Chris Hedges, "The Dead"

The tombstone for my grandparents, Ethel and Philip Prince, 

and my uncle, Maurice Prince.

"The Dead"

by Chris Hedges

Mechanic Falls, Maine — "I am standing in Maple Grove Cemetery in Mechanic Falls, Maine. In front of me, within a radius of a few feet, are three rectangular granite headstones that read “HEDGES,” “BLAIR” and “PRINCE.” Before me lie the remains of my parents, grandparents, two uncles and my aunt. The grass is parched and yellowed. There are small American flags placed in round metal holders, slightly askew, next to each gravestone.

All of the men were World War II veterans. My father was an Army sergeant in North Africa and the Middle East. Uncle Ellsworth was in the Merchant Marine and went back and forth in the North Atlantic convoys. Uncle Morris fought on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and Luzon in the Philippines, where he was wounded. My grandfather, Philip Prince, an Army master sergeant, trained troops in Texas.

Besides being identified as veterans, there is little information available from these plots, although my father is named as the Rev. Thomas Hedges. The women, including my mother, who was an English professor, have almost nothing to identify them. Their names. Their dates of birth and death. Patriarchy rules, even in death.

Service to the war machine of the state confers the ultimate status, especially in small, rural towns, although my father and Uncle Morris loathed war and the military. Uncle Morris returned from the South Pacific and drank himself to death as he struggled with physical and emotional wounds. My father, unlike my other relatives, refused to have a gun in the house. He became a pacifist after the war and an anti-war activist during the war on Vietnam. He told me as a boy that if the Vietnam War was still being fought when I was 18, and if I was drafted, he would go to prison with me. I carry that image, my father and I, in a cell.

I feel grief and loss. But I also feel something else. These individuals loom large in my consciousness. They visit me in dreams. They carry the gargantuan imprint our immediate family make on us, for good or ill. I can summon up their faces and voices.

Small, insignificant moments in our lives, like old-time movie reels, play in my head. Fishing in trout streams with my grandfather. Duck hunting in icy waters on the Maine coast with Uncle Ellsworth. Sitting in a hard wooden pew during my father’s sermons. Arguing with my mother - which I did frequently - about William Faulkner, who I loved and who she did not. My slight and wickedly funny grandmother in her apron, cooking French toast on the white porcelain stove. Uncle Morris, disheveled and seated at my grandparents’ small kitchen table, his breath smelling of alcohol, which no one else in our family drank. Aunt Miriam, who we called Auntie Mim, who had no children and who doted on my sister, brother and me.

I always wanted to be a writer. My mother, even before I could read, would type up my stories and staple them together in little pamphlets. When I arrived at my grandparents’ house, which burned down shortly after my grandmother died, I would climb upstairs to find yellow legal pads and neat rows of sharpened pencils laid out on a birdseye maple sewing table.

Lunch in rural communities is the big meal. Not dinner. My grandmother, when it was time to eat, would shout up the narrow stairs, “Christafa,” in the thick Maine accent that colored the speech of my relatives.

The red wooden barn, where swings hung from the thick beams for us as children and where I hand-tied fishing flies with my grandfather, is a pile of broken timber.

My grandfather, who smoked a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes a day and died at 86, unsurprisingly, of emphysema, would mix batches of Prince’s Insect Repellent in the barn. He poured it into small amber-colored glass bottles to sell to gun and tackle shops. One afternoon, he took me out to the barn and made me put my hand on a Bible. “Swear you will never tell this formula to anyone,” he intoned. I promised. He then made me doubly swear not to divulge it to my mother, his daughter. They had a fraught relationship, given his domineering personality and my mother’s formidable resistance.

Love is imperfect.

I am alone in the Maple Grove Cemetery. There is nothing to stop me from speaking to the empty space. I tell them I love them. I tell them I miss them. I carry memories of a few dramatic intervals in our lives. Mostly, I carry mundane interactions of daily existence, which death makes sacred.

Thornton Wilder’s play "Our Town" is set in the fictional town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire between 1901 and 1913. In the play Emily Gibbs dies at 26 giving birth to her second child. She joins the dead in the town cemetery. She defies the advice of the departed townspeople around her and returns to earth to relive one happy day.

She goes back to the day of her 12th birthday. It is dawn. No one from her past can see or hear her as she speaks to them. “I can’t bear it,” Emily says as she watches her birthday celebration. “They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old?”

“Oh, Mama,” she implores, “just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.”

“I can’t,” she goes on. “I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.” Emily breaks down sobbing. "Take me back - up the hill - to my grave,” Emily says. “But first: Wait! One more look.” She looks left, out past the audience and then to the right.

“Good-by, Good-by, world,” she says. “Good-by, Grover’s Corners...Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Emily and the other spirits watch the stars come out over Grover’s Corners. She admits she should have listened to them. It was a mistake to return. “Yes, now you know,” Simon Stimson, the bitter, alcoholic choirmaster, tells Emily. “Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know - that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”

“Simon Stimson,” Emily’s mother-in-law Mrs. Gibbs says, “that ain’t the whole truth and you know it.” Emily’s husband George comes to the cemetery. He throws himself on her grave. He does not speak. “They don’t understand, do they?” Emily says. “No dear,” Mrs. Gibbs says. “They don’t understand.”

It is dusk in Maple Grove Cemetery. It is time for to leave. My generation will follow the generation before me. This is the ancient rhythm of existence.

Death comes faster than we imagine. It robs us of all that is most precious. I carry these dead with me. I will carry them until I, too, depart. They remind me of my obligation to the living. They remind me, as the poets and sages tell us, that life is sacred, that love must always be honored, that our existence is brief, that human beings are fragile, that one day the memories we carry will vanish, that we are made from dust, and to dust we will return.

Live, the dead whisper, while you can."

