“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world – few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to a whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality"
- Michael Ellner
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"Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth"; but there isn't one. It is like betting on the future of the human race - I might wish to lay a bet that the human race would destroy itself by the year 3000, but there is nowhere to place the bet. On the contrary, I am involved in the world and must try to see that it does not blow itself to pieces. I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should spring into action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: "You scare me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first." So she told me that I had no love for my future generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position.
As Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died, "It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so." You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise."
“Most people, sad to say, are too rushed, frightened, and confused to think about what they really want out of life. They are hustled through school, forced into long-term decisions before they’re ready to face them, then held to those decisions by fear and shame. They choose from a limited set of options, and they know that change will be punished. Eventually they get old and find time to think, but by then they can’t bear to question too deeply; that would jeopardize their self-worth, and they haven’t time to rebuild it.
For an intelligent, creative, and expansive species like ours, this rush to nowhere is among the greatest of evils. And yet it continues, mostly unquestioned. At no point in the usual Western life do we stop, take some serious time for ourselves, and think about the overall:
• What’s life about anyway? What’s the point of what we do?
• What’s the purpose of a career? Why should I care about it above everything else?
• Why should I glorify the existing system? Why should I agree to support it?
• Who paid for everything I learned in school?
• Should I have a family? If so, why? If not, why not?
• What do I think is fun? Does it really coincide with the beer ads on TV?
• What’s the purpose of being like everyone else? Why am I so afraid to be different?
We don’t address such questions. Rather, we’re pushed past them. Even in a church or synagogue – places where larger questions are supposed to be addressed – the person in the pulpit wants us to become and/or remain a member of the congregation; their job depends upon it. There are true ministers and rabbis, but for most it’s all too easy to push their audience into what’s convenient. As a result, we see little motivation in the modern West, save for the basest of motivators: things that match a line from the Bible that says, “Whose god is their belly.”
Mind you, I’m not against wealth, good food, or sex. I think those are fine things. They are not, however, the whole of life. We are much bigger than that. We ought not be limited to belly-level aspirations. But when we’re rushed, that’s all we’re able to see.
Status and Fear: The two big motivators we face in this rush through life – fear and status – are both negative. Fear is a manipulation technology; people who make you afraid are hacking your mind. They want you to ignore reason and obey them fast. I wish I could cover this in depth here, but we haven’t space. When we’re afraid, we make our worst choices. Put plainly, fear makes us stupid. But we encounter it on a daily basis… and it destroys us by inches.
Status is the compulsion to compare ourselves with others, and whether we’re looking for the ways we’re better than others or looking for our shortcomings, it is deeply destructive. It’s also irrational, but the advertising business would crash without it and advertisers currently own the collective eyeballs of humanity.
Fear and status are, in a broad sense, drugs, and if you had a choice between smoking pot every day or being on fear and status every day, I’d definitely recommend the pot.
Confusion: Let’s be clear on something: Nearly every adult in the West will agree that politicians are liars and thieves… and yet they obey them without question. Is there any possibility we’d do such things if we weren’t harried and confused? When we are confused, we pass over our own minds and their deliberations. There’s an old joke: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” But that’s precisely what confusion does to us, and under the pressures of confusion and authority, most people will ignore their own eyes.
Such things do not happen to people who are calm and confident. But the existing hierarchies of the West couldn’t function with a calm and confident populace; their operations require people to be frightened, confused, and blindly chasing status.
As a Result… As a result, most of us hurry through life, never knowing why. We live as others do, simply because that path is streamlined for us, exposing us to a minimal level of fear and shame. But that path does something else: It keeps us from experiencing ourselves. Seldom has this problem been put more succinctly than in this quote from Albert Einstein: “Small is the number of them who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”
"A great madness sweeps the land. There are no limits on extremes in greed, credulity, convictions, inequality, bombast, recklessness, fraud, corruption, arrogance, hubris, pride, over-reach, self-righteousness and confidence in the rightness of one's opinions. Extremes only become more extreme even as the folly of previous extremes wearies rationality.
Imaginary sins are conjured out of thin air to convict the innocent while those guilty of the most egregious fraud and corruption are lauded as saviors.
The national mood is aggrieved and bitter. The luxuries of self-righteousness, indignation, entitlement and resentment have impoverished the national spirit. Bankrupted by these excesses, what little treasure remains is squandered on plots of petty revenge.
Blindness to the late hour is cheered as optimism, confidence in the false gods of technology is sanctified while doubters of the technocratic theocracy are crucified as irredeemable infidels.
Witch-hunts and show trials are the order of the day as those who cannot stomach the party line are obsessively purged, as healthy skepticism is condemned as a mortal sin by brittle true believers who secretly fear the failure of their cult.
Mired in a putrid sewer of suspected subversion and disloyalty to The One True Cause, heretics are everywhere to those caught up in the mass hysteria. In this choking atmosphere of toxic hubris, self-righteousness, indignation, entitlement and resentment, humility is for losers, prudence is for losers, caution is for losers, skeptical inquiry is for losers.
Completely untethered from cause and effect, those confident in the inevitability of a glorious future of unlimited expansion cling to past glory as proof of future glory, even as their hubris leads only to a treacherous path of decay and decline. As they stumble into the abyss, their final cries are of surprise that confidence alone is not enough.
Those who see the madness for what it is have only one escape: go to ground, fade from public view, become self-reliant and weather the coming storm in the nooks and crannies where cause and effect, skeptical inquiry, humility, prudence and thrift can still be nurtured."
"Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.”
- Shakespeare, "Coriolanus"
"Long ago, but what seems like only yesterday, I didn’t go to the U.S. war against Vietnam but the war came to me. It was when my exile began. I am telling you this to try to shed some light on today’s wars and alarums since my tale is common for a small subset of Americans of my generation. We learned long ago that the USA was run by ruthless killers who reveled in war. Vietnam, the Phoenix Program, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc. Nothing was beyond them. We sensed that they would never stop and they haven’t. The genocide of Palestinians, the proxy war via Ukraine against Russia, the current bloodbath in Syria and Lebanon led by our ruthless terrorists – it is all nightmarish, malevolent, utterly evil, and conjures up hell on earth. And it will get worse in the future. The mainstream media claimed that the new savior of Syria is the terrorist “rebel” leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the founding leader of Al Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra, and a former deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
While there is truth in the view that the world has always been a butcher’s bench with wars, hatred, and strife being a common theme, “always” is meaningless to me. For I have never lived in “always.”
All this has been sustained by lies and propaganda that most Americans have swallowed. It is a deeply ingrained Yankee doodle dandy ethos joined with American exceptionalism and a self-induced false innocence.
Just this as it did during the Vietnam war, The New York Times spewed out lies about the events in Syria, calling the U.S.-backed jihadist terrorists (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham/Al Qaeda, et al.) “rebels” and the overthrow of the Assad government a “civil war.” In doing so, the paper is just doing what it has always done as an organ for U.S. foreign policy, seemingly forgetting that it was the Obama administration that in 2012 launched Operation Timber Sycamore, a CIA program to, under the guise of a civil war, overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as part of a larger effort to undercut Iran and Russia for U.S./Israel/Turkey/NATO control of the region.
It is propaganda about a much larger war well underway, as the presence of Ukrainian forces in Syria and the usual Israeli bombing attest. Like a mountain ridge wildfire, the winds whip wildly now, and whether the fire spreads next to Iran or somewhere else, it is sure to spread.
To paraphrase Thoreau, there is no need to care for a myriad of instances and applications, the only thing you need is to be acquainted with the principle, which in this case is the long-standing demonic nature of U.S. foreign policy which is synchronous with waging perpetual war. Yet most people don’t want to go past such lying headlines that are repeated by all the mainstream media. They never did, except when the issues concerned them personally, as when there was a military draft.
Yes, government and media propaganda have contributed mightily to it, but so many of the country’s war crimes have been committed out in the open and accompanied by the public’s cheering and flag waving that propaganda is only part of the explanation. The will to believe and self-delusion are a large part of it. And people seem to like war, if it is far away and the cheerleaders are on this side of the water. It lends excitement to life like a real murder mystery, a sex scandal, or an approaching hurricane.
Furthermore, it provides roots for the national myth, the mythic home, the mythic womb, wherein one can root for the home team as one stands with tens of thousands of team people and sing along with the words “bombs bursting in air” while feeling a stirring of patriotic pride. This desire to be patriotically conventional, to support the national team in war and peace, is very powerful. Why else the creation of the mammoth bureaucracy called Homeland Security, the un-American word homeland taken straight from Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally. Root, root, root for the home team.
I know the patriotic feeling. It left me back in 1967 when my exile began. For the most part, it has not been apparent to outside observers, for there are places difficult to reach, and the one within is the most distant. My youthful “normalcy” received its first body blow with JFK’s assassination in 1963. By 1967 I had joined the Marines and then declared myself a conscientious objector as I realized the evil my country was committing in Vietnam. I was on my way away.
In the years that followed, as Malcom X, MLK, Jr. and RFK, were assassinated and Johnson and Nixon lied and brutalized Vietnam, my understanding of history and politics deepened. Families and friends called me a communist for being a C.O. and opposing the war and a lying government. It was laughable but relentless.
Many years have elapsed, and the charges have risen and fallen as the years have gone by. For years now, the name of abuse is a “conspiracy” theorist or Russian sympathizer for daring to say that Russia Gate was a Democratic conspiracy and the war against Russia in Ukraine has been a U.S. project from the start. There is much more.
But my point about internal exile is that I had to adopt the motions of normalcy in everyday life – to create a pleasant persona – to get through the days. My teaching and writing continued as hard-hitting as before, but family, friends, academic colleagues, and acquaintances didn’t take my courses or read my writing, which they made sure to avoid.
These days, many more people have been forced to discover the twofold life where they can’t talk to the people in their lives about many issues – politics, wars, Covid, etc. Something has broken. Almost everything.
To accept the conclusion that the country is run by a bunch of ruthless warmongering imperialists is a step too far for most people. They must mean well or just make mistakes, for their hearts are in the right place, runs through so many minds. At least they assume that about the leaders they support.
A key way the endless wars roll on is the deadly political game of the lesser of two evils. If it is one’s political party waging the foreign wars, there are always many reasons to still find it better than the other party’s wars. “My leader may be a warmonger but he’s better than your warmonger” is the unspoken implication.
This neat trick is supported by a host of mitigating excuses to justify the delusion that one is for peace even as these wars occur non-stop throughout the decades as the Democratic and Republican leaders switch highchairs. Rather than dismiss the lot of them, the desire to feel that patriot heart-pump, however dim, and to reject the “extremist” conclusion that war is the life blood of the country, remains.
Throughout the sixty years of my adult life, the U.S. has been continuously waging wars, hot and cold, small and large, openly and secretly, all across the world, and its economy has increasingly become a military-industrial-national-security complex so vast and intricately linked to daily life that the country would collapse without it. Simply put: Beneath daily life lies a death cult, a river of blood. If that sounds too strong for you, give me another name for it.
It seems to me very clear that most Americans are today suffering from some sort of traumatic mental sickness, trying desperately to deny it in a multitude of ways. Scratch the surface of an everyday conversation or a greeting on the street and there’s the rolling of the eyes and the looks that say, “Let’s not go there, it’s all too crazy!” Something has broken, and people seem like walking desperadoes with the flag planted like a dagger in their hearts.
Even the alternative media, those writers with whom I share wishes for a peaceful world, have for a good while let their hopes trump realty by claiming the American empire is doomed, as is Israel and the neo-liberal, neo-con agenda. For many months now, I have noticed something amiss with these claims. Too much wishful thinking. Too little appreciation for the machinations of the CIA, M-16, Mossad, Turkish conspiracies. To think these devils would accept defeat without bringing the world down is naïve. I don’t relish saying all this. It is depressing. But I think it is true.
Some people who know me call me an extremist and claim I make no room for the middle ground. When it comes to U.S. war-waging, I say there is none. It is endless and integral to U.S. foreign policy no matter which party is in office. And the foreign policy is integral to the domestic policy. Without it, the country would be so different. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump – to buy their lies is to be a fool.
To realize the difference between power and innocence is to come to understand the demonic nature of America’s Forever Wars. When in 2014 President Obama stood at West Point and said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” he was revealing, consciously or not, a hard truth, just as when he received the Nobel Peace Prize and told the world he believed in war. But he smiled. For war is the lifeblood of this “exceptional” country. But if you keep repeating that, don’t expect smiles to come your way."
"The economy is flashing warning signs everywhere. In today’s video, Dan from i Allegedly breaks down the latest business news including the new Fed chairman, rising inflation, wholesale prices exploding higher, and why producer price index (PPI) numbers show that costs are still climbing fast. We also cover layoffs at major companies like GM, rising mortgage delinquencies, student loan debt problems, housing market weakness, insurance spikes, food inflation, and why many Americans are struggling to keep up with bills despite working harder than ever.
Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing, Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, AI job losses, global food shortages, and the rising cost of living are all adding pressure to consumers and businesses alike. This video covers personal finance, inflation, recession fears, real estate, layoffs, debt, food prices, and the overall direction of the U.S. economy in 2026. If you want honest economic analysis, business news, financial warning signs, and practical insights on preparing for what’s coming next, this episode of i Allegedly is for you."
"Gallup released a poll conducted April 1-15 finding that 55 percent of Americans say their financial situation is getting worse, the highest at any point since 2001, higher than during the 2008 financial crisis or the pandemic. This is the fifth consecutive year the majority says their finances are worsening. Gallup's Economic Confidence Index dropped 11 points in a single month to negative 38. Sixty-two percent worry about not having enough for retirement. Sixty percent worry about covering medical costs. In 1950 the United States ranked 12th in life expectancy. It now ranks 46th. Behind Costa Rica. Behind Chile. Behind Slovenia. Maternal mortality is triple the OECD average. Infant mortality ranks worst among peer countries. Drug overdose deaths quadrupled since 1999. Youth suicide rates increased 57 percent. At least 717 companies filed for bankruptcy through November 2025, up 14 percent, including Spirit Airlines, Del Monte Foods, and Rite Aid.
One in three Americans skipped a meal in the past year due to cost. Nearly half of adults under 30 delayed medical care. Credit card delinquencies climbed to the highest in almost a decade. Auto repossessions hit the highest since 2008. Family health premiums approaching $27,000 annually. Consumer sentiment at 47.6, the lowest in the 75-year history of the University of Michigan survey. People experiencing homelessness die nearly 30 years earlier than the average American. Over 150 rural hospitals closed since 2010. More than a third of U.S. counties are maternity care deserts. The Surgeon General declared loneliness a national epidemic. Every American feels it. The end is happening."
"Right now 4,500 ships are stranded near the Strait of Hormuz unable to pass through. FedEx raised its fuel surcharge to 26.5 percent. Bank of America reported credit card spending at gas stations spiked 16.5 percent in March. Consumer prices rose 0.9 percent in March alone, triple February's pace. Costco and Sam's Club are reporting bulk-pack sellouts with restocking timelines measured in weeks not days. Freeze-dried emergency food kits that sat untouched for three years are selling out in 48 hours. Prescriptions are being filled ahead of schedule. Gas cans, generators, and water pallets are moving at pandemic-era rates. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index fell to 47.6 in April, the lowest reading in the entire 75-year history of the survey. Lower than the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic, 1970s stagflation, or September 11th. The deterioration was across age, income, and political party. Diesel fuel is up 45 percent. Every product in America ships by truck. Every truck runs on diesel.
A roofing contractor reported materials up 8 to 9 percent on April 18th with another 10 to 12 percent increase coming June 1st. A $10,000 roof last month costs $11,000 now and $13,000 by June. Approximately 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients in American medications are manufactured overseas. Pain relievers, vitamins, antibiotics, and prescription medications are being pulled from pharmacy shelves as patients fill prescriptions weeks early. Ready.gov disaster supply guidance is being cited in Newsweek, Mirror US, and AOL coverage. Fortune covered the March 2026 toilet paper panic which has spread beyond the US to Japan. Median household income adjusted for inflation was no higher in 2024 than in 2019. Credit card delinquencies climbed to the highest in almost a decade. Auto repossessions hit the highest since the financial crisis. Americans are scared. Everyone is preparing."
"I have been thinking for some time about the disappearing quality of food. Consider restaurants. I remember when people went to restaurants to enjoy dishes that even good cooks could not prepare at home. Many mothers and grandmothers grew up with the adage that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. Children needed nutritional food in order to perform well in school and in sports. Home cooking served up good fried chicken, baked ham, spaghetti and meat balls, roast beef, pot roast, pork roast, butterbeans, lady peas, corn on the Cobb, and tomatoes. But if you wanted Chicken Kiev, Beef Wellington, Beef Stroganoff, Beef Burgundy, Sole Meunière, Pheasant Under Glass and desserts like baked Alaska and chocolate mousse, you went to a quality restaurant.
Quality restaurants did not jam the space with as many tables as could be accommodated. They left space so that you did not feel like you were sitting at the counter in a diner. Tables had tablecloths and dishes were served on china. Waiters would be in black tie. The clientele was not talking and laughing at the top of their voices, and you could actually have a conversation with your dinner companions. Those days are gone.
In more recent times I have dined at the best restaurants in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Cleveland, and none of the items mentioned above was on the menus. The menu I experienced at Claridges in London in the 1960s no longer exists at Claridges. The only survivor on Claridges’ dinner menu is sole meunière. Moreover, today the cost of afternoon tea at Claridges for one person is five times more than the bill for four for dinner including vintage port with which I was presented in 1963.
A year or two ago or less, I posted on my website menus from New York City’s famous restaurants at the turn of the 20th century. The extraordinary wide selection of dishes offered, 90% of which are not offered today even in 5-star French restaurants in Paris is astonishing. If you research my website you will find the menus. The prices are also astonishing. You could eat like a king for the price of a fast food takeout today. Of course, money was worth far more in those days. The American people were correct to oppose the creation of a central bank, but it was forced on them and destroyed the value of their money.
To return to my topic of quality food. Recently I purchased from Publix, where I grocery shop, an individual serving of strawberry short cake, a southern dessert that reminded me of my grandmother. It was an easy dessert to make and was always welcome. What was required was some flour, water or milk, cane sugar, sliced fresh strawberries, and whipped cream made by hand-whipping the cream from the top of non-pasteurized, non-homogenized milk, a product no longer available in stores.
Carried away by my expectation of enjoying a taste from the past, I did not read the ingredients listing on the Publix’s strawberry shortcake before I ate a combination of chemicals unknown to me. Here it is: Strawberry, sugar, water, bleached enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin,reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, ribbon flavin, folic acid), egg white, hydrogenated vegetable oil (palm, palm kernel, coconut, &/or cottonseed), dextrose, soy oil, eggs, food starch-modified, milk, graham crumbs, (whole wheat graham flour, sugar, wheat flour, palm oil, palm kernel oil, honey, molasses, soy lecithin, sodium bicarbonate, salt, natural flavor, cream, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate), wheat starch, sodium caseinate, food starch-modified (tapioca), propylene glycol mono-&diesters of fats & fatty acids, polysorbate 60, whey, gums (guar, xanthin, carbohydrate), salt, mono-&diglycerides, natural & artificial flavor, soy lecithin, sodium stearoyl lactylate, pectin, sorbitan monostearate, colors (red 40, yellow 5, lake beta carotene), citric, anhydrous, potassium sorbet (preservative), 010825 Contains milk, eggs, wheat, and soy.
Compare this endless list with the 5 ingredients my grandmother used. Note also that hardly any of the public have any idea what most of these ingredients are. And ask yourself why a preservative is needed for a product that has a shelf-life at Publix’s of two days.
I then turned to Publix’s in-store baked Italian five grain bread. The list of ingredients is almost as long. As the shelf-life is 2 days, I asked the manager of the in-store bakery the purpose of the long list of mainly unknown ingredients. He answered that the dough arrived mixed and that in-store they simply manufactured the product by baking the bread. I concluded that the preservatives, et. al., are for the shelf-life of the pre-mixed dough. The same for cake icing, whipped cream. They come in cans and the store assembles the products.
Compare this to the real bakeries that used to exist. A few still do. Such bakeries bake for the day’s sales based on sales experience. Most cakes were baked to order. Unless they used pre-mixed dough, which I doubt existed in those days, you could get a real product without nameless ingredients. Homes that baked their own bread needed only water, milk, or buttermilk, yeast, cane sugar or honey, salt, butter, and flour.
The centralization of food supply requires a long shelf-life, which requires ingredients that are not good for us. Avoiding spoilage becomes the goal, and feeding us chemicals is the way it is achieved. Moreover, food manufacturers come up with ever more ways to deceive us. For example, smaller pieces of expensive cuts of beef too small to market as steaks are today fused together with meat glue. An enzyme called Activa, fuses together the pieces and a steak is created. The problem is, as Dr. Russell Blaylock reports, that the process releases excitotoxins that raise the risk of gastroenteritis and that fuel cancer growth. Of course, the food industry lobby prevents the FDA from doing anything about it.
The further foods are produced from the users, the less the concern for the users. Other concerns become more important than the quality of the food. Moreover, localized food production is not subject to catastrophic failure as is a centralized one. Thought should be given to the dangers of centralized food production and distribution, but there is no money in it. Reliance on processed foods with additives is likely entrenched as at-home cooking seems to be an abandoned task."
"Many have argued that energy is the central pillar of our economy, because it requires energy for just about anything to get done in our modern world. It takes energy to make stuff, it takes energy to move stuff, and it even takes energy to entertain ourselves. The war with Iran has dramatically increased energy costs for businesses of all types, and those costs are starting to get passed along to consumers. As a result, our standard of living is going down. If the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened soon, the change in our standard of living will be the largest that any of us have ever experienced.
We live at a time when economic dissatisfaction is already at very alarming levels. In fact, a recent YouGov/Economist survey discovered that the number of Americans that believe that economic conditions are getting worse is nearly four times higher than the number of Americans that believe that economic conditions are improving…A new YouGov/Economist poll found that 59% say the economy is getting worse, while just 15% say it’s improving. More than two-thirds of Americans say the country feels “out of control.”
These depressing numbers are the result of many years of economic deterioration. At first, a lot of people out there wanted to deny that the U.S. economy was in decline, but now the truth is becoming apparent to everyone. Unfortunately, the crisis in the Middle East is threatening to make our economic problems a whole lot worse.
We are being told that the shocking inflation numbers that we just got are a result of “the war with Iran”… Wednesday’s Producer Price Index report showed the war with Iran is raising costs for US businesses at a rate not seen in nearly four years, increasing the likelihood that companies will pass on those higher costs to consumers.
PPI, a measure of wholesale inflation, increased in April to 6% on an annual basis from 4% in March, well exceeding economists’ expectations. On a monthly basis, the index increased 1.4%, according to data released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s twice the pace that economists expected. It’s also the second-largest monthly gain dating back to the index’s inception in 2010.
A 15.6% increase in gas prices accounted for 40% of the increase in prices businesses paid last month. That only looks to be getting worse with oil prices yet to reach their peak levels and global inventories falling at a record pace, according to a report released Wednesday by the International Energy Agency.
Without a doubt, we could certainly survive a few months of this. But if the crisis in the Middle East drags on for many more months, we truly will be in unprecedented territory, because at some point there simply won’t be enough oil for everyone. Over the past couple of months, the global economy has been functioning fairly normally because we have been running through existing inventory levels and strategic reserves.
However, it we continue going down this road we could be facing “operational stress levels” by early next month…If the Middle East war doesn’t end quickly, the world - including the Group of 7 developed nations that have relied on their ample oil reserves - “will start facing scarcity,” warned Ipek Ozkardeskaya, an analyst at Swissquote. And analysts at J.P. Morgan recently said that developed countries’ commercial crude stocks could be close to operational stress levels by early June.
You see, the truth is that we are running an “oil deficit” right now. We are consuming far more than we are producing, and existing inventory levels and strategic reserves are being depleted. At this stage, total OPEC production is down over 30 percent from pre-war levels… OPEC production fell by 1.7 million bpd in April after output plunged by 7.9 million bpd in March. In total, production among OPEC members has dropped more than 30%, or 9.7 million bpd, during the war.
The update Wednesday from OPEC will likely be the last one to include data from the United Arab Emirates, which left the cartel on May 1. The total supply loss from the Gulf oil producers now exceeds a billion barrels with more than 14 million bpd shut down due to the Hormuz closure, according to the International Energy Agency’s latest update published Wednesday
Okay, so let’s assume for a moment that the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow. OPEC production cannot fully return to pre-war levels because a lot of infrastructure has either been damaged or destroyed. It will literally take years for all of that infrastructure to be repaired or rebuilt.
Of course there is quite a bit of infrastructure that remains intact, but even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow it would still take weeks for commercial traffic in the Persian Gulf to return to normal… Analysts at Morgan Stanley on Monday said that oil markets are in a “race against time,” as the combination of factors that have been in place to curb crude-price jolts will fray if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed through June. And once the conflict ends and tanker transit through the Strait of Hormuz resumes, it would still take weeks for flows to resume, and markets likely will still price in risk of potential additional disruptions.
Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled oil giant Saudi Aramco cautioned Monday that if the strait remains closed for weeks further, a market rebalance likely will extend into 2027 and “oil supply challenges” will continue.
Of course the Strait of Hormuz is not going to reopen tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that. In fact, the Strait of Hormuz may remain closed for a very long time. The reason why global markets have not crashed yet is because most investors are anticipating that there will be a quick end to the war. But what if they are wrong?
When people start realizing that there isn’t going to be a quick fix, global markets will be shaken. And just like we witnessed during the early days of the last pandemic, there will be panic buying. Many Americans don’t realize this, but we have already seen this happen in some parts of the world… In scenes reminiscent of pandemic-era panic buying, South Koreans rushed to buy plastic rubbish bags after the Iran war led to the closure of the strait, disrupting global supply chains. Australians cleared the shelves of jerry cans as drivers and farmers vied to stock up on fuel in rural areas. Social media posts on possible shortages of condoms went viral in China last month.
In just a matter of weeks, shortages will start to become quite noticeable. Asia will be hit the hardest, because they are more dependent on commodities from the Middle East than anyone else. For example, a shortage of naphtha has already forced the largest snack producer in Japan to switch to black-and-white packaging… Japan’s biggest snack maker has been forced to use black-and-white packaging for some flagship products because of ink ingredient shortages caused by the strait of Hormuz blockade. Calbee, whose potato chip brands in particular are known for brightly coloured bag designs, said 14 of its products would switch to monochrome branding by the end of May.
Thousands upon thousands of supply chains are being threatened by this crisis. Most people in the western world have absolutely no idea what is really going on out there, and for the moment ignorance is bliss. But if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for several more months, the entire world will clearly be feeling the pain of shortages and rapidly rising prices."
"Sharp telescopic views of NGC 3628 show a puffy galactic disk divided by dark dust lanes. Of course, this deep portrait of the magnificent, edge-on spiral galaxy puts some astronomers in mind of its popular moniker, the Hamburger Galaxy. It also reveals a small galaxy nearby, likely a satellite of NGC 3628, and a faint but extensive tidal tail. The drawn out tail stretches for about 300,000 light-years, even beyond the right edge of the wide frame.
NGC 3628 shares its neighborhood in the local universe with two other large spirals M65 and M66 in a grouping otherwise known as the Leo Triplet. Gravitational interactions with its cosmic neighbors are likely responsible for creating the tidal tail, as well as the extended flare and warp of this spiral's disk. The tantalizing island universe itself is about 100,000 light-years across and 35 million light-years away in the northern springtime constellation Leo."
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again.”
"Caliban is talking to Stephano and Trinculo in Shakespeare's “Tempest”, telling them not to be "afeard" of the mysterious place they find themselves, an island seemingly beset with magic, strangeness, ineffable presences. And you and I, and, yes, all of us, find ourselves inexplicably thrown up on this island that is the world, and we too, if we are attentive, hear the strange music, the sounds and sweet airs, that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere
No, I'm not talking about the usual ubiquitous clamor, the roar of internal combustion, the blare of the television, the beeping of mobile phones. I'm not talking about the Limbaughs and the Becks, the televangelists, the blathering politicians, the twitterers and bloggers (including this one). I'm not even talking about the exquisite music of Mozart, the poetry of Wordsworth, the theories of Einstein.
I'm talking about the sounds we hear in utter silence, in moments of repose, in the heart of darkness, when we are a little bit afraid, disoriented, off kilter. A strange music that comes from beyond our knowing, a felt meaning. You've heard it. I've heard it. You'd have to be deaf not to have heard it.
Where we differ is how we describe it. Mostly, we give its source a name. Angels. Fairies. Gods or demons. Yahweh. Allah. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Nixies, E.T.s, shades and shadows. Naiads, dryads, Ariel and Puck. A host of invisible creatures who are, in one way or another, images of ourselves. And, in naming, we are a little less afraid.
And some of us are just content to listen, to take delight. Having woken to the inexplicable mystery of the world- the sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not- we let the music lull us back into a sweet slumber, a kind of dreamless dream, a reverie. Does reverie share a deep root with reverence? I don't know.”
"America's Auto Industry Is Falling Apart - Here Is Why"
"The American auto industry has quietly reached a breaking point - and almost nobody is talking about what's actually happening at every level of it. From dealership service bays sitting empty by the thousands to federal mandates that will turn every new car into a surveillance device, from ethanol fuel destroying older engines to parts for basic models simply disappearing - the industry that built this country is coming apart from every direction at once.
In this video, you'll hear from ten people across America describing what their work and their cars actually look like in 2026. A twenty-year master technician walking off the dealership floor for good. A young mechanic explaining the thirty-thousand-dollar tool investment a starter is expected to bring on day one. A cybersecurity expert walking through Section 24220 of the Infrastructure Act, which mandates AI cameras, eye tracking, and driver monitoring in every new car. A driver pointing out that the 15% ethanol federal fuel mandate is corroding fuel lines and gaskets in every pre-2010 vehicle on the road. A shop owner explaining why he can't find parts for a 1980s Chevrolet anymore. This isn't one problem. This is the entire industry collapsing in slow motion - workers walking out, new cars getting locked down, old cars getting killed off, the supply chain falling apart, and almost no national press coverage of any of it.
