebula has an age of about 70,000 years. Relatively faint emission captured by narrowband filters in the deep image is dominated by the glow of ionized oxygen atoms mapped to a blue hue. Presenting a mostly harmless outline, SH2-308 is also known as The Dolphin-head Nebula.”
Chet Raymo,“What Not to Believe”
“What Not to Believe”
by Chet Raymo
“In Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra, I came across this epigraph from Euripides: "Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe." I have no idea which of Euripides' plays the quote is from, but it strikes me as a suitable source for reflection. Credulity is the default state of a human life. Children are born to believe, to accept as true what they are told by adults. An innate credulity has survival value in a dangerous world. If a grown-up says "There are crocodiles in the river," it is probably best to stay out of the water.
Skepticism, on the other hand, must be learned. I was late in realizing that I didn't have to believe the received "truth." My best teacher was a somewhat older Panamanian secular Jew I went to graduate school with at UCLA. We took our brown-bag lunches together in the university's botanical garden, and spent the hour talking about physics, religion, and the "meaning of life."
Moises was the first person I had encountered after sixteen years of Catholic education who mentioned the word "skepticism." "Why do you believe that?" he would ask, and often I had no answer except that it was what my family and teachers told me was true. The idea that I might actually examine the basis for my beliefs was a rather new concept. In matters of religion, like almost everyone else in the world, I had embraced uncritically the faith story into which I was born.
And thus began my search for "a judicious sense of what not to believe." When later, as a teacher, I wrote a little column for each issue of the college newspaper, I called it "Under a Skeptical Star," from a line of the Scots poet/scholar William MacNeile Dixon: "If there be a skeptical star I was born under it, yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment." A liberating sense of what not to believe opened the door to a vastly more interesting world whose diverse and astonishing riches I continue to explore to this day."
"So We Never Live..."
"We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us; and if it be delightful to us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching. Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so."
- Blaise Pascal
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The Marmalade, "Reflections Of My Life"
"Consider The Following..."
"Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.
Nor is it so remarkable that our greatest joy should come when we are motivated by concern for others. But that is not all. We find that not only do altruistic actions bring about happiness but they also lessen our experience of suffering. Here I am not suggesting that the individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others' happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune than the one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace- anxiety, doubt, disappointment- these things are definitely less. In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense.
What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others' happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others' happiness. A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities"
- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
The Poet: Alfred, Lord Tennyson,"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
Full screen recommended.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson,"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
Read by John Davies
"The Battle of Balaclava, fought on 25 October 1854 during the Crimean War, was part of the siege of Sevastopol to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, Russia's principal naval base on the Black Sea. The Charge of the Light Brigade was a charge of British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British forces, had intended to send the Light Brigade to prevent the Russians from removing captured guns from overrun Turkish positions, a task well-suited to light cavalry.
However, there was miscommunication in the chain of command, and the Light Brigade was instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one well-prepared with excellent fields of defensive fire. They reached the battery under withering direct fire and scattered some of the gunners, but they were forced to retreat immediately. Thus, the assault ended with very high British casualties and no decisive gains.
The events are best remembered as the subject of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's narrative poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), published just six weeks after the event. Its lines emphasize the valor of the cavalry in bravely carrying out their orders, regardless of the obvious outcome. Blame for the miscommunication has remained controversial, as the original order itself was vague, and the officer who delivered the written orders with some verbal interpretation died in the first minute of the assault."
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As glorified by Hollywood (1936):
Full screen recommended for all.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
"I Hope I End Up..."
“I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, “Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case.” I will turn and say to them, “It is you who are the basket case! For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!” And maybe, the passersby will drop a coin into my cup.”
- Henry Rollins
"Fast Spreading Outbreak In US… And a Deadly Virus Abroad"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 2/8/26
"Fast Spreading Outbreak In US…
And a Deadly Virus Abroad"
Comments here:
"Earth's Geophysical Situation Is More Serious Than I Realized"
Full screen recommended.
Stefan Burns, 2/8/26
"Earth's Geophysical Situation
Is More Serious Than I Realized"
"New aurora activity up in the high arctic circle is hinting that unique geophysical dynamics are currently in play which could result in a historic equalization of energy through a geophysical event. Geophysicist Stefan Burns reports from location in Abisko, Sweden."