- https://chrishedges.substack.com/

"Seventy-Two Hours from Desolation: When the Shelves Bleed Empty and the Aquifers Run Dry While America Sleeps and the Government Has Already Abandoned You to the Famine That Comes Like Thief in Night"

"Seventy-Two Hours from Desolation: When the Shelves Bleed Empty 

and the Aquifers Run Dry While America Sleeps and the Government

 Has Already Abandoned You to the Famine That Comes Like Thief in Night"

by Madge Waggy

Editor’s Note: The following investigation arrives at a moment when complacency regarding American alimentation security has reached perilous magnitude. What follows amalgamates verified agrarian data, supply chain assessments, and eyewitness documentation from individuals positioned to observe systemic degradation. The paragraph immediately below was authored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spent decades examining agricultural policy and nourishment system vulnerabilities, and who granted permission to reproduce his assessment verbatim:

“We are witnessing the deliberate dismantlement of America’s alimentary independence. Within eighteen months, perhaps sooner, the confluence of collapsing aquifers, fertilizer scarcity, and transportation breakdown will create conditions for widespread hunger in a nation that has not experienced such deprivation since the 1930s. The warning signs are not merely visible; they are flashing scarlet. Those who do not prepare will find themselves dependent upon a government that has systematically destroyed the infrastructure of local nourishment production and has already demonstrated—through its pandemic response—its willingness to let populations suffer while protecting institutional interests.”

The editorial staff has verified through independent sources the specific vulnerabilities cited in Kennedy’s assessment. What follows represents our own investigation into how rapidly these theoretical failures could translate into empty shelves and hungry bellies. The timeline is shorter than comfortable analysis suggests. The preparation window is closing. The reader is advised that dismissal of these findings constitutes a gamble with stakes measured in children’s lives and civilizational continuity.

The Mirage of Perpetual Plenty: How Just-in-Time Distribution Created a Seventy-Two Hour House of Cards: Perambulate through any American supermercantile establishment. Fluorescent illumination hums overhead. Shelves stretch aisle after aisle, packed with colorful containers, fresh produce pyramids, meat cases gleaming with cellophane-wrapped abundance. To the casual observer, this resembles the most successful nourishment distribution apparatus ever constructed. And indeed, for a season, it functioned magnificently.

Beneath this veneer of perpetual plenty, something has gone terribly amiss. Not yet visible to shoppers who assume tomorrow will bring more of the same. But visible to the truckers who know diesel reserves are thin. To the agrarians watching aquifers evaporate. To the warehouse managers seeing order fulfillment times stretch from hours to weeks. To the agricultural economists who track grain reserves and comprehend that America—supposedly the breadbasket of the world—maintains approximately seventy-two hours of nourishment security at any given moment.

Seventy-two hours. Three days. That buffer stands between normalcy and nationwide hunger when just-in-time delivery systems encounter disruption. Not weeks. Not months. Days. And the disruptions are already beginning, already accumulating, already testing the tensile strength of a system that has eliminated every margin for error in pursuit of quarterly profit maximization.

American grocery establishments operate upon principles that would have seemed insane to previous generations. Inventory turns over every three to five days. Warehouses hold minimal stock. Regional distribution centers maintain perhaps two weeks of certain staples, less of perishables. The entire edifice depends upon continuous resupply—trucks arriving daily, sometimes multiple times daily, to restock what consumers purchased hours before.

This apparatus, celebrated by supply chain experts as “efficient,” represents a radical departure from historical nourishment security. As recently as the 1950s, most American communities maintained grain elevators, local nourishment processing, and household pantries that could sustain families through seasons of scarcity. Previous generations canned vegetables from gardens, kept root cellars, maintained relationships with local butchers and bakers who sourced from nearby farms. Nourishment traveled perhaps fifty miles from production to consumption.

Contemporary nourishment travels an average of 1,500 miles. Processing occurs in massive centralized facilities—sometimes single points of failure for entire product categories. A conflagration at one JBS meatpacking plant in 2021 disrupted twenty percent of American beef production for weeks. A ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline stopped fuel distribution to the Southeast, and within days grocery shelves emptied as trucks could not operate. The apparatus has no redundancy because redundancy costs capital, and quarterly earnings reports punish inefficiency.

The average American metropolis contains approximately three days of nourishment at any moment. Not three days in warehouses—three days total, counting what sits upon shelves, what moves in transit, and what remains in households combined. Beyond that, starvation begins. Not discomfort. Not inconvenience. Actual starvation, with its attendant civil unrest, violence, and societal disintegration.

The Diesel Hemorrhage Nobody’s Tracking: When Transportation Becomes Optional, Nourishment Becomes Scarce: Marcus Chen (name altered, Iowa-based long-haul driver, twenty-three years traversing American highways) describes what he observes: “Previously, one would pull into any trucking station, replenish fuel, continue rolling. Presently? Stations run dry by noon. Rationing appears at the pump. Colleagues abandon loads because they cannot secure fuel to complete the haul.”

Diesel reserves have plummeted to levels unseen since 2008. But 2008 possessed functioning refineries. 2024 possesses refinery capacity that has declined twenty percent since 2019. Environmental regulations—however well-intentioned—have rendered new construction uneconomical. Existing facilities operate at maximum, with no surge capacity. When one malfunctions, as occurred in Louisiana in March, prices spike regionally within hours.

Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases? Gasoline and crude. Not diesel. The refined product that actually moves nourishment from farm to table has been systematically neglected because it fails to generate headlines like $5 gasoline does. (When diesel reaches $7, $8, $10 per gallon, nourishment transport becomes optional. Optional transport signifies rotting grain in silos while supermercantile shelves empty.)

Chen continues: “Acquaintances have parked their rigs. Cannot afford operation. The load pays $3,000, the diesel costs $2,800. For two days of driving, sleeping in the cab, consuming station sustenance. They have finished. And when sufficient numbers finish, your nourishment does not move. Period.”

The American Trucking Association estimates a shortage of 80,000 drivers currently. By 2025, that reaches 160,000. Autonomous trucks? A decade distant at minimum. The men and women who move America’s nourishment are aging out, burning out, and shutting down. No one replaces them.

Aquifer Extinction Beneath the Breadbasket: When Ancient Water Runs Dry: Beneath Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas lies the Ogallala Aquifer. Largest underground freshwater reserve in the Western Hemisphere. It contains water that fell as precipitation during the last Ice Age. It required 15,000 years to accumulate. It has been depleted by forty percent in sixty years of industrial agriculture.

Dave Miller (pseudonym, third-generation Kansas wheat agrarian) stands beside a well that now pumps at 380 feet depth. “My grandfather drilled to 80 feet. My father to 200. I am at 380 and the flow diminishes. When I reach 500, I am finished. The energy cost to pump that deep exceeds the value of the crop.”

