Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/7/25
"Alert! Inflation Is About To Explode!
The Next Great Depression Is Coming!"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Friday, February 7, 2025
"Millions Panic, Americans Emergency Savings Is Gone"
Snyder Reports, 2/7/25
"Millions Panic,
Americans Emergency Savings Is Gone"
Comments here:
"Trump Is Crashing The System; Musk Exposes Massive Medicare Fraud; Food Shortage Fears"
Jeremiah Babe, 2/7/25
"Trump Is Crashing The System; Musk Exposes
Massive Medicare Fraud; Food Shortage Fears"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: 2002, "Time Traveler"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Time Traveler"
"This song is from our album, "Time Traveler." This album was inspired by memories of the paths we chose to follow and of the friends that journeyed with us. Some friends now live only in our hearts, immortal. But somewhere, someday we will pick up again, right where we left off. The journey never ends."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Planetary nebula Abell 78 stands out in this colorful telescopic skyscape. In fact the colors of the spiky Milky Way stars depend on their surface temperatures, both cooler (yellowish) and hotter (bluish) than the Sun. But Abell 78 shines by the characteristic emission of ionized atoms in the tenuous shroud of material shrugged off from an intensely hot central star. The atoms are ionized, their electrons stripped away, by the central star's energetic but otherwise invisible ultraviolet light.
The visible blue-green glow of loops and filaments in the nebula's central region corresponds to emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms, surrounded by strong red emission from electrons recombining with hydrogen atoms. Some 5,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Cygnus, Abell 78 is about three light-years across. A planetary nebula like Abell 78 represents a very brief final phase in stellar evolution that our own Sun will experience... in about 5 billion years.”
"Do Not Let Your Fire Go Out..."
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the
hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.”
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern - Weekly Wrap"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/7/25
"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern - Weekly Wrap"
Comments here:
"The Trouble With Most people..."
"Kaufman thought his public health students at the Kennesaw State University might know more than high schoolers. During the same week, he conducted an ad hoc survey in class, “How many of you believe the American dream is dead?” He asked his class of about 25 students. “Ninety percent raised their hands,” said Kaufman. “I was just blown away.”
He asked his college students what the American dream was. Not getting an answer, he defined it for them, “The American dream is, in this country, if you work hard, you sacrifice, and you never quit, you will find some type of success in your life.” After giving the students his definition, he tried again, “How many of you still believe the American dream is dead?” Still, 90 percent raised their hands. “If you believe the American dream is dead in this country, why are you sitting in a college classroom?” he asked. The class was silent. Students looked shocked, and one said he hadn’t thought about that."
o
"According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 57% of Americans have a reading grade below 9th level, and 13% have a reading grade below 5th level. Only 13% can understand the Declaration or Patrick Henry’s speech, and virtually none can understand the Constitution. And that includes all Americans. Among Generation Z, it’s far worse. They are the least literate generation in American history.
Spend a few minutes on YouTube watching our young people be interviewed on the most basic matters of our history and values. They do not know anything of the good, the true, and the beautiful; and even if they wanted to, they could not learn it because the texts are inaccessible to them. Far too many have been cognitively crippled."
○
"Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: ''What were you doing for the last 12 years before you got here?''
- Thomas Sowell
○
"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
- Thomas Sowell
○
"The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds." - Will Durant
○
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance."
- Thomas Sowell
The Poet: Charles Bukowski, "Darkness Falls"
"Darkness Falls"
"Darkness falls upon Humanity
and faces become terrible things
that wanted more than there was.
All our days are marked with
unexpected affronts -
some disastrous, others less so,
but the process is
wearing and continuous.
Attrition rules.
Most give way,
leaving empty spaces
where people should be.
And now,
as we ready to self-destruct,
there is very little left to kill,
which makes the tragedy
less and more,
much, much more. "
- Charles Bukowski
"Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have"
"Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have"
by John Wilder
"Time. Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list. Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me. The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control. Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially. We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.
Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power. We have used technology to shrink the world. The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days. Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality. Now? The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.
Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom. We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.
We can see at night. We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away. My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance. Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.
But time remains fixed. It flows only one way. And it is the most subjective of our senses. Even Pugsley notices it: “This summer was so short!” He’s in high school. That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood. I’ve long felt that I understood why this was. Let me give it a shot.
For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life. For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more. It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%. For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years. If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years. 1/8 versus 1/20? It’s amazingly different. We don’t perceive life as a line. We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives. Each day you live is smaller than the last.
