Bill Bonner, "America’s Yard Sale"

Bison crossing a road in Yellowstone National Park

"America’s Yard Sale"

by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "Dan sent an intriguing thought. What if US bonds were not ‘certificates of guaranteed confiscation’ after all? What if America’s credit was well secured...by trillions of dollars’ worth of real assets? Dan: "Yesterday a guy I follow and respect said the $40 trillion in debt is secured by America’s massive (not quite infinite) natural resources...land, water, food, energy that sits on public lands ostensibly ‘owned’ by the American people. His implication was that these public assets more than balance out the $40 trillion in debt. We’re good for it!"

The thought comes up from time to time. What’s Yellowstone worth? NASA? Millions of acres of prairie? The Washington Monument? Cape Canaveral? Are they worth enough to cover a $40 trillion in debt...along with $15 trillion more in pension and prostate operations for federal employees...not even to mention the trillions more in ‘mandatory’ spending in line behind them?

But many of America’s most precious assets never show up on the balance sheet. Gold, for example. The feds carry their gold on the books at $42 an ounce. It’s actually worth more than 100 times as much. That alone would bring in about $1.2 trillion at auction...enough to fund the government for about two months.

Then, there is land. The feds own 640 million acres - more than a quarter of the entire US landmass. What it is worth is anyone’s guess...since dumping that much property onto the market would surely crash prices. And even if you could sell it for an average of $100 an acre (think of all that desert and uninhabitable wilderness), it would still only net you $64 billion, again, enough to keep the feds going for three days.

And here is where we’re beginning to see the vast gap between reality and fantasy. An acre of Alaskan forest is real...it has a real value, based on where it is and how it could be used. But the debt numbers are fantastical, wisps in the wind, unimaginable, unfathomable, and unmanageable. When you look at them hard, you see that no plausible combination of real things can measure up.

Proponents of the ‘the feds are good for it’ hypothesis turn to the near-mythical ‘resources’ under federal land - oil, gas, coal, minerals etc. They claim they are worth as much as $200 trillion - far beyond what the feds owe. Hurrah, they say. Problem solved.

But look again. Oil may sell for $100 a barrel, delivered to the refinery. But it may cost more than $100 to deliver it. That’s why most of the world’s oil ‘reserves’ remain in reserve, until the price rises enough to make them viable.

The Cato Institute had a go at better numbers. Its Randal O’Toole did the math and came up with as much as $2 trillion worth of energy resources, along with less than $2 trillion more for the land itself. Of course, the feds have much more in assets. The General Accounting Office says they have $2 trillion in (mostly) student loans, $1.4 trillion in buildings and equipment, $1.2 trillion in cash (last year) and military hardware worth about half a trillion more.

Click image for larger size.

There really is no way the feds are ever going to auction off the nation’s treasures. Who in Congress would vote to sell Yellowstone, for example?

But let’s imagine that the sale would go on. Picture the excitement when the Pentagon holds its first lawn sale. Israelis, Iranians, Chinese - what a marvelous collection of eager buyers. They would kick the tires on jeeps...climb up on the half-tracks...and try out the rocket-launchers to make sure they were in working order. And then, after the buyers had gone home - laden with F-35s and huge tracts of empty land in Wyoming and Montana (one of which included an ICBM silo!) - the feds could count their money.

Damn! Selling everything, even the Lincoln Memorial, would bring in less than $15 trillion, and probably much less. After all, how many of those student loans are actually collectible? No matter, the ‘going-out-of-business’ sale might bring in enough to retire a third of the national debt. But wait. Deficits add about $2 trillion to the debt each year. Within six or seven years, the debt would be back to where it was...

And then, having sold its buildings, land and other assets, the feds would have turned themselves from proud owners to grudging tenants...and instead of receiving lease payments, grazing fees, timber rights, and royalties, they would get nothing. The feds would still be in business...and still losing money...but without a pot to you-know-what in."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Two Things Are Infinite..."

"The Lighter Side Of Dating, Mating, And Civilizational Collapse'

"The Lighter Side Of Dating,

Mating, And Civilizational Collapse'

by John Wilder

"Even thirty years ago, finding a spouse was as easy as grabbing a beer at a kegger. You met. Maybe at school, maybe at church, maybe at work, maybe some friends introduced you. Hell, maybe at the kegger. It was a straightforward and reliable process, and it was also often sweaty and fun.

Even before my time, though, it was even easier. Take it back to the 1800s, and men brought home the bacon, women kept the hearth warm, and together they built a life, maybe a farm, maybe a picket fence. Often, people would meet and spend their whole lives in the same location. The process wasn’t perfect, but it worked for thousands of years.

Fast-forward to 2026, and the mating market is a dumpster fire. A constant source of conversation is the baby bust, describing how women aren’t reproducing enough children to keep society going. Part of the reason for that is that cultural shifts and technological disruptions have turned love from carnal creativity in the backseat of a Camaro™ to the swipe of a finger on the smooth glass of a screen protector. The result? A generation of lonely hearts, spinsters, and guys who’ve decided sweatpants and beer are a better deal than chasing women who don’t even see them as people. Culture and tech crashed the human mating economy, and why it’s tearing the family, the atom of society, to shreds.

For thousands of years, societies kept a lid on female promiscuity, not because of some patriarchal conspiracy (okay maybe it was, we’re still meeting Thursday night, right guys?), but because it worked.

People who tear down traditions often don’t realize exactly what they’re destroying until it’s gone, and then it’s too late because the fragile fabric that it was supporting has collapsed. It’s sort of like playing Jenga™ with retarded monkeys on crack, but I won’t speak any more about how I know that.