Miller’s narrative repeats across the Great Plains. Satellite gravimetry—NASA’s GRACE satellites—confirms what agrarians know: the aquifer disappears. Portions in Texas will be economically exhausted by 2028. Kansas follows by 2030. When those portions fail, American wheat production drops by thirty percent. Minimum. (Thirty percent less wheat signifies bread prices that working families cannot afford. It signifies export markets that vanish. It signifies geopolitical leverage that evaporates.)

Alternatives? None exist. Surface water in the Colorado River is over-allocated; the river no longer reaches the ocean. Desalination is energy-prohibitive and geographically distant. Cloud seeding remains wishful thinking. The Ogallala represents irreplaceable capital being liquidated to maintain current production that cannot be sustained.

Climate projections—verified by tree ring data showing medieval megadroughts lasting centuries—suggest the Southwest and Plains are entering drought conditions unprecedented in recorded experience. The “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s lasted a decade. The coming drought may last a century.

American agriculture was built upon assumptions of water availability that are proving false. When the water runs out, the nourishment runs out. The timeline is years, not decades. Possibly months, depending upon weather patterns.

The Fertilizer Chokepoint: When Input Scarcity Meets Output Collapse: Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer requires natural gas. The Haber-Bosch process feeds half the global population but consumes enormous energy. When gas prices spike, fertilizer production stops.

European fertilizer plants shut down in 2022 when Russian gas supplies were sanctioned. They have not restarted. American plants in Louisiana and Texas—accounting for sixty percent of domestic fertilizer production—experienced outages in 2023-2024 due to hurricane damage and cost-driven maintenance deferrals.

Agrarians entering 2024 planting season faced prices double those of 2020. Many applied half rates. Some applied none, gambling on soil reserves. The yields are arriving now, and they are down. Corn production—down. Wheat production—down. Soybeans—down.

China, previously a major fertilizer exporter, restricted exports in 2021 to ensure domestic nourishment security. They have not resumed. Russia and Belarus face sanctions. The remaining global supply flows to highest bidders. American agrarians are being priced out of the inputs required to maintain yields. (Without fertilizer, American agriculture reverts to 1920s productivity levels. Those levels cannot feed 340 million people. Those levels cannot feed 200 million people.)

Phosphate and potash face similar constraints. Morocco controls seventy percent of global phosphate. Saskatchewan has most potash. Transportation disruptions, export restrictions, or geopolitical conflict affecting either region eliminates American access within weeks. The “Green Revolution” that multiplied global nourishment production was built upon synthetic inputs. Those inputs are becoming scarce and expensive. The revolution is ending.

Processing Concentration and Single Points of Failure: American meatpacking is concentrated. Four companies control eighty-five percent of beef processing. When JBS—Brazilian-owned, operating facilities across America—suffered a ransomware attack in 2021, twenty percent of American beef production stopped for a week. Prices spiked forty percent.

When a conflagration destroyed a Tyson chicken processing plant in 2022, regional poultry shortages lasted months. When COVID outbreaks forced temporary closures at Smithfield and Cargill facilities in 2020, agrarians euthanized millions of animals that could not be processed while grocery stores limited meat purchases.

The apparatus has no redundancy. None. A single point of failure—cyberattack, fire, pandemic, labor strike—can eliminate national capacity for specific proteins. The “efficiency” of concentration creates catastrophic fragility.

Labor in these facilities is increasingly scarce. Immigration restrictions have reduced the workforce that historically staffed slaughterhouses. Wages have risen, but not enough to attract American workers to jobs that involve killing and butchering animals ten hours daily. Automation exists for portions of the process, but not for skilled cutting and trimming.

When the next disruption hits—and it will—the animals will back up on farms, unable to be processed, while supermercantile cases empty. The disconnect between production and consumption is not bridged by goodwill. It requires functioning infrastructure that is being systematically degraded.

Import Dependency and the Southern Border Nourishment Chokepoint: Despite agricultural exports, America has become dependent upon imported nourishment for categories that cannot be domestically produced economically. Fresh produce in winter—tomatoes, peppers, berries, leafy greens—comes from Mexico and Central America. Eighty percent of seafood is imported. Coffee, chocolate, spices—essentially 100% imported.

The southern border crisis is not merely a migration issue. It is a nourishment security issue. When border crossings close, when customs inspection slows, when trucks wait days to cross, produce spoils. Avocado prices spike. Berry shelves empty. The “fresh” nourishment that Americans expect year-round depends upon frictionless cross-border movement that is being deliberately impeded by policy choices. (When you cannot buy a tomato in January, you notice. When you cannot buy any fresh produce for weeks, you panic.)

Mexico is experiencing its own water crisis. The Colorado River no longer reaches the delta. Mexican agriculture that supplies American supermarkets is contracting. The supply that Americans assume will always be there is shrinking from the source.

China controls American nourishment processing in ways that are not widely understood. Smithfield Foods—America’s largest pork producer—is Chinese-owned. ChemChina owns Syngenta, major agricultural chemical supplier. The supply chains that appear domestic are controlled by entities that answer to Beijing, not Washington.

When geopolitical tensions escalate—and they are escalating—nourishment becomes a weapon. The exports that America depends upon can be restricted. The processing that America requires can be disrupted. The “nourishment independence” that policymakers assume exists is a mirage.

The Seed Monopoly and Genetic Vulnerability: American agriculture depends upon seeds produced by three corporations: Bayer (German), Corteva (American), and ChemChina (Chinese). These entities control the genetics of corn, soybeans, cotton, and vegetables. The seeds are engineered for specific conditions: high fertilizer input, abundant water, pesticide application. They are not adapted for drought, for poor soil, for organic cultivation. When inputs fail, these seeds fail. They are also patented, meaning agrarians cannot save and replant. They must purchase annually from the monopoly.

The genetic diversity of American agriculture has collapsed. Where a century ago hundreds of corn varieties existed, now a handful of genetically identical hybrids dominate. A single pest or pathogen adapted to these specific genetics could eliminate national corn production in a season. (The Irish Potato Famine occurred because one variety—the Lumper—dominated. When blight evolved to attack it, millions starved. American agriculture has replicated this vulnerability at industrial scale.)

