"How It Really Is"

 

"Bread And Circuses..."

"Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt."

- Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, in English "Juvenal"

"Take away my bread and circuses and all I have left is my pitchfork..."

"A Murderer Is Less To Be Feared..."

 

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague." 

- Marcus Tullius Cicero, from a speech given to the Roman Senate, 

recorded in approximately 42 B.C. by Sallust.

"How To Forge The Spectator Class"

"How To Forge The Spectator Class"

by Josh Stayman

"My father could disassemble and rebuild a car engine in our garage. I, like many of my generation, was steered toward the ‘civilized’ path – white collar work, climate-controlled offices, and an increasing detachment from the physical world. While I grew up loving sports, memorizing baseball stats with religious devotion, and finding genuine joy in the games, something fundamental has shifted in how men engage with athletics today.

In dimly lit rooms across the nation, millions of men gather every weekend, adorned in jerseys bearing other men’s names – not as a complement to their own achievements, but as a substitute for them. We’ve transformed from a nation of players to a nation of watchers. Like Rome’s bread and circuses, this passive consumption serves to pacify rather than inspire.

The games themselves aren’t the problem – they can build character, teach discipline, and provide genuine entertainment. I still love sports, finding genuine joy in the games just as I did memorizing those baseball stats as a kid. But somewhere along the way, I grew up and realized they should complement life’s achievements, not substitute for them. The danger lies in what happens when grown men never make this transition.

A growing segment of young men face an even more insidious form of spectator culture. While their fathers at least watched real athletes achieve real things, many young people now idolize social media personalities and content creators – becoming passive observers of manufactured personas who achieved fame primarily by being watched. They can recite influencer dramas and gaming achievements but don’t know the stories of Solzhenitsyn or have ever built something with their own hands. The virtual has replaced the visceral; the parasocial has replaced the personal.

History shows us a recurring cycle: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. We find ourselves now in the latter stages of this cycle, where comfort and convenience have bred a generation of observers rather than builders. Our sophisticated entertainment serves as a digital opiate, keeping the masses content while their capacity for meaningful action atrophies.

This transformation isn’t accidental. As I explored in my ‘Engineering Reality‘ series, the systematic reframing of physical fitness as problematic represents a calculated effort to weaken societal resilience. Major media outlets like the Atlantic and MSNBC have published pieces linking physical fitness to right-wing extremism, while academic institutions increasingly frame workout culture as problematic. Even gym ownership has been characterized as a potential indicator of radicalization. The message couldn’t be clearer: individual strength – both literal and metaphorical – threatens the prescribed order.

This erosion of self-reliance extends far beyond fitness. A friend who’s spent decades as an auto mechanic recently confided that he’s grateful to be nearing retirement. “These Teslas,” he told me, “they’re not even cars anymore – they’re computers on wheels. When something goes wrong, you don’t fix it; you just replace entire modules.” What was once a craft that any dedicated person could learn has become an exercise in supervised dependency. Even Klaus Schwab openly predicts that by 2030, Los Angeles will be “private car driven free” – just a fleet of self-driving Ubers. With this week’s devastating tunnel fire in LA leaving thousands stranded, one wonders if such ‘Build Back Better’ moments are exactly the opportunities needed to accelerate these transformations. The message becomes clearer: you won’t fix things anymore because you won’t own them.

The Covid response revealed this agenda with striking clarity. While liquor stores remained ‘essential businesses,’ authorities closed beaches, parks, and gyms – the very places where people might maintain their physical and mental health. They promoted isolation over community, compliance over resilience, and pharmaceutical dependency over natural immunity. This wasn’t just public health policy; it was a dress rehearsal for state dependency. The same institutions that discouraged basic health practices now champion policies that replace family authority with bureaucratic oversight. From school boards usurping parental rights to social services intervening in family decisions, we’re witnessing the systematic replacement of the capable father figure with an ever-expanding nanny state.

But true masculinity has never been solely about physical strength. History’s greatest exemplars of masculine virtue weren’t just men of action – they were men of principle, wisdom, and moral courage. From Marcus Aurelius to Omar Little, as I explored in my earlier writing, the common thread was having an unwavering code – the willingness to stand firm on conviction even when it carries personal cost.

Consider how many men today silently acquiesce to policies they know are wrong, embrace narratives they privately doubt, or submit to institutional pressures that violate their conscience. During Covid, we watched as men who understood the importance of natural immunity, outdoor exercise, and community bonds nevertheless enforced policies that harmed their neighborhoods and families. They chose institutional compliance over moral courage, career safety over civic duty, majority approval over personal conviction.

Real strength isn’t found in anonymous aggression or digital posturing. I learned this firsthand during Covid when I spoke out against vaccine mandates and became a pariah for defending personal choice and bodily autonomy. While numerous ‘brave’ keyboard warriors attacked me online, one incident stands out. A friend forwarded me a Reddit thread where someone had posted personal information about my family and me, hoping to incite harassment against me – all because I stood up for bodily autonomy and opposed arbitrary biomedical segregation. The initials gave it away – it was my own neighbor, someone I’d known for years.

When I confronted him in person, this digital lion transformed instantly into a cowering mouse. The same man who had boldly called for my destruction from behind his screen, believing he was anonymous, now stood physically trembling before me, his hands shaking, voice quivering, unable to even meet my gaze.