Tradition knew what science later confirmed: high rates of female promiscuity correlate with lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates. Skanky women are horrible for society. A 2020 study from the Institute for Family Studies found that women with more sexual partners before marriage are less likely to stay married. They graph waivers after the big increase in marrying a woman who has had more than one sex partner to a big drop at around four sex partners (for some reason). If you can’t get a virgin, four seems to be the lucky number. But if you’re the 167th guy to tap into that action?

The chances of you being “the one” are nearly zero, yet in 2026 she still wants a ring worth six months of blood, sweat and tears and a house and she brings...you being number 167. Back when shame was a thing, women faced social pressure to be selective, and men had a reason to step up for a low-mileage woman. Now? Shame is as outdated as a Marvel™ movie. Women are free to “explore” and “find themselves” and “live their best life” all while banging a neverending stream of potential Prince Charmings.

Then there’s money. Historically, men were the breadwinners, or at least the leaders in the grind in the family business or farm, with Ma raising the kids and churning the butter while Pa tamed the back 40. Women relied on men for financial stability, and men relied on women to keep the home and raise the children.

Enter the modern workforce: women now make up nearly half of U.S. workers and 90% of the human resources department everywhere. That leads to the dilemma of the Stunning and Brave woman: she wants a man who makes more than her, yet demands equal pay. A 2023 Pew Research study found 55% of women prefer a partner with higher income (and 45% of women are liars). That’s fine, but men’s wages have stagnated since the 1970s while women’s have risen. The math doesn’t add up.

Worse, the government has stepped in as Husband 2.0. Welfare programs, from food stamps to housing subsidies, act like a sugar daddy for single women, especially mothers. In 2022, over 40% of single-mother households received some form of public assistance. Why marry a man when Uncle Sugar’s got your back and they can still bang all the men they want and don’t have to listen to any man?

Women on welfare aren’t wives anymore; they’re concubines of the state, trading solemn vows for EBT and government cheese. The family, once the bedrock of civilization, is now a casualty of games and prizes fueled by promiscuity and feminism. But I repeat myself.

And that’s not even factoring in divorce-rape where unhaaaaapppy or bored women can hit the eject button and blow up the marriage with no real consequences except getting to keep the house, kids, cash and getting a free ticket to ride on the Chad carousel.

That’s bad enough. It’s actually worse than Madonna’s herpes. If culture cracked the mating market, technology crushed it like a python on a peanut. Enter Tinder®, Bumble®, and the swipe-right revolution. Women, all women, are hypergamous. They want the very best mate they can find. Society used to keep them in check through societal pressure. Oh, and soon enough they would have run out of random men to pleasure. Now the apps give them a digital buffet of Chads, Brads, and Thads. Is anyone named Thaddeus nowadays? I digress.

A 2021 study showed women on dating apps rate 80% of men as “below average” in attractiveness, while men rate women more realistically on a bell curve. The result? A 5 or 6 woman swipes right on a 10. Call him Prince Charming the Senator’s son, complete with abs and a hedge fund, who might bang her once but won’t stick around for breakfast or be seen in public with her, let alone hang a ring on her.

She walks away thinking, “He was the one, I could get him to marry me,” and now every guy who doesn’t match up to Prince Charming is... settling. Yes. Settling, even though Prince Charming doesn’t remember her and only picked her up because it was a Tuesday, and was just taking his father’s deathbed advice: “go ugly, early” and picked her up just for amusement. Spinsterhood beckons, with a side of cat and wine memes.

Men aren’t entirely innocent bystanders here, either. Faced with an endless parade of women chasing the top 10% of guys, many men have thrown in the towel. Why grind for a better job, hit the gym, or learn to dress like you didn’t just roll out of a laundry basket?

A 2024 survey found 30% of men aged 18-29 have given up on dating entirely, opting for porn, video games, or “monk mode.” They’re not wrong to notice the game is rigged against traditional one-for-one sorting. Now, Chad gets his choice, and, if they’re lucky, the might get the attention of a slagged-out woman who is still pining for Chad – a widow for a man that was only in her life for a night.

This isn’t just about lonely Friday nights. This is about the death of the family. Men want decent looks, monogamy, and a partner who’s kind - basic stuff. “She can’t read but she’s faithful and hasn’t had sex with Baltimore” has become a passing grade for many. Women want the whole package: money, status, looks, protection, and a guy who’s basically a football start with a corner office. Wait. Tom Brady didn’t work out for his wife. Neil Armstrong’s wife became unhaaaapppy. What chance does the average guy have?

Marriage rates are at historic lows, being down 60% since 1960. Divorce rates hover around 40%. Kids grow up in fractured homes or none at all, with single-parent households now at 30% nationwide and rising. The family, the core unit, the atom that glues society together, is being eroded by individualism on steroids. I could write a book about this topic, but you get the idea.

So how do we dig out of this mess? Start with culture. Bring back shame. The scarlet-letter kind. Encourage women to value loyalty over chasing Chad, and men to step up instead of checking out. That starts with incentives, because I don’t think anyone has any shame left.

Let’s rethink current incentives. Have a kid and no husband? Tough luck. No child support, no state support. Same thing with divorce. No fun and prizes for that, and if you’re at-fault, you lose the kids. Sure, tax breaks for married couples or policies that don’t make Uncle Sugar a better bet than a husband are nice, but we don’t need a nudge, we need a nuke.

Will the norm come back? It has to. Two more generations of this, and civilization will cease to exist. Perhaps G. Michael Hopf (LINK) got the old quote wrong and it should go more like this:

Bad times create strong men,

Strong men create good times,

Good times make women skanky,

Skanky women create bad times.

Don’t worry, nothing’s depending on this. I mean, nothing other than the fate of civilization."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

"They Know What's Coming Because They Planned It" (Excerpt)

"They Know What's Coming Because They Planned It"

by Jim Quinn

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency involved.” –  Ludwig von Mises

“The financial history of the last century shows a steady increase in the amount of public indebtedness. Nobody believes that the states will eternally drag the burden of these interest payments. It is obvious that sooner or later all these debts will be liquidated in some way or other, but certainly not by payment of interest and principal according to the terms of the contract.” – Ludwig von Mises

Excerpt: "Anyone living in the real world of commuting to a job, buying groceries, paying rent, filling up their gas tank, paying utility bills, paying property taxes, and generally trying to live an honest hard working life with a couple weeks of vacation per year, knows they are being fed a load of bullshit by the Trumps, Bessents and Warshs of the world. They are spinning false narratives, faking the economic statistics, lying to you about how dire our economic situation is, and above all, spending and printing fiat at hypersonic speed in a desperate attempt to give the appearance of normalcy, when in reality we are living through the most abnormal, corrupt, degenerate, dangerous period in history.

This normalcy bias is employed by the vast majority of dumbed down, I-gadget addicted, debt enslaved, mRNA jabbed, zombie-like consumers, as they shuffle through their daily existence believing the propaganda shoveled at them 24/7 on the boob tube and their social media accounts, by billionaire oligarchs, corrupt politicians, captured media talking heads, and the invisible government pulling the strings to manipulate their thoughts, decisions, and false beliefs. As a born cynical skeptic, I no longer believe anyone or anything. I’m real fun at parties.

As our national debt surpassed $40 trillion last week and has been accelerating at a rate of $13.4 billion per day (annualized rate of $4.9 trillion) since July 1, the only analogy I can make is the final scene of Thelma & Louise when they purposely drive off a cliff into the Grand Canyon, rather than face the consequences of their actions. But, in my daily existence, the people at the gym, drugstore, and grocery store seem happily oblivious to the extreme danger we currently face as citizens of a dying empire, intent on going out with a bang. We are accelerating towards an economic meltdown, inflationary financial collapse, and possibly global war, and no one seems to care or acknowledge reality.

It’s almost as if the 270 million sheep, who allowed themselves to be injected with a Big Pharma toxic gene altering poison, with little critical thinking skills to begin with, have been rendered deaf, dumb and blind to the machinations of their overlords as we spiral towards collapse. It seems only 5% to 10% of the population have the proper critical thinking skills, distrust of the government, ability to do math, comprehension to understand history, and courage to tell the truth and act rationally, in an irrational, perverted, debased world, built on debt, delusions, and denial. It makes me sick to my stomach observing the cowardice, corruption, and degradation of the pedophile elites who wield the power in our society, leading the sheep to slaughter and the world towards catastrophic ruin."

Full, most highly recommended article is here:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Trinity’s Shadow"

"Trinity’s Shadow"

by Edward Curtin

"I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep.

Someday I will die and I wonder why. This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young. That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.

Trinity has shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has enkindled my days. Sick minds play sick word games as they inflict pain and death. They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gadget,” as if it were an innocent little toy. They took and blasphemed the Christian mystery of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were. They thought they were gods. Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.

Where are they now? Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Where are the just and the unjust? Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their doomsday machines for a rerun, the final first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living? Will they sing as they launch the missiles – “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night?”

The wheel turns. We count the years. We wonder why. Years ago I started my academic life by writing a thesis entitled “Dealing With Death or Death Dealing.” It was a study of the transformation of cultural symbol systems, death, and nuclear weapons. The last hundred years and more have brought a transformation and disintegration of the traditional religious symbol system – the sacred canopy – that once gave people comfort, meaning, and hope. Science, technology, and nuclear weapons have changed all that. Death has been socially relocated and we live under the nuclear umbrella, a sinister “safeguard” that is cold comfort. The ultimate power of death over all life has been transferred from God to men, those controlling the nuclear weapons. This subject has never left me. I suppose it has haunted me. It is not a jolly subject, but I think it has chosen me.

Was I born in a normal time? Is war time our normal time? It is. I was. But to be born at a time and place when your country’s leaders were denouncing their German and Japanese enemies as savage war criminals while execrably emulating them and then outdoing them is something else again. With Operation Paperclip following World War II, the United States government secretly brought 1,600 or more Nazi war criminals into the U.S. to run our government’s military, intelligence, space, chemical, and biological warfare programs. We became Nazis. Lewis Mumford put it this way in "The Pentagon of Power":

"By the curious dialectic of history, Hitler’s enlargement and the refurbishment of the Nazi megamachine gave rise to the conditions for creating those counter-instruments that would conquer it and temporarily wreck it. In short, in the very act of dying the Nazis transmitted their disease to their American opponents; not only the methods of compulsive organization or physical destruction, but the moral corruption that made it feasible to employ those methods without stirring opposition."

There are always excuses for such moral corruption. When during WW II the U.S. firebombed almost all Japanese cities, Dresden and Cologne in Germany, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in gratuitously savage attacks, these were justified and even celebrated as necessary to defeat evil enemies. Just as Nazi war criminals were welcomed into the U.S. government under the aegis of Allen Dulles who became the longest running CIA director and the key to JFK’s assassination and coverup, the diabolic war crimes of the U.S. were swept away as acts of a moral nation fighting a good war. What has followed are decades of U.S. war crimes from Korea through Vietnam and Iraq, etc. A very long list.

