"Some Shattering Illusions of Our Declining Empire"

"Some Shattering Illusions of Our Declining Empire"

by George O’Neill Jr.

"Now that the lofty 250th-anniversary rhetoric about the greatness of our country has faded, it is time to face the reality of our country’s actual behavior. The U.S. fashions itself as a generous and benevolent world leader enforcing the “rules-based order”—a deceptive construct used by globalist elites to bully other countries. The rules are arbitrarily changed to suit the bullies and are regularly fashioned into pretexts for military action against uncooperative nations. In short, it is a hoax, untethered from the principles and ideals of our founders.

Almost daily we witness some spectacle illustrating the appalling corruption of our country’s leadership. The recent release of Anthony Fauci’s diary entries confirms long-held suspicions about the Covid-19 narrative, which we now know even Fauci himself did not fully believe. Think of the millions of lives ruined and harmed by that corruption. Yet this vain phony, when asked to testify before Congress, hid behind half a dozen lawyers and refused to answer any questions. What a fine example of transparency from one of our leading scientists and civil servants! What else are our leaders still hiding about the worldwide disaster caused by Covid-related deceptions and manipulations? There has not yet been any meaningful examination of our medical profession, which largely acted as cowards during the pandemic, adhering to the bogus official narrative at the expense of the welfare of their patients.

Our leadership has not even begun to scratch the surface of the horrors created by the many secret - and potentially illegal - biolabs scattered around the globe, supported by funds often hidden from voters under the guise of “national security.” The Fauci crowd appears to have been deeply involved in that dark world.

America’s Middle East policy remains a source of shame. The U.S. Treasury secretary brags about ruining the currency of the Iranian people, against whom we have waged a war of aggression. In Gaza, Washington has enabled a brutal assault on a vulnerable population. Not many years ago, most Americans considered standing up for the vulnerable and innocent an honorable act of a true American. Not our leaders. These days, opposing the harm of politically inconvenient innocents attracts name-calling, ostracism, and sanctions. What would our Founding Fathers have thought of that?

The current wars have exposed the shortcomings of our nearly trillion-dollar military and its multi-billion-dollar weapons systems. If the Covid mess is any indication, we should assume there is hidden and shockingly ugly information about the behavior and practices of the military-industrial complex. The failure of our various expensive defense systems to protect our Persian Gulf “allies” from Iranian missile and drone attacks is a tragic example of government dishonesty. Despite repeated failures, the administration continues to brag of its ability to destroy Iran’s military and shoot down its remaining missiles and drones. After years of being told we possess the “most powerful military” in history, Americans are beginning to realize it is a fantasy. The success of that false narrative rests on decades of fighting people riding donkeys and bicycles.

Our government classifies and redacts documents as a matter of course. Think of the billions of pages we are still not allowed to see - especially information about the most important events in our country’s history. Many significant, history-changing events remain shrouded in secrecy. How is it that information is still being withheld about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? After six decades, what bad behavior are they still “protecting” from the public? Most Americans suspect the official government narrative was false, yet officials continue to withhold information that might shed light on that crime. The same is true for the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., our government’s willful abandonment of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam, the September 11 attacks, and the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Not to mention the disgusting manipulations and secret operations used to drag our country into the long list of dishonest, illegal, and failed wars we have “fought.”

Our political leadership’s frenzied efforts to hide the Epstein files make it look as though the “national security” excuse is merely a convenient tool to obscure malfeasance, rape, blackmail, bribery, and plain old corruption. They clearly believe they are not subject to the same pesky and inconvenient laws as the rest of us who live in the country. So much for equal protection under the law and the “rules-based order.”

We watch with horror the chaos, death, and destruction currently being wreaked on the world - and on our own country - by our “exceptional nation.” Why has the second Trump administration bombed at least seven countries and engaged in underhanded efforts to weaken and harm the political systems of others? None of this serves the interests of the American people; it serves only the special interests of our elites. All this from a president who campaigned on an America First policy, an end to forever wars, and the promotion of peace. It looks like we were fooled again. Presidential candidate after presidential candidate promises peace, and we get war after war. The system is subverted by corruption.