This spiritual and intellectual weakness poses a far greater threat than any decline in physical capability. A society of physically strong but morally compliant men is just as vulnerable as one of physically weak ones. True masculine strength requires the courage to think independently, to question authority when necessary, and to protect those who depend on you even when it carries risk. It demands the wisdom to distinguish between legitimate authority and manufactured consensus, between genuine expertise and institutional capture.

History offers a stark lesson: civilizations thrive when diverse virtues work in concert – builders and nurturers, protectors and healers, strength balanced with empathy. Today’s systematic erosion of both isn’t random but calculated. As men are steered toward passive consumption and women away from their intuitive wisdom, both are replaced by institutional authority – a nanny state that attempts to fill both roles while achieving neither.

Consider the machinery at work: government programs increasingly separate children from family influence at younger ages, while school curricula promote ideologies that deliberately blur biological realities. From preschool to college, institutions systematically distance children from their parents’ values. Like the fiat currency that replaced real money, we now have fiat relationships through social media, fiat achievements through gaming, and fiat experiences through the metaverse. Each substitution moves us further from authentic human experience toward engineered dependency. When children no longer understand what it means to be male or female, when they’re taught to look to institutions rather than parents for guidance, the state’s victory is nearly complete.

The result is a society of spectators rather than builders, of consumers rather than creators, of followers rather than leaders. A society where men trade real achievement for virtual entertainment and keyboard courage, while genuine feminine wisdom is replaced by corporate-approved stereotypes.

The state can only expand into the vacuum left by weakened men and disconnected women. It feeds on our engineered helplessness, growing stronger as we grow more dependent. Those who recognize this pattern face a simple choice: remain comfortable spectators in our own decline, or reclaim the authentic virtues that make us human."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

Bill Bonner, "A Game Of Chicken"

"A Game Of Chicken"

by Bill Bonner

New York, New York -  "As we all know, the US is headed for a fiscal crisis. Like having a ‘heart attack,’ says Ray Dalio. The only way to prevent it is to make dramatic policy changes now - not just to ‘improper payments’ to federal bureaucrats, but also serious cuts to the firepower industry.

Possible? Here’s Barrons: "Trump Sends Shockwave Through Defense Stocks, Says Military Spending Could Be Halved. "At some point, when things settle down, I'm going to meet with China and I'm going to meet with Russia, in particular those two, and I'm going to say there's no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military … and I'm going to say we can spend this on other things," Trump said."

But here’s Congress: "House Republicans on Tuesday revealed a budget resolution that would add $100 billion in defense funding, one-third less than the Senate blueprint which would raise defense spending by $150 billion. Asked about the latest Senate budget proposal, Sen. Rand Paul said: “I don’t think the numbers are real.” What follows is a look at how unreal the feds’ world… and their numbers… really are.

News came yesterday that a dozen eggs now cost nearly $5. US News: "US eggs prices hit a record high of $4.95 and are likely to keep climbing. The latest monthly consumer price index showed that the average price of a dozen Grade A eggs in U.S. cities reached $4.95 in January, eclipsing the previous record of $4.82 set two years earlier and more than double the low of $2.04 that was recorded in August 2023."

In 1925, a dozen eggs cost about 25 cents. The typical working man had to work about 30 seconds to buy a single egg. Today - after all the labor-saving devices… computers, motors, artificial intelligence… and 100 years of enlightened economic management - he has to work 50 seconds.

Don’t trust our math? We don’t either. It’s based on phony numbers (there is also the matter of 20 million chickens that have either died of bird flu in the last four months or been culled by order of the Federal government). Almost all the statistics used to compute the effects of federal programs - are frauds.

Let’s begin with unemployment… now near record lows. Politico reports: "The prevailing 'unemployment’ statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed and the government would still count you as “employed.” If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today - hardly something to celebrate.

Based on research from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity we see also that the average wage has been similarly inflated. When we did our egg calculations, we used the feds’ number for earnings - around $60,000. But when you adjust incomes to include all the marginally employed people in the statistic, the real number is closer to $52,000, which makes an average egg worth 57 seconds of human labor.

The Ludwig research team also found that inflation was understated. Just tracking prices of the everyday things that everyday people buy, they found: "In 2023 alone, the CPI indicated that inflation had driven prices up by 4.1 percent. But the true cost of living, as measured by our research, rose more than twice as much - a full 9.4 percent." 

In the recent election, the Democrats couldn’t understand why the voters didn’t appreciate the great economy they had given them. This is why. The numbers were fake. Real earnings, for example, did not rise, as widely advertised; instead, they fell. But the big kahuna of federal statistics is GDP. If it is going up, we are told that all is well. If it is going down, something must be done.

Want to increase GDP? Set up a suicide hotline. Then, when people call… you sell them a tombstone… a burial plot… and a casket, with an upsell to silk lining. Every sale will be included as a boost to GDP. When you die, too, GDP will get a little bump up - maybe your house will be sold… flowers… estate resolution. Or suppose five million immigrants suddenly arrive. The competition might reduce your earnings, but the economy - GDP - would rise.

A big component of GDP is government spending. Transfer payments are not included; the rest totes to about 17% of GDP. So, if the feds spend another trillion on weapons, for example, it will add a trillion to GDP. Except for some people in the firepower industry - its suppliers, lobbyists, think tank shills and owners - most people will be worse off.

As it is, today’s GDP includes more than $4 trillion of federal spending, mostly wasted on unproductive programs, and much of it debt financed. The big question is whether Trump, Musk et al are cutting it back…or making it worse. More to come…"

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Darkness Dying"

"Darkness Dying"

by Jim Kunstler

“The nature of the NGO scams is to have a cause that sounds philanthropic, like ‘Save the Orphans of Sadville’ and then they pocket the money and zero actual orphans are helped.”

-  Elon Musk

"The exorcism of the USA just keeps revving up. You can tell by the number of revolutions-per-minute Elizabeth Warren’s head spins while she spews pea soup at the cameras. Who knew what a demon-infested slough USA Management Central was? And yes, I would like some insight as to how humble civil servants like Liz Warren accrue a $12-million fortune...and $30-million for Samantha Power (ex-USAID-chief)...and more than a $150-million for Nancy Pelosi. Could it be as simple as just good stock-picking? (Is that how they spend their time?)

You have reason to suspect that what goes on in Washington DC is the greatest racketeering operation ever run on God’s green earth. “A threat to our democracy!” the Party of Chaos spouted incessantly during the election campaign in re: Donald J. Trump. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post still declares on its name-plate. Yet, who exactly kept the lights off the past four years? Who scrambled the brains of the nation’s management and thinking classes? Who made mental illness aspirational?

You begin to detect that by “our democracy” they actually meant “our everlasting grift.” And it didn’t die darkness - it thrived, grew, and spread in the moist bureaucratic darkness like the Devil’s own slime mold. And now it is being revealed, to the astonished disgust of slightly more than half the nation that was not on-the-take. Turn over a log in the woods and you have the metaphor for “our democracy.” Countless hundred-footed things slither around under it, their feeding interrupted...

The political left’s success springs from its dedication to organizing its member ranks and their activities. Organizing has been the key to their grand plan for arriving at Utopia. Except, sometime near the dawn of this century, with the torch of communism burning out, they realized that Utopia was a destination unlikely to be reached. Instead, they could turn their organizing talent to directing the money flow from their ever-expanding roster of world-saving NGOs into the bank accounts of their own member ranks.

USAID was the poster-child for that, a flowering of mutually-referential dollar feedback loops providing six-figure “jobs” and non-stop cocktail partying for the elite surplus churned out of left’s training academies, Harvard, Brown, Yale - with a whopping vig paid to congress-persons and senators who disbursed massive taxpayer funding for each newly-sprouted org dedicated to the uplift of the “marginalized and oppressed.”

Of course, that was merely the feeding frenzy of the small fish on the surface. Deeper down, the money-flow was going to much more demonic enterprises: the color revolution gang in the CIA, State Department, and God knows what other surreptitious agencies...Antifa and BLM (the Democratic Party’s shock troops)...the news industry (now completely corrupted into a global mind-f*cking operation)...Hollywood’s zeitgeist-shaping dream factory of girl-boss fantasies...book publishing (with its zillion-dollar “advances-on-royalties” to political celebrity authors, who could never possibly earn-out that windfall on book sales)...the school systems at every level...the medical-pharma matrix...the military procurement racket too vast to even quantify (and the probable cause of the Pentagon’s consistent audit failures)...and, we’ve learned recently, the care-and-feeding of twenty-million illegal aliens ushered into our country by the “Joe Biden”/Al Mayorkas travel agency.

This colossal worm-farm lies exposed now with its slithering denizens drying up under the DOGE sunlamp. The response by the political left’s clown troop fronting for all these scams is the most pathetic performative cluster-B psychodrama ever enacted on the streets of our nation’s capital: Schumer, Maxine Waters, Ayana Pressley, Liz Warren, and every other mewling loser in Wokedom singing that old union ditty "Which Side Are You On" for the cameras - as if they were reenacting the 1907 Monongah Mining Disaster. They are crying - as the old saying goes - all the way to the bank.

The histrionics of the past three weeks are only the beginning, you understand, since USAID was just a mole-hill beside the mountain range of past turpitudes yet coming into view as Mr. Trump’s generals deploy in the battle-space. Yesterday - mirable dictu! - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was sworn-in for Health and Human Services, to oversee the empire of fraud that public health became during the rogue reign of Tony Fauci and his cohorts. The flip-side of MAHA is Make Medicine Truthful Again. Everything about health-care in America slouches in disrepute and ignominy, from the doctors hostage to their private equity taskmasters to the faked drug trials at FDA to the deliberate data mismanagement at CDC to the grant-and-kickback game at NIH and NIAID, to the hellscape of medical insurance fraud, to the revolving door between pharma and government - RFK faces one of the most onerous tasks of filth-clearing since Hercules shoveled out the Augean stables. And then there’s the giant hairball of poisoned American food.