Comments here:
"S-400 In Iran - F-35 Myth About To Collapse"
Larry C. Johnson, Col. Larry Wilkerson, 2/8/26
"S-400 In Iran - F-35 Myth About To Collapse"
Comments here:
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Daniel Davis/Deep Dive, 2/8/26
"Col Douglas Macgregor -
Attacking Iran: The Global Implications"
Comments here:
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Dr. Marandi, 2/8/26
"The U.S. Is 'Hastening Its Own Demise'"
Dr. Marandi argues US foreign policy is pushing Iran
toward nuclear weapons and deeper ties with Russia and China.
Comments here:
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Danny Haiphong, 2/8/26
"Trump Cornered as Iran Drops Missile Bombshell,
Israel Begs for War - Justin Podur"
"Trump is cornered as the Iran reveals a devastating secret about its missile capabilities and the lengths the US is going to prevent feeling their wrath. Meanwhile, Israel is begging the US to go to war with Netanyahu rushing to Washington on his hands and knees. Geopolitical and military analyst Justin Podur joins the show for the first time to SITREP the coming US-Iran war and discuss what's next."
Comments here:
"Why Hasn't The Economy Collapsed Yet?"
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 2/8/26
"Why Hasn't The Economy Collapsed Yet?"
Comments here:
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"Economic Collapse = Societal Collapse"
It’s deliberate so that we can have “order out of chaos”,
as in New World Order, also known as the tyranny of the ruling sociopaths.
by Milan Adams
"Other than the obvious consequences, what might we expect from a partial economic collapse? A total collapse of the economy would throw the nation into utter chaos. But what if we endure an economic depression, or a severe and long-lasting downturn? I think that some of the effects are not so obvious.
1. The college and university system will collapse: As I explained in this previous post, the system of higher education is a house of cards. The cost of getting a college degree has risen sharply and steadily, while real income has remained relatively flat. The price rise is due to the easy availability of grants and loans for education. But with so many persons getting a college degree, its value in the marketplace has plummeted. Many college grads are out of work, or they are working in a job that does not require a degree. Eventually, this practice of paying more and more, for something that is worth less and less, will collapse the system. Colleges and universities will not have enough paying students, and professors will not agree to a drastic pay cut. Overhead expenses are far too high. All that is needed is an economic collapse, or partial collapse, to topple this house of cards. Many universities and colleges will be forced by economics to shut down.
2. Agricultural yields will plummet: The current U.S. agricultural system is based on the expectation of high yields. But high yields are obtained by high inputs - all the things that go into growing the crop, including lots of fertilizer, perhaps irrigation, herbicides, pesticides, labor, machinery. Then those high yields are sold and the money is then used to fund the inputs for the next crop cycle.
An economic collapse will mean that farmers will not be able to afford all the inputs needed for high yields. And when yields fall, the amount of money from that crop will be less. Then the next crop cycle will have even less money for inputs, resulting in even lower yields. And the process will continue — lower yields, less money, lower inputs — until many farmers are out of business and a food crisis results.
3. Violent crime will increase: When people lack money and food, they become desperate. And desperate people do desperate things. Theft and robbery will skyrocket, and people will be afraid in their homes, and afraid to go out in the community. Even a quick trip to the market will become risky. Sales of most goods will plummet, causing the economic crisis to worsen. Protests will turn violent. Home invasion robberies will become much more common. Many people will be killed or injured as a result of this increase in violent crimes.
4. Law enforcement will be overwhelmed: The law enforcement system in the U.S. is commercial. Officers are paid. We don’t keep a large excess of officers on the payroll, just in case crime sharply increases. So it is relatively easy for the system to be overwhelmed. And that means a call to 911 might not bring the police to your door in time, if at all. Those who have firearms for home defense will be much better off than those who rely solely on the police. But many households have no firearms. And that means that robberies will increase, and so will the economic damage and the number of injuries and deaths.
5. The healthcare system will be overwhelmed: The healthcare system is also commercial, and lacks a safety margin in the form of excess doctors and nurses. Hospitals operate at close to capacity. A sudden increase in persons who are sick or injured will overwhelm the system. The aforementioned increase in violent crime will undoubtedly increase injuries. But it is less obvious that a disruption to the food production and distribution system will increase illnesses. Plenty of good healthy food is the first line of defense against illness. Malnourished persons are much more likely to get sick. So an extended disruption to the food supply will cause an increase in illnesses.