Seed vaults exist—Svalbard, various government facilities—but the knowledge of how to grow, save, and breed seeds has been lost. The agrarians who knew how to maintain open-pollinated varieties are dead. Their children and grandchildren purchase from catalogs, dependent upon supply chains that are failing.

Government Incompetence and the Illusion of Emergency Preparedness: The USDA maintains emergency nourishment reserves. Theoretically. In practice, the “Strategic Grain Reserve” holds approximately 30 million bushels of wheat. America consumes roughly 2 billion bushels annually. The reserve covers less than a week of consumption. What is held is old, often spoiled, poorly stored. The facilities are crumbling. The logistics to distribute in emergency do not exist. The reserve is theater—designed to reassure, not to feed.

During COVID, the USDA demonstrated its priorities. Agrarians destroyed crops because restaurant demand collapsed while nourishment banks faced shortages. The apparatus could not pivot. Milk was dumped while children went hungry. This is the apparatus that is supposed to manage the next crisis.

The “farm bill”—the legislative mechanism that supposedly supports American agriculture—is a welfare program for agribusiness giants, not a nourishment security measure. It subsidizes corn and soy for ethanol and animal feed, not vegetables for human consumption. It pays landowners to leave fields fallow while prices spike. It is designed by lobbyists, not nutritionists or security planners.

When crisis hits, the federal government will not save you. It cannot. The infrastructure has been dismantled. The local nourishment systems have been destroyed. The knowledge has been lost. You will be on your own.

The Timeline: From Complacency to Hunger:

DayEventConsequence:

1 Hurricane hits Gulf Coast refineries. Diesel spikes to $8/gallon. Trucking companies cancel unprofitable routes. Regional shortages begin.

2 Panic buying empties urban supermarkets. Social media shows empty shelves. Those paying attention buy what they can. Others assume restocking.

3 National Guard called to protect deliveries to cities. Rural areas receive nothing. Urban-rural divide becomes explicit, hostile.

4 Refrigeration failures in summer heat cause massive spoilage. What was in transit rots. What was in stores is gone. Home reserves consumed rapidly.

5 Looting begins. Not criminal opportunism—survival behavior. Police cannot control it. National Guard cannot be everywhere.

6 Hospitals report malnutrition admissions. Diabetics without nourishment face insulin crises. Elderly, infants, immunocompromised begin dying.

7 Martial law declared in major cities. Curfews. Travel restrictions. Constitution suspended “temporarily.”

This is not speculative fiction. This is the timeline from multiple emergency management simulations. The “seventy-two hour” estimate assumes government response, National Guard deployment, emergency distribution. When those systems fail or are overwhelmed, the timeline compresses. (If you do not have thirty days of nourishment in your home right now, you are gambling that the above scenario will not occur in your lifetime. The odds are worse than you think.)

The Preparation Gap and Who Will Survive FEMA recommends three days of emergency nourishment and water. Three days. The same seventy-two hour window that represents total system vulnerability. Their recommendation assumes that government will restore function within that window. The experience of Hurricane Katrina, of Puerto Rico after Maria, of Texas during the 2021 freeze, demonstrates that government does not restore function within three days. Government often makes things worse.

The Americans who will survive the coming scarcity are those who have already prepared. The Mormons, with their church-mandated year of nourishment storage. The preppers, mocked by mainstream culture, who have gardens and pantries and community. The rural families who never stopped canning, hunting, maintaining local nourishment networks.

Everyone else—urban, dependent, just-in-time consumers—will face choices that no American has faced in three generations. The choice between hunger and violence. Between starvation and theft. Between death and degradation. The supermarkets will not restock. The government will not rescue. The cavalry is not coming. You are on your own, and the time to recognize that is before the shelves empty, not after.

The Reckoning: Kennedy’s Timeline and the Accelerating Crisis: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s eighteen-month timeline may be optimistic. The confluence of aquifer depletion, fertilizer scarcity, diesel shortage, and processing concentration suggests that multiple failure points could activate simultaneously, accelerating the timeline to months rather than years.

The 2024 harvest is coming in below projections. The 2025 planting season faces input costs that will drive acreage reductions. The 2026 harvest—if current trajectories continue—will be a disaster that makes the 1930s Dust Bowl appear minor by comparison.

America has not experienced widespread hunger since the Great Depression. The social fabric has not been tested by scarcity. The assumption that nourishment will always be available, that the apparatus will always function, is about to be destroyed.

The warning signs are not hidden. They are visible to anyone who looks: emptying aquifers, idling trucks, rising fertilizer prices, contracting processing capacity, border disruptions, seed monopolies, government incompetence. The pattern is clear. The trajectory is set. The only question is timing, and timing is running out.

Seventy-two hours. That is what stands between you and hunger. Not years. Not months. Days. And those days are counting down, whether you acknowledge them or not. The famine is not coming. It is already here for those who cannot afford $8 eggs and $12 milk. It is spreading up the economic ladder as inflation destroys purchasing power. It will become universal when the apparatus breaks, and the apparatus is breaking now."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Why Is America Being Hit By One Catastrophic Disaster After Another?"

by Michael Snyder

"For months, the U.S. has been getting pummeled by one major disaster after another, and the past few days have been absolutely insane. Hurricane Lala just dumped more than two feet of rain in some parts of Hawaii, we are witnessing the worst flooding in the entire modern history of Indiana, the endless drought in the Southwest has caused Lake Powell to drop to the lowest level ever recorded, and an absolutely massive heat dome is going to make it feel like it is over 110 degrees in many cities in the Southeast on Monday. If it was just one disastrous week, we could write this off as bad luck. But it hasn’t just been one disastrous week. In fact, we have been experiencing a nightmarish string of natural disasters that stretches all the way back to 2024. So why is this happening to us?

Hurricane Lala was not supposed to be this powerful. According to CNN, more than 30 inches of rain have already fallen on Hawaii’s Big Island…Videos obtained by CNN show streets flooded by torrential rainfall on the Big Island, which got over 30 inches of rain. More than 190 flights in and out of Hawaii have been postponed, Green said. Emergency responders are expected to be busy dealing with urgent matters for 36 hours as the storm passes Hawaii, with damage assessment expected to begin on Monday, the governor said.

Have you ever lived somewhere that suddenly got 30 inches of rain? The National Hurricane Center has issued a warning for those that live in Hawaii to be alert for life-threatening flooding and mudslides. Those that live in areas with steep terrain will be particularly in danger. By the time it is all said and done, it is being projected that Lala will dump up to 35 inches of rain in some areas…By the time Lala’s completely gone, some higher-altitude places on the Big Island, dominated by the towering Mauna Kea volcano, will have been hit with as much as 35 inches (89 centimeters) of rain, forecasters said, enough to loosen steep slopes where some of the 210,000 islanders live off the grid in improvised housing.

I can’t even imagine that much rain, because I have never experienced anything like it. Officials instituted a search and rescue mission after a number of homes were reportedly “swept off their foundations”…The island of Oahu, including the state’s capital Honolulu, is under a flash flood warning Sunday morning. Parts of Hawaii’s Big Island are also under a flash flood warning, and National Weather Service had previously called that warning a “Particularly Dangerous Situation.”

“Several occupied homes may have been swept off their foundations, and based on that, civil defense has initiated a search and rescue mission,” Hawaii County Mayor Kimo Alameda said overnight. One minute you are sleeping, and the next minute your house is literally being swept along by floodwaters. That is how fast it can happen.

Lala also brought extremely high winds to the island chain. In fact, Accuweather is telling us that there were “wind gusts as high as 140 mph” on Mauna Kea…As of Sunday morning, wind gusts as high as 140 mph have been observed at the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island, where heavy snow and blizzard conditions were observed. Intermediate elevation gusts to 91 mph have been observed at Waimea on the Big Island and near 80 mph on Molokai.

Meanwhile, Indiana is dealing with a flooding disaster that is absolutely unprecedented. Entire communities are underwater, and officials are calling this a “once-in-a-lifetime” event…Six people are dead and many more are missing as torrential rain spawned destructive high water across Indiana in what authorities are calling “once-in-a-lifetime floods.” Entire towns were inundated with murky water as rising rivers exceeded their banks, with some residents taking to kayaks and small boats to save fellow residents or to escape, according to news outlets.

There are actually portions of several states that have been severely flooded, but Indiana was hit the worst. At one point, the White River actually set a brand new all-time record by reaching a level of 24.93 feet… The day after a destructive derecho tore across northern Indiana and parts of Illinois, rivers in eastern Indiana swelled, engulfing homes and reaching historic levels.

The White River at Anderson, Indiana, reached 24.93 feet early Friday morning. This surpassed the previous record of 23.60 feet set in 1913, more than a century ago. The river had not been above 20 feet at this location since 1958. At Raible Avenue in Anderson, the river crested Friday morning at 21.60 feet, just shy of its record of 23.00 feet, also set in 1913.

What a nightmare. Some of the images that are coming out of Indiana are absolutely heartbreaking…

While the center of the country keeps getting hammered by one storm after another, the western third of the nation continues to endure a multi-year drought of epic proportions. I wrote about the horrific wildfires in the Northwest at the end of last week.

In the Southwest, the big story today is the fact that Lake Powell has now hit the lowest level ever recorded…Lake Powell, the giant reservoir on the Utah-Arizona border that helps power millions of homes, has fallen to its lowest level ever amidst a worsening western drought exacerbated by climate change. The lake’s surface dropped to 3,519.91 feet above sea level on Aug. 15, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s automated gauge system. The previous lowest level was 3,519.92 feet, reached in April 2023. Dropping below 3,490 feet could imperil the lake’s ability to generate electricity, and federal officials have been pulling water out of smaller reservoirs upstream to help delay reaching that level.

Federal officials are going to do what they can, but if it simply doesn’t rain this crisis is only going to intensify. If you live in that area of the country, this is a story that you will want to watch very closely.

In the Southeast, a gigantic heat dome continues to absolutely bake tens of millions of Americans… An extensive heat dome will continue to build across the Gulf Coast early this week, bringing several days of dangerous heat and high humidity with little overnight relief and increasing the risk of heat-related illnesses. On Monday, it is going to feel like it is 113 degrees in Jacksonville, Florida. That is hot!

Of course it isn’t just the United States that has been experiencing more frequent natural disasters. Since the beginning of June, our planet just hasn’t stopped shaking. I wrote about the magnitude 7 or greater earthquakes that have been occurring in recent months last week, and now we have another one to add to the list…Rescuers started arriving today for thousands of evacuees on Indonesia’s Flores Island after a powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake killed 51 people, injured dozens and damaged hundreds of houses and buildings.

Some 5,000 people fled their homes as the quake hit the island on Saturday at 5.58am local time – around 11pm in the UK. It was followed by at least 341 aftershocks, a spokesman for the BNPB national disaster agency, Berton Suar Pelita Panjaitan, said.

Magnitude 7 or greater earthquakes are supposed to be rare. In some years, we have less than 10. But now they are happening with alarming regularity. We live at a time of tremendous chaos. Catastrophic events are occurring all around us, and I fully expect the months ahead to be even crazier."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"The Tail That Couldn’t Keep Up: How the US Navy Ran Its Own Sailors Short on Food and Soap"

T-AOE 6 Supply Fast Combat Support Ship

"The Tail That Couldn’t Keep Up: How the 

US Navy Ran Its Own Sailors Short on Food and Soap"

by Larry C. Johnson

"The images were mundane in a way that made them land harder than any battle footage: half-empty meal trays, a gray slab of processed meat, sailors rationing food among themselves so no one got more than anyone else. Through the spring and summer of 2026, the crews of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and the assault ship USS Tripoli contended with food shortages, long chow lines, broken toilets, mold in the showers, dead laundry machines, and shortages of basics like soap and toothpaste - aboard warships operating in the Arabian Sea and the wider Indian Ocean after more than 250 days at sea. The strain told on morale, and in the worst cases on the safety of the crew.

When the conditions became public, the Navy’s institutional reflex was denial. The despicable Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, dismissed the early reporting as “fake news,” and a 5th Fleet spokesman insisted the crew “remain resilient and ready” and the ship “remains fully capable of meeting all mission tasking.” That response is worth remembering, because it is part of the failure rather than a rebuttal of it - a chain of command more prepared to defend its readiness narrative than to reckon with why its sailors were going without. The conditions were real. The more important question is why warships from the world’s best-funded navy were running short on food and hygiene supplies at all.

The answer is not primarily about one carrier or one supply officer. It is structural, it has been building for fifteen years, and it lives in a part of the fleet the public never sees - the ships that feed and fuel the fighting ships.

The fleet behind the fleet: Warships do not carry enough on their own to stay at sea indefinitely. What keeps a carrier strike group fed, fueled, and armed without returning to port is a dedicated fleet of supply ships called the Combat Logistics Force (CLF) - the underway replenishment ships, operated by Military Sealift Command with mostly civilian crews, that steam alongside warships and pass fuel, ammunition, food, and stores across on cables and hoses while both ships are moving.

The CLF comes in three flavors. Fleet replenishment oilers (T-AO) carry fuel. Dry cargo and ammunition ships (T-AKE) carry ordnance, spare parts, and food. And fast combat support ships (T-AOE) are the premium asset - the “one-stop shop” that carries fuel, ammunition, and provisions together, and is fast enough to travel inside a carrier strike group rather than shuttling back and forth to it. That last category is exactly the ship you want when a single carrier is holding station in a distant sea for months on end. And it is the category the Navy has gutted.

Flat numbers, hollowing capability: Here is the heart of the problem. The Combat Logistics Force today numbers about 34 ships - a figure that has stayed essentially flat for well over a decade. On paper, stability. In practice, a slow hollowing, because the demands on that force have grown while its most capable ships have disappeared.

Around 2010, the Navy operated all four of its Supply-class fast combat support ships. Today only two remain. In the mid-2010s the Navy inactivated two of them into reserve to save roughly $30 million a year each in operating costs - a decision that looked reasonable on a spreadsheet and looks indefensible from the deck of a hungry ship. The reason it bites is arithmetic: replacing the combined capability of one fast support ship typically takes an oiler plus a dry cargo ship - two hulls, two crews, two schedules - to move the fuel, ammo, and food that one ship used to carry in a single package. Cut the fast support fleet in half and every sustained single-carrier mission becomes harder to feed.

The rest of the force is aging underneath the flat headline. The Henry J. Kaiser-class oilers that form the backbone date to the 1980s and are being retired faster than their replacements arrive. The new John Lewis-class oiler program is meant to recapitalize the fleet with some twenty ships, but the lead ship only delivered in 2022 and just one was fully operational by mid-2025. The Navy’s own newer answer - a smaller, more numerous “light replenishment oiler,” the T-AOL - does not begin construction until FY2027 and will not arrive in numbers until the 2030s. The analytic consensus across defense researchers is blunt: the logistics force is not enough, and not fast enough, for the demands now being placed on it.

Why the Arabian Sea is the worst place to be short: Geography turned a fleet-wide thinness into a shipboard shortage, and the waters off Arabia and across the Indian Ocean are close to a worst case.

A carrier holding station in the North Arabian Sea operates at the far end of a very long supply chain, often without the easy, friendly, high-capacity port access that a deployment in, say, the Mediterranean enjoys. Everything the crew eats and uses either came aboard before the deployment or has to be carried out to the ship by the very replenishment fleet that is stretched thin. When the deployment then stretched - and the Lincoln’s did, past 250 days, pulled into and extended by the 2026 war with Iran - the ship burned through consumables faster and longer than planned, precisely when the logistics tail was least able to surge extra runs to a distant sea. Long deployments and a thin supply fleet are a bad combination anywhere. In the Indian Ocean they compound into empty shelves.

This is also why the fast combat support ship matters so much in exactly this theater. Its whole design purpose is to keep a carrier group sustained far forward without a constant relay of separate oilers and cargo ships. The Red Sea operations of the past two years drove that lesson home for the Navy - that the multi-product ship it spent the 2010s economizing away is the one it now most needs for sustained, distant, high-tempo presence. The shortage of the ship type was felt most sharply in the mission it was built for, and the sailors aboard the Lincoln paid the bill for a procurement decision made a decade before many of them enlisted.

From oiler counts to empty trays: The line from a thinned logistics force to a specific empty tray runs through a system with almost no slack left in it. A navy running long deployments in distant waters on a supply fleet that has stayed flat in numbers while shedding its most capable ships is a navy operating with vanishing margin. When margin is thin, the failures show up first in the least glamorous places - not in a missile that won’t fire, but in a laundry that won’t run and a galley that runs low. Food, soap, and clean water are the leading indicators of a sustainment system operating at its limit, and off Arabia in 2026 those indicators went red.

The human cost compounded the material one. A crew worn down by more than eight months at sea, short on the basics that make shipboard life tolerable, is a crew under strain that runs deeper than inconvenience - a strain that showed up in collapsing morale and, in the worst cases, in concern for sailors’ committing suicide. It would be too simple, and unfair to the people involved, to reduce that human toll to a single cause; morale and mental health aboard a warship turn on many things. But it is fair to say that a fleet cannot ask its sailors to endure ever-longer deployments while cutting the margin that keeps them fed and clean, and expect no cost in the well-being of the people inside the hull. Sustainment is not a comfort. It is a condition of a crew’s endurance.

The bottom line: It is tempting to read what happened aboard the Lincoln as a story about one ship or one deployment. The more useful reading is that it was a symptom surfacing at the end of the supply chain. For fifteen years the United States kept its Combat Logistics Force at a roughly constant size while cutting its most capable replenishment ships, aging out its oilers, and delaying their replacements - all while asking the fleet to sustain longer deployments in more distant and more contested waters. A force stretched that way does not fail loudly at first. It fails quietly, in the galley and the shower and the laundry, on ships operating at the far end of the longest supply lines the Navy has.

The shortages off Arabia were not an accident, a rumor, or a supply officer’s bad week. They were the predictable result of a decade and a half of decisions that let the margin preventing them erode - and then, when the consequences reached the mess deck, an instinct at the top to insist everything was fine. A fleet that cannot be reliably supplied cannot be reliably sustained. The hunger and shortage aboard the Lincoln were the sound of that margin finally running out, and the sailors who lived it deserved better than both the shortage and the denial."

- https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/

"Col. Doug Macgregor: Morale Has Completely Collapsed - U.S. Troops Refusing to Fight"

Full screen recommended.

OPTM, 8/15/26

"Col. Doug Macgregor: Morale Has Completely Collapsed -

 U.S. Troops Refusing to Fight"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Canadian Prepper, "Iran End Game is Approaching! Get Ready"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 8/15/26

"Mark Sleboda, 

Iran End Game is Approaching! Get Ready"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Land of Forever"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Land of Forever"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Riding high in the constellation of Auriga, beautiful, blue vdB 31 is the 31st object in Sidney van den Bergh's 1966 catalog of reflection nebulae. It shares this well-composed celestial still life with dark, obscuring clouds recorded in Edward E. Barnard's 1919 catalog of dark markings in the sky. All are interstellar dust clouds, blocking the light from background stars in the case of Barnard's dark nebulae. For vdB 31, the dust preferentially reflects the bluish starlight from embedded, hot, variable star AB Aurigae.

Exploring the environs of AB Aurigae with the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the several million year young star is itself surrounded by flattened dusty disk with evidence for the ongoing formation of a planetary system. AB Aurigae is about 470 light-years away. At that distance this cosmic canvas would span about four light-years.”

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

Jeremiah Babe, "Work So Hard You Have Nothing Left"

Jeremiah Babe, 8/15/26

"Full Destruction Is Coming - 

Work So Hard You Have Nothing Left"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Tyson Foods Shuts Down Plants in Illinois, and Utah, Affecting Over 2700 Jobs!"

Adventures With Danno, 8/15/26

"Tyson Foods Shuts Down Plants in Illinois, 

and Utah, Affecting Over 2700 Jobs!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Bertrand Russell, “Three Passions”

“Three Passions”

”Three passions have governed my life:

The longings for love, the search for knowledge,

And unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind.

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.

In the union of love I have seen

In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision

Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.

I have wished to understand the hearts of people.

I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,

But always pity brought me back to earth;

Cries of pain reverberated in my heart,

Of children in famine, of victims tortured,

And of old people left helpless.

I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,

And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.”

- Bertrand Russell

"The False Choice Society"

"The False Choice Society"

by The Zman

"The false dichotomy, sometimes called the false choice, is one of the most popular rhetoric tricks used in liberal democracy. The point is to frame the debate in such a way as to either avoid some unpleasant topic or narrow the scope to the benefit of one party in the debate. “We either do X or we allow this terrible thing to continue” is an effective way to compel action. After all, everyone knows that doing nothing in never an acceptable action. Only monsters choose that option.

It is fair to say that our political system is built upon the false choice. Every election we are asked to choose between the two offerings put forward by the parties. In most cases, one option is ridiculous. That is why over 90% of incumbents win reelection. In races with real competition, the options put forward are nearly identical. Both parties offer up a plank of wood spouting whatever slogans are popular at the moment. The voters select between two robots programmed by the same people.

The reason this is a false choice is there is at least one other option. The voters could stage a boycott of the election. Maybe demand some reforms as a condition of rejoining the charade of democracy. Of course, the voters could riot at the polling stations, hurl the voting machines into the river and burn the ballots. They could vote for a third party candidate as a protest. Picking from one of the two options offered up from the uniparty is a false choice, because there are other options.

Of course, people do not select the other options because they are constantly reminded that those are all bad options. No rational person votes third-party. Even the most cynical critics of democracy say the third party option is a waste of time. Similarly, boycotts are dismissed as pointless. Rebellion, of course, is dismissed out of hand, despite the fact the country was literally founded on rebellion. The one thing everyone seems to agree upon is you have no choice but to pick from the two parties.

Another example of where the false choice is the foundation of liberal democracy was in the Covid panic. The reason the rulers took a wrecking ball to society is they were sure they had just two options. It was either the wrecking ball or do nothing and we all know that doing nothing is never an option. They had to do something, and all of the choices were bad, so they happily went with the bad option. When you eliminate the best option, you are always left with the worst options.

The false choice plays out in more subtle ways too. Unwilling to leave well enough alone, the rulers tried to impose a vaccine passport. The idea is to require this for travel or to attend public gatherings. Given that liberal democracy looks a lot like fascism, businesses and banks were making noises about requiring the vaccine in order to have a job or use the financial system. You can get the vaccine, the choice is yours, but you may not be able live in society.

People were rightly upset about this turn of events. House broken conservatives were banging on about how the vaccine passport if just like when their grandparents made the Jews wear gold stars. The point of the yes/no debate on the vaccine passport was to distract from the real problem. The people in charge of public health are incompetent and have turned a minor public health problem into a disaster. Worse yet, they seem to take some pleasure in being incompetent at it.

Not so long ago, proof of vaccination was a common requirement for travel. People were given a card that showed their vaccinations. This was before computers when the people in charge were somewhat competent at their jobs. People went along with it because they understood it was for public health. They could trust the people in charge enough to go along with it. The people who cured things like polio and smallpox were proud of it and the policies that made it possible.

Today, of course, no one trusts anyone. There can be no public pride in collective accomplishment because we have accomplished nothing, other than putting men in dresses and desecrating some statues. This is why half the public is skeptical of the vaccine and the passport business. Instead of dealing with that reality, we choose to have a debate about the passport itself. The false choice here was whether to get the vaccine or not. Whether to have a proof of vaccine or not.

The promise of democracy is that public policy is no longer set according to the narrow interests of a small ruling class. Instead, the marketplace of democracy will set the priorities and select the polices based on majority will. In reality, democracy is a mass delusion where the public debates pointless issues and selects from identical options, all in order to avoid facing reality. Say what you will about aristocracy, at least everyone knows who is in charge and who is to blame.

The Covid hysteria underscored how the false choice society staggers on through inertia and dumb luck. Faced with a real crisis, the current regime would collapse in a pile, with the people bickering with one another over how best to celebrate the pile once the dust settles. The false choice society is a society built on lies the people tell one another in order to avoid reality. The trouble is reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

- http://thezman.com/wordpress/

○

"The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation. [Jim Quinn - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal at the website": https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Oh You...

"Life passes like a flash of lightning, whose blaze barely lasts long enough to see. While the earth and sky stand still forever, how swiftly changing time flies across mans face. Oh you who sit over your full cup and do not drink, tell me, for whom are you still waiting?" 