The solitary figure who remains absent on the playing field is Kash Patel, and you can tell by the delaying tactics employed by the Party of Chaos that they (and their blob allies) dread the coming day that he gets confirmed to lead the FBI. That’s when the combined forces of avalanche, tsunami, earthquake, and fire send forth an exterminating spewage of long-suppressed information about the 1960s assassinations, RussiaGate, the Epstein matter, the Ukraine money-laundry, and any number of other unresolved treasonous scandals. It’s going to happen. And, if by some quirk of fate, Mr. Patel fails to get the votes, somebody else eventually will, somebody equally capable of fumigating that rat-hole. When that day comes, I’m sure Chuck Schumer will sing "Kumbaya" from the Capitol steps, expecting to make it all magically go away..."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

o

"DOGE Investigating Feds Whose Net Worths

 Have Exploded After Samantha Power Bombshell"

"Trump & DOGE Fire Layoff Bazooka: 

Targets 200,000 Fed Workers On Probation"

"Top 5 Best and 5 Worst Fast Food Chains Ranked! Must Try and Must Avoid"

Full screen recommended.

Frugal Living Tips, 2/14/25

"Top 5 Best and 5 Worst Fast Food Chains Ranked! 

Must Try and Must Avoid"

"Discover the top 5 fast food chains you should try and the 5 you might want to avoid. Based on customer reviews and satisfaction scores, we provide an in-depth analysis to help you make informed dining choices. Best fast food chains, worst fast food chains, top fast food rankings, must-try fast food, fast food chains to avoid, fast food reviews, customer satisfaction fast food, Chick-fil-A review, Five Guys review, Jersey Mike's Subs review, In-N-Out Burger review, Acai Republic review, Taco John's review, McDonald's review, Burger King review, KFC review, Popeyes review."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Travelling With Russell, 2/14/25

"Russian KFC (Rostic's) Has 

Opened a New Restaurant Format"

"Join me on a tour of a brand-new Rostic's Restaurant location in Moscow, Russia. After KFC left Russia, Rostic's took over all of the KFC locations throughout Russia. Chic Stop is their first-ever Micro Formation Restaurant location."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

John Wilder, "Charity, Corruption, And Bad Jokes About Iron"

"Charity, Corruption, And Bad Jokes About Iron"

by John Wilder

"As we pass through this next week, I’d like to remind everyone that Trump hasn’t been in office even a single month (seventeen years for GloboLeftists) at this point. One argument that I’ve seen the GloboLeft chattering class attempt to make is that USAID® is “too small to worry about, it’s less than 1% of the budget”. This is a continual talking point, so you know that the GloboLeftElite is coordinating them to make this point.

So, we are presented with the Paradox of Federal Spending as presented by the GloboLeftElite: “Every small budget cut is too small to matter, and every large budget cut is impossible to make.” I supposed I should call it Schrödinger’s Budget. But in context, USAID™ funding is fifty billion dollars. Doing the math, that’s $600 for a family of four. Every year. So, too small to matter? No, $600 would matter to a lot of folks. I mean, that’s a dozen eggs nowadays.

But there is a much, much bigger picture here. If the family of four had that extra $600, would they donate it?

• Would they donate it to an AIDS clinic in South Africa so that African prostitutes could get AIDS treatments?

• Would they donate it to Peruvian comic books to propagandize LGBT politics to Peruvian children?

• Would they give it to a luxury hotel in New York City to house illegal aliens with the nightly bed turndown service and the little mint on the pillow that they so rightly deserve?

• Would they donate it to a charity with several hundred million in the bank that pays their CEO $10 million a year so the charity could pay for oxygen for a 71-year-old with emphysema from smoking in Malaysia?

These are all real examples. Nothing I made up. This is where your tax dollars are going. So, what would that family do? Would it give it so they could see how monkeys act when they’re on cocaine? Or would they use it for their own, selfish purposes, things like buying food for the family?

Well, they don’t get to decide, because unelected (and, to listen to the GloboLeftElite) entirely independent bureaucrats whose decisions are unreviewable by anyone get to decide how to spend that money. Not the American public. Not the State Department. Not Donald Trump. And certainly not you.

Back before Pa Wilder passed on, I’d go visit him when I could, and go to church with him. On one Sunday we went to church, and the pastor prayed, “Oh, and I pray that the president and congress don’t pass welfare reform. In the spirit of charity, those people need help.” I got very, very angry. I rarely get angry in church, except for those times I got burned with holy water, but that’s another story. In this particular case, though, what made me mad was the idea that charity comes from the government.

No, charity doesn’t come from the government. Charity is a conscious choice. If the government gives someone money, it took it from someone else. It wasn’t voluntarily given. And if you think taxes are voluntary, I encourage you to stop paying them and send me the result of that experiment.

No, welfare from the United States government is a cruel parody of the idea of charity. It is money taken by force from people who may not want to give it. That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. Since it’s given not by an individual or church but rather the government, the welfare is often resented by those that get it. Yes. Resented. Because the act of welfare creates a system where the recipient is unconnected from the donor. Not only that, it is money given without any obligation on the part of the person receiving it, so they experience no growth. Additionally, there is no gateway to limit the recipient to people who are worthy.

I say it’s a parody of charity because real charity provides benefits to the giver as well as the receiver. It is a virtue, but when force is applied it is stripped of meaning to both. This, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of USAID. It was taken over by GloboLeftElite bureaucrats. The most charitable interpretation is that the agency was then taken over by people that Jerry Pournelle wrote about in his "Iron Law of Bureaucracy." 

Pournelle’s "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

“First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers (sic) union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”

This is the very kindest way I could describe the situation. In my opinion, the more likely reality of what happened at USAID is somewhat different. I think that $50 billion in funds dispersed on bureaucratic whims attracted corruption, and that corruption spread until nearly the entire organization was corrupt, top to bottom and fully in the hands of the GloboLeftElite to spend on themselves and to spend to increase their power. But I’m betting they’d say my viewpoint is less than charitable."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

o

Freely download "The Yak Online Governance Primer" here:

- https://www.yakcollective.org/

"Alert! US Nuke Bomber Near Russia; 'State Of Emergency'; Iran Attack"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 2/13/25

"Alert! US Nuke Bomber Near Russia;

 'State Of Emergency'; Iran Attack"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"The Crooks Are Freaking Out; Ray Dalio Sends Ominous Message"

Jeremiah Babe, 2/13/25

"The Crooks Are Freaking Out; 

Ray Dalio Sends Ominous Message"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Kevin Kern, "Another Realm"

Full screen recommended.

Kevin Kern, "Another Realm"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"This intergalactic skyscape features a peculiar system of galaxies cataloged as Arp 227 some 100 million light-years distant. Swimming within the boundaries of the constellation Pisces, Arp 227 consists of the two galaxies prominent right of center, the curious shell galaxy NGC 474 and its blue, spiral-armed neighbor NGC 470. 

The faint, wide arcs or shells of NGC 474 could have been formed by a gravitational encounter with neighbor NGC 470. Alternately the shells could be caused by a merger with a smaller galaxy producing an effect analogous to ripples across the surface of a pond. The large galaxy on the top lefthand side of the deep image, NGC 467, appears to be surrounded by faint shells too, evidence of another interacting galaxy system. Intriguing background galaxies are scattered around the field that also includes spiky foreground stars. Of course, those stars lie well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. The field of view spans 25 arc minutes or about 1/2 degree on the sky."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200827.html

Chet Raymo, “New Philosophy”

by Chet Raymo

"It is one of Albert Einstein's most-often quoted quotes: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." Is the world comprehensible? Apparently at least partially so. Consider the NASA solar eclipse atlas I referenced the other day. It is possible to calculate the precise locations and times for solar eclipses thousands of years into the future and past. That's comprehensibility for you.

Of course, there are still things we do not comprehend, such as consciousness or the development of organisms, but there is no good reason to suppose those things are intrinsically beyond human understanding. The whole of modern technological civilization and medicine is a monument to comprehensibility.

Why? Why this strange consonance between the world and the human mind? For centuries the answer was simple. God created a world of space and time, a finite mirror, so to speak, of his own intelligence. He created humans in his own likeness. Human intelligence partook of the intelligibility of God. Everything in the closed, human-centered cosmos was ordered in his likeness. The world was comprehensible because it was made that way - for us to comprehend.

Then, in the 16th and 17th centuries, came the great disruption, which Alexandre Koryé described in his seminal 1957 book "From the Closed World To the Infinite Universe." Daring thinkers resurrected the Greek idea that the universe might be infinite in extent and eternal in duration - no boundaries in space, no beginning or end in time. It was a radical thought, heretical really, but it meshed well with what the astronomers and physicists were learning about the world we live in. As the poet John Donne wrote:

    "And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
    The element of fire is quite put out,
    The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit
    Can well direct him where to look for it.
    And freely men confess that this world's spent,
    When in the planets and the firmament
    They seek so many new; they see that this
    Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
    'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
    All just supply, and all relation."

Of course, it wasn't as bad as all that. Galileo and Newton provided a new coherence. The physical world itself took on two characteristics of the Godhead - omnipresence and everlasting life. Everything unfolded not in accordance with the divine will, but according to eternal and immutable laws of nature. The Divine Artifex, master craftsman, in Koyré's words, was replaced by the Dieu fainéant, a lazybones God with nothing to do. And the comprehensibility of the world became- well, as Einstein said- incomprehensible. But...things were about to get more complicated. 

Koyré's "From the Closed World To the Infinite Universe" was published in 1957. When I started teaching college in 1964, the required reading for my general studies science course included two articles by two prominent physicists published in "Scientific American" at about the same time as Koyré's book. George Gamow, a principal architect of the big bang theory, made the case for a universe that began billions of years ago as an explosion from an infinitely dense and infinitely small seed of energy. Fred Hoyle, stalwart champion of the steady state theory, took the stand for an infinite universe with no beginning and no end, in which matter is continuously created in the space between the galaxies.

Both theories had strengths and weaknesses. For example, the big bang successfully accounted for the known abundances of hydrogen and helium in the universe but posited an embarrassing beginning that could not be explained. The steady state theory avoided the stumbling block of a universe that seemed to come from nowhere but replaced it with many little unexplained beginnings (those particles of matter appearing continuously from nothing). Yet the big bang theory made one prediction that was testable: if the universe began in a blaze of luminosity, a degraded remnant of that radiation should still permeate the cosmos, and the precise spectral distribution of this microwave-frequency background could be calculated.

Then, that very year I started teaching, the cosmic microwave background radiation was serendipitously discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, with precisely the predicted spectrum, a triumph of comprehensibility. The universe- space and time- had an apparent beginning! For some people, this extraordinary development re-opened the door to a creator God, whose intelligence is the source for the intelligibility of the world. Koyré may have anticipated this. In his final paragraph he wrote: "The infinite Universe of the New Cosmology, infinite in Duration as well as in Extension, in which eternal matter in accordance with external and necessary laws moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternal space, inherited all the ontological attributes of Divinity. Yet only those - all the others the departed God took away with Him."

What others? Personhood. Love. Justice. And intelligence. Intelligence that is the source of the intelligibility of the world.

But for Einstein, and many of us here, the mathematical singularity which is the big bang is an opaque barrier. To say the universe is created by God conveys no more information than to say it is created by X. We learned to live without Koyré's Dieu fainéant, the lazybones God who had nothing to do, and see no reason to bring him out of retirement. So why is the universe comprehensible?

There are reasonable arguments for the incomprehensibility of human consciousness, and some of them were given here the other day in Comments. Let me offer arguments for the contrary.

First, one very important feature of consciousness has already been comprehended. We can say with a high degree of confidence that there is no ghost in the machine, that consciousness is an emergent physio-chemical property of the material brain. Whether consciousness is deterministic or involves some measure of quantum uncertainty remains to be seen, but I find Roger Penrose's argument for quantum uncertainty unconvincing. For the moment, Ockham's Razor rules.

Second, we can study emergent consciousness by observing other organisms, from sea snails to chimpanzees. That is, in principle, we can build up an understanding of human consciousness incrementally. This assumes, of course, that human consciousness differs from that of other organisms only in complexity, not kind. Again, for the moment, the Razor rules.

Third, as I mentioned here once before, a project is underway to fully map the neuronal structure of the human brain, at which point it should be possible to construct an operational electronic analog of the brain. Will such machines be conscious? Google "artificial consciousness" and you'll find arguments for both sides. At the very least we will pare away some of the incomprehensibility.

Fourth, we may already have created a "conscious" machine: the internet, which approaches the human brain in its degree of interconnected complexity. It is continuously "aware," sensitive to millions of sensory inputs- touch, vision, hearing, smell, and for all I know even taste. I can ask a question in human language or tap an icon and instantly have a response from the internet's vast memory. The internet and its myriad of input/output devices mimic enough of the aspects of human consciousness for us to be increasingly confident that consciousness is not intrinsically beyond in principle understanding. And isn't in principle understanding all we ask of science, and Life?"

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"No Smooth Road..."

"Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere

of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps,

till the legend, over steep ways to the stars, fulfills itself."

- W. C. Doane

The Daily "Near You?"

Scottsboro, Alabama. USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"17 Words that Changed My Life Forever"

"17 Words that Changed My Life Forever"

by Jerry Clark

“I remember several years back I heard something that changed my life forever. Up until that point I had been struggling through life – doing everything the hard way. I couldn’t figure out why my life wasn’t going the way I felt it should be. I saw some people going through life effortlessly and seemingly with less tension and frustration while I was wondering if I could ever straighten out the mess my life had turned out to be. I was behind on my dreams, my promises, and my bills. Then one day I was listening to a tape and the lady was talking about the power of having dreams and goals and all of the other stuff that those motivational speakers talk about. By that point I had listened to hundreds of such tapes, but it seemed as if nothing worked for me.

Probably the only reason I was listening to that one was because I had developed a habit of listening to cassette tapes while driving my car. The statement the lady said was simple and I think I had even heard it somewhere before but this time a light bulb went on in my head. I remember stopping the tape and rewinding it over and over again to hear the 17 words she said. I couldn’t believe it was so basic and simple. I was looking for something sophisticated and complicated. I thought I had to attend a $10,000 seminar. I didn’t know I could find it on a $10 tape program.

I’m taking the time to tell you all of this preliminary information because when I tell you the 17 words, I really want you to get it and get it NOW! Because if you get it NOW, your life will never be the same. You will be using the same principle that all who have became wealthy before you have used. Even those who became wealthy and can’t tell you how they did use this same principle without even being aware of what they are doing. Well, are you ready for the 17 words that made a powerful and positive impact on my life and on the life of tens of thousands of individuals who have achieved unimaginable success? Of course you are… Well, here they are…

For things to change, you must get a

picture of what you want them to change to.

Yes, it’s as simple as it sounds and as easy as it seems… Don’t try to make it any complicated than this because it will only frustrate you.

You must know exactly what you want and the more specific and clear you can get, the better. This is important because Human Beings are Teleological in nature… In other words, we move towards the pictures we constantly hold in our minds. Let me give you an example… Suppose you went to the store and bought a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle but it didn’t have a picture on the box of what the end result should look like.

Would you have a much harder time putting the picture together? Of course. You may eventually figure it out; however, the person who has a clear picture of what the end result should look like will be more than 100 times ahead of you. The question is are they 100 times ahead of you because their IQ is 100 times greater? Is it because they are 100 times better looking than you? Maybe it’s because they live 100 times closer to the person who created the puzzle? Ohh, I know – they were one of the first students to take the Evelyn Woods mind-expanding speed-reading and comprehension course right? If none of this is true then what is?

Yes, the person who had the clear and specific picture of what the outcome was supposed to be was simply operating in accordance to how our brain works. It moves towards the pictures we hold in our mind. It’s interesting because once you know exactly what it is you are moving towards, you seem to automatically know the steps to take or the necessary steps will soon become noticeable.

Your brain's subconscious mind, operating similar to a magnet, will start to attract in your direction the conditions, people, and circumstances that will help you move closer to the mental picture you maintain in your mind and it will repel all of those things that do not correlate to the picture you have in your mind. Therefore, the people who are clear and specific about what they want are using the powers of the Universe to assist them. This is, indeed, an awesome power. A person who knows how and uses this awesome power of the Universe to his or her advantage is a person who is working smart. A person who struggles every day trying to move closer to the success that they have no idea how it’s supposed to look is a person who is working hard.

Based on your observations over the years, do you think that most people are working hard or working smart? People who just work hard day in and day out without a clear picture of what they are moving towards are about as exciting as a tulip. Even though they may seem to be willing to work hard and put in the hours, they don’t seem to have much life in them. And people want to follow people who seem to have some life in them. If they want to find people who don’t seem to have much life in them, all they have to do is go to their job. People will follow people who look like they know where they are going and look like they are excited about the journey.

You must understand that your strength comes from knowing what you want. This will ignite the fire inside of you and enable you to borrow from the promise of the future so you can engage in the activities today that will move you closer and closer to what you want. It will enable you to go through the trials and tribulations that may be necessary so you can arrive at your destination. But remember the journey will be more important than the destination because in the journey you will become the person you require to become to finally arrive at your destination. So when you reach your destination, look at the person you have become and set a new destination so you can continue to grow and develop.

Whatever you do, just always remember that for things to change, you must get a picture of what you want them to change to. These are the "17 Words that Changed My Life Forever"… why not allow them to change yours too?”

- http://prorev.com/

"The Dead Man Who Wore Pajamas "

"The Dead Man Who Wore Pajamas" 

by Paulo Coelho

"I remember reading a piece of news on the Internet that a man was found dead in Tokyo on 10 June 2004, dressed in his pajamas. So what? I imagine that most people who die wearing their pajamas either a) died in their sleep, which is a blessing, or b) were in the company of their relatives or on a hospital bed, death did not come quickly, so they all had time to grow used to the undesirable one, as Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira called it. The news goes on: when he died, he was in his room. So, the hospital hypothesis is out and we are left with just the possibility that he died in his sleep, without suffering any, without even realizing that he would not see the light of day. But there is still another possibility: assault followed by death.

Those who have visited Tokyo know that the gigantic city is at the same time one of the safest places in the world. I remember once stopping to eat with my editors before taking a trip to the interior of Japan all our suitcases were in sight on the rear seat of the car. Immediately I said that it was very dangerous, someone was sure to come along, see all those bags and make off with our clothes, documents and so on. My editor just smiled and told me not to worry, he knew of no such incident in all his long years of life (in fact, nothing happened to our suitcases, although I kept tense all through dinner).

But to return to our dead man in pajamas: there was no sign of struggle, violence or anything of the sort. In an interview, a Metropolitan Police officer stated that it was almost certainly a case of a sudden heart attack. So the hypothesis of homicide was also eliminated. The body had been found by workers of a construction company on the second floor of a building in a housing complex that was about to be torn down. Everything led to the idea that the dead man in the pajamas, unable to find anywhere to live in one of the most densely and expensive cities in the world, had simply decided to settle where he did not have to pay any rent.

And now for the tragic part of the story: our dead man was only a skeleton dressed in pajamas. At his side was an open newspaper dated 20 February 1984; a calendar on the table nearby gave the same date. In other words, he had been there for twenty years. And nobody had noticed his absence.The man was identified as a former employee of the company that had built the housing complex, where he had moved to in the early 80s soon after his divorce. He was just over fifty years on the day that all of a sudden, reading the newspaper, he left this world.

His ex-wife never sought for him. It was discovered that the company where he worked had gone bankrupt right after the building had been finished, since no apartment was sold, and so they did not find it odd that the man never turned up for his daily activities. His friends were looked up, and they put his disappearance down to the fact that he had borrowed some money and could not pay it back.

The news ends informing us that the mortal remains were delivered to the ex-wife. I finished reading the article and wondered at the last sentence: the ex-wife was still alive, and for twenty years had not even looked up her husband. What must have gone through her head? That he no longer loved her, that he had decided to remove her for ever from his life? That he had met another woman and disappeared without a trace? That life is like that, once the divorce procedures are over there is no point in carrying on a relationship that has been legally terminated. I imagine what she must have felt upon finding out the fate of the man with whom she had shared a good part of her life.

Then I thought of the dead man in his pajamas, of solitude so utter and abysmal that for twenty years nobody in this whole wide world had realized that he had simply disappeared without leaving a trace. And my conclusion is that worse than feeling hunger and thirst, worse than being jobless, suffering for love, in despair over some defeat, worse than all this is to feel that nobody, absolutely nobody in this world, cares for us. Let us at this moment say a quiet prayer for this man and let us offer him our thanks for making us reflect on how important our friends are." 

- http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

The Poet: A. J. Constance, "All of Us Here On This Spinning Blue World"

"All of Us Here On This Spinning Blue World"

"Let's not plan too much

or expect

or promise

or say how much

or how little

or outline how things must be

or how they must not be.

All of us here on this beautiful

spinning blue world,

let's just love each other

from one millisecond to the next

as much as we can."

- A. J. Constance

o

Full screen recommended.

The Moody Blues, "Blue World"

"How It Really Is"

 

"I Don't Believe..."

"I don’t believe in ‘original sin.’ I don’t believe in ‘guilt.’ I don’t believe in villains or heroes – only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.”

- Tennessee Williams

Bill Bonner, "The Ford Factor"

1977 Ford F-150 Fleet side.

"The Ford Factor"

by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "We’ve left a few important dots, like mixed cement waiting in wheelbarrows… we need to connect them before they harden up. How come we say that stocks do not go up over the long run, when they are up 366 times since 1925? Why is the price of a Ford pickup truck is still a good way to measure real value? And is this a good time to buy gold, even at record high prices? Let’s clear up the F-150 Deflator issue today… we’ll move on to the others later. But first, the dots keep coming…

Yesterday, while we were still incarcerated by the snow, we watched the most remarkable White House press conference we have ever seen. Trump, Musk and little four-year-old X in the Oval Office. And Musk did the talking! As usual, the mainstream press went wild. They had worked months to tag ‘The Donald’ with fomenting an insurrection in Jan, 2021… and now… another coup d’etat!

• Newsweek: "Top Historian Warms Elon Musk is Performing a Coup"

•The Nation: "Who Will Stop Elon Musk’s Coup"

•The Atlantic: "Elon Musk’s Bureaucratic Coup"

But there’s no more of a ‘coup’ today than there was four years ago. A coup is a violent takeover, like the dozens that have been organized by the CIA since WWII. One group seizes power from another group - by force. That is not what is going on today in the US. Elon may be buying influence. Trump may be selling it… or perhaps just renting it out for a while… but it’s not a coup. The question for us is: What is the meaning of it? Is Musk really reducing the deficit? Is he really changing the course of history? We’ll see…

In the meantime, the snow has melted away. Day to day, the weather changes. One warm day. One cold day. And yet, there’s a deeper pattern at work, a Primary Trend. Spring is coming. It is the ‘eternal return.’ The earth spins… and circles the sun. Everything begins… and ends where it started off, from dust to dust. Net zero. The only thing that is linear, with neither beginning nor end, is time. In the end, time is all we have. And most people earn their way in life by selling it, hour by hour, week by week.

The average wage was about $5,400 in 1925. Today, it’s $60,000 according to the Labor department. That puts the gain at eleven times. But the cost of a new Ford truck (basic, working man’s model) has gone up from $500 to $42,000 – 83 times.

In 1925, it took a wage earner only a bit more than a single year’s work to buy an average house. Now, it takes more than eight years. But for an investor, it took only the equivalent of 50 Dows to buy a house a hundred years ago. Now, it takes only twelve. It’s all a bit puzzling and confusing. But we’ll figure it out.

When we were in college, we worked in the summers as a roofer. It meant carrying heavy packs of shingles on our shoulders up a steep ladder. Today, nobody does that; all the materials are unloaded from a truck by a forklift and telescoped onto the roof. Carpenters today rarely fashion windows or doors on the job site. Nor do they cut wood with a handsaw. Instead, the parts are pre-fabbed in factories and assembled on site with nail guns, laser levels, and lifts.

But every time we mention houses or autos as a way of keeping track of real wealth, we get a note from George Gilder or another of the ‘Time Prices’ crowd telling us that our method is invalid. “Of course they are more expensive,” they say, “they’re better.”

But first, how come technology only improves the product… and not the production? Of course, it works on both ends of the assembly-line and everywhere in-between. Improvements on the production side - robotics, better materials, new techniques - should make it less expensive to turn out good products. It takes less human labor to build a Ford pickup than it did a century ago; it should also take less labor to buy it.

Also, if technology delivers a better car, and you have to pay more for it, the tech gain is a fraud. If you have to pay more - in time - for the better product, you’ve gained nothing. Because your time is limited and has to be taken away from the other things you wanted. Real net gain = zero.

Finally, the whole idea that modern things are ‘better’ is unproven. Is a cherry pie better today than the ones we ate as children? Are our blue jeans stronger, more durable? And our houses? Is Monticello inferior to a modern McMansion? We don’t think so. More to come…"

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "I Lost My Job Via Text"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 2/13/25

"I Lost My Job Via Text"

"You won’t believe this one! In today’s video, I’m talking about Kirsty’s shocking and unprofessional experience - her job offer was canceled over a TEXT message! Can you imagine? She had already quit her old job and was just days away from starting the new one when her would-be boss decided to “rescind” the offer. And the reason? Absolutely ridiculous. This kind of behavior from companies today is beyond unprofessional, and I break it all down for you. Layoffs, shady employer practices, and even bizarre tech like AI-driven beekeeping. Oh, and don’t even get me started on Jeep’s crazy new ad program!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Prepare For A Worst Case Scenario, Much Higher Inflation Is Coming"

Gregory Mannarino, 2/13/25

"Prepare For A Worst Case Scenario, 

Much Higher Inflation Is Coming"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Market Gains 2/13/25

"9,000 Employees Just Got Fired From Chevron"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Jaw Dropping Prices At Kroger"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 2/13/25

"Jaw Dropping Prices At Kroger"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Travelling with Russell, 2/13/25

"Russia's Oldest Meat Processing 

Plant Factory Shop Tour"

"What is it like shopping at a meat processing plant company store? Mikoyan Meat-Processing Plant is Russia's oldest meat processing plant, dating back over 200 years. What products does their company store have to offer?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/