As the failure of the illegal war against Iran becomes increasingly obvious, more Americans are realizing that it in no way serves their interests. As the war against Russia in Ukraine grinds toward failure, American and European leaders continue more frantically than ever to promote the fantasy that Ukraine can defeat Russia in that sad and disastrous conflict.

There is one positive development: The American people, especially the younger generation, are beginning to recognize the corruption at the top of our country and the magnitude of the war lies. They understand that the special interests driving these belligerent policies care nothing about the well-being of the general populace or of our nation. There has always been skepticism toward powerful special interests, but we are moving past skepticism into righteous fury. This is also true of our “allies,” who watched U.S. elites prioritize Israel over American security when the missiles started flying.

Ours is not an “exceptional nation.” It is not the “shining city on a hill.” It is not “a thousand points of light.” Not anymore. It is a declining empire with a declining military - one unable to protect its allies, yet still seeking to bully and harm any country that angers its corrupt elites. Our military defenses are so ineffective that Iran - a country one-fourth our size, with an economy smaller than our bloated military budget - can practically name its next round of targets knowing our mighty military can do little to stop them."

With a governing elite that serves foreign and special interests rather than the people and a sweeping surveillance state that stretches from sea to shining sea, Americans are becoming increasingly disillusioned. A sobering question to consider: When the illusion finally shatters, who will be left willing to defend a government that wouldn’t defend its own?"

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.

"Why Comfortable People Don't Revolt: Propaganda, Debt, and Control"

"Why Comfortable People Don't Revolt: 

Propaganda, Debt, and Control"

by Chris MacIntosh

"The question serious analysts must ask is not "why do governments expand?" That is self-evident, a structural feature of any bureaucracy. The appropriate question is "why do populations permit it?" The answer requires understanding the propaganda apparatus that Western states have built, refined, and now operate at industrial scale.

The modern architecture of consent management dates to the First World War. Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, run by George Creel, demonstrated that a population could be mobilized for any purpose - including a war most Americans had no interest in fighting - through systematic control of information, the manufacture of enemy imagery, and the weaponization of social pressure.

Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the inventor of modern public relations, drew the explicit lesson: the techniques of wartime propaganda could be applied in peacetime, continuously, to manage democratic populations who had been given the formal appearance of self-governance.

Bernays wrote in 1928: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." He meant this approvingly. The masses, in his view, required management. The only question was who would do the managing.

Walter Lippmann, a despicable little parasite who was also the era’s most influential political journalist and advisor to presidents, concurred. In "Public Opinion" (1922), he argued that the complexity of modern society exceeded the cognitive capacity of ordinary citizens. The solution was an expert class - a "specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality" - who would process reality and present the public with a manageable, simplified version of it. Democracy would be preserved as ceremony; governance would be conducted by administrators insulated from democratic pressure.

This was not conspiracy. It was, in its originators’ minds, practical social engineering for the modern age. The conspiracy came later, when the machinery was captured by interests with specific agendas -  and when those agendas diverged sharply from the welfare of the managed populations.

Credit Expansion as Social Control: The propaganda apparatus alone is insufficient to maintain compliant populations. People who are struggling economically have little to lose and much to gain from resistance. The second pillar of modern social management is therefore material: keep the population comfortable enough that compliance feels rational. The credit expansion of the post-Bretton Woods era served this function with extraordinary efficiency.

The Nixon Shock of 1971 - the closure of the gold window, the final severing of money from any physical constraint - did not immediately impoverish ordinary people. Instead, it created something more insidious: the illusion of prosperity, financed by debt, distributed through asset price inflation, and sustained by ever-lower interest rates.

In the United States, median real wages stagnated after 1971. The economic pie did not stop growing, but the share accruing to labour contracted sharply relative to capital. The compensation was the credit card, the home equity line, the student loan, the 30-year mortgage on an asset perpetually inflated by the monetary expansion that was compressing real wages in the first place. People felt wealthier because their houses were worth more. They did not feel wealthier because they were more productive or better compensated.