6. Travel anywhere will become dangerous: As a result of all the above described problems, travel will be dangerous. Want to make a quick trip to the supermarket? You risk having your house robbed, if it is left unoccupied. And you risk being attacked on your way back from the market. Robbers might wait outside the market and follow anyone who looks like they purchased a lot of food.
There will be protests in many places, and violence will often break out. People who are hungry and afraid do not make the best decisions. Then there is the cultural aspect of the situation. We live in a culture that tells us to expect the government to take care of us, and to protest whenever anything doesn’t go our way. Ironically, self-sufficiency is abhorrent to our narcissistic culture. I expect that the roadways will be dangerous, as violent criminals will see travelers as easier targets than homes.
7. The death rate will jump higher: People will be malnourished because of the disruption in the food supply, so they will get sick more easily. Violent crimes and violent protests will result in many more injuries than usual. And yet healthcare will be much more difficult to access. There will be a shortage of hospital beds. It will be difficult to get a doctor’s appointment. There may be a shortage of prescription and OTC medications.
All of these factors will make life a riskier endeavor. Now if you are a seasoned prepper, who has long considered the dangers inherent in an economic collapse, you may have anticipated some of the above consequences. But I hope I’ve added to your understanding of the possible problems that we may soon face."
"The Universe"
“There are no accidents. If it's appeared on your life radar, this is why: to teach you that dreams come true; to reveal that you have the power to fix what's broken and heal what hurts; to catapult you beyond seeing with just your physical senses; and to lift the veils that have kept you from seeing that you're already the person you dreamed you'd become. There are no accidents. And believe me, that was one heck of a dream.”
“Tallyho,”
The Universe
“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”
- www.tut.com
“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”
- www.tut.com
"Intense Cognitive Workout, Enter a Highly Focused Mental State - Isochronic Tones"
Full screen recommended.
Headphones are NOT REQUIRED for this video/track.
Jason Lewis - Mind Amend,
"Intense Cognitive Workout,
Enter a Highly Focused Mental State - Isochronic Tones"
"This an extended version of my "Peak Focus For Complex Tasks" session. Listen to this when you need a strong burst of intense focus to concentrate and study things like advanced mathematics, scientific formulas, financial analysis or any other complex mental activity. Listen to this track with your eyes open while doing the task/activity you want to focus on.
This is a high-intensity audio brainwave entrainment session, using isochronic tones. Use this video to increase focus and concentration while studying, working and doing any mentally taxing activity. Listen to this track with your eyes open while doing the task/activity you want to focus on. Although headphones are not required you may find they produce a more intense effect, because they help to block out distracting external sounds.
Isochronic tones are a fast and effective audio-based way to stimulate your brain. Among many of the benefits, they can help improve focus, relaxation, energy levels, sleep and more, without taking drugs or needing any special equipment. What isochronic tones essentially do is guide your dominant brainwave activity to a different frequency while you are listening to them, allowing you to influence and change your mental state and how you feel."
I strongly suggest you read Comments here:
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"Isochronic Tones –
How They Work, the Benefits and the Research"
This is a brainwave entrainment audio session using isochronic tones combined with music. The isochronic tones are the repetitive beats you can hear on top of the music throughout the track. If you are new to this type of audio brainwave entrainment, find out how isochronic tones work and how they compare to binaural beats here:
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Listen folks, we're out of time! Whether you want to know it or not we're literally in the fight of our lives, for our lives right now, and it's going to get much, much worse. Some of you reading this will not survive, and I may not either, so I'll take any edge I can get, and you should too... This works for me. Prepare yourself, brace for impact... - CP
"It May Be Then..."
"Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum."
- W. Somerset Maugham
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
- Sydney J. Harris
"In A Nation Ruled By Swine..."
“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile - and the rest of us are f****d until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.”
- Hunter S. Thompson, “The Great Shark Hunt”
"Lookout Don't Look Up"
"Lookout Don't Look Up"
Phone addiction is the most powerful drug on earth.
by Nicholas Creed
"Is the art of conversation dying or dead almost those born since 2000? Does that age cohort favour emojis and digital communication over face to face human interaction and verbal dialogue? I ask these questions both rhetorically and tongue-in-cheek, because we all know the answer. I feel like I am surrounded by zombies. I am surrounded by zombies. I’ve ranted about this kind of thing before, here, here, and here.