If you've got a mechanic or a car owner in your life - send them this video. Drop your story in the comments. The shop. The tools. The car you can't get parts for. Let people see they are not alone."
"To eliminate misunderstanding as to what taxes are, it is helpful to define the word "theft." One good definition is "the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods of another." The definition does not go on to say, "unless you're the government."
There is no difference, in principle, between the State taking property and a street gang doing so, except that the State's theft is "legal" and its agents are immune from prosecution. Many people do not accept that analogy, because the government is widely viewed as being of, for, and by the people, even though it's also acknowledged as acting badly from time to time.
Suppose a mugger demanded your wallet, perhaps because he needed money to buy a new car and threatened you with violence if you weren't forthcoming. Everyone would call that a criminal act. Suppose, however, the mugger said he wanted the money to buy himself food. Would it still be theft? Suppose now that he said he wanted your wallet to feed another hungry person, not himself. Would it still be theft?
Now let's suppose that this mugger convinces most of his friends that it's okay for him to relieve you of your wallet. Would it still be theft? What if he convinces a majority of citizens? Principles stand on their own. Even if a criminal act is committed for a good purpose, or with the complicity of bystanders, (even if those people call themselves the government), it is still an act of criminal aggression.
It is important to establish an ethical viewpoint on the matter, even if it doesn't change your reaction to the mugger's (or the State's) demands. Just as it's usually unwise to resist a mugger, it's usually unwise to resist the government, which has a lot of force on its side.
That's not to say it's easy to swim against the tide. Every year at tax time promoters of big government haul out an assortment of nostrums to sedate the lambs as they are shorn. One of the worst is "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization," a statement of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It is a splendid example of how, if a lie is big enough and is repeated often enough, it can come to be accepted.
Actually, the truth is almost exactly the opposite. As Mark Skousen, economist and author, has pointed out: "Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state is a complete failure of civilization, while a totally voluntary society is its ultimate success."
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Taxes are destroyers of civilization and society. They impoverish the average man. They support welfare programs that anchor the lower classes at the bottom of society. They underwrite a gigantic bureaucracy that serves only to raise costs and quash incentive. They pay for public works programs (once called "pork barrel projects," but now rechristened "infrastructure investment") that are usually ten times more costly than their privately financed counterparts, whether needed or not. They maintain programs that cause huge distortions in the economy (such as deposit insurance for banks). And they foster a climate of fear and dishonesty. The list of evils goes on. But the simple truth is that anything needed or wanted by society would be provided by profit-seeking entrepreneurs, if only the tax collector would retire.
Protesting against taxes because they're a costly or inefficient way of providing services, however, is in good measure futile. It's like saying that the mugger shouldn't rob you because there might be a better way for him to get what he wants.
How serious is the tax problem in the long run? I believe it will become less, not more serious, despite the government's increasingly high tax rates and draconian enforcement measures. The major long-term trend of society is toward decentralization and smaller-scale organizations. The US government will prove no more able to deal with a rapidly evolving economy than was the Soviet government. More and more Americans will see the government as meaningless and irrelevant, as serving no useful purpose.
READER Q&A
Question: Inflation has been roaring back unreported for decades. Why do you think half of America with 2 jobs can't put food on table?
Answer:
Nick Giambruno: Without a doubt, the culprit is the central banking and fiat currency system. Imagine working 9 to 5 for 50 years, only for the Federal Reserve to print 40% of the money supply and inflate away 20 years of your hard work. You don’t have to imagine - it actually happened during the Covid mass psychosis, when governments around the world indulged in a frenzy of currency debasement. In other words, if your after-tax wealth hasn’t increased by 40% since 2020, you aren’t keeping pace with the monetary debasement.
It’s no wonder an increasing number of people are struggling to make ends meet. It’s like running on a treadmill that only tilts steeper and speeds up. I have no doubt the Fed will soon engage in even more egregious currency debasement. It could amount to the largest wealth transfer in history, and you do not want to be on the wrong side of it. It’s also crucial to remember that central banks have nothing to do with the free market. They are, in fact, the antithesis of it.
In Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, central banking is the fifth plank. Meanwhile, the lying media portrays central bankers as selfless bureaucrats heroically trying to save the economy. It’s a load of BS. Central bankers are the enemies of the average person - the driving force behind currency debasement and the primary cause of the spiraling cost of living."
“The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then - poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.” - Charles Simic