The English dramatist Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Address, put it bluntly: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Nothing could be truer. When in 2014 the U.S. engineered the coup in Ukraine (coups being an American specialty), it allied itself with neo-Nazi forces to oppose Russia. This alliance should have shocked no one; it is the American way. Back in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting death squads in Central America, Ronald Reagan told the world that “The Contras are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” Now the Ukrainian president Zelensky is feted as a great hero, Biden telling him in an Oval Office visit that “it’s an honor to be by your side.” Such alliances are not anomalies but the crude reality of U. S. history.

But let me return to “Trinity,” the ultimate weapon of mass destruction since I was reading a recent article about it. Kai Bird, the coauthor of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," the book that inspired the film "Oppenheimer" about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist credited as “the father of the atomic bomb” and the man who named the first atomic bomb Trinity, has written an Op Ed piece in The New York Times titled, “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” True in certain respects, this article is an example of how history can be slyly used to distort the present for political purposes. In typical NY Times fashion, Bird tells certain truths while concealing, distorting, and falsifying others.

I do not consider Oppenheimer a tragic figure, as does Bird. Complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future. Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical or big tech industries to regulate themselves.

Bird rightly says that Oppenheimer did not regret his work inventing the atomic bomb, and he correctly points out the injustice of his being maligned and stripped of his security clearance in 1954 in a secret hearing by a vote of 2 to 1 of a security panel of The Atomic Energy Commission for having communist associations. “Celebrated in 1945 as the ‘father of the atomic bomb,’” Bird writes, “nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.” A “victim,” I should add, who named names to save his own reputation.

But tucked within his article, Bird tells us: “Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.” By which he means these officials like Anthony Fauci were maligned when they gave the public correct scientific information. This is absurd. Fauci – “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” – and other government “civil servants” misinformed the public and lied over and over again, but Bird implies they too were tragic figures like Oppenheimer.

He writes: "We stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation. Our politicians need to listen more to technology innovators like Sam Altman and quantum physicists like Kip Thorne and Michio Kaku."

Here too he urges “us” to listen to the very people responsible for Artificial Intelligence, just as “we” should have listened to Oppenheimer after he brought us the atomic bomb. Implicit here is the belief that science just marches progressively on and there’s no stopping it, and when dangerous technologies emerge from scientists’ work, we should trust them to control them.

Nowhere does Bird suggest that scientists have a moral obligation before the fact to not pursue a certain line of research because of its grave possible consequences. Maybe he has never read Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein", only written over two hundred years ago.

Finally, and most importantly, Bird begins his concluding paragraph with these words: "Today, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are a stark reminder that we can never be complacent about living with nuclear weapons This is simply U.S. propaganda. The U.S. has provoked and fueled the war in Ukraine, broken all nuclear weapon treaties, surrounded Russia with military bases, stationed nuclear weapons in Europe, engaged in nuclear blackmail with its first strike policy and threats, etc. Putin has said in response that if – and only if – the very existence of the Russian state and land is threatened with extinction would the use of nuclear weapons be considered."

A little history is informative. “Barely six weeks after the Hiroshima-Nagsaki bombings,” Michel Chossudovsky tells us, “the US War Department [Pentagon] issued a blueprint (September 15, 1945) to ‘Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map’ (66 cities with 204 atomic bombs), when the US and the USSR were allies. This infamous project is confirmed by declassified documents.” (For further details see Chossudovsky, 2017)

Below is the image of the 66 cities of the Soviet Union which had been envisaged as targets by the US War Department. 

The 66 cities. Click here to enlarge.

See also Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War. “90 Seconds to Midnight”: The Pentagon’s 1945 “Doomsday Blueprint” to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”

But back to Bird, who, in writing a piece about Oppenheimer’s “tragedy” and defending science, has also subtly defended a trinity of other matters: the government “science” on Covid, the transformative power coming from AI, and the U.S. propaganda about Russia and nuclear weapons. There is no mention of JFK’s call to abolish nuclear weapons. This is how the “paper of record” does its job.

I sit here now at the end of the day. Shadows are falling and I contemplate such trinities. I am stunned by the fact that we exist, but under a terrifying Shadow that many wish to ignore. Jung saw this shadow side as not just personal but social, and when it is ignored, the collective evils of modern societies can autonomously erupt. Bird argues that nuclear weapons are the result of a scientific quest that is unstoppable. He writes that Oppenheimer “understood that you cannot stop curious human beings from discovering the physical world around them [and then making nuclear bombs or designer babies].”

This is the ideology of progress that brooks no opposition since it is declared inevitable. It is a philosophy that believes there should be no limits to human knowledge, which would include the knowledge of good and evil, but which can then be ignored since it and all thought and beliefs are considered a priori to be relative. The modern premise that everything is relative is of course a contradiction since it is an absolute statement. Many share this philosophy of despair disguised as progress as it has crept into everything today. It is tragic, for if people accept it, we are doomed to follow a Faustian pact with the devil and all hell will follow. I think of Bob Dylan singing : 

"I just don’t see why I should even care,

          It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there..."             

But I do care, and I wonder why. As night comes on, I sit here and wonder."

- https://www.globalresearch.ca/

"This Day In History Krakatoa Explodes With Massive Force – 1883"

Full screen recommended.

"This Day In History

Krakatoa Explodes With Massive Force – 1883"

by History.com

"One of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history occurs on Krakatoa (also called Krakatau), a small, uninhabited volcanic island east of Sumatra and west of Java, on August 27, 1883. Heard 3,000 miles away - and believed to have produced the loudest sounds in human history - the explosions threw five cubic miles of earth 50 miles into the air, created 120-foot tsunamis and killed 36,000 people.

Krakatoa exhibited its first stirrings in more than 200 years on May 20, 1883. A German warship passing by reported a seven-mile high cloud of ash and dust over Krakatoa. For the next two months, similar explosions would be witnessed by commercial liners and natives on nearby Java and Sumatra. With little to no idea of the impending catastrophe, the local inhabitants greeted the volcanic activity with festive excitement.

On August 26 and August 27, excitement turned to horror as Krakatoa literally blew itself apart, setting off a chain of natural disasters that would be felt around the world for years to come. An enormous blast on the afternoon of August 26 destroyed the northern two-thirds of the island; as it plunged into the Sunda Strait, between the Java Sea and Indian Ocean, the gushing mountain generated a series of pyroclastic flows (fast-moving fluid bodies of molten gas, ash and rock) and monstrous tsunamis that swept over nearby coastlines.

Four more eruptions beginning at 5:30 a.m. the following day proved cataclysmic. The explosions could be heard as far as 3,000 miles away, and ash was propelled to a height of 50 miles. Fine dust from the explosion drifted around the earth, causing spectacular sunsets and forming an atmospheric veil that lowered temperatures worldwide by several degrees.

Of the estimated 36,000 deaths resulting from the eruption, at least 31,000 were caused by the tsunamis created when much of the island fell into the water. The greatest of these waves measured 120 feet high, and washed over nearby islands, stripping away vegetation and carrying people out to sea. Another 4,500 people were scorched to death from the pyroclastic flows that rolled over the sea, stretching as far as 40 miles, according to some sources. In addition to Krakatoa, which is still active, Indonesia has another 130 active volcanoes, the most of any country in the world."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"The Earth Is Being Hit By One Catastrophic Disaster After Another, And This Is Only Just The Beginning"

by Michael Snyder

"Those people didn’t have a chance. One moment they were normally living their lives, and the next moment they were gone. Many that were swept away by the rushing waters didn’t even live in the region. In fact, we are being told that “hundreds of tourists” are missing…Devastating flash floods and mudslides have wiped out buildings and bridges along the Nepal–Tibet border – with hundreds of tourists still missing. In Nepal, houses and roads were swept away by rushing water and mudslides. Meanwhile, officials in China–controlled Tibet said they feared ‘major casualties’.

We have seen flooding in Nepal and Tibet before, but this was different. As the wall of water and mud rushed forward, it came slamming into homes and bridges… Harrowing footage from the scene showed fast-flowing floodwater ripping through the streets and destroying everything – including homes and bridges – in its path. River banks burst as walls of water came rushing through the densely populated areas, sweeping people underwater as others sought safety on higher ground. Aerial footage showed floodwater completely consuming land near the Nepal-Tibet border, sending people running for their lives as buildings collapsed in seconds. In the end, the final death toll will probably be in the thousands.

Originally, experts were telling us that a magnitude 4.4 earthquake triggered a gigantic ice avalanche which caused the sudden flooding…

But later reports claimed that a landslide that occurred at 8:37 local time triggered the avalanche that created the flooding. Apparently the huge earthquake that was detected was actually caused by the landslide…

Though the horrifying disaster is still unfolding, initial reports suggested the floods could be the result of an avalanche triggered by an earthquake, Nepal’s foreign minister Shisir Khanal told the country’s parliament Wednesday. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported recording a 4.4 magnitude quake around the time the security footage was taken at the border. However, USGS hours later clarified that the trembling detected was not an earthquake, but caused by the landslide itself, registering as the equivalent of a 5.2 magnitude quake. But no matter how it started, nobody can deny that this was truly a historic disaster.

Meanwhile, we just witnessed a series of 13 eruptions at Mount Anak Krakatau…The Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (PVMBG) recorded 13 eruptions from Mount Anak Krakatau in South Lampung Regency, Lampung Province. The height of the eruptions varied from 50 to 300 meters from the summit of Mount Anak Krakatau, from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Jakarta time. Suwarno, Head of the Mount Anak Krakatau Monitoring Post in Hargopancuran, Rajabasa District, stated on Wednesday that the volcano remains volatile, so further eruptions are still possible.

This should deeply concern all of us, because one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history occurred there in 1883…Between 19 May and 21 October 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa (located in the Sunda Strait, then part of the Dutch East Indies - modern-day Indonesia) began erupting, lasting more than five months. On 27 August, the island had its most significant eruption, which destroyed over 70% of the island and its surrounding archipelago, the island collapsing into a caldera. The eruption of 27 August had an estimated volcanic explosivity index of 6, and is one of the deadliest and most destructive volcanic events in recorded history; the third explosion of that day, that occurred at 10:02 a.m., remains the loudest-known sound in history.

The explosion was heard 3,110 kilometres (1,930 mi) away in Perth, Western Australia, and Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,800 kilometres (3,000 mi) away.[3] The acoustic pressure wave circled the globe more than three times.[4]: 63  At least 36,417 deaths are attributed to the eruption and the tsunamis it created. Significant additional effects were felt worldwide in the days and weeks after the volcano’s eruption. Additional seismic activity was reported until February 1884, but any reports after October 1883 were dismissed by Rogier Verbeek’s subsequent investigation into the eruption.

That gigantic eruption caused a volcanic winter that lasted for about a year. Our oceans could actually use a cooling trend right now, because they are hotter than ever. In fact, average global ocean temperatures just hit the highest level ever recorded…As a record-breaking El Niño builds in the Pacific and large swaths of the globe’s oceans are affected by marine heat waves, a significant record has fallen. According to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, average global sea surface temperatures have reached a new high, rising to nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit late last week -  potentially for the first time in millennia.

This mark surpassed the previous record set in March 2024. This is crazy. On August 22nd, we broke the record that had been established in March 2024… The daily average sea surface temperature across the extra-polar global ocean, between 60°S and 60°N, reached 21.1°C (70°F) on August 22, 2026, the highest value in the Copernicus Climate Pulse record beginning in 1979. The reading exceeded the previous daily record of 21.09°C (69.96°F), set in March 2024, and came in August, although temperatures across the domain normally reach their annual maximum in March and April. If global ocean temperatures are going to set an all-time record, it is supposed to happen in either March of April. For it to happen so late in the year is extremely strange.

Many want to blame humans for what is occurring, but scientists have discovered that the warming of our oceans actually gets worse the deeper than you go. That suggests that whatever is warming our oceans is coming from underneath.

Currently, 42 percent of the Earth’s oceans are experiencing unusual marine heat waves…According to NOAA data, 42 percent of the planet’s oceans are currently experiencing marine heat waves. In the Pacific Ocean alone, marine heat waves cover an area that’s equivalent to nine times the size of the contiguous United States - greatly contributing to the new global sea surface temperature record.

So why is this important? When the oceans get warmer, we tend to experience hotter temperatures, intense droughts, enormous storms and massive wildfires…Hotter oceans exacerbate the sea level rise and extreme storms that threaten billions of people, as well as driving marine heatwaves that decimate sea life and undermine coastal livelihoods, scientists warned.

The northern hemisphere summer has already been hit by record-breaking heatwaves, drought and wildfires in Europe and North America, and intense rain and typhoons in Asia. The ocean heat spike is being intensified by a fast developing El Niño event, which is set to be the hottest in at least a century. El Niño events are natural climate variations that raise global temperature and change weather patterns, with serious impacts around the world. The new El Niño has already delivered low monsoon rain in India, major wildfires in Indonesia and heightened fire concerns in Australia.

More importantly, when ocean temperatures rise to unusual levels, fish start dying in very large numbers. One expert has warned that “the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish”… Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade.

Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year. “To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish,” said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study’s lead author.

As our oceans warm, we could lose billions upon billions of fish. That is really bad news, because the world is already facing very serious food shortages in the months ahead. In 2026, global food production is being hammered from so many different directions. We really are facing a “perfect storm”, and for those of us that live in the western world that means that food prices will soon go up even higher. But for many of those that live in impoverished nations around the globe, a dramatic drop in global food production could be the difference between life and death."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"Glacier Wall Collapse May Have Sparked Deadly

 Flash Flood That Swallowed Nepal-Tibet Border Crossing"

"Wars And Rumors Of Wars, 8/27/26"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 8/27/26

"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: 

No Chance for US to Prevail in Iran"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Col. Douglas Macgregor, 8/27/26

"Collapse Coming Sooner Than You Think"

"In this new interview, Colonel Douglas Macgregor warns that a renewed confrontation with Iran could devastate the Persian Gulf, including oil infrastructure and desalination plants on the western side of the Gulf. He argues that Saudi Arabia could not withstand such attacks and that the East-West pipeline across the kingdom would be vulnerable to disruption, threatening a region responsible for a major share of global energy flows. Macgregor also examines the escalating drone campaign against Russia, claiming that roughly 800 long-range drones reached targets around Moscow and Volgograd. He points to a 38% reduction in Russian refining capability and the suspension of refined fuel exports, while warning that repeated strikes could eventually push Moscow toward a much more forceful response against Ukraine and potentially the Western states supporting it."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! NATO Emergency Meetings, Russia Nuclear Options! Kaliningrad!"

Canadian Prepper, 8/26/26

"Alert! NATO Emergency Meetings, 

Russia Nuclear Options! Kaliningrad!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Massive Supply Shock Will Rock The US Economy"

Jeremiah Babe, 8/26/26

"Massive Supply Shock Will Rock The US Economy"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Even McDonald's Won't Hire Them Now And Americans Are Giving Up"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 8/26/26

"Even McDonald's Won't Hire Them 

Now And Americans Are Giving Up"

"Across America, people are being let go in meetings that last less than ten minutes — and then finding out that the door behind them has closed too. In this video you will hear from Americans who filmed the day it happened to them. A nursing-home worker who walked in at 6 a.m. and was told to grab her bags before 10:15, with HR admitting there was no reason given. A woman laid off twice in two years, whose safety net was already spent on the first one. A product manager at Meta who refreshed his email every minute at 7 a.m. and got logged out of every single app at 7:10, before the letter even arrived. A woman who watched half of her engineering team disappear in one regional decision made "way above my pay grade." Then you will hear what comes after. Ten years of experience and 200 applications. Fifty first-round interviews. Twenty second and third rounds. Rejected by McDonald's for being overqualified. Rejected by Starbucks. Rejected by Target's AI screening. Sixteen months unemployed, two final-round interviews, no offer. 

A young man who cannot even get accepted as an unpaid volunteer, because his application was "too generic." A woman whose severance is decent, but who has chronic illnesses and already had to cancel her weekly physical therapy. And the arithmetic underneath it: a $172,389 final paycheck broken down line by line. Unemployment capped at $530 a week that does not cover rent. Interviews held for jobs the company never actually opened. One creator explains why the falling unemployment rate is not good news: the percentage only counts people still receiving benefits. Once you run out, you stop being counted at all."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"WW3: Harvard Professor Makes 1 Year Prediction For Russian War!"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 8/26/26

"WW3: Harvard Professor Makes 

1 Year Prediction For Russian War!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Beef Prices Skyrocket And Nobody Can Afford It Anymore"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 8/26/26

"Beef Prices Skyrocket And 

Nobody Can Afford It Anymore"

"There is a moment that keeps repeating in American grocery stores this month. Someone stops in front of the meat case, looks at a sticker, and takes their phone out. Not to complain to anybody in particular. Just because the number on the label no longer makes sense to them. Twenty Americans filmed that moment, and this is what they found. A man picks up a basic ribeye and it is $18. Another looks at a family pack of extra lean ground beef marked $35, with regular ground beef at $24 beside it. A shopper in a Publix meat department holds up a single pound and it is almost $13 - over $3 for a quarter pounder before it ever reaches a pan. Someone else finds ground beef at $6.29 a pound and says flatly that it was $2.99 a year ago. A woman puts a box of Hamburger Helper and a pound of 80/20 in her cart and the till says $15 for a dinner for two. A shopper at Walmart stops mid-aisle because the number on the package does not match anything she remembers paying. And then the arithmetic that has been passed around all month: the average pound of ground beef in the United States is $8.69. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. In 2009, when that wage was last set, a pound of ground beef was two dollars. An hour of work at the legal floor no longer buys a pound of the cheapest beef in the case. That is not a talking point. That is a receipt. 

What makes this different from every other price story is who else is in the video. The people who raise the animals are here too, and they are not comfortable either. A rancher watches three-day-old bull calves sell for $2,200 apiece and explains what a bet like that says about where prices are heading eighteen months out, because that is how long it takes to turn a calf into beef. A cattle family loads calves onto a trailer early, before the market moves against them, and says out loud what that decision costs them. A pitmaster shows how a 19-pound brisket bought at $8 a pound cooks down to six pounds of servable meat, which puts his true cost north of $25 a pound before he has paid himself a dollar. A fifth-generation cattleman watches live cattle drop forty cents a pound in a single morning and points out that nothing on the shelf moved at all. The price fell for him. It did not fall for you. That gap is the whole story, and the numbers behind it are not complicated. 

The American herd is the smallest it has been in about seventy years. Drought thinned it, feed and fuel costs kept it thin, and rebuilding a herd is a multi-year decision that nobody makes while the future looks like this. Four processors handle over 85% of the beef in this country, and the Justice Department has now said out loud that it is looking at them. Foreign beef is being brought in by the hundreds of millions of pounds, priced under the domestic market - and the ranchers who are supposedly protected by keeping it out are the same people telling you plainly that letting it in will not lower your grocery bill much either. None of the people in this video are analysts. They are standing in an aisle or a field with a phone, and the number in front of them is bigger than the paycheck it is supposed to come out of. That is the only qualification any of them needed. One family here did the sum that everybody keeps talking about. They split a steer with friends: $2,000 for the animal, $750 in feed and hay to finish him, $800 for the butchering and packaging. Split two ways that is $1,700 each, and against a hanging weight of 624 pounds it works out at $5.60 a pound - ribeyes, roasts, ground and all. Cheaper than the case, if you have a freezer and somebody to split it with. That is the workaround people are actually using, and it says a lot that it has come to that.

 If beef has quietly dropped off your weekly shop, you are not imagining the change and you are not managing your money badly. The cart costs more than it did and your wages did not follow. There are still a few things that help. Chuck and round still cook down well in a slow cooker and cost a fraction of the steak cuts. A whole chicken still goes further than anything in the beef case. Splitting an animal with another family genuinely does beat the supermarket per pound if you have the freezer space and can put the money up front. And it is worth asking a local butcher what they have that is not on the display - the answer is often surprising, and often cheaper. Tell us in the comments what a pound of ground beef costs where you live, and what you have swapped it for. Somebody scrolling past is trying to work out the same thing, and these comments end up being more useful than the video. If this is what your grocery run looks like now, subscribe. We put out videos like this every week, made entirely out of what Americans are filming themselves."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Mike Oldfield, "Tubular Bells, Finale"

Mike Oldfield, "Tubular Bells, Finale"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“In one of the brightest parts of Milky Way lies a nebula where some of the oddest things occur. NGC 3372, known as the Great Nebula in Carina, is home to massive stars and changing nebulas. The Keyhole Nebula (NGC 3324), the bright structure just above the image center, houses several of these massive stars and has itself changed its appearance.

The entire Carina Nebula spans over 300 light years and lies about 7,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina. Eta Carinae, the most energetic star in the nebula, was one of the brightest stars in the sky in the 1830s, but then faded dramatically. Eta Carinae is the brightest star near the image center, just left of the Keyhole Nebula. While Eta Carinae itself maybe on the verge of a supernova explosion, X-ray images indicate that much of the Great Carina Nebula has been a veritable supernova factory.”

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

"No Special Hurry..."

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.”

- Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell To Arms”

"How to Remember You're Alive"

"How to Remember You're Alive"

by David Cain

"One way to appreciate virtually any moment of your life is to pretend that the whole thing is already over. Your life came and went a long time ago, but for some reason you’ve just been sent back to this random moment, here in this office chair, or in line at Home Depot.

It isn’t clear why you’ve been sent back. Maybe it was a cosmic accounting error, or a boon from a playful God. All you know is that you’re here again, walking the earth, having been inexplicably returned to the temporary and mysterious state of Being Alive.

Any moment will do for this experiment. In fact, the more mundane the moment, the more profound the effect. You might find yourself, in this instance, pushing a cart through the frozen foods aisle. Or maybe you’re seated in front of a bowl of cereal at the speckled Formica breakfast table you bought on Craigslist. Or you’re carrying a bag of recycling down the back stairwell on a muggy night. It’s definitely your life though, and at least for now, you get to be alive again.

When you view life as something you’re returning to - rather than something that has never not been happening - it feels like the gift it perhaps always should. It’s just so damn interesting to be alive and experiencing things, and choosing what to do during those experiences.