Today I re-examine ‘smart’ dumb phone addiction through the lens of a pedestrian in mortal peril, a driver who sees 99.9% of motorists playing on their phones or watching videos in Bangkok, and as a quietly despairing man from a bygone era that values meaningful human connection. I must be old-fashioned. I was born in 1984 and now I am living through Eric Blair aka George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty four. I have yet to turn forty years old, yet I may be called a ‘boomer’ simply by virtue of my principles and how I cling onto being human, acting human, rejecting the merging of man and machine, and quite literally detesting my own phone.
I leave my little blue screen at home most of the time. Mrs. Creed is never without hers; alas I do encourage her to spend less time on her Instagram story and more time on our story in the land of the living, within the magical, spontaneous, unpredictable realm of reality.
There are a handful of friends who I can rely on for punctuality to appear at a convened meeting point at the allotted time. It is liberating being without that little device that craves attention - even with zero anti-social media apps installed, no email account apps, *no Substack app*, no food delivery apps - only Telegram and Signal messaging - I can make do with those on my laptop desktop alone.
I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks back when I met a friend in the park for some outdoor exercise at the open-air gym, when he was despondent to my calls and messages. I reluctantly brought my phone in its little faraday cage pouch and fished it out upon arrival to check if he was nearby. He turned up and proudly announced that he’d left his phone at home, inspired by observing me having done the same so often. It was checkmate with me in the NPC crosshairs on that occasion. Nay bother. Going ‘phoneless’ is catching on. Long may it continue.
Last night I braved thunder and lightning in a torrential classic Bangkok monsoon season downpour to make a run to the local minimart. There are rarely any pavements (‘sidewalks’ in American English) around Bangkok’s little ‘Sois’ (roads). As I toddled home, I hugged the right side of the road on the final corner of the home stretch, only to be almost wiped out of the game.
A food delivery driver tore around the corner towards me, one hand on his motorcycle handlebar, the other hand holding his phone as he slouched forwards checking the map direction on his blue screen. I breathed in and darted further still into the walls atop the drains. He missed me by millimeters. I shouted in Thai “concentrate!” - to which I received an angry glare. Sorry for existing, and being in your way as you multi-tasked your journey one-handed in zero-visibility heavy rain at highspeed, Mr. Motorcyclist.
I see these near-misses daily around my neigbourhood - for the most part these motorcyclists seem to have developed an extra-sensory perception via peripheral vision that allows them to remain glued to their phones as they swerve around oncoming traffic and pedestrians. Although I know from the daily death tolls on the roads involving motorcycles and pick-up trucks, that many souls are not so ‘lucky’. It really is a concrete jungle out there.
As my car’s engine idles in the dreaded Bangkok gridlocked traffic from time to time, I look around from side to side, and what do I see? Everyone is on their phone, almost all motorists are wearing a facemask, often alone in their cars, and motorcyclists are often playing games or watching YouTube videos; if they are not otherwise mesmerised by the infinite scroll of drivel via Facebook.
When the traffic lights turn green, invariably it warrants a beep of my horn to pull the driver in front of me out of their phone-induced stupor, so that they may drive forwards, whilst they ambidextrously continue tapping away on their screens, putting their automatic drive vehicles into gear.
Frightening. Insane. Normalized. The brief reprieves from being - I like to think - sane, in an insane and abnormal society, come via the rare glances of acknowledgement from fellow humans who are socially self-aware of their surroundings, and fully conscious. What a rare, beautiful sight it is to behold, truly. Especially on the public transport links - Bangkok’s underground mass rapid transit (MRT) trains, or the over-ground ‘Skytrain’ system.
It reminds me of that scene in the film "I Am Legend" when Will Smith’s character discovers the mutated humans underground all huddled together in silence:
Yet within the silent, huddled, phone scrolling of the public transport trains in Bangkok, I yearn to find just one person who is phoneless, without earphones, without an Ipad or device in their palms. It is extremely rare. If our eyes meet but for a moment, we might exchange a knowing smile as we glance around at the other automaton passengers. It makes for good people watching at least.
What a waste of the inherently natural beauty that used to radiate from Thai women. They just do not look up anymore. They are also still often masked. Hidden away from the world, sinking into the digital, all consuming, attention sapping succubus demon of the blue screen. Unquestionably addicted. Hopelessly dependent on their bastion of truth propaganda, spewing out attention-span diminishing ten second clips of nonsense.
I am so glad to not be a single man in this landscape which is devoid of feeling, numbed by always being connected to the internet, yet entirely disconnected from the sense of self, surroundings, and from life itself.
I met an interesting bloke at the sports hall in the local park. He has a unique job where his role comes in between physiotherapy and doctor’s rehabilitative duties for people who have suffered devastating physical injuries, often from car accidents. I can’t recall the job title, but it is something ‘activated’. He helps people to ‘get activated’ through a type of Swedish massage and stretching exercises. He ranted about phone addiction.
He casually said: “Basically, babies are born now, they learn to walk, then that’s it really. They do not progress beyond the ability to walk in terms of their physical development. The walk turns into a shuffle with poor posture. Most infants are given an Ipad by the age of two years old here. Then they are cognitively and physically stunted in terms of development.”
We mused on how across the sports centre halls of the local park - Pickle Ball, Badminton, Table Tennis, Basketball, and Volleyball - the children are absent. Teenagers are nowhere to be seen. The age demographic for the most part is 30 years old and up. We agreed, nostalgically, how our childhoods in England were spent climbing trees, building rope-swings, playing football, and generally being outdoors as much as possible.
“Piss off Creed you cringeworthy Boomer!” - I hear some youngster shout from the backrow…
As a teenager at the turn of the millennium on new year’s eve 1999, I was at a house party with the entire high school year of pupils. It was wild. I drank myself stupid and ended up throwing up all over my friend’s parent’s pretty flowerbed in their neatly trimmed suburbia garden. I was somewhat mortified. I featured heavily in Monday morning’s gossip stories around the school. It faded away. Only to be replaced by some other drunken teenager falling down some stairs or into a bush at the next week’s house party.
Nowadays, teenagers cannot afford to make such mistakes - even though such errors can be a coming of age rite of passage. Not necessarily involving alcohol, but general moments of great embarrassment when you want the ground to swallow you up and memory hole the incident.
Nowadays, a teenager would be subject to intense ‘cyber bullying’ if they put one foot wrong at a party. It would be remixed into a funky video clip to a whacky soundtrack and might go viral, if they are very unfortunate. I wonder what teenaged house parties are like now. Do they sit around on their phones showing each other videos and messaging the person sat beside them? Do some people play up to the camera phones for attention, or choregraph a little dance for TikTok?
“Shut up Creed you stupid Boomer!”
As a child, I would call my friends by landline and ask “are you playing out today?” Then we would ‘knock-on’ our friend’s front door, and off we went to explore the great outdoors, tearing around on our BMX bikes, with the only danger we put ourselves in owing to our own non-stop laughter, and perhaps foolishly cycling together side by side in a row on a main road.
Although we weren’t chased by nefarious government officials from clandestine programs like in the show Stranger Things, we once experienced a bicycle chase from a group of much older boys after we replaced the huge log on their rope-swing with a twig, just for a laugh. I am sure they would have beaten us to a pulp if they had caught up with us - a lucky, narrow escape.
That’ll do it for glimpsing into my misspent well-spent, character building youth. We were free once upon a time. Carefree, adventurous, explorative, and curious about the big wide world."
Lookout Phone Parody Video I don’t know who to give credit for this final parody clip. Fellow Substacker TriTorch sent me a link to it (I hope he recommences his writing again when the time is right). If I can persuade Mrs. Creed to add a Thai voiceover to the video, I bet my inbox will be inundated by Thais asking where they can order it…
As TriTorch said to me in a direct message which I am sure he won’t mind me quoting verbatim: "They're (phones) highly weaponized poison aimed directly at mankind. Worse than drugs because the vector of attack makes so much sense ("well my son has to have his cell phone in class, what if there's an emergency") <--- there's so much evil built into that mantra it's practically inconceivable (we went on just fine for 200 years without cell phones in classrooms, but whatever eases the parents' minds paves the path to our ruin).
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