But that’s not everything. As we age, novelty decreases. When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily. New words. New thoughts. New ideas. That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing. They don’t realize that I can reattach it. Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents. Ever drive a new route somewhere? When I do it, I have to focus my attention. It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.
I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years. I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.
There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive. Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.
Work is similar. Over time, we gain experience. Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them). But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.
The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims. I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life. Finding a new one is... difficult. Life goes faster, day by day for me. Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.
And yet... Each day is still 24 hours. I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling. Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness. I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life. I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.
Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against. Does the flow of time vary? Certainly. But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.
I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this: Time is all we have – it is what makes up life. We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life. We have the hours we have. The only difference is what we do with that time.
I mentioned in a previous post that (during the week) I often get by on scant hours of sleep. That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days. I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.
Maybe I can settle for that definition of time: a gift. Each moment is a gift. Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them. Just make each moment count. Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time. It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away."
o
Full screen recommended.
Hans Zimmer, "Time"
Dan, I Allegedly, "It’s Total Madness! More Crazy Stories"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 2/7/25
"It’s Total Madness! More Crazy Stories"
"Jamie Dimon says he’d win the presidency? 😂 In today’s wild ride, we unpack his eyebrow-raising claim and dive into some of the craziest stories from the so-called “greatest economy ever.” From Starbucks blaming their app for struggling sales to Ford losing billions on EVs, the chaos doesn’t stop there. We’ve got everything from egg heists to flying cars and even a guy scamming self-checkout with tomato sauce barcodes. Yes, you read that right!
Plus, did you know Jaguar had to destroy thousands of EVs because of fire risks? Or that over 50,000 government employees would rather quit than return to the office? Oh, and let’s not forget the skyrocketing costs of insurance and ConEd’s outrageous rate hikes. It’s total madness!"
Comments here:
"Major Food Supply Alert! Just In Time, A Deadly New Strain Of H5N1 Threatens To Make Our Egg And Beef Shortages Even Worse"
"Major Food Supply Alert! Just In Time, A Deadly New Strain Of H5N1
Threatens To Make Our Egg And Beef Shortages Even Worse"
by Michael Snyder
"We just received some very serious news. The extremely deadly D1.1 strain of the H5N1 bird flu which has been ripping through the nation’s poultry population in recent weeks has now gotten into the cattle population in the state of Nevada. This is the very first time that cattle in the U.S. have ever tested positive for this strain. What this means is that we are facing a very serious threat to our food supply. As I detailed earlier this week, the U.S. is dealing with the worst egg shortage that it has ever experienced, and it is likely to get even worse as this new strain spreads. Meanwhile, the size of the U.S. cattle herd could be reduced even further by this new strain, and it is already at the lowest level that we have seen since 1961…
As of January, the total number of cattle and calves was 86.7 million, down by 1% from last year, reported Market Intel. The beef herd has shrunk 40% since 1975 to the smallest size since 1961. Beef cows that have calved hit a record low at 27.9 million, revealed the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while replacement heifers also decreased, indicating continued contraction in the cattle cycle.
In 1961, 182 million people were living in the United States. Today, 334 million people live in the United States. So now we have the same amount of beef that we did in 1961, but we have nearly twice as many people to feed. A beef shortage is here. Needless to say, the price of beef is going to go higher as supplies of beef just keep getting tighter and tighter.
I don’t know why the mainstream media is not making a bigger deal about this. I know that they are absolutely fixated on the drama that is unfolding in Washington D.C. right now, but this new strain of the H5N1 bird flu is an extremely huge story…"Six dairy herds in Nevada have tested positive for a newer variant of the H5N1 bird flu virus that’s been associated with severe infections in humans, according to the Nevada Department of Agriculture.
Scientists say these infections with a different type of virus mark an inflection point in the nation’s efforts to contain the virus: It may be here to stay. The strain is not the same one that has been circulating in other dairy herds throughout the United States, a virus called B3.13. The newer version, D1.1, has previously been detected only in birds and in people who had contact with infected birds.
This is the very first time that D1.1 has been detected in any of our dairy herds. Up until just recently, the milder B3.13 strain of H5N1 was the dominant strain in birds all over the nation. But over the past few months there has been a dramatic change. The D1.1 strain has become dominant, and it has been ripping through bird populations from coast to coast…"That bird flu strain, called D1.1 by scientists, was also linked to a fatal human case in Louisiana last year after exposure to sick birds. The D1.1 strain has emerged in recent months to dominate infections in wild birds and poultry flocks across North America."
