Full screen recommended.
R.E.M. "Everybody Hurts"
"Don't throw your hand..." Never give up... never.
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Saturday, December 20, 2025
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Will the spider ever catch the fly? Not if both are large emission nebulas toward the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga). The spider-shaped gas cloud on the left is actually an emission nebula labelled IC 417, while the smaller fly-shaped cloud on the right is dubbed NGC 1931 and is both an emission nebula and a reflection nebula.
About 10,000 light-years distant, both nebulas harbor young, open star clusters. For scale, the more compact NGC 1931 (Fly) is about 10 light-years across.”
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" I do not question the presence of intelligent life on other planets;
but I do question its existence on this one."
- Dr. Ivan Desantis
Chet Raymo, “Half Sick Of Shadows”
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“Half Sick Of Shadows”
by Chet Raymo
“Who is this woman? Her name is on the prow of her boat: The Lady of Shalott. Yes, it’s Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” from the poem of 1842, here illustrated by John William Waterhouse in 1888. By some unspecified curse this lovely maiden was confined to a tower…
“Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Through the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river”
near Camelot, where, forbidden to look out the window, she observed the world in a mirror and wove what she saw into a tapestry. So what is she doing in the boat, with her hand-stitched creation? One day, Sir Lancelot rode by her tower alone. She saw him in the mirror and – “half sick of shadows” – couldn’t resist turning to see him unreflected.
“His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d;
On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flow’d
His coal-black curls as on he rode…”
The mirror cracked. She left her loom, descended from the tower, found a boat, inscribed her name on the prow, and…
“Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right -
The leaves upon her falling light -
Thro’ the noises of the night”
cast off to drift downstream to Camelot – and to Lancelot. But curses are not to be foiled.
“For ere she reach’d upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.”
We are all of us in a way the Lady of Shalott, all of us who seek to create an image of the world, artists, poets, scientists. We perceive the world through the filter of our limited senses, our biologically evolved brains, our nurtured preconceptions. We weave our tapestries, knowing that our creations are a reflection removed from reality. Our “curse” is to be in love with the real, yet never able to embrace it except in the cold glass of conceptualization. Our legacy? To be found in a boat lodged among the reeds, our tapestry draped across the thwart, with Camelot yet somewhere further down the stream, glistening, beckoning, inescapably out of reach. But, ah, there’s that gorgeous tapestry.
There is another curse, self made, and that is to mistake the mirrorworld for the world outside the window, to fail to recognize the contingency of our conceptualizations, to forego an honest seeking for the falsely found, and – most ominously – to want to impose our own mirrorworld on others.”
"Perhaps..."
"Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy.
But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants
can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future.
Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future."
- Arthur C. Clarke
Gerald Celente, "Crash, Worse Than 1929..."
Gerald Celente, 12/20/25
"Crash, Worse Than 1929..."
"In this explosive interview, renowned trend forecaster Gerald Celente issues a dire warning: the AI-driven stock market bubble is mirroring the 2000 dot-com bust, with Nvidia and Meta volatility signaling an impending crash worse than 1929, fueled by overvalued P/E ratios, $39 trillion U.S. debt, and empty office buildings poised to collapse 30 mid-sized banks."
Comments here:
"Philadelphia Homeless Crisis 2025: Through America’s Darkest and Most Forgotten Streets"
Full screen recommended, if you can stomach it.
Homeless US News, 12/20/25
"Philadelphia Homeless Crisis 2025:
Through America’s Darkest and Most Forgotten Streets"
"Philadelphia - a city rich in history and culture - is now revealing one of the darkest and most forgotten realities in America. In this 2025 homeless documentary, we walk through streets where homelessness, addiction, and extreme poverty have taken over entire neighborhoods. What unfolds here is raw, disturbing, and hidden from most of the world.As the homeless crisis in Philadelphia deepens, entire blocks have become survival zones. Open drug use, fentanyl addiction, untreated mental illness, and overcrowded shelters define daily life for those trapped on the streets. These are not isolated scenes - they are part of a growing national emergency unfolding in real time. This documentary exposes the truth about homeless in America in 2025, showing how people are being forgotten in one of the nation’s most historic cities. The reality on these streets is far worse than most imagine - and impossible to ignore once seen."
Comments here:
"1,200,000 Layoffs, Grocery Prices Explode, and RV Living - 16 U.S. States Are Out of Control"
Full screen recommended.
Rollin With Rivr, 12/20/25
"1,200,000 Layoffs, Grocery Prices Explode,
and RV Living - 16 U.S. States Are Out of Control"
"America is entering a critical economic phase in 2025 - and most people aren’t prepared. In this video, we break down how mass layoffs, rising food costs, and housing unaffordability are colliding across 16 U.S. states, pushing families, seniors, and workers toward RV living as a last resort. This isn’t about travel or lifestyle freedom - it’s about economic survival. We analyze the data behind job cuts, cost-of-living increases, rent inflation, and housing shortages, and explain why RVs are becoming America’s fastest-growing form of emergency housing. From cities tightening overnight parking laws to states quietly restricting vehicle dwelling, millions are being squeezed from every direction. Whether you’re worried about job security, inflation, housing costs, or the future of RV living in America, this is essential information you need to see."
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 12/20/25
"Layoffs In 2026 Will Be Far WorseThan 2025, Here's Why"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 12/20/25
"Budweiser Closing Down As US Economy Gets Worse"
Comments here:
"The Fundamental Pivot of Humanity"
"The Fundamental Pivot of Humanity"
by Paul Rosenberg
"At some point, someone must have considered the things we’ll start to cover today, but I haven’t found any evidence of it. It’s also ironic that I should be the person introducing this subject, because it involves evolutionary science, with which I’ve had a difficult relationship.
On one hand, there’s no question about genetic (DNA) inheritance and that certain traits displace others over time; the evidence for that is overwhelming. Natural selection, or something that looks like it, has been occurring. On the other, evolutionary scientists can be remarkably unscientific and rigidly dogmatic, lashing out at unbelievers and heretics with vehemence. I’ve learned to turn away from such people and their dogmas. As Goethe noted back in his time, “Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong.” If you want more detail on this, you can find it in our book on Post-Primate Society, but that will have to be something you seek out.
What Happened Two Million Years Ago? Two million years ago, give or take, there was a fundamental and unexplained change in the archaeological record. Since then our progress has come far faster than it should have according to evolutionary theory, leaving scientists perplexed. Here, for example, are two passages from Carel P. Van Schaik’s highly regarded textbook, "The Primate Origins of Human Nature": "Whatever made us human must have been something very unusual. Even some non-cultural features of humans are sufficiently unique to leave our usual approaches to understanding their evolution close to ineffective.
Something special has been happening in us; something with no real analogs among other species. You can see this yourself if you examine ancient skulls and their reproductions at Natural History museums. You’ll see that the pre-2 million BC skulls (homo habilis and prior) have ridges at the eyebrow level, and that the skulls go directly backward from there. That is, they have no forehead.
Beginning at homo ergaster and homo erectus, however – that being roughly two million years ago – the skulls begin to rise in their fronts. The image below displays the change well. Notice the low skulls turning into the modern skull at the top, featuring a high, spacious forehead.
Now, please refer to the graph. You’ll see that the long, slow increase in brain size takes off in a “hockey stick” pattern at 2 million years ago. But there is one more crucial detail here, and that is the way human brains became bigger: They changed not only in size, they changed in shape. Human brains feature an enormous prefrontal cortex. This is the structure that allows us to do all the massively advanced things we do. And this structure could not fit into our skulls without that high forehead; the prefrontal cortex fills precisely that new space.
So, please understand that this is the fundamental fact of human evolution and human behavior. Any explanations of human development that do not feature this fact are missing their core. Thus, they are likely to wander into unmoored speculation. (And generally into speculation that preserves and expands pre-existing assumptions.)
Two Primary Posits: A posit, of course, is a statement that we propose for consideration... a statement that we we intend to support and/or prove. The two posits we make here seem sensible. Sensibility isn’t proof, of course, and properly proving things that began thousands or millions of years ago can be difficult, but this or something very much like it did occur and is occurring. And so, here they are; our two primary propositions:
Humans behave precisely like primates who had a pre-frontal cortex dropped into them.
From this, we can identify human institutions and actions, strengths and weaknesses, as direct effects of posit number one. This illuminates not only a great deal of our history, but our future as well.
Primates With Superpowers: Our bodies share a tremendous amount of chemistry and form with primates (baboons, bonobos, chimps, etc.). Scientifically we are classed as, and old primate routines still run in us... a lot of them. But we are also incredibly different, and the seat of that difference is our prefrontal cortex, which I’ll abbreviate as PFC. And if there’s anything in nature that might be called “superpowers,” we are the ones who have them, and the thing that makes them work is our PFC.
The standard description of the PFC (again, prefrontal cortex, the very front of our brains) is that it “makes executive decisions.” That’s true enough, but it’s also a thin description. The PFC allows us to conceive of ourselves. That is, it opened up our internal universe. The prefrontal cortex gives us the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals, not just in reference to external things. It allows us to be conscious of ourselves. And that turned us into advanced beings.
Now, before I begin explaining precisely what our new brains have opened up to us, I want you to see what the two scientists we’ll be quoting today, Van Schaik and Robert Sapolsky (in his book "Behave"), note as uniquely human characteristics: "The prefrontal cortex gives us the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals. The first [major difference between the cultures of humans and great apes] is that human culture is characterized by extensive use of symbols... use of symbols among humans is incomparably richer than among great apes. Humans are hypervariable.”
The hyper-cooperation that characterizes humans. Language is the most obvious difference between humans and all other animals, and arguably the most consequential one. When we humans think – when we converse within ourselves – “we” are seated in our PFC. From there we refer to both our interior selves and the outer world at the same time. It is in this condition, and only in this condition it seems, that we can do things like recall on demand and imagine with detail and depth.
This ability to think – our superpower – has brought humans to the place where we have no natural predators. More or less every other creature on this planet has some natural predators, but we don’t. There are the occasional “bear in the woods” stories, but those happen when we purposely leave our intelligently structured environments, and infrequently at that. And this, our elevation above predation, stands in spite of the fact that, unlike nearly all other creatures, we are bereft of natural weapons: no claws, no fur, no teeth suited to fighting, and so on.
Our Interior Universe: It would be hard to over-state the importance of this interior universe that is opened by our new PFC. This is a basic structural adaptation to consciousness. Our PFC, by being connected to the rest of our brain and yet separating itself from it, is able to use the rest of the brain as a partner and as a tool. What I’ll do now is start listing some of the things that became possible to us with the PFC. I’ll start with a very simple one.
Deferred gratification. We can imagine the scenario that will come to us if we bypass the moment’s pleasure and work with no immediate reward. Then we can order our actions accordingly. This was essential, for example, for farming. The seed corn had to be set aside, even when the family was hungry and low on food. It’s also necessary for thrift, exercise, education and a thousand other things. Some creatures (notably those who hibernate) do something like this. At best, however, these are one-trick operations; sharply limited actions spurred by instinct rather than decided upon by deliberation. Our delayed gratifications are chosen, adaptable and limitless.
Morality. As we’ve noted before, self-reference – the internal standards, recall and imagination rooted in the PFC – made us inherently moral beings. Humans run facts through their minds “in the first person;” from a purely self-interested view. Thus we form decisions on what we believe to be the best available evidence. By assuming others to be like ourselves and running “as if” experiments (how would it feel if this was done to me?) we extend our pure decisions to others, treating them as fairly as we treat ourselves. This is morality, and we alone seem to possess it.
Furthermore, this is the engine that drives our massive cooperation. Just as a base-level proof, consider the things humans complain about: They cluster strongly around people doing to others what they wouldn’t like themselves.
We are infinitely creative beings. This is true only because our PFCs have opened an internal universe to us. As I’ve noted before, humans, alone in the known universe, are able to reverse entropy willfully. That’s such an important concept that I’m ready to put it on billboards.
Like you I sometimes hear people who are trying to sound smart or enlightened, recounting all the ways in which humans are deficient, even comparing us negatively with animals. A rough response that sometimes runs through us is “Let me know, please, the next time a team of dolphins builds a hospital or a chimp writes a symphony.” And while harsh, such a response illustrates the immense benefit we gained with our superpowered brains. The rest of our brain is now open to training, communication and we don’t know what else. This is an area where I believe a great deal lies in front of us. Our relative lack of progress in this area is likely the result of two things:
We generally had little reason to dig into this, being overburdened (as most of us were for most of our history) with our daily work, raising our children, dealing with difficult relatives, a lack of rain or shipments, and so on. Those of us who spent a good deal of time in spiritual endeavors may have occasionally stumbled upon this, but indirectly.
Over the past few centuries, we’ve been led to fear our own minds. The phrase, “the depths of the subconscious,” leads most people to expect dark, animalistic, horrifying and embarrassing things. (A greatly exaggerated concept.) That said, we have learned to train our subconscious mind. Everyone who has created a new habit has done so. By making a habit, we use our PFC to train the rest of our mind to do this a new way, which will no longer require conscious thought.
We also see this in creativity. Creative people learn, mainly by accident, that if they feed needs to their subconscious properly (usually meditatively and or just before sleep), a solution will tend to appear in their minds, unbidden. Again, this is a use of the subconscious, initiated by the PFC. And so I say again, a great deal of fallow ground lies here.
The Hybrid Characteristics: More or less everything we covered above has been introductory: setting a base of understanding and alignment. Now we can move forward into the really interesting things. And since the best way is probably to start with the process of abstraction, we’ll do just that.
Abstraction is the process of creating mental categories and fitting things into them. It’s one of the most common things humans do. Telling a child, “Don’t throw balls in the house,” uses “ball” as an abstraction. We don’t want to specify each type, and the kid is more than able to extend “ball” to include everything from the tennis ball in his hand to the basketball across the room. That’s abstraction.
And while humans are the only known creatures to use abstraction widely, there is at least some root for abstraction in primates. In specific, they identify us-them divisions very well. I’ve yet to see a study that defines this one way or the other, but so it appears.
It is interesting that the us-them abstraction of primates is a binary: An extremely easy to process division between categories of things. It is further interesting to notice that the simplest, most primitive and easiest abstraction for us to make is the binary opposite. We see this very clearly in word association tests, where the fastest and most common answers tend to go like this:
Hot. Cold.
Happy. Sad.
Hard. Soft.
Left. Right.
Wet. Dry.
Apparently this is circuitry we inherited. With a PFC, however, we became able to use abstractions profligately. And here we begin to see primate circuitry mingling with advanced human circuitry. Consider this: Male primates get a testosterone boost from dominating other primates, and, for better or worse, we share a lot of that chemistry. But with us, it’s not just direct dominance that raises our testosterone: abstract dominance does the same thing. Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts our testosterone levels. Even our favorite sports team winning raises our testosterone levels.
So, by merely watching images on a television screen, we get the same effect that baboons do from winning a direct, physical contest. In us, then, mere abstraction triggers physical effects. That is, our dominance circuits (the ones that trigger testosterone when victorious) also interact with our advanced circuits. We, then, are hybrid creatures, running primate impulses through more evolved systems.
And it goes still farther. Consider this notation (based upon a study) from Sapolsky: Testosterone more closely tracks winning through skill. (Rather than through luck). What we see here is our primate impulses being run through (or otherwise being affected by) not only abstraction, but our morality mechanism. Winning by skill deserves the full testosterone boost, winning by accident doesn’t. It wouldn’t be fair.
This is also why people turn into petty tyrants once they’re ensconced in homeowners’ associations and rules committees: “Punishing norm violations,” Sapolsky notes, “is satisfying.” This again is abstracted dominance. Here people who wouldn’t be able to assert physical dominance get in on the hormone-boost game.
There are many more examples of this type, and we’ll be covering some below, but I want you to notice the key point in all of this, which is that we are operating in a hybrid way, partly as primates and partly as higher beings. If this is even half-way true, we have found a crucial point of reference… a type of landmark, and a very potent one.
On one hand, this seems degrading, that we have so very much monkey circuitry in us. But on the other, it is massively elevating: If we can understand what’s really going on in us, we can move forward much better, becoming advanced creatures far more quickly than we had imagined. And while we won’t have space to establish the fact in this issue, the clear fact is that we’ve been evolving faster and faster over the past several millennia. Humanity is not the same as we were even a few thousand years ago. We are becoming better. And please note that we’ve made significant progress in establishing our two posits:
Humans behave precisely like primates who had a pre-frontal cortex dropped into them. From this, we can identify human institutions and actions, strengths and weaknesses, as direct effects. And again, this is very good news.
Planet Primate: I frequently divide the world (and human action in general) between production and plunder. Like any “two kinds of people” reference it’s rough, partial and not entirely fair, but it remains a useful generalization. And we’ll see almost precisely this division as we continue these studies: Primate characteristics and primate behavior are necessary for the continuance of the ruling models of this planet... and are enforced by the ruling models of this planet. A very easy way to begin this conversation, and an entirely fitting one, is with a comment from Van Schaik’s book: "Among non-human primates, skew [in access to resources] arises because dominants take larger shares, either by force or by threat of force. In humans, similar processes ensue."
In another place, he gets specific on primate dominance: "When a dominant and subordinate both arrive in a fruit tree, the dominant will have priority seating, picking a rich branch and thus forcing a subordinate to settle in at a less rich part of the tree. If the subordinate reads the dominant’s plans wrong and enters the branch earmarked by the dominant it will be threatened or attacked."
I’ve not sure there could be any better illustration of this in human life than an explorer planting a government’s flag in a new territory. (Even on the moon!) The primate model is used all day, every day, in human governments. All penalties accrue to the dominant band of rulers. And a larger percentage of human production is taken by human rulership than could be taken by an alpha gorilla.
Government, then, is almost entirely a primate-style operation, expanded with advanced human abilities. But likewise are the justifications and supports for rulership. The dominance hierarchies of this planet (and that’s the current scientific term for both primate and human power systems) reproduce their primary characteristics in the populace. Sapolsky notes the results of one study: "Countries with more brutal socio-economic hierarchies produce children who enforce their own hierarchies more brutally. The key training grounds for this, of course have been government schools, where children are forced into relationships, with a strong and even dangerous dominant directly above them (the teacher), and further dominants above them."
Contrast that with the ad hoc relationships we choose in our non-ruled life. Those relationships are guided by our internal morality systems. In our families, small businesses and Little Leagues, we operate mainly by the golden rule, which is a direct use of our PFC-enabled morality mechanism. Enforcement of hierarchy-generated demands (edicts, rules) is a displacement of the golden rule; a triumph of the primate over the human. The uncritical enforcement of legislation is primate stuff, no matter how creative and thick are our justifications.
And yet, this occurs endlessly, and among humans who are nearly always decent and reasonable people. But this, too, is explicable by our theory. Humans are easy to mislead because of their internal references. We are complicated beings, struggling to make our way (so to speak) from the kingdom of monkeys to the kingdom of heaven. And so we carry a great number of vulnerabilities within us. As Solomon Ashe showed, we are massively vulnerable to conformity pressures, and this is but one of many. Those seeking the dominant position take power precisely by using such vulnerabilities, and they’ve been quite successful at it.
As we all know, elections – a modern path to power – don’t revolve around reason, they revolve around emotion, and generally around fear. The reason, of course, is because emotions provide the most direct paths to the best vulnerabilities. And so it continues. The operators of social media corporations, the new leading powers of our era, know very well that they are taking advantage of human weaknesses, and hire psychiatrists to make the most of it.
Moreover, our past errors defend themselves. Humans, after all, are intelligent, self referential and possess fine memories. You’ve doubtless seen and felt this: For a person to change his/her mind on a hotly debated issue is to condemn his or her self as having erred in the past. More than that, they can be confident that they’ll be called out for hypocrisy, and quite possibly made to suffer for it.
Changing our minds, then, carries both internal and external costs. And if the new opinion has opponents, suffering is likely via both avenues. This is a primary reason why people are afraid to change their minds and afraid to speak their minds. In far too many cases, they simply stop thinking along one line or another, once they can see they could be made to suffer for it.
And so we see that the human, carrying both primitive, primate circuitry and advanced, PFC-based abilities, is in a difficult position. He and she are at the same time far better and far more vulnerable. They also learn (and usually quickly) that they are the primary targets of the least ethical humans, who make use of them in their struggle for dominant positions. And all this rests on top of the fact that they are buffeted by circumstances in the physical world: sickness, loss, the immense labor of family, the uncertainty of life and so on. And yet, we rise.
The Road To Homo Novus: We are, and quite clearly in my view, on the road to homo novus, the new man. It is, perhaps, a confirmation of this that some of the most forward thinking humans – St. Paul and Friedrich Nietzsche among others – have tried to create a “new man” or a “superior man.” These theorists weren’t wrong that humans could and should become much better, but they were consistently wrong about the nature of the superior man, and how contemporary man would rise to his future position.
In particular, the theorists nearly always claimed that the path to the superior being involved conformity to an external standard of some type. That is, they took obedience, conformity and an assumption of personal inadequacy as a starting point. They were, however, wrong.
The path to the superior man, as it happens, involves using what is already in us, not seeking something from outside or convincing some super-dominant entity to elevate us. The correct model, as Jesus worked so hard to establish, is to grow into it. I’ve always loved this passage from the Torah that makes the same point:
For this commandment is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.
There is a great deal more to say about this, but I’ll leave you to seek it out. I’ll close with this: Our ascent is actual, it’s well underway, and we’re finding new tools to distinguish between that which helps our development and that which hinders it. Our path may be slow and at times difficult, but we are ascending like nothing else we’ve ever seen."
"A Primer For The Propagandized: Fear Is The Mind-Killer"
"A Primer For The Propagandized:
Fear Is The Mind-Killer"
by Margaret Anna Alice
“Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.”
- George Orwell
"The noose is dangling gently around our necks. Every day, they cinch it tighter. By the time we realize it’s strangling us, it will be too late. Those who – gradually and gleefully – sacrifice their freedoms, their autonomy, their individuality, their livelihoods, and their relationships on the altar of the “common good” have forgotten this is the pattern followed by every totalitarian regime in history.
Everyone wonders how ordinary Germans could have been manipulated to participate or stand dumbstruck while their government was transformed into a genocidal juggernaut. This is how. Read Sebastian Haffner’s "Defying Hitler" memoir to see how this can happen anywhere - including here.
Everyone wonders how Russians could have permitted and even zealously reported fellow citizens for imprisonment and execution under "Article 58", the penal code invented to incarcerate anyone who dared express the slightest whisper of noncompliance under Stalin’s homicidal state. This is how. Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s meticulously documented "The Gulag Archipelago" to witness this progression of authoritarian lunacy.
Everyone wonders how Hutus could have suddenly started axing their Tutsi neighbors to death after being inundated with waves of anti-Tutsi propaganda from "Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines." Read Philip Gourevitch’s "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda."
The list goes on. And on. And on. From Machiavelli’s "The Prince" to Étienne de la Boetie’s "The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" to Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s "Manufacturing Consent" (and accompanying documentary) to BBC’s "The Century of the Self," mechanisms of mass control have been chronicled for millennia.
George Orwell wrote, "As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.”
Can you imagine what master propagandist Edward Bernays would have done with access to today’s mainstream media conglomerate combined with the global surveillance infrastructure of Big Tech? And you really think that’s not happening now - with another century of psychological, neurological, and technological research under their belts?
The present ability to curate reality and coerce obedience is unprecedented, far beyond what Orwell envisioned in "1984", Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451", Huxley in "Brave New World," and Burgess in "A Clockwork Orange."
A textbook example of "Problem Reaction Solution", the tsunami of worldwide Covid hysteria was the latest and potentially most threatening example of mass control in history. The recipe is simple. Take a naturally occurring phenomenon, say a seasonal virus, and exaggerate its threat far beyond every imagining - despite exhaustive evidence to the contrary. Suppress, silence, ostracize, and demonize every individual who dares present facts that expose the false mono-narrative.
Whip up a witches’ brew of anger, envy, and, most importantly, fear, escalating emotions to a boil so as to short-circuit our faculties of reason and logic. Isolate us from one another, supplant real-world interactions with virtual feuds, label nonconformists as a threat to the group, and pump the public with a disinformation campaign designed to confuse and atomize. In essence, foster a cultlike mentality that shuts down thought to guarantee assent.
Cultivate and wield our cognitive biases - especially ingroup bias, conformity bias, and authority bias - against us in a comprehensive divide-and-conquer policy that keeps us too busy squabbling amongst each other to recognize and unite against those corralling us into a Matrix-like collective delusion that enables the powerful to extract our resources for their own gain.
This ideological mass psychosis is religion - not science. If this were about science, the Media–Pharmaceutical–Big-Tech complex would not be memory-holing every dissenting voice, vilifying every thought criminal, and censoring every legitimate inquiry in quest of the truth.
Mark Twain said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” He also said: “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
The next time you’re watching the news, reading a social media post, listening to a friend repeat a scripted talking point, pay attention. Learn to identify the earmarks of propaganda, the clickbait used to trigger your emotions, the mechanisms employed to engineer your cognitive biases.
Don’t let your pride prevent you from seeing - and admitting - the Emperor is naked. We are losing our last sliver of opportunity to resist authoritarianism. This is not a partisan issue. Those who wish to control us have made it such because disunited lemmings are easier to steer than independent, critical thinkers.
This is a human issue. This is about crushing the middle class - the backbone of a democratic republic - and transferring trillions from the middle and lower classes to the ruling plutocracy. This is about demolishing the foundations of a free society and building it back - not better, but better-controlled.
I will close by recommending a series of illuminating videos on menticide (“the systematic effort to undermine and destroy a person’s values and beliefs … to induce radically different ideas”) throughout history by "Academy of Ideas." This analysis of mass psychosis is nonpartisan and of value to every thinking human being.
"Dare to question. Dare to disbelieve.
Dare to defy ideology in favor of science while you still can."
"Dumber, Sicker & Poorer"
"Dumber, Sicker & Poorer"
by Jim Quinn
"The chart below is a fascinating snapshot of the last 75 years in the demise of the American empire. There are currently 164 million people employed in America. About 34 million of those are employed part-time. When you understand the working age population is 275 million and your friendly number fudgers at the BLS declare 103 million of them NOT IN THE LABOR FORCE, and hysterically declaring only 7.8 million Americans are unemployed, you understand what a fraudulent economy we have. The reported 4.6% unemployment rate is complete and utter bullshit. In reality, it is north of 20%. Welcome to the golden age.
Click here for larger size.
What jumps off the chart to me is: The percentage of total jobs in the Education and Health Services sector has grown from 4.8% in 1950 to 17.8% today. Wow!! We must be the smartest, healthiest nation on earth. Not quite. With 28 million teachers, doctors, nurses, and mostly administrators (aka overhead), our education system matriculates millions of barely functional idiots into society every year. Meanwhile, as a country, we are sickly, fat, lazy, dependent upon Big Pharma drugs, and spend more on healthcare than any country on earth. To quote the immortal Dean Wormer, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
Proof we have become a non-productive, debt dependent, government dependent, shadow of our former industrial powerhouse is the decline in the percentage of manufacturing jobs from 30.2% in 1950 to 8.0% today. We borrow and consume, when we used to invest and build. Trump can threaten, tariff the world, and make bullshit announcements about manufacturing jobs coming back, but they are not coming back. Any new manufacturing plants will be operated by robotics.
Even though the percentage of government employees (aka parasites) has remained relatively steady since 1950, we are stuck with 24 million blood suckers who contribute nothing to the country’s productivity. The average working schmuck has to pay outrageously high taxes to pay the bloated salaries and pensions of these government freeloaders.
And now some bad news for the formerly well paid workers in the Professional & Business Services sector, which had grown from 6.6% of total jobs in 1950 to 14.1% today. ChatGPT and the avalanche of AI tools are eliminating jobs in these sectors at hyperbolic speed. These are the same assholes who used to tell blue collar workers to “learn to code”. Well, now the plumbers, electricians, and construction workers can recommend they learn to be fry cooks at McDonalds, but too late, robots are taking those jobs.
The relatively stable employment situation over the last few years has been the only thing keeping this ship of fