No, You Don’t Have To Care About Any Of This”

“No, You Don’t Have To 

Care About Any Of This”

by Joe Jarvis

“Lots of people are trying to force you to care about the things they care about. True, some of these issues are really important. But if you don’t care, you don’t care. You don’t have to pretend. And you don’t owe anyone an explanation. Henry David Thoreau summed it up almost 200 years ago when he said: “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him.”

See, a lot of self-righteous people can’t imagine how anyone could make a different calculation about the most important causes in the world. The person who donates to hungry children finds it absurd that others donate to animal shelters while there are still needy kids out there. But this is just another variation of how specializing makes things more efficient. If everyone works on the causes they care about most, their passion and efforts will go the furthest.

But Thoreau continues that even if someone doesn’t want to help eradicate a wrong, it is “his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.” If you’re not contributing to wrong, that is enough. In fact that is MUCH BETTER than acting like you’re saving the world, when in reality you are contributing to evil.

It’s great to care about important causes, but “I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his own contemplations too.” For example, helping poor people is a noble cause. Forcing others to help poor people is pursuing a noble cause “sitting upon another man’s shoulders.” No, he isn’t automatically evil if he doesn’t help the poor, “he may still properly have other concerns to engage him.”

These days you’ll hear people say things like, “it’s not enough to simply not be racist, you have to be actively anti-racist.” Incorrect. It is absolutely enough to simply not perpetuate an evil. They don’t know you. They can’t see inside your head, or into your life. They don’t know what you’re engaged in. But if you are not hurting others, that is enough.

Like imagine if someone told you, it’s not enough to not murder, you have to become a criminologist, and go out there and solve murders. You know I am grateful there are people out there who go into homicide investigation. But it’s not for me.

It’s pretty ironic actually. Because the same people who try to bully you into taking the action that they want you to take would scoff at your demands for a more peaceful and prosperous society.

Because guess what one of my causes is? It’s not enough to simply not steal others money. You must actively oppose the systemic theft the government calls taxes. Oh wait, but they need to steal from me in order to pursue their causes, because they do so “sitting upon another man’s shoulders.” They tell me that a portion of my income, my labor, my time, will be taken without my consent to support the causes they care about, while whatever I had planned for my labor and time will be subordinated to their whims.

But guess what? No one really cares about my cause. So I moved to Puerto Rico to take advantage of tax incentives, and now perfectly legally pay a 4% tax rate. That did a lot more for me than trying to get people to vote – as if there was anyone who would advance my causes anyway. Now, more than ever, as the chaos of the world seems to be reaching a crescendo, it is perfectly reasonable to tune out, and say, you know what, I just don’t care.

All the ships have sailed. It’s much more important to make sure you and your loved ones are in a position of strength moving forward. Everyone is going to tell you that you have to care about this, that your silence on that is as bad as whatever, that you’re either with us or against us…

I care about a lot of things, and have plenty of passionate ideas about how this world should turn out. But now is the time to keep your powder dry, and wits about you. In the board game Risk, you win by building strength while remaining unnoticed. The strongest players fight it out, and weaken each other. It is then, when the smoke clears, that it is easiest to control the board.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Live your life. Be a good person. That’s enough. Ignore the noise.”

- https://www.thedailybell.com/

"The Whole Problem With The World..."

 

"A Day Of Reckoning Arrives For U.S. Treasuries Just As The U.S. National Debt Reaches $40,000,000,000,000"

by Michael Snyder

"We all knew that this was coming. For ages, people like me have been ranting that we would be facing a financial nightmare if we didn’t get the national debt under control. Of course most of the population didn’t want to listen, and they just kept sending big spenders back to Washington. Now we are 40 trillion dollars in debt and we are spending well over a trillion dollars a year just in interest on that debt. Nobody can deny that we have reached a stage where our debt spiral is totally out of control. The federal budget deficit for the month of July was 432 billion dollars. Interest on the national debt for the month of July was 118 billion dollars. Now Treasury yields are spiking as investors become hesitant to buy more of our debt. Borrowing costs are rising to very alarming levels, and we are in far more trouble than most people realize.

The size of the national debt officially crossed the 40 trillion dollar threshold on Tuesday…The U.S. national debt has surpassed $40 trillion for the first time, marking a historic milestone in a borrowing buildup that has accumulated over generations, through wars, recessions, tax changes, and the expansion of major federal benefit programs under presidents of both parties. The Treasury Department reported that total public debt outstanding reached about $40.047 trillion Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

This is money that we have stolen from future generations of Americans. What we have done to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal. People should be going to prison over this.

Thanks to years of absolutely reckless spending, the size of the national debt has more than doubled in less than 10 years…The Treasury Department’s daily financial report shows that the nation’s debt reached $40.05 trillion on August 18, more than double its level in 2017. The federal debt has ballooned because government spending is outstripping revenue, forcing the U.S. to borrow more money to cover the shortfall.

Our politicians are literally destroying the future of this country. In 1980, the size of our national debt was just reaching 1 trillion dollars.When Barack Obama entered the White House, the size of the national debt was sitting at about 10 trillion dollars. Now we are 40 trillion dollars in debt with no end in sight…

We just hit 30 trillion dollars about 4 years ago. How long would it take us to hit 50 trillion dollars?

If Elon Musk donated his entire fortune to the government, it would barely even make a dent in the national debt… The sheer scale of America’s $40 trillion debt is hard to fathom. The amount is significantly greater than U.S. annual GDP. That means even if all U.S. income went toward paying down the debt for a full year - rather than to things like salaries, corporate profits and investment - the federal government would still owe trillions, by this measure.

If Elon Musk helped pay down the debt by sacrificing the entirety of his nearly $1 trillion net worth—itself a mind-boggling sum - it would barely make a dent. The gross debt owed by the federal government is also nearly equal to what is owed by all U.S. households and businesses combined (excluding banks). Even if you took every single penny from every single billionaire in this country, that would only get you about 8 trillion dollars.

We are drowning in debt with no way out. At this stage, we are spending more on interest on the national debt each year than we are on either the U.S. military or Medicare… As the government continues to borrow, interest payments are consuming a larger share of the nation’s spending, creating a compounding effect that further fuels the debt. The U.S. government now spends more on servicing its debt than on national defense or Medicare. We really are in the endgame.

At the same time that our national debt has hit 40 trillion dollars, a moment of reckoning has arrived for the Treasury market…The fiscal pressures are increasingly visible in the bond market. The yield on the 30-year Treasury recently reached roughly 5.3%, its highest level in nearly two decades, according to the Journal and Reuters. Higher Treasury yields increase the government’s cost of issuing and refinancing debt and can also influence borrowing costs for households and businesses. Government borrowing costs are starting to spike.

In a desperate attempt to calm investors, the U.S. Treasury Department conducted a dramatic intervention on Wednesday…In a move announced Wednesday morning, the Treasury Department, led by Secretary Scott Bessent, said it would at least double the size of its government debt buybacks, starting Sept. 9 and running through Nov. 4. Yields tumbled following the announcement, with the 30-year down about 10 basis points after previously hitting its highest in about 19 years, predating the global financial crisis in 2008. But it didn’t work.

On Thursday, yields on long-term Treasury bonds bounced right back…Bond yields climbed Thursday, erasing most of the pullback they saw the previous day after the Treasury Department announced an intervention aimed at easing pressure on longer-dated government debt. The yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond - the primary focus of the accelerated buyback - was up more than 6 basis points at 5.256%. Yields on 10-year U.S. Treasurys - the main benchmark for mortgages, auto loans and credit card debt - moved more than 5 basis points higher to 4.704%.

This is a really big deal. And there aren’t going to be any easy fixes, because as Wolf Richter has aptly pointed out, there is only so much that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will be able to do moving forward…Going forward, yields will have to be high enough to entice bond buyers off the fence and buy an additional $1 trillion of new Treasury securities every three to five months or so; yields have to be high enough to overcome their fears about inflation, government profligacy, and the new supply pushing up yields even higher.

This didn’t happen by accident. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have brought us to this point. Meanwhile, bond markets in Europe are also starting to go nuts… A sharp increase in borrowing costs also took place across Europe. France’s 10-year bond yield hit its highest level since 2009 on Tuesday, while the yield on German bunds climbed to 3.25pc, a 15-year high. And the yield on 5 year Japanese bonds recently hit the highest level in 31 years.

Government bonds sit at the very foundation of the global financial system. Now that foundation is really starting to be shaken, and that is an extremely troubling sign. The stage has been set for a meltdown of epic proportions, and it won’t take very much at all to push us over the edge."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"Massive Price Increases, This Is Really Happening"

Adventures With Danno, 8/20/26

"Massive Price Increases, This Is Really Happening"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Walmart Investors Panic, The Consumer Is Broke; 8 Days Without Power"

Jeremiah Babe, 8/20/26

"Walmart Investors Panic, The Consumer Is Broke;

 8 Days Without Power"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Heaviest Burdens..."

 

"In Human Society..."

"When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair."

- Nadezhda Mandelstam

"Credit Crisis Coming: Banks Just Exposed What's Happening To Your Money"

Snyder Reports, 8/20/26

"Credit Crisis Coming: Banks Just 

Exposed What's Happening To Your Money"

"Banks just issued their second warning - and this time it's not about inflation. Credit card debt has hit $1.26 trillion, student loans are entering massive delinquency, and lending standards are tightening fast. Here's what concerns them most: Americans are financially vulnerable. Most people earning $4,000-$5,000/month have $3,600 in FIXED costs alone (mortgage $2,100 + car $700 + student loans $500 + credit minimums $300). One crisis - a layoff, a garnishment, a rate hike - and they're underwater. 

We break down the real numbers: 2.6 million student loan borrowers now 120+ days delinquent. Credit utilization soaring. Banks cutting credit limits. Housing market frozen. This isn't speculation - it's the playbook that precedes economic collapse. What it means for you: Credit limits may drop from $10,000 to $2,000-$5,000 without warning; student loan garnishments could eliminate 10% of income instantly; housing trapped inventory signals mortgage stress ahead; Over 50% of Americans have NO emergency savings - they're one crisis away."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Farron Balanced, 8/20/26

"Potentially Huge Market Crash 

Could Be Right Around The Corner"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"The West's Financial System on the Brink of Collapse"

Michael Hudson, 8/20/26

"The West's Financial System on the Brink of Collapse"

Prof. Michael Hudson, a world-renowned classical economist, discusses 

the history of finance and why the West's financial system is on the brink of collapse.

Comments here:

https://www.youtube.com/

Follow the work of Michael Hudson:

-  https://michael-hudson.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Nobody Gives a Damn About Your Status"

Full screen recommended.

Delta Blues Brother,

"Nobody Gives a Damn About Your Status"

"Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away"

"Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man 

Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away"

by John Wilder

"Routine is where life goes to die. On reflection the other day I was a bit amused to note how much of my life is on autopilot. I have three pairs of pants that are all the same that I wear for work that are identical in cut, color, and comfort, so I never have to stand in front of the closet wondering what matches what. I have six shirts that rotate on my torso for daily wear, each one as unremarkable as the last. I get up, generally, within one minute of the same time each day, and the Wildermobile™ hits the pavement within the same thirty seconds each workday. 