Since the pandemic began in early 2022, “around 957 dairy herds and more than 153 million poultry have been affected” by the bird flu…"According to the CDC, around 957 dairy herds and more than 153 million poultry have been affected by types of bird flu in the United States." The devastation that this pandemic has caused has been immense, but nearly all of the carnage that we have witnessed so far has been caused by the relatively mild B3.13 strain. Now the D1.1 strain is spreading like wildfire, and this has pushed egg prices to dizzying heights…
Egg prices continue to move higher due to limited inventory due to an avian flu outbreak. The volume of trailer load loose egg sales decreased 16% at the end of January. Prices for white large shell eggs hit $8.97 per dozen. Delivered prices on the California-compliant wholesale loose egg market increased $0.37 to $8.72 per dozen in the last week of January, according to the Department of Agriculture. Of course there are many supermarkets where the shelves are completely empty and there are no eggs to be purchased at any price.
Unsurprisingly, eggs have now become a target for thieves because they have become so valuable. In fact, someone just stole 100,000 eggs from a trailer in Pennsylvania, and police have still not been able to determine who did it…"The heist of 100,000 eggs from the back of a trailer in Pennsylvania has become a whodunit that police have yet to crack. Four days after the theft that law enforcement say could be tied to the sky-high cost of eggs, no leads have come in, Trooper First Class Megan Frazer, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Police, said Wednesday."
There is something else that I would like for you to consider. What is going to happen if the new D1.1 strain of the bird flu starts spreading widely among humans? Already, it has killed a 65-year-old victim in Louisiana, and it almost killed a 13-year-old girl in Canada…"In November, an otherwise healthy 13-year-old girl from British Columbia, Canada, was infected with D1.1 bird flu from an unknown source. She had not been exposed to any birds or cattle, and her only risk factor was obesity. She went into respiratory failure and had to be placed on life support, though she eventually recovered. And a 65-year-old patient in Louisiana died last month after being hospitalized with severe respiratory symptoms from D1.1."
The B3.13 strain only caused mild illness in humans. But the D1.1 strain is a killer. One expert is warning that if this strain “were to mutate and gain the ability to efficiently spread from person to person”, we could be facing a new “global pandemic”… Professor Bobbi Pritt of the Mayo Clinic issued similar warnings to the Daily Express US last month. “If the virus were to mutate and gain the ability to efficiently spread from person to person, then this could result in a large outbreak or even a global pandemic,” she said."
I realize that this is not welcome news for many of you. But the truth is that we were warned that pestilences would be one of the major themes of this period. It has been less than a month since President Trump was inaugurated, and now it appears that he will have a major health scare to contend with. My advice is to be prepared to deal with another unprecedented global health panic, because this crisis could spiral out of control at any time."
"Tip of the Swampberg"
USAID Headquarters, 1300 Pennsylvania Av. DC.
"Tip of the Swampberg"
by Joel Bowman
“It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts
of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate
planning are required to waste this much money.”
- P.J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores" (1991)
"An External Revenue Agency... Mar-a-Gaza in the Levant... banning blokes from female sports...and now a ceaseless torrent of grift, deceit and chicanery hemorrhaging from the open wound that is/was the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)...
What’s next? Anyone who tells you they’re au courant with the shifting geopolitical sands is either telling pork pies... or has a severe vitamin D deficiency. Even for someone who suffers the mainstream news as something of an occupational hazard (on your behalf, dear reader), keeping pace with the passing parade is truly a Herculean task.
And so, in case you had better things to do and missed the latter story: Earlier this week, federal “workers” at USAID found themselves locked out of their cushy public building and placed on administrative leave. Their hobby horses were tagged, blindfolded... and bound for the glue factory. Indeed, it appeared as though Captain DOGE himself, Elon Musk, had gone “Full Milei” on the sprawling hydra, which employs something in the vicinity of ~10,000 individuals to help spread American taxpayer dollars across 130 countries around the world.
Side Note: When is someone going to superimpose Musk’s face on this timeless meme? (That’s your cue, Internet. Now do your thing!)
The Swampberg: The agency, which burned through an impressive $40+ billion of taxpayer money in 2023 alone, is/was viewed by the managerial class as a cornerstone of the empire’s “soft power.” Now, if that sounds soft-headed to you, consider the gravity of the following programs, destined to be sorely unmissed...
$2 million for sex changes in Guatemala... $4.5 million to combat “disinformation” in Kazakhstan... $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt... $20 million on a new Sesame Street show in Iraq... and on, and on... And that was just the tip of the swampberg. From Elon Musk’s X: “DOGE is on the warpath.”
By mid-week, as government and non-government organizations alike were furiously acid scrubbing their DEI-laced websites of anything USAID-related, hardworking American taxpayers on both sides of the political aisle were beginning to ask themselves an obvious question: Who else is on the take?
Then came the second shoe to drop... news outlets themselves, including those most vehemently claiming “just the facts, ma’am” objectivity, were being funded by USAID, either directly, through grants, or indirectly, through millions of dollars of federally subsidized subscriptions. The Associated Press... Reuters... The New York Times... Politico... and even the (*clutches pearls*) unimpeachable BBC... were all named among the beneficiaries.
What followed sounded suspiciously like the denials of guilty men...Politico patiently “fact-checked” the claim, explaining that, although it did receive more than $40k in direct funding from USAID, the bulk of its $8.2 million in payments came from federally subsidized subscriptions for government employees. Either way, the funding is being cut.
The BBC, meanwhile, defended its take by explaining that, although BBC Media Action, an “international organization that supports and trains local journalists and outlets around the world,” received funds from USAID, totaling a non-trivial 8% of the charity’s entire income in 2023-24, the charity is “completely separate from BBC News,” and “does not produce news itself.” That is to say, BBC Media Action does not produce the news itself... it merely produces the journalists and outlets around the world that produce the news. To which jilted voters responded: Auntie doth protest too much, wethinks!
Meanwhile, Trump’s Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, is playing what remains of the media like a fiddle. As she told a room full of gaping maws this week…“We are going line by line when it comes to the federal government’s books, and this president and his team are making decisions across the board, asking ‘Do these receipts serve the interests of the American people. Is this a good use of the American taxpayer’s money?’ If not, that funding will no longer be sent abroad and American taxpayers will see significant savings because of that effort.”
Big Bird in Baghdad: Of course, tragi-comical line items like Big Bird in Baghdad pale in comparison with the real Big Bad Bucks being siphoned off to war torn hellscapes like the Ukraine, where USAID partnered with national gas company Burisma, from which crackhead-turned-artiste, Hunter Biden, mainlined $11 million as a “board member.”
In 2023 alone, USAID funneled over $16 billion into the giant, Ukrainian-shaped laundromat, almost double the next eight recipient countries... combined. And yet, Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself said the quiet part out loud recently when he admitted that, of the ~$177 billion total US funding for the war on the Eurasian Steppe, ~$100 billion never even made it to Kyiv. In fact, it never got past the ravenous defense contractor corridor in DC, McClean, Bethesda, Falls Church, Arlington...
Are we beginning to see how this works, yet? Dollars earmarked for hungry children... end up on the sagging plates of the schmoozing, overfed consultant class. Funds allocated for “fact-checking” and “journalisming”... are loaded into the arsenal of a goose-stepping platoon of anti-factsers and the Censorship Industrial Complex. Hundreds of billions promised to end wars... go instead to prolonging them, forever and ever, Amen.
As more corruption is exposed, as more flesh flies from the flabby, otoro underbelly of the beast, beware those squealing the loudest. If they think the chainsaw is painful... just wait ‘till the bonesaw comes out. !Afuera!"
Bill Bonner, "Myth of Empire"
Battle of Teutoberg forest in 9AD, in which German tribes led by Arminius
of the Cherusci defeated three Roman legions led Publius Quinctilius Varus
"Myth of Empire"
by Bill Bonner
"Quintili Vare, legiones redde! "
("Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!")
- Emperor Augustus, after the Teutoburg Forest disaster.
Baltimore, Maryland - "Oh what a jolly, juicy, jingo-ed up world! As Dan explained yesterday, we’re still waiting for the feds to take out millions of dollars’ worth of subscriptions to Bonner Private Research… thus guaranteeing we get behind their efforts to improve the world. We’re open to bribery as well as flattery.
In the meantime, we’ll explain our very-minority view more carefully. To the dismay of many readers, we doubt that Trump was spared by God to lead a renaissance in the US. You could say that he was selected by God - inasmuch as God and Nature are one - to do what he is doing.