- Hermann Hesse

"Kind Ain't the Same as Stupid"

Full screen recommended.

Delta Blues Brother,

"Kind Ain't the Same as Stupid"

"A good heart doesn't require an open door. One of life's harder lessons is learning that forgiveness and access are two very different things. "Kind Ain't the Same as Stupid" is an original Delta blues song about kindness, boundaries, forgiveness, and the wisdom to care about people without letting them repeatedly take advantage of you. Gritty resonator guitar, soulful harmonica, dry humor, and hard-earned wisdom carry a message many people only understand after learning it the expensive way. This is the blues of having a good heart - and finally using your head with it. "A good heart can forgive somebody... without becoming their damn fool." You don't have to hate someone to close the door. Sometimes peace simply means wishing them well from the other side of it."

The Daily "Near You?"

Chickasha, Oklahoma, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"‘Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ The Story of Oppenheimer’s Infamous Quote"

"‘Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ 

The Story of Oppenheimer’s Infamous Quote"

by James Temperton

"As he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It is, perhaps, the most well-known line from the Bhagavad Gita, but also the most misunderstood.

Oppenheimer, the subject of a film from director Christopher Nolan, died at the age of 62 in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 18, 1967. As wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the birthplace of the Manhattan Project, he is rightly seen as the “father” of the atomic bomb. “We knew the world would not be the same,” he later recalled. “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.”

Oppenheimer, watching the fireball of the Trinity nuclear test, turned to Hinduism. While he never became a Hindu in the devotional sense, Oppenheimer found it a useful philosophy to structure his life around. “He was obviously very attracted to this philosophy,” says Stephen Thompson, who has spent more than 30 years studying and teaching Sanskrit. Oppenheimer’s interest in Hinduism was about more than a sound bite, Thompson argues. It was a way of making sense of his actions.

The Bhagavad Gita is 700-verse Hindu scripture, written in Sanskrit, that centers on a dialog between a great warrior prince named Arjuna and his charioteer Lord Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu. Facing an opposing army containing his friends and relatives, Arjuna is torn. But Krishna teaches him about a higher philosophy that will enable him to carry out his duties as a warrior irrespective of his personal concerns. This is known as the dharma, or holy duty. It is one of the four key lessons of the Bhagavad Gita, on desire or lust; wealth; the desire for righteousness, or dharma; and the final state of total liberation, moksha.

Seeking his counsel, Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal his universal form. Krishna obliges, and in verse 12 of the Gita he manifests as a sublime, terrifying being of many mouths and eyes. It is this moment that entered Oppenheimer’s mind in July 1945. “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one,” was Oppenheimer’s translation of that moment in the desert of New Mexico.

In Hinduism, which has a non-linear concept of time, the great god is involved in not only the creation, but also the dissolution. In verse 32, Krishna says the famous line. In it “death” literally translates as “world-destroying time,” says Thompson, adding that Oppenheimer’s Sanskrit teacher chose to translate “world-destroying time” as “death,” a common interpretation. Its meaning is simple: Irrespective of what Arjuna does, everything is in the hands of the divine.

“Arjuna is a soldier, he has a duty to fight. Krishna, not Arjuna, will determine who lives and who dies and Arjuna should neither mourn nor rejoice over what fate has in store, but should be sublimely unattached to such results,” says Thompson. “And ultimately the most important thing is he should be devoted to Krishna. His faith will save Arjuna’s soul." But Oppenheimer, seemingly, was never able to achieve this peace. “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatements can quite extinguish,” he said, two years after the Trinity explosion, “the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

“He doesn’t seem to believe that the soul is eternal, whereas Arjuna does,” says Thompson. “The fourth argument in the Gita is really that death is an illusion, that we’re not born and we don’t die. That’s the philosophy, really. That there’s only one consciousness and that the whole of creation is a wonderful play.” Oppenheimer, perhaps, never believed that the people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not suffer. While he carried out his work dutifully, he could never accept that this could liberate him from the cycle of life and death. In stark contrast, Arjuna realizes his error and decides to join the battle.

“Krishna is saying you have to simply do your duty as a warrior,” says Thompson. “If you were a priest you wouldn’t have to do this, but you are a warrior and you have to perform it. In the larger scheme of things, presumably, the bomb represented the path of the battle against the forces of evil, which were epitomized by the forces of fascism.”

For Arjuna, it may have been comparatively easy to be indifferent to war because he believed the souls of his opponents would live on regardless. But Oppenheimer felt the consequences of the atomic bomb acutely. “He hadn’t got that confidence that the destruction, ultimately, was an illusion,” says Thompson. Oppenheimer’s apparent inability to accept the idea of an immortal soul would always weigh heavy on his mind."

- https://www.wired.com/story/

Freely download The Bhagavad Gita here:

- https://ia803107.us.archive.org/

"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

"This System Is Fundamentally Corrupted"

Full screen recommended.

Scott Ritter, 8/15/26

"This System Is Fundamentally Corrupted"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Something Is Spiraling Out of Control in America… And People Are Finally Noticing"

Full screen recommended.

Global Discovery Documentary, 8/15/26

"Something Is Spiraling Out of Control in America… 

And People Are Finally Noticing"

"Something is changing across America  - and more people are finally noticing. From rising living costs and changing neighborhoods to consumer behavior, employment, housing, debt, and local economies, this documentary takes an educational look at the forces reshaping everyday Life in America. The goal is not to blame one group or explain everything with a single cause, but to understand how multiple economic and social trends can develop at the same time. This American Documentary examines what people are seeing in living in America, how the U.S. economy affects American life, and why cost of living has become such an important part of the conversation. We also look at the Middle Class, the American Dream, and the changing realities of the United States. The video connects national trends with everyday experiences across different communities. 

America today can look very different depending on where someone lives, works, shops, or raises a family. Most importantly, this Documentary looks beyond the problem. Better financial planning, workforce skills, affordable housing, community investment, responsible spending, debt management, and adapting to changing economic conditions can all play a role in building greater resilience. This is an educational exploration of modern America, the U.S. economy, cost of living, and the future of the American Dream - helping viewers understand what is changing, why it matters, and what practical responses may be possible."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"