 I have cigars three times a week, on the same days and at the same approximate time, rain or shine, good mood or bad. Why three times a week? Well, because insurance says that means I’m a non-smoker. It’s a loophole I’m happy to exploit, and it keeps the premiums from getting as high as Johnny Depp jumping on Mount Everest.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I set those things up on purpose. I figure I have only so much energy to make decisions each day, so why not save it up and also pre-make decisions for the time I’m stupidest each day? For me, that’s in the morning when I get up. Brush teeth first, pants second, and if I’m lucky they’re on my legs and not as a unique set of chestless arm chaps. No debate, no drama, just forward motion.

It’s like giving my brain a head start on the real work that comes later. This makes sense to me. Efficient. Practical. The kind of system a man builds when he realizes life is long on demands and short on spare mental horsepower.

But. I get concerned sometimes that I’ve pre-programmed life a bit too much, and created too much of a routine. The reason I’m concerned is that all of those minutes faced with nothing novel or consequential happening slip away like the replicant played by Rutger Hauer says in Blade Runner: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

And the mostest lostest will be those moments where I was living life on routine, putting one foot in front of the other with hours of my life slipping by on autopilot. The coffee is hot, the drive is the exact same stretch of highway, the cigar smoke curls up exactly as it did last Tuesday. Comfortable, yes. But is comfort the same as living?

Time is really one of the biggest fascinations of my life. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with the idea that something new is only bright and shiny when it’s brand new, and after a certain amount of damage it simply can’t be made to look new again. It wears. It gets scratched and dinged, and none of that is, short of melting it down and remaking it new again, reversible.

Time does that to everything, including us. I can go back to the home I left this morning, but I can’t go back to this morning. It’s a lost country, a place where I can only go in my memory. Gone. Irretrievable. And what if every morning is the same for a thousand days? Haven’t I just compressed all of my life into one single Groundhog Day, with the only exception that I’m getting older, less shiny and new? Less naïve? Less innocent?

The calendar pages flip, but the days bleed together into one long, grey blur. I wake up, I do the things, I go to bed, and suddenly a decade has vanished while I was busy being responsible. The flip side of routine is novelty.

I remember the first night I met The Mrs., the way the room felt electric and the conversation refused to end. I remember my first car. I remember my first touchdown. I remember my last day of college.

I remember building the first Pinewood Derby® car with The Boy and the last one with Pugsley. Those moments and milestones that make up the peaks and valleys of life. Those, certainly, have made my life longer. Not in years, but in the way that life stretches when something real happens. I remember those moments intensely.

There’s a fine line, though. If my life is nothing but novelty, then what chance do I have of creating something useful, of establishing meaning with my life? There is none. Chaos is where life goes to lose meaning. One wild distraction after another, no anchor, no progress, just a pinball existence bouncing from shiny object to shiny object until nothing sticks and nothing matters.

If my life is always routine, I’m pushing every bit of meaning away, becoming a grey man in a gray room on a grey house on a gray hill. Everything blends. Nothing stands out. The days stack up like identical bricks in a wall you can’t see over, and one day I realize the wall is my life and I built it yourself.

I have this thought, mainly because Pugsley is mostly on his own now. I figure the time when I’ve spent half of the hours I’ll ever spend with him was sometime in 2015 or 2016. He’s now out in the world. That realization sneaks up on a father like a quiet thief. No warning bell when the halfway mark passes. I just look up one day and notice the house is quieter, the schedule has gaps, and the kid you taught to ride a bike is suddenly navigating highways I’ll never drive.

It forces the question: so what now? Again, routine is where life goes to die, and chaos is where life goes to lose its meaning. Routine is Scylla; Chaos, Charybdis. I love it when I work a semicolon into a sentence! We paddle between the two monsters, trying not to get devoured by either. Too much of one and we drown in sameness. Too much of the other and we drown in noise.

I think we as a culture are caught between these two monsters right now. We have chaos in the never-ending rise of technological advancement, which at the same time turns faces toward the black mirrors in their hands, where they take the cold comfort of doomscrolling their life away in an endless sea of other people’s outrage and other people’s highlights. Every notification promises novelty with a new opinion that will surely change everything.

But it doesn’t. It just scrolls. The phone lights up, the brain lights up, and another slice of irreplaceable time disappears into the glow. We’ve engineered a world that offers infinite novelty at the cost of any real depth, and we wonder why so many feel hollow.

Reality, I think, is part of the antidote. Writing is, for me. Sure, I do it on a routine: same time, same chair, same keyboard, but each post is something different. Each one starts from a fresh thought, a fresh observation, a fresh wrestle with whatever corner of life is nagging at me that week.

It’s routine that (mostly) invites novelty instead of smothering it. And getting out and accomplishing something in the physical world is also important, too. Building something with my hands. Moving my body until it complains and then keeps going anyway. These things don’t just fill time; they mark it. They leave evidence that I was here, that I did something that outlasts the doomscroll.

The balance isn’t perfect and it never will be. Some days the routine wins because the world demands it. Other days novelty crashes in whether I wanted it or not. The trick, I’m learning, is to guard the line between them like it’s the most important border in your life. Protect enough routine to keep the engine running and enough novelty to keep the engine pointed somewhere worth going.

Because time doesn’t wait for us to figure it out. It keeps moving, wearing us down, turning shiny new mornings into well-worn afternoons. And if I’m going to lose moments like tears in rain, I’d rather a few of them be the kind worth remembering: sharp, vivid, and undeniably mine, than a thousand identical ones that blur together into nothing at all."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

“Incidit In Scyllam Cupiens Vitare Charybdim”

“Incidit In Scyllam Cupiens Vitare Charybdim”

by Steve Candidus

“One of the great things about ancient Greek Mythology is that the stories all teach a lesson. They don’t end with – and the moral of the story is – though. They leave it to the reader to figure them out. So in addition to being just plain fun to read they are wonderful teachers about life. Perhaps the best thing about this one is that we still use the expression it contains exactly the same way that the ancient Greeks intended it almost 3,000 years ago. That almost never happens. Language is fluid and the meanings of words and expressions changes from one generation to another, but this one is an exception. The everyday expression it contains is one that we often refer to without really knowing where it came from.