But nature abhors a vacuum, said Aristotle. Nothing ever finds no place. Then again, nothing ever fills all space, either, because nature also despises a monopoly. Everywhere you look, you see not just one plant… not just one kind of person… nor one hair color… nor one brand of vacuum cleaner or one type of whiskey. No one person has all the answers, all the money, or all the power. And no matter how witty or dim we are, we will die along with everyone else.
Empires expand. But they never seize all the power or all the space. And it is not long before the imperial race has ‘over-stretched.’ Napoleon in Moscow… Hitler in Stalingrad… Yamamoto in the Pacific… the Romans in the Teutoburg forest. Jack Snyder refers to it as a ‘myth of empire’… that security can be enhanced by expanding outward… conquering more territory and setting up more garrisons.
The same myth exists in business. Successful companies often acquire other businesses. If they make a profit by building swimming pools, they try their hand at making movies… or publishing a newspaper. They stretch… until they lose their balance. As recounted in these pages several times, Jack Welch, an expander par excellence, bought a new company every week, while he was enjoying his heyday at GE. The stock rose ten times from 1990 ‘til the end of the decade. But it’s hard enough to run one company… or one country… let alone dozens of them. After 2000, GE stock lost 80% of its value. It took years to fully recover.
The US is now the cock o’ the walk, with huge military and economic advantages over its rivals. It famously spends more on its military than the next ten nations combined. Its consumer market is the richest in the world… and its dollar is still the go-to currency for people everywhere. No single other nation can come close. It would take a very rare talent to bring it down. But it’s only a couple weeks into the new administration and already Donald Trump is off to a good start.
The BBC: "Trump tariff 'made something snap in us' - many Canadians see US rift beyond repair. After US President Donald Trump threatened Canada with steep tariffs, Monika Morelli from Montreal cancelled her subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon, two giant American companies. She also called off a trip that she had planned for later in the year to New Orleans. "There is something that has been irrevocably broken now, after centuries of the US and Canada being allies," Ms Morelli, 39, told the BBC."
And this from the India Cable, where a deportee describes his trip back to India: “For 40 hours, we were handcuffed, our feet tied with chains and were not allowed to move an inch from our seats…the crew would open the door and shove us in…[to the bathroom]”
Make enemies all over the world. And stretch. Already US troops are stationed in 800 bases (some of them secret) overseas. And every day brings the threat of another grab – Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama, Gaza. But even with Trump at the helm, the USS America probably has a few good years before sailing to Alang. What should it do? What course should it take? Historian Paul Kennedy frames the challenge:
The task facing American statesmen over the next decades, therefore, is to recognize that broad trends are underway, and that there is a need to "manage" affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.
A genuine ‘America First’ agenda could probably ensure a graceful, peaceful and civilized future. Yes, the US could calmly and carefully husband its resources. It could cut $2 trillion out of current spending, going back to 2019 levels, and balance the budget. It could stop trying to run the world and bring the troops home. Or, it could follow the well-trod path into the Teutoburg forest."
Jim Kunstler, "How It Worked"
"How It Worked"
by Jim Kunstler
"They never prepared for algorithms that could map everything.
For personnel pre-positioned everywhere.
For a president who counts every week like it's his last."
- VP JD Vance
"If you wondered since 2016 how come the blob and the Democratic Party were aligned so exquisitely in their operations to destroy populism (personified by Mr. Trump) and to permanently entrench single party power in America for all time to come, it’s because an endless font of taxpayer money was streamed into countless non-governmental orgs creating a shadow civil service of Democratic Party activists that melded seamlessly with the big policy-making agencies.
The money was laundered through manifold layers of these orgs and their sub-orgs to pay for an ongoing “color revolution” in the USA - lawfare, election fraud, propaganda, censorship, career cancellation, medical fu*kery, open borders, and other totalitarian ploys - while enriching political players at all those manifold layers from multi-millionaire congressmen and senators to thousands of NGO officials making six-figure salaries to street hustlers like Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter and “anti-racism” racist Ibram X. Kendi and his $50-million Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University (recently axed) - and, of course, ultimately the former Potemkin president “Joe Biden” and his family.
It was all this money that drove eight years of sponsored insanity. Mainly, it kept the hands of the Democratic Party firmly on the levers of power so that nothing could be done about the insults and injuries they were inflicting on our country. So, is it a mystery now that nobody was prosecuted for burning the cities in 2020, or for magically creating millions of extra “Joe Biden” votes out of nowhere that year, or setting up the kickback machine from Ukraine to Congress, or forcing millions to get a janky vaccine?
Pam Bondi is going to be a busy girl. The DOGE has uncovered a government racketeering operation of which the USAID scandal is but one cog in a colossal engine of grift. What the public, including you readers, may not appreciate is how much planning went on over the past year to mount the DOGE effort, and how comprehensively the work of its many hundreds of computer techies (not just six whiz-kids) has laid bare the money-trails out of previously impenetrable government computers. Their algorithms have pierced the firewalls, revealing decades of fraud and deceit.
Mr. Trump’s cabinet officers have started the job of dismantling the machine by getting rid of the employees who set it up and worked for it. By Thursday, Secretary of State Rubio, fired all but 300 of the 10,000 people working for USAID. CIA Director Ratcliffe offered the agency’s entire workforce a “deferred resignation” option that will allow them to bail out and still collect their salaries until September. Look for straight-up firings to ensue. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the acting FBI director to terminate eight senior FBI officials and asked for a review of up to 5,000 involved in J-6 investigations (including, presumably, agents who engaged in abusive SWAT-team deployments).
Many lawsuits have been mounted by blob-adjacent attorneys to make all this stop. But one big problem for them is that their gigantic legal fees - hundreds of dollars an hour on the meter multiplied by x-hundreds of lawyers - were previously paid by exactly those NGOs that are getting shut down now. So, perhaps you see exactly how those levers of power worked. The money will have to come from somewhere else, and I doubt that like Silicon Valley billionaire blob-supporter Reid Hoffman wants to piss away the rest of his fortune on this.
Some actual persons will have to be held accountable for all the mischief carried out in rogue agencies over many years. It has to start somewhere. I nominate Samantha Power as a first test case. She was in charge of USAID for nearly four years - until Jan 20, 2025 - including the duration of the Ukraine War. She was also personally very busy hands-on in arranging attempted color revolutions in Hungary (failed, against Viktor Orban), Georgia (failed), Mexico (failed), and Brazil (succeeded against Jair Bolsonaro). Ms. Power provided money from USAID-connected NGOs to foster instability in many more countries, including our country. It must have come as quite a shock to her that Kamala Harris did not win the 2024 election. USAID will not be paying for Ms.Power’s legal representation.
Much more will come to shock the blobsters and their legions - though just now, as the reformation of government begins, it’s comforting just to think of all those dedicated seditionists, Wokesters, Marxians, and Jacobins unable to make their rent payments or buy groceries all of a sudden. The paychecks have stopped coming for thousands who wanted to turn American life upside-down and inside-out. This happened most colorfully at the fake-news outfit called Politico this week. Turned out they were a subsidiary of the blob. Who knew? (Everyone who was paying attention to the jive they published.) Management had to send out a memo that reporters and editors would not get paid this week, or maybe ever again. Boo hoo.
It was also revealed this week that the Reuters News Agency, the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Wash-Po, and around 700-other news outfits altogether had been receiving financial support from USAID, the CIA, and other government entities. Now do you understand why the Democratic Party voters are so obdurately deluded and deranged?
Besides the perfunctory lawsuits filed against DOGE and the agency chiefs, the response to all this corrective action has been surprisingly feeble. You might conclude that they couldn’t marshal the rioters this time because the money for rioters has been cut off. Instead, you saw a motley pack of political creeps - Jamie Raskin, Ayanna Pressley, Liz Warren, Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters, Jasmine Crockett, Ilhan Omar - crying crocodile tears outside USAID HQ at 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. They looked like roaches after the exterminator’s visit.
The reform of our gone-rogue government is barely underway, notwithstanding these mighty initial actions. Yet to come, you have the whole filthy underbelly of the public health agencies who brought you Covid-19. The terrified Democrats are holding back confirmation of Patel, Gabbard, and RFKJr, but even if they fail to get confirmed, the new administration will put capable figures in those jobs at FBI, ODNI, and HHS. The party of Chaos must know that they cannot stop the dismantling of their evil machine.
Beyond these grifts lies the Okefenokee of treason, bribery, conspiracy, and sedition deriving from RussiaGate, the impeachment of 2019, and all the shenanigans emanating out of Ukraine since the Maidan Revolution in 2014. Turns out, it was all of a piece. The same cast of characters were involved in all these nefarious events. I believe we’ll see those “Joe Biden” preemptive pardons tested in the SCOTUS. You haven’t begun to hear about the cases that AG Bondi will have to consider in that giant hairball. It’s only her second day on the job. Have mercy."
Adventures With Danno, "I Was In Complete Shock At Kroger, Amazing New Deals!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 2/7/25
"I Was In Complete Shock At Kroger,
Amazing New Deals!"
Comments here:
"Larry Wilkerson: Netanyahu Faces Total Defeat As Hamas Gains Support And Israel Loses Control"
Full screen recommended.
The Face Of War, 2/7/25
"Larry Wilkerson: Netanyahu Faces Total Defeat
As Hamas Gains Support And Israel Loses Control"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Double Down News, 2/7/25
"Trump’s Shocking Plan for Greater Israel Exposed"
Comments here:
Thursday, February 6, 2025
Jeremiah Babe, "Where Did All The Money Go? Elon Musk Just Found Out"
Jeremiah Babe, 2/6/25
"Where Did All The Money Go?
Elon Musk Just Found Out"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Dream Ten"
Full screen recommended.
Liquid Mind, "Dream Ten" (Black Holes and Quasars)
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Massive stars, abrasive winds, mountains of dust, and energetic light sculpt one of the largest and most picturesque regions of star formation in the Local Group of Galaxies. Known as N11, the region is visible on the upper right of many images of its home galaxy, the Milky Way neighbor known as the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC).
The above image was taken for scientific purposes by the Hubble Space Telescope and reprocessed for artistry by an amateur to win the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures competition. Although the section imaged above is known as NGC 1763, the entire N11 emission nebula is second in LMC size only to 30 Doradus. Studying the stars in N11 has shown that it actually houses three successive generations of star formation. Compact globules of dark dust housing emerging young stars are also visible around the image.”
Chet Raymo, “Mortal Soul: The Great Silence”
by Chet Raymo
“If there is one word that should not be uttered, it is the name of – no, I will not say it. Any name diminishes. In the face of whatever it is that is most mysterious, most holy, we are properly silent. It is appropriate, I think, to praise the creation, to make a joyful noise of thanksgiving for the sensate world. But praising the Creator is another thing altogether. When we make a big racket on His behalf we are more than likely addressing an idol in our own image. What was it that Pico Iyer said? “Silence is the tribute that we pay to holiness; we slip off words when we enter a sacred place, just as we slip off shoes.” The God of the mystics whispers sweet nothings, as lovers do.
In a diary entry for “M.”, near the end of his too-short life, Thomas Merton wrote: “I cannot have enough of the hours of silence when nothing happens. When the clouds go by. When the trees say nothing. When the birds sing. I am completely addicted to the realization that just being there is enough.” The natural world was for Merton the primary revelation. He listened. He felt a presence in his heart, an awareness of the ineffable Mystery that permeates creation. It was this that drew him to the mystical tradition of Christianity, especially to the Celtic tradition of creation spirituality. It was this that attracted him to Zen.
There come now and then, perhaps more frequently in late life than previously, those moments of being (as Virginia Woolf called them) when creation grabs us by the shoulders and gives us such a shake that it rattles our teeth, when love for the world simply knocks us flat. At those moments everything we have learned about the world – the invaluable and reliable knowledge of science- seems a pale intimation of what is. In Virginia Woolf’s novel “The Waves”, the elderly Bernard says: “How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”
In moments of soul-stirring epiphany, it is reassuring to feel beneath our feet a floor of reliable knowledge, the safe and sure edifice of empirical learning so painstakingly constructed by the likes of Aristarchus, Galileo, Darwin and Schrodinger. But at the same time we are humbled by our ignorance, and more ready than ever to say “I don’t know,” to enter at last the great silence. Erwin Chargaff, who contributed mightily to our understanding of DNA, wrote: “It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same blind force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If the scientist has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist.”
The whole thrust of the mystical tradition, the whole thrust of science, is toward the great silence- an awareness of our ignorance and a willingness to say “I don’t know.” A lifetime of learning brings one at last to the face of mystery. We live in a universe of more than 2 trillion galaxies. Perhaps the number of galaxies is infinite. And the universe is silent. Achingly, terrifyingly silent. Or, rather, the universe speaks a little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”
"Anyway..."
“Bad things don’t happen to people because they deserve for them to happen. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s just… life. And no matter who we are, we have to take the hand we’re dealt, crappy though it may be, and try our very best to move forward anyway, to love anyway, to have hope anyway… to have faith that there’s a purpose to the journey we’re on.”
- Mia Sheridan
“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”
“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space,
and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”
“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”
by Maria Popova
“In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.
But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as ‘The Life of the Mind’ (public library) – the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.
In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand:
“Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego – summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s – is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls – and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them – does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.”
Echoing Thomas Mann’s assertion that “the perishableness of life… imparts value, dignity, interest to life,” Arendt adds: “Man’s finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time span set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities: it manifests itself as the only reality of which thinking qua thinking is aware, when the thinking ego has withdrawn from the world of appearances and lost the sense of realness inherent in the sensus communis by which we orient ourselves in this world… The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”
T.S. Eliot captured this nowhereness in his exquisite phrase “the still point of the turning world.” But the spatial dimension of thought, Arendt argues, is intersected by a temporal one – thinking invariably forces us to recollect and anticipate, voyaging into the past and the future, thus creating the mental spacetime continuum through which our thought-trains travel. From this arises our sense of the sequential nature of time and its essential ongoingness. Arendt writes:
“The inner time sensation arises when we are not entirely absorbed by the absent non-visibles we are thinking about but begin to direct our attention onto the activity itself. In this situation past and future are equally present precisely because they are equally absent from our sense; thus the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead.”
[…]
In other words, the time continuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present, future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himself has an “origin,” his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands at any given moment between them; this in-between is called the present. It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change – which we can conceive of cyclically as well as in the form of rectilinear motion without ever being able to conceive of an absolute beginning or an absolute end – into time as we know it.”
Once again, it is our finitude that mediates our experience of time: “Seen from the viewpoint of a continuously flowing everlasting stream, the insertion of man, fighting in both directions, produces a rupture which, by being defended in both directions, is extended to a gap, the present seen as the fighter’s battleground… Seen from the viewpoint of man, at each single moment inserted and caught in the middle between his past and his future, both aimed at the one who is creating his present, the battleground is an in-between, an extended Now on which he spends his life. The present, in ordinary life the most futile and slippery of the tenses – when I say “now” and point to it, it is already gone – is no more than the clash of a past, which is no more, with a future, which is approaching and not yet there. Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward “the quiet of the past” with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.”
This fluid conception of time, Arendt points out, is quite different from its representation in ordinary life, where the calendar tells us that the present is contained in today, the past starts at yesterday, and the future at tomorrow. In a sentiment that calls to mind Patti Smith’s magnificent meditation on time and transformation, Arendt writes: "That we can shape the everlasting stream of sheer change into a time continuum we owe not to time itself but to the continuity of our business and our activities in the world, in which we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow. In other words, the time continuum depends on the continuity of our everyday life, and the business of everyday life, in contrast to the activity of the thinking ego – always independent of the spatial circumstances surrounding it – is always spatially determined and conditioned. It is due to this thoroughgoing spatiality of our ordinary life that we can speak plausibly of time in spatial categories, that the past can appear to us as something lying “behind” us and the future as lying “ahead.”
[…]
The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent – either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent “regions” into the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself.”
This elusive gap, Arendt argues, is where the thinking ego resides – and it is only by mentally inserting ourselves between the past and the future that they come to exist at all: Without [the thinker], there would be no difference between past and future, but only everlasting change. Or else these forces would clash head on and annihilate each other. But thanks to the insertion of a fighting presence, they meet at an angle, and the correct image would then have to be what the physicists call a parallelogram of forces.
These two forces, which have an indefinite origin and a definite end point in the present, converge into a third – a diagonal pull that, contrary to the past and the present, has a definite origin in the present and emanates out toward infinity. That diagonal force, Arendt observes, is the perfect metaphor for the activity of thought. She writes:
“This diagonal, though pointing to some infinity, is limited, enclosed, as it were, by the forces of past and future, and thus protected against the void; it remains bound to and is rooted in the present – an entirely human present though it is fully actualized only in the thinking process and lasts no longer than this process lasts. It is the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man; it is somehow, to change the metaphor, the quiet in the center of a storm which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it. In this gap between past and future, we find our place in time when we think, that is, when we are sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position of “umpire,” of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world, never arriving at a final solution to their riddles but ready with ever-new answers to the question of what it may be all about.”
“The Life of the Mind” is one of the most stimulating packets of thought ever published. Complement this particular portion with Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, Dan Falk on how our capacity for mental time travel made us human, and T.S. Eliot’s poetic ode to the nature of time.“
The Poet: e. e. cummings, "Humanity I Love You"
"Humanity i love you because when you’re hard
up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink..."
"Humanity I Love You"
"Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death
Humanity, i hate you"
- e. e. cummings
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)