The distinction matters enormously. One generates genuine capital; the other generates a debt-financed simulacrum of capital that must eventually be reconciled. The political consequence was exactly what Hyman Minsky would have predicted: financial stability bred risk appetite, risk appetite bred leverage, leverage bred fragility.

But crucially, the fragility was concentrated in the financial system - not in the felt experience of ordinary households. As long as asset prices rose, people felt fine. They did not ask questions. The combination of material comfort and media management neutralized the impulse to resist.

Comfortable people do not revolt. The genius of the modern system is that it has made debt feel like wealth and dependency feel like security. Propaganda can conceal reality, and easy credit can postpone the consequences - but neither can repeal economic law forever. When the debt-fueled illusion finally breaks, the resulting upheaval will be devastating."

- https://internationalman.com/

Bill Bonner, "One Preposterous Flim-flam After Another"

"One Preposterous Flim-flam After Another"

by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "There goes the neighborhood. Up the river from us in Ireland...comes another rich guy. The Irish Times: "With a rumored pricetag of between €20 to €30 million, Strancally Castle has been bought by Meta giant, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. This morning, The Irish Times reports that the 440-acre estate was sold several weeks ago from Michael and Giancarla Alen-Buckley to the Zuckerbergs."

We already have one billionaire next door - James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner fellow. The last thing we need is another one. Helicopters overhead. Lights on the river. Black vans with ‘security’ agents. The big billionaires lower the quality of life - even for themselves. Mark and Priscilla are surely a nice couple. But when we see them carrying their silverware and linens into Strancally Castle…it will be time to leave.

Also lowering the quality of life is Scott Bessent. Scarcely 24 hours had passed when speculators realized they had been fooled. They had bid up prices (lowering yields) on 30-year bonds on the strength of Treasury Secretary’s pledge to intervene in the market. He is going to buy the long bonds. Of course, he has no money, so he will have to sell short-dated paper to buy the long-dated paper. Which is to say, he proposes to make your mortgage cheaper and your credit cards more expensive. For a few moments it seemed as though he might convince speculators to play along. But then...ABC News:

"Bond yields jumped Thursday, erasing the declines stemming from the Treasury Department’s unusual intervention in the debt market a day earlier. In early trading, the 10-year Treasury bond yield rose as high as 4.71%, its highest level since Tuesday. The 30-year yield spiked to as high as 5.627%, rising just above the level yields were at when the Treasury Department’s action Wednesday."

The real problem is neither long rates, nor short rates, but the sheer tonnage of paper itself. The very same day that Bessent announced his plan to manipulate interest rates the feds elsewhere announced another milestone - federal debt weighed in at $40 trillion. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

"For perspective, it took nearly 200 years for America’s gross debt to reach $1 trillion for the first time in 1981. At that time, President Reagan told the nation in a televised address, “If we as a nation needed a warning, let that be it.” Jumping to America’s 250th year, we are spending more than that just on interest payments on our debt. And other warnings signs are flashing too, with debt held by the public recently exceeding the size of our economy, the deficit-to-GDP ratio running twice as high as where it should be, and interest costs exceeding our national defense budget. $40 trillion of debt doesn’t exist solely on the government’s ledgers; it is felt throughout the economy and finds its way to the pocketbooks of people one way or another. The more we borrow, the more we exacerbate inflation, squeeze out other priorities in the budget, and leave ourselves vulnerable to emergencies at home and turmoil abroad."

Since Independence Day, July 4, the US has added more than a half trillion to its debt. Over the last 12 months, $3 trillion has piled on - more than ever before....and during the last three years, Zuckerberg has gotten about $100 billion richer. Those facts are not neighbors by coincidence. Everything, every asset class...every shopping decision...and every dollar has been distorted, stretched...twisted, puffed up and corrupted. Everything gets crushed under a huge mass of fake money and paper wealth.

And there is the aforementioned Bessent. He says the Treasury doesn’t intend to: ‘Mitigate episodes of acute market stress.’ And yet, that is exactly what he is trying to do...in the worst way...at the worst time. Instead of signaling strength, he admitted weakness. Instead of demonstrating his ability to control yields, he proved helpless.

You’ll recall that the US could borrow, in 2020, at below 1% interest. It might have locked-in the whole pile at the lowest rates in human history...and forsworn deficits forever. Had it done so, today, just five years later, the situation would be entirely different...with $28 trillion in debt (rather than $40 trillion) and an annual interest bill of $378 billion (rather than $1 trillion+).

And now...facing rising interest rates all over the world...and a US debt headed to $50 trillion in a few short years...Bessent says we will ‘grow our way out’ from under the debt pile. But over the last twelve months, US debt grew six times faster than GDP.

One preposterous flim-flam after another. Bessent aims to keep rates on the long end down. Because it’s the 30-year bond that determines mortgage rates. And people with mortgages...or who want them but can’t afford them...vote. And now that Bessent is unloading his tacky furniture in the mortgage market…and joining the local bridge club… There goes the whole neighborhood."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

o

"'Doom Loop' Engaged: US Debt Hits $40 Trillion 

As Treasury Enters The Endgame"

Jim Kunstler, "Remember the Names"

"Remember the Names"

by Jim Kunstler

“It’s subversion and nothing about it is accidental. it’s a well worn playbook 

to use the democratic institutions of a high trust state to destroy a civilization.” 

- El Gato Malo on Substack

"An eerie quiet masks the panic rising among the many players in the long-running train of crimes carried out under color-of-law against the people of the this country that goes roughly under the clunky name of The Grand Conspiracy. What is Joe DiGenova up to, exactly, in the Southern District of Florida, with its several grand juries grinding away? Indictments will fly, for sure, but then who will flip on whom? It won’t take a whole lot of flippers to seal many fates in this skein of sedition and treason. The tension must be terrible for them.

The question has long been: how do you even begin to organize a set of coherent cases around this roaring avalanche of nefarious acts that got bigger with each successive attempt at cover-up? Let’s see if we can block out a panoramic picture of potential prosecutions. The gigantic mess must be separated into packets.

It’s probably best to begin with the FBI’s “Midyear Exam” op of 2016 - the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. You can bet that the server contained evidence of HRC’s two seminal crimes that kicked things off: 1) the transfer of US military technology to Russia’s Skolkovo high-tech hub and payments from seventeen companies involved coincidentally received by the Clinton Foundation when she was Sec’y of State; and 2) the “Uranium One” deal transferring US-owned nuke material to Russia (via Canada) that required a State Dept signoff by HRC - coincident with husband Bill receiving a half-million dollar “lecture fee” from a Russian bank. Players involved in Midyear Exam: Comey, Strzok, McCabe, Page, then-AG Loretta Lynch.

That potential embarrassment of this sketchy business was simply squashed by Lynch and Comey, while HRC took care to physically destroy the server and devices linked to it. But it also prompted the creation of the Russian collusion prank against then-candidate Donald Trump, (“Crossfire Hurricane”) to distract attention from all that. . . which turned into the huge RussiaGate operation that marshaled the FBI, the CIA, the Senate Intel Committee, and offices deep in the Pentagon to put over a gigantic hoax. It was green-lighted by President Barack Obama and organized by CIA-Director John Brennan, with FBI Director Comey and DNI James Clapper. Supporting players (potential defendants) include Susan Rice, Sally Yates, Veep Joe Biden (or “Joe Biden”), then White House aide Lisa Monaco, and CIA agent Eric Ciaramella (who wrote the actual Intel Community Assessment that jump-started the op). McCabe, Stzrok, Page, Ohr (and wife, Nellie), Rosenstein, and many FBI agents are potential defendants. Also Gina Haspel, CIA London station chief, who coordinated with the UK’s MI6 agent, Christopher Steele of the Steele Dossier. Throw in DOD-sponsored spook Stefan Halper and FBI liaison in London, Alan Kohler. After May, 2017, Christopher Wray was responsible for all FBI mischief and FISA Court irregularities (along with FISA Judge James Boasberg).

The Mueller Investigation was a subset of RussiaGate, but deserves its own case packet. It was an attempt to legitimize the RussiaGate hoax, and to keep the news media fed with innuendo. In effect it was a hoax unto itself, consumed $32-million, and ran nearly two years. It produced exactly nothing in evidence that President Trump had “colluded” with Russia about anything. Since Robert Mueller was mentally incapacitated, the investigation was run by subordinates, Aaron Zebley, Andrew Weissmann. Attorneys Jeanie Rhee, Elizabeth Prelogar, Brandon Van Grack and others. It was a fraud on the public and probably an obstruction of justice.

Impeachment No. 1 (the Ukraine phone call impeachment) was an entirely false operation cooked up by lawfare ninja Norm Eisen in collusion with Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff, with assistance from CIA agent (“whistleblower”) Eric Ciaramella and NSC member Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, with a boost from then-IC Inspector General Michael Atkinson. Eisen later admitted on a video that the aim of the impeachment was to “prebunk” Veep “Joe Biden’s” bribery and grift activities in Ukraine as the Democratic party prepared to run him for president in 2020. Ciaramella had accompanied Veep “Joe Biden” on several trips to Ukraine and knew what “JB” was up to there. Indict them all for sedition and treason.

The 2020 election op was pulled off in coordination with the Covid-1 scam that positioned the nation for massive mail-in ballot fraud, which was coordinated by lawfare ninja Marc Elias, then employed by the Democratic Party law firm Perkins Coie. Elias was assisted by Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, now Meta), whose nonprofit, Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), distributed over $400-million to roughly 2500 election districts around the country, much of it used to pay select officials who would count and report mail-in ballots. The mail-in ballot fraud had been planned and gamed-out previously by the non-profit org Transition Integrity Project, run by Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman.

In October 2020, fifty-one former intel officials signed a public letter denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop as having “the earmarks of Russian disinformation.” The letter was organized by Antony Blinken and former CIA-Director Michael Morrell. It was done in coordination with a social media campaign to suppress public knowledge of the laptop (and the Biden family record of international grift inside it) to influence the presidential election a month later. Potential fraud indictments.

The Jan 6 riot at the US Capitol has never been adequately investigated. FBI Director Wray was allowed to evade answering to Congress about the number of FBI agents and associated employees (including CIA personnel) that were mixed in with the crowd to provoke the intrusion inside the building and related violence. Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered the situation so that the certification of electoral vote slates would not be challenged as procedure allowed. Sedition and Treason.

The Jan 6 Congressional Committee was a fraud on the American people put together by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to coverup her involvement in the crimes behind the Jan 6 Capitol riot. The members involved likely enjoy Congressional immunity for the spectacle itself, but perhaps not for destroying all the evidence that was collected in the course of the investigation. Chairman Bennie G. Thompson was responsible for that.

The Mar-a-Lago raid of August 2022 was authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland and carried out by FBI Director Wray with Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono. Three months later, Garland appointed Jack Smith Special Counsel to oversee the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which he botched, resulting in its dismissal two years later. The raid itself arguably lacked probable cause and was based on an improper scope of evidence sought. Indict Merrick Garland under 18 U.S.C. § 241, conspiracy against rights.

The lawfare operations of 2023-2024 in several jurisdictions resulted in indictments against candidate Donald Trump and others in Fulton County, GA, and New York City. The Fulton County case under DA Fani Willis (later disqualified for “the appearance of impropriety”) was assisted by the “Joe Biden” White House, possibly by attorneys Richard Sauber and Beth Mueller in the WH Counsel’s Office, giving it the odor of a purely political prosecution. In the the Stormy Daniels hush money case against Donald Trump brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, DOJ officer Matthew Colangelo left his cushy position as Principal Deputy Associate US Attorney General to take a job assisting DA Bragg in the NYC court. Colangelo delivered the opening statement at the 2024 trial and played a central role in the prosecution. The trial was presided over by political judge Juan Merchan. Just days ago, The New York Times reported that the Democratic Party fundraising company, Authentic Campaigns, previously owned by Judge Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, has been under investigation the past year. Anybody detect the odor of politics? Malicious prosecution, improper judicial conduct.