This is one of the tales of Odysseus who was the heroic king of Ithaca and of whose ten-year journey back to Greece after the Trojan War was immortalized in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. There was a point in his journey when his ship had to enter a narrow straight. It was a passage so narrow that it could only be made under special conditions. They had to have both the wind at their backs and the current in their direction. However, once committed it was impossible to turn back.

Unknown to the sailors the straight was guarded by two deadly perils. On the one side, it was guarded by Scylla. Scylla was a six-headed monster that disguised itself as a rock. On the other side, it was guarded by Charybdis, a terrible deadly whirlpool born of the sea god Poseidon.

In olden times, it was common to refer to any place that a ship came to rest on land as being in a hard place. It didn’t matter if it was blown on shore by a storm, grounded on a reef or brought up intentionally for repair. If it was on shore, it was on a hard place as opposed to the soft place – water.

It also applied to a ship that had foundered. A ship that sinks will eventually rest on the bottom. The land at the bottom of the ocean is therefore called a hard place. It used to be a common term, but it has since pretty much fallen out of practice in common language today. A deadly whirlpool such as Charybdis could take a ship and send it straight to the bottom – a hard place.

So, now as we return to the story of Odysseus we see that their ship had entered a narrow straight and that straight was guarded by two evil perils with hardly enough room for a ship to pass between them. They were forced to choose between the six headed monster ‘Scylla’ disguised as a rock or the dreaded whirlpool ‘Charybdis’ that would surely send them to a hard place and they could not turn back.

There is a Latin proverb from this story, “Incidit in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim” which translates to, “He runs on Scylla, wishing to avoid Charybdis.” In modern day English, we simply say, “They were between a rock and a hard place”. And now you know…”

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Doug Casey on the $20 Burrito, the Affordability Crisis, and What Comes Next"

"Doug Casey on the $20 Burrito,

 the Affordability Crisis, and What Comes Next"

by International Man

"International Man: A $20 burrito has somehow become a national political issue. Is this just another silly internet controversy, or does it reveal something important about the state of the American economy?

Doug Casey: The bottom line is that $20 just isn't worth that much anymore. Malcolm Forbes used to joke that his idea of social change was plenty of tens and twenties. If he were alive today, he'd have to say fifties and hundreds.

If it's a good burrito, $20 might be quite reasonable. On Sunday, I ordered a breakfast burrito at an ordinary restaurant - it was $21, although accompanied by home-fried potatoes. I wasn’t outraged. When I was a kid in the 50s, a bottle of Coke was a nickel or a dime, and any candy bar was a nickel. And if you returned the bottle, you got 2 cents back.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal last week talking about $100 hot dogs. They're decked out with caviar and other exotic accouterments. But it’s still a $100 hot dog on a bun. It’s the type of thing future generations will tell stories about, as we do of the Romans eating sparrows' tongues - the signs of degenerate civilizations which have lost all sense of value.

People are blaming burrito makers, or cattle farmers, or capitalism itself, for the existence of a $20 burrito. Few blame the government or the Federal Reserve for debasing the currency. Idiotically, they're looking for the government to make it better when the government itself is the problem. The election of the so-called Democratic Socialist Mamdani in New York to cure the problem is a sign that the situation is hopeless. $20 burritos are the least of our problems.

International Man: Some say today’s high prices are simply capitalism at work—the market sets the price, and consumers can choose whether to pay it. It seems something is missing from that argument?

Doug Casey: High prices are not the fault of capitalism. In a pure free market capitalist system, prices of consumer goods would fall consistently. What Boobus Americanus doesn't understand is that we don't live in a real capitalist system. What we have in the U.S. is better described as state capitalism, which is a "partnership" between large corporations and the government. Mussolini described it as fascism - a term he coined. But that word has lost its original meaning. Fascism has nothing to do with jackboots, military parades, and hating Jews. It’s an economic system where the means of production are privately owned but essentially controlled by the State.

International Man: One response to the affordability crisis has been essentially: stop complaining, eat cheaper food, get roommates, and lower your expectations. Are younger Americans actually entitled - or has their standard of living genuinely deteriorated compared with previous generations?

Doug Casey: The key to financial success is to produce more than you consume and save the difference. That's become harder in recent years, because wages have not kept up with debasement of the currency. Even worse, the money that you do save is losing value faster than ever. Saving dollars has become a losing proposition, a fool’s game.

There is no question that each generation of Americans has become softer and more entitled than the previous generation. As technology increases the amount of leisure, and debt finances a higher standard of living, moral fiber diminishes. It's perfectly natural, however unfortunate. Little can be done to alter major trends in a civilization. All you can do is keep yourself from being corrupted and act as a good example.

International Man: Politicians inevitably respond to affordability problems with proposals for higher minimum wages, price controls, subsidies, tax credits, or other government programs. Why do these supposed solutions make the underlying problem worse?

Doug Casey: That’s because none of those things are solutions. To start with, politicians are inevitably the worst type of people in a society. They're professional busybodies who get into politics because they like to manipulate other people and impose their will on them. It's foolish to hope what amounts to a professional criminal class will solve economic problems. The average American knows nothing about economics. And what he thinks he knows is basically Keynesian economics. He's easily convinced that there are political solutions to economic problems.

International Man: If the government continues running huge deficits and debasing the currency, where should people position their capital to protect themselves - and potentially profit from what comes next?

Doug Casey: There is no question but that the government will continue running huge deficits. The deficits are not just huge, but growing exponentially. Those deficits can't be financed from domestic savings, which are approximately zero. They're not going to be financed by selling debt to foreigners, who have come to despise the US. The deficits will, therefore, be financed by selling debt to the Federal Reserve, which pays for them by printing dollars and depositing them in the government's accounts in commercial banks.

The dollar will continue losing value, and at an accelerating rate. Although, because of all the debt that's being created, we might suffer a deflationary credit collapse on the way to hyperinflation. Americans are caught between a rock and a hard place. Or, as recent watchers of "The Odyssey" may have learned, between Scylla and Charybdis."

- https://internationalman.com/

Bill Bonner, "Stroll Through BubbleLand"

"Stroll Through BubbleLand"

by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "Today, like a hick at a county fair, we wander through BubbleLand. Our mouth open, we gawk and wonder. We’ve been hunting deer on the ‘back 40’ for years, we ought to be able to hit a few targets and win a stuffed teddy bear, no? Is the ‘Naked Lady’ really a lady? Would a sane person ride on the ‘Death Swirl?’ With so many bright lights and carnival barkers, it’s hard to stay focused on what really matters. The war with Iran? AI? Trump’s health issues? Midterm elections? Rising interest rates?

We don’t know which of these will bring down the tent. But one of them probably will. Yesterday, in the early morning, interest rates looked like the frontrunners. MarketWatch: The U.S. Treasury on Wednesday will be asking investors to hand over another $16 billion for 20 years to help finance the nearly $1.8 trillion U.S. budget deficit so far this year.

The answer from investors probably will be “fine, but you need to pay us close to a 5.28% yield” - the going rate for existing 20-year Treasury debt on Tuesday, and the most it’s cost Washington to borrow this way since the 20-year tenor was auctioned six years ago. With long-term Treasury yields hovering at multi-decade highs, traders have begun asking the uncomfortable question: How much will the U.S. need to pay to convince the world to keep lending it money?

And here’s Barron’s: "30-year yield rises to highest level since 2007 as oil and Treasury supply bite bonds." The Wall Street Journal is on the case too: "Bonds are getting hammered, and Wall Street says the rout won’t end anytime soon."

Really? But the bond rout ended before we finished our breakfast. CNBC: "Treasury yields pulled back on Wednesday from multi-year highs seen earlier this week, with the long end of the curve dropping sharply after the Treasury Department announced an upscaled buyback operation of U.S. long-term debt. The Treasury Department said it will double the size of its government debt repurchases, lending support to longer-dated bonds."

“Repurchase?” With what money? The word hides its true meaning. In effect, the feds are going to ‘print’ money in order to buy their own debt, lowering yields...and further inflating the economy. Gold knew what it meant immediately. At 8 am yesterday, it was selling for $4,416 an ounce. An hour later, the fellow with 10 ounces of gold was $1,000 richer. And by the end of the day, the dots had come together in a preview of America’s financial future. Reuters: ‘US debt crosses $40 trillion threshold after doubling under Trump and Biden.’

The feds can’t stop spending. And they can’t afford to let interest rates rise. Look for more intervention...more debt, and a dollar that shrinks like cotton candy. Under our financial Big Top, there are two things of most immediate concern. First is the amount of debt hanging over us. Second is the interest rate we have to pay on it. As the two of them rise, so do the odds of major blow-up. The feds can delay it by ‘repurchasing’ their own debt...but they just make it worse, later.

But let’s continue our stroll through BubbleLand and keep our eyes open. Here’s some ‘good news.’ Charlie Bilello: "S&P 500 Q2 earnings are now on pace to rise 50% YoY, the highest growth rate since Q2 2021. And the 29% upside surprise in Q2 earnings versus expectations at the start of earnings season is officially the biggest upside surprise on record."

Don’t get too excited. These are not real ‘earnings.’ They are bubble earnings. They come from investments the ‘hyperscalers’ have made in other AI companies. And they’re expected to keep coming. Earnings for next year are estimated at twice the ‘normal’ 15% rate. So far this year the S&P 500 has risen 15% - again, twice the normal level. But so many companies have spent so much money on AI that the ‘Death Swirl’ threatens to topple over.

The top ten companies in the S&P are all dependent on the AI bubble. Sandisk, Dell, Seagate and Micron all have gone up more than 200% this year. And overall, stocks are so expensive that the naïve, long term-oriented investor, depending on dividends, would wait a hundred years to break even. This is not a boom based on actual revenues...but on the hope of more capital gains.

Any Wall Street hustler worth his suspenders knows what to do next. That is the thinking behind what might be another Peak Bubble signal that appeared last week. The Street: "Anthropic’s $2 trillion IPO dream rests on staggering revenue bet." Anthropic now prepares the biggest IPO in history. When investors are eager for ‘pie in the sky’...give it to them a la mode."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "We Just Hit $40 Trillion - You're Going To Pay For It"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 8/20/26

"We Just Hit $40 Trillion - 

You're Going To Pay For It"

"The United States has officially crossed $40 TRILLION in national debt - and this isn't just a number coming out of Washington anymore. It can affect your mortgage, car loan, credit cards, business, prices, interest rates and retirement. In this video, I break down what the $40 trillion national debt milestone means for everyday Americans, why the bond market matters, why borrowing costs are rising, and why the government's growing interest expense deserves your attention. We also look at the impact on consumers, businesses, real estate, student loans and the broader economy.

The financial warning signs are getting harder to ignore. I explain why I believe Americans need to get their personal finances in order, build an emergency fund, maintain access to cash and banking, and prepare for a potentially volatile period ahead. We also discuss gold, silver, inflation, Social Security, the housing market, consumer spending, business debt and what could happen if credit conditions tighten further. The $40 trillion debt milestone affects all of us - and understanding what is happening now may help you prepare for what comes next."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "$.99 Deals At Kroger!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 8/20/26

"$.99 Deals At Kroger!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Slow Boil"

"Slow Boil"

by Todd Hayen

"Everyone knows by now the analogy often tossed about these days describing a frog in a pot of water on a stove. The heat is turned up so slowly that the frog has no idea that if he (or she) doesn’t jump out he will be boiled alive. Seems that most sheep, the normies, are like the frog. The rest of us (for the sake of simplicity I will call the rest of us “shrews” - more on that later!) are doing most of the jumping - or at least trying to. I don’t know if TPTB (“the powers that be” - need I clarify?) really care about a few jumping frogs, although our shrew numbers are increasing every day and may soon outnumber the sheep! What does seem to be clear is that some of the sheep are waking up and are attempting to jump out of the pot themselves.

It seems quite imperative that the majority of frogs stay in the pot, because if most of them jump out, there will be no dinner for whoever is cooking them. The shrew frogs are very much aware of the heat being turned up leading to their demise, the sheep frogs still are not quite sure what the hell is happening. In order to fully know the degree of seriousness regarding the pot and water situation you have to believe that the point of being in the pot to begin with is to be boiled - dead. Maybe we can still stick with a metaphor here, but possibly not - the intention of the boiling pot could literally be to kill the sleeping frogs contained therein. Or, at the very least, have them completely under the control of TPTB. Do they need to remain asleep forever? 

I can’t actually answer that question, maybe not, but maybe so. I would think it would be best that they are close to being asleep most of the time. If they wake up too much, they will possibly make too much ruckus. Look at all the totalitarian regimes throughout history, real ones, as well as made up ones (as in Orwell’s “1984”). Being partially asleep, if not totally asleep, seemed to be a rather important criterion in these regimes. Most people, historically, living under totalitarian rule are not that aware of the freedoms they have lost, or the dehumanizing power they live under. This control on a large populace was obviously achieved through government lies, confusions, departures from reality executed by the predominant media, censorship and the silencing of opposing voices - on and on. 

Us shrews are very familiar with these tactics. The sheep don’t believe they exist, even when their little noses are rubbed in it. These tactics have worked brilliantly for centuries in various contexts. Yes, there have always been thinking, awake, shrews, but they are typically silenced, or eliminated, very quickly.

Sheep do whatever they can to avoid seeing the truth. Obviously they think they see it, and make a lot of noise about what they believe is true and why it is true. In this Covid situation typically the noise they make is about how “unscientific” the shrews are, yet in an argument, you seldom hear sheep talk about actual science. They just like to rant on about how so and so is stupid, an anti vaxxer, or a science denier, or is publicly discredited in various ways, or was kicked off of YouTube so they MUST be an idiot. I have never heard a sheep talk about actual science. Maybe they do, and maybe I’ve heard it, but certainly not often.

So the sheep continue to get cooked. Of course the shrews are cooking too. So far, the jumping shrews are getting just as cooked as the sheep, but they are awake, and feel the pain of the boiling water. And, of course, as much as they jump, they can’t get out of the water. Neither can the sheep, but they don’t seem to care - not yet at least.

TPTB are a bit concerned that there is so much jumping going on in the pot. It is possible that all of the shrews and some sheep might jump around so much the lid pops off and a lot of the frogs get out, which could slow things down - not stop things mind you, but slow them down. If most of the sheep and shrews got out of the pot because they were all awake, then that could cause a real disruption in the mainstream agenda. But most of the sheep that are hopping are not really awake. They must want to get back to what, in their previous asleep state, seemed normal. They are tired of Covid - tired of being afraid of it, tired of lockdowns, of restrictions, of inconvenience. They are not awake to the bigger picture like shrews are. In order to be fully awake, a sheep or a shrew has to believe in some rather radical things.

1. The Government of whatever country you live in is corrupt, and they really don’t care all that much about you, if anything at all.

2. Big Pharma is corrupt, and although, if profitable, may come up with some stuff that actually helps people, for the most part they will kill you if they can make some dough doing it and keep most everyone asleep so they can keep doing it (turning up the heat).

3. Most doctors are like privates in a huge powerful army. They follow orders from their generals and “commanders in chief” and they typically do not question them. They get all of their information from specific sources that could, for the above reasons 1 and 2, be wrong. They are NOT, usually, scientists or researchers (although some, on the shrew side, most definitely ARE, but we don’t hear much from them because they are typically silenced (see above.)

4. Institutions such as hospitals and universities depend so much on funding from the corrupt government and corrupt pharmaceutical companies that they are completely unreliable, if not criminal.

5. The mainstream media is also for the most part “fake.” The media is mostly owned and otherwise funded by the corrupt pharmaceutical companies, the corrupt government, and whoever else is supporting the power and money agenda.

This is a big pill for sheep to swallow... for anyone to swallow for that matter, but for some mysterious reason shrews, and wanna-be shrews, swallow that pill without even thinking about it. Why? I don’t know, and this article isn’t going to attempt to figure that out. We just do, and bless us for that.

There are even bigger pills to swallow than the five listed above - the Great Reset, which includes centralization of government and economy, possible eugenics/population reduction, etc. I won’t go into all that. Most shrews are onboard, some are not quite there yet, but some form of “bigger agenda” is at play here beyond just power hungry rich people.

So where does this leave the pot of boiling frogs? Many say the heat is being turned down. Why? Some say because TPTB believe all the frogs are going to get out and shut the whole shebang down. Some say TPTB are afraid for their own safety, that they could be held accountable, tried by a court, and punished - possibly by hanging from an end of a rope.

Granted, TPTB have great incentive to keep most of the frogs asleep so they can continue to boil them. But, in my humble opinion, they are far from any immediate concern that there are too many rambunctious jumping frogs. They may turn the heat down, but only in effective ways that assure calming the frogs down a bit, while turning it up in other ways that the frogs don’t notice. We need to continue hopping, and knock that lid off."

- https://www.shrewviews.com/

"Americans are Preparing For What’s Coming...More Bills Coming"

Full screen recommended.

Michael Bordenaro, 8/20/26

"Americans are Preparing For What’s Coming...

More Bills Coming"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"People Will Be Furious When They See Why Gas Prices Didn't Come Back Down"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 8/19/26

"People Will Be Furious When They See 

Why Gas Prices Didn't Come Back Down"

"Crude oil cost the same in July 2026 as it did back in January. Gasoline hit $4.003. So where did the rest of it come from? Not the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait carries crude and crude barely moved. From January 2nd to February 27th, 2026, Brent averaged $68.69 a barrel. On July 1st it was $69.24. A penny apart, per gallon. What moved was the refining margin: the money made turning a barrel into fuel. It went from about 44 cents a gallon to $1.45. Over the same stretch the pump went up 97 cents. And the clearest test is this: at crude's absolute peak - April 7th, Brent at $138.21 - the refining margin was BELOW its pre-war level. The margin moves against the crude price, not with it. That alone breaks the "war scarcity" explanation on its own terms. Four big US refiners - Marathon Petroleum, Valero, PBF Energy and HF Sinclair - reported a combined operating-income swing from $3.51 billion to $14.96 billion in a single quarter. An $11.4 billion difference, filed with the SEC on July 30 and August 4, 2026. 

Nothing in the public record we read broke a law. This video does not allege wrongdoing by any company or executive. What it does is follow the arithmetic to where the money actually sits - and the answer isn't an ocean away. The world did not lose crude. The world lost the machinery that turns crude into diesel. Ukrainian strikes took out roughly a third of Russia's refining capacity (18 refineries hit in July 2026 alone; Russia banned diesel exports on July 8). American capacity was retired years ago - 18.8 down to 18.2 million barrels a day since 2019. Roughly two-thirds of the margin expansion is diesel and jet fuel: the fuels that move food, freight and nearly everything you buy. Ken McClure's family started K&P McClure in Lansing, Michigan in 1992 with one truck. He runs forty-four. In March, on local television, he named a month. The school district in Yakima, Washington runs sixty buses. At its own contract price, those buses cost it $213,000 more a year - roughly what two teachers make, in a district where student poverty runs 86 percent. There is no federal price-gouging statute. Just a hole in the law, exactly the size of their fuel bill."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Sea and Silence"

Deuter, "Sea and Silence"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Where did this big ball of stars come from? Palomar 6 is one of about 200 globular clusters of stars that survive in our Milky Way Galaxy. These spherical star-balls are older than our Sun as well as older than most stars that orbit in our galaxy's disk. Palomar 6 itself is estimated to be about 12.5 billion years old, so old that it is close to - and so constrains - the age of the entire universe. 

Containing about 500,000 stars, Palomar 6 lies about 25,000 light years away, but not very far from our galaxy's center. At that distance, this sharp image from the Hubble Space Telescope spans about 15 light-years. After much study including images from Hubble, a leading origin hypothesis is that Palomar 6 was created - and survives today - in the central bulge of stars that surround the Milky Way's center, not in the distant galactic halo where most other globular clusters are now found."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211019.html

"How to Bear Your Desolations"

"How to Bear Your Desolations"

by Maria Popova

"The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of it in shiny shards. And meanwhile spring was breaking outside and a little girl in bright blue rain boots was jumping in a puddle, smashing the reflections of the clouds with savage joy. And I thought, this is all there is: breaking, breaking apart, breaking open. Breaking alive.

It is not an easy assignment, being alive. Coming awake from the stupor of near-living that lulls us through our days, awake to the knowledge that on the other side of the neighborhood ICE trucks are handcuffing people and on the other side of the planet children are dying in gunfire, while outside the first birds of spring are singing and everywhere people are falling in love and in some faraway mountain village a shepherd is singing under a thousand stars. And somehow, somehow, all of it has to cohere into a single world in which we, in all our incohesion, must live this single life.

Ellen Bass reckons with all of this in her splendid poem “Any Common Desolation,” originally published in The Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day newsletter and later included in James Crews’s lifeline of an anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (public library), shared here with Ellen’s blessing.

“Any Common Desolation” read by Maria Popova

"Any Common Desolation"

by Ellen Bass

"can be enough to make you look up

at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few

that survived the rains and frost, shot

with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep

orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird

would rip it like silk. You may have to break

your heart, but it isn’t nothing

to know even one moment alive. The sound

of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant

animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.

The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.

Warm socks. You remember your mother,

her precision a ceremony, as she gathered

the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,

drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath

can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,

the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything

you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves

and, like a needle slipped into your vein -

that sudden rush of the world."

Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living and Hermann Hesse on how to be more alive, then revisit Ellen’s magnificent poem “How to Apologize.” And if you are looking to break your poetry open, I couldn’t recommend her Living Room Craft Talks more heartily."

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

"We All Run Out of Time…"

Full screen recommended.

oltsev art,

"We All Run Out of Time…"

"We always thought we had more.More summers. More mornings. More time to say the things we meant to say. This one is for everyone who has ever wished the clock would just slow down. And for everyone who finally made peace with the fact that it won't.

All lyrics and concepts are written by me. Every frame is built from my own creative direction - the story, the feeling, the reason it exists. I use AI the way a composer uses an instrument. I'm open about that. I think AI can be something more than noise. It can carry real human emotion if a real human puts it there first. Not for speed. Not for shortcuts. I want you to feel it. Thank you for watching."

Delta Blue's Kings, "The Weight of Unspoken Words"

Full screen recommended.

Delta Blue's Kings,

"The Weight of Unspoken Words"

"Some things don’t haunt you because they happened. They haunt you because they never did. “The Weight of Unspoken Words” is a deep Delta blues reflection on silence, pride, missed conversations, and the emotional weight carried by the things we never say out loud. Some words don’t disappear. They stay."

Native Elder, "Why You Hear Your Name Called When Nobody Is There"

Full screen recommended.

Native Elder,

"Why You Hear Your Name 

Called When Nobody Is There"

The Daily "Near You?"

Metamora, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Essence Of Life..."

"It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane."

- Philip José Farmer

"Future Uncertain, Part II"

"Future Uncertain, Part II"

by Joel Bowman

“No man of sense, even if he is prosperous for the moment, 

will ever reckon with certainty on the future.”

~ Polybius, "Histories (written between 160 – 146 BC)

Buenos Aires, Argentina - "When we left you last, we were reckoning on a theory of time: it’s speeding up. Alas, we ran out of time to finish the thought! (Readers can get themselves up to speed, right on time, in Part I.)

We’ll pick up that thread in just a moment. But first, what’s the point of all this? Why bother thinking about such abstract concepts at all? Isn’t there something more pressing, more immediate, au courant over which to cogitate? Has POTUS dropped another “Truth bomb” on social media? Is the Iran War on/off again? Has the Empire crested the $40T debt summit? Have the forests all burned and the oceans all boiled? And what happened to inflation figures and GDP measurements and consumer confidence indexes? Where’s “the meat”?

A little patience, if you would be so kind. At least some good things come to those who wait...Besides, we’re teasing out a paradox, dear reader: the idea that the more we come to “know” – about our past, about the human condition, about the world around us – the more uncertain our future becomes. But how could this be so? Conventional, post-Enlightenment wisdom assures us the opposite ought to be the case... that the more we refine our measuring tools, the more we apply cold, hard reason to the questions outstanding, the more easily we’ll be able to “peek around the corner.”

Surely with all our whizz-bang technology... our doubt-free “thought leaders”... our globalist gatherings and press corps. blatherings... we’re closer to “The Truth” than ever before, no? But let us save that laughable conceit for the end of our little tale. Today, we pick up where we left off, hot on the heels of man’s marvelous technological adventure...

Old School Rock ‘n’ Roll: From the humble wheel, which probably got rolling in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) sometime around 3,500 BC... to iron smelting, for which we thank the Hittites, c. 1,800 BC... to the precursors to the modern day alphabet, courtesy of the Phoenicians, c. 1,200 BC...

We watched as man plodded along, dragging his simple tools and fractured languages around with him for centuries, sometimes millennia, before his best and brightest (or at least, most fecund) ideas began to catch on. Sometimes these ideas were spread by trade and commerce... other times by war and conquest... and often by pure chance.

Other times, they were simply lost along the way... see the The Baghdad Battery or the Antikythera mechanism or the Greek “Lycurgus Cup,” a dichroic glass artifact whose optical properties weren’t properly understood until modern science... for just a smattering of the ideas History “forgot.” (Our friends at Classical Wisdom have delved into these and other wonders. See more here.)

Indeed, in many ways, the record of History itself, as far as we may claim to “know” it at all, survives largely as a result of chance and contingency, much of it invisible to us. Consider, for example, that it is only because the population of Pompeii was so completely annihilated by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius (in 79 AD), that their history was preserved for us.

Call it “conservation through extermination.” Convenient for historians, perhaps... not so much for Pliny the Elder and his “fortune favors the bold” shipmates. Ah, but that’s another story, for another time...

Upstream to Mainstream: In any event, it was not until the Renaissance, in general, and Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press, in particular, when technology really began to reach escape velocity. Cue the Scientific Revolution (c. 1540–1700), the Age of Enlightenment (c. 1680–1800) and the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1850), and before you could say “a car in every garage,” Henry Ford’s automobile production plants are cranking out 2M new sets of wheels per year in the United States alone.

Mankind had come a long way since his original rock ‘n’ roll days, back in the cradle of civilization. And he was only just getting going...From the mid-19th to the early 21st Century, technology underwent an acceleration so dramatic it became impossible to ignore, at least for anyone with eyes to see. Herewith, a pithy breakdown of some nifty breakthroughs. (Shown is the number of years it took for each technology to reach 25% of the US population, the so-called tipping point where a technology is said to safely “cross the chasm” into the mainstream)...

Electricity: 46 Years (1873 to 1919)

Automobile: 35 Years (1886 to 1921)

Radio: 31 Years (1920 to 1951)

Television: 26 Years (1926 to 1952)

Personal Computer: 16 Years (1975 to 1991)

The Internet: 7 Years (1991 to 1998)

Smartphones: 4 Years (2007 to 2011)

Faster than Light: This is a phenomenon economists, investors, policy wonks, and fringy newsletter scribblers sometimes call “adoption curve compression,” wherein the time from innovation to saturation... from lab to “fab!”... significantly shortens over time.

The “The Law of Accelerating Change,” as the futurist Ray Kurzweil described it, happens in part because each new technology is able to benefit from the previous technology in order to better “build itself.” Once man had fashioned the first wheel, the first iron tool, the first computer, etc., he could use it to help build a better, faster, more efficient wheel, iron tool, computer, etc. In this way, the rate of technological advancement went from linear... to exponential.

Another contributing factor is the speed at which knowledge (not wisdom, mind you) can travel. In the ancient world, ideas spread as fast as men could physically carry them... about 3 miles/hour. By the industrial era, seated aboard trains and ships, he could manage perhaps 60 mph. And by the time he was surfing the web of fiber optic cables, man’s ideas (good, bad and ugly) could travel at the speed of light. (Actually, it is potentially infinitely faster than that.. as a single piece of information can now travel from Point A to any number of destinations simultaneously, thereby collapsing the denominator of the speed equation from the very outset.)

All of which makes the arrival of Artificial Intelligence entirely unsurprising post factum… but next to impossible to have predicted ante hoc. But is A.I. itself another Gutenberg moment… or a Mt. Vesuvius rumbling underfoot? And is there any way to know for sure? More on all that, next time...Stay tuned for your Notes From the End of the World..."

- https://joelbowman.substack.com/