Seeing life as the curious and rare condition it is gives even ordinary events the character of a brilliant film. An oblong rectangle of sunlight on the table flutters with the shadows of leaves. While you fold laundry, your phone lights up: a friend texting you a cheesy pun she knows you will appreciate. A short-lived party of bubbles appears and disappears when you fill a glass of water from the tap. A thin mist pours from the open freezer display onto your sandaled feet. It’s all spectacular, just because it’s happening, and once it’s over you would greatly miss it if you could. So why not miss it now? Or at least understand why you would.

The state of Being Alive also comes with a rich and distinct sense of possibility. You can make any number of interesting things happen by sheer will. You can scrawl sentences on a scrap of paper that will trigger certain thoughts later, for you or someone else. You can touch a few buttons on your phone and be speaking to any of a hundred people you know, and whatever is said would change each other’s day, or life, in some way. You could clean the house this afternoon, or leave it messy, and each option would give a different shape to the evening.

Can you believe that this condition - of being in the world, of feeling stuff and doing stuff - was once happening all the time? Remember being able to open windows and pet dogs and wash your hands in warm water? What an amazing time that was. No matter what happened, whether life was decidedly going “well” or not, it was always so eventful, and you got to decide what to do in each moment of it.

It’s all over, of course, which is too bad. You didn’t realize at the time how small a window it was, and you can’t believe you spent a lot of it complaining. However, for right now at least, for some reason, you’re back. You have at least this moment to enjoy being alive. There may be more coming afterward, but you can’t count on that. Not this time anyway.

Except in moments of extreme emotional tilt, this exercise always seems to work. I can almost always, when I think of it, choose to see the current moment as a certain kind of an unexpected gift - a long-awaited return to the most interesting thing ever, which is being alive.

It works because if it were true - you really had just been sent back to the realm of the living - chances are you really would think it’s unutterably great to be here, even if you didn’t the first time. By mentally jumping out of life and then back in, it becomes clear that the experience of being alive really is a profoundly interesting thing, and we can live with an ongoing awareness of that. That few seconds of contemplation reframes virtually any moment as the best thing that can happen: you, enjoying a rich pocket of Being Alive Right Now, amidst a vast universe that is almost entirely not that.

At least, it becomes interesting when you’re aware that there’s no reason any of this should necessarily be the case. There will not always be things happening. You will not always have the ability to experience the world and respond how you please. But - by the grace of whoever - you do right now. Whatever the metaphysics of it really is, the point is that the window is small, and if you’re in it right now, that should probably be regarded as a profoundly lucky thing, whether it’s your first time here or you’ve been sent back for another tour.

However, because the window is open continuously until it’s closed for good, it’s hard to feel the luckiness of being alive while life is still happening. This is one way to contact that sense of good fortune reliably - see the moment as an inexplicable return to the wild and spectacular condition of Being Alive, which was once so abundant you forgot to appreciate it. This experience you’re having right now, of being here in a body, experiencing the world and choosing how to respond - is gone, and by the Law of Joni Mitchell, you only now know what you had. But by some unbelievable stroke of luck, here it is again."

- https://www.raptitude.com/

"Hell..."

“'Why did people call it Hell?' I wondered. No place was Hell, no place could be Hell. It’s the people calling it Hell, that’s the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly anymore. No, Hell wasn’t anything to do with place, Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people.”

- John Marsden

"Future Generations (If There Are Future Generations)"

"Future Generations (If There Are Future Generations)"

by Caitlin Johnstone

"Future generations, if there are future generations,

will scarce believe that our species once stockpiled armageddon weapons on purpose,

once built our entire civilization around economic models that could only result in the destruction of our biosphere,

once permitted corporations who profit from war to successfully lobby policymakers to start more wars,

once warehoused living beings in factory farms where they were tortured and brutalized,

once starved children to death with sanctions because their rulers disobeyed our rulers,

once made policies which kept people poor so they’d be financially coerced into facilitating military mass murder,

once let people go hungry and homeless if they didn’t have enough imaginary numbers in their bank accounts,

once stripped this planet of biodiversity and old growth forests to turn the gears of an imaginary economy instead of collaborating with our ecosystem.

Future generations, if there are future generations,

will look back in perplexity at our omnicidal madness,

at our blind subservience to the very worst among us,

at our remarkable ingenuity in always finding groundbreaking new ways to hate each other,

at our fanatical devotion to competition and control when we knew that all we really wanted was to be loved,

at the way we’d marginalize and outcast those who thought differently from the rest of us even though we knew full well that our way of thinking wasn’t working,

at the way we’d spend our lives feeding insatiable hungry ghosts only to wind up on our deathbeds wondering why we feel dissatisfied,

at the amount of energy we’d pour into not experiencing the beauty which surrounds us in every moment and rejecting the gifts we were being showered with from every direction,

at the herculean effort we poured into keeping enlightenment from crashing in,

at our nonstop desperate flailing attempts to be anywhere but here and now,

at the amount of work we put into avoiding being at ease.

Future generations, if there are future generations,

I am so glad that you made it past all the many obstacles we put up between our present age and your birth.

Praise be to you and your parents

for cleaning up our mess,

for setting things right,

for becoming conscious,

for valuing a healthy world,

for getting humanity to where you’re at now

so that the real adventure of our species could begin.

Future generations, if there are future generations,

thank you for your kindness and compassion as you gaze back on us through the records we have left you.

It might not be immediately obvious,

but some of us here saw what you’re seeing from there."

- https://caitlinjohnstone.com/

○

SoundCloud Reading by Tim Foley:

- https://soundcloud.com/