Many of the political celebrities mentioned above, and probably many not-so-well-known players, must be freaking out as the waves ominously pound the beach and the summer days tick down toward the ill winds of fall. I’m pretty sure that readers and commentors can add some candidates to the list of potential indictments, and perhaps some ops I might have overlooked. (The entire odious Covid-19 affair is partly a separate matter, but that has also commenced a new phase with the guilty plea deal announced days ago by Dr. Fauci’s chief advisor, Dr. David Morens.) Even former President Obama looks boxed-in. He enjoys immunity from actions he took as president, but that immunity prevents him from hiding behind the fifth amendment as a now-private citizen in a court of law. Things are livening up."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."

- John F. Kennedy

Adventures With Danno, "Meijer Grocery Deals!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 8/21/26

"Meijer Grocery Deals!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Alert! This is Very Suspicious, A Major Attack Seems Imminent"

Canadian Prepper, 8/20/26

"Alert! This is Very Suspicious, 

A Major Attack Seems Imminent"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, “Remember Now”

Full screen recommended.

2002, “Remember Now”

"A Look to the Heavens"

"The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, third largest in the Local Group of galaxies after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), and our own Milky Way. About 3 million light-years from the Milky Way, M33 is itself thought to be a satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy and astronomers in these two galaxies would likely have spectacular views of each other's grand spiral star systems. 

As for the view from planet Earth, this sharp image shows off M33's blue star clusters and pinkish star forming regions along the galaxy's loosely wound spiral arms. In fact, the cavernous NGC 604 is the brightest star forming region, seen here at about the 4 o'clock position from the galaxy center. Like M31, M33's population of well-measured variable stars have helped make this nearby spiral a cosmic yardstick for establishing the distance scale of the Universe."

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

Chet Raymo, “As Time Goes By”

“As Time Goes By”

by Chet Raymo

“Is time something that is defined by the ticking of a cosmic clock, God’s wristwatch say? Time doesn’t exist except for the current tick. The past is irretrievably gone. The future does not yet exist. Consciousness is awareness of a moment. Or is time a dimension like space? We move through time as we move through space. The past is still there; we’re just not there anymore. The future exists; we’ll get there. We experience time as we experience space, say, by looking out the window of a moving train. Or is time…

Physicists and philosophers have been debating these questions since the pre-Socratics. Plato. Newton. Einstein. Most recently, Lee Smolin. Without resolution. What makes the question so difficult, it seems to me, is that time is inextricably tied up with consciousness. We won’t understand time until we understand consciousness, and vice versa. So far, consciousness is a mystery, in spite of books with titles like “Consciousness Explained”. Will consciousness be explained? Can consciousness be explained? If so, will it require a conceptual breakthrough of revolutionary proportions? Or is the Darwinian/material paradigm enough? Are we in for an insight, or for a surprise?

As I sit here at my desk under the hill, looking out at a vast panorama of earth, sea and sky, filled, it would seem, infinitely full of detail, so full that my awareness can only skim the surface, I have that uneasy sense that it’s going to be damnably difficult to extract consciousness, as a thing, from the universe in its totality. I think of that word “entanglement,” from quantum theory, and I wonder to what extent consciousness is entangled, perhaps even with past and future.

Who knows? Perhaps consciousness, or what I think of as my consciousness, is just a slice of cosmic consciousness, in the same way that the present is a slice of cosmic time. As a good Ockhamist, I am loathe to needlessly multiply hypotheses. But time will tell. Or consciousness will tell. Or something.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

o

"Casablanca, As Time Goes By"

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"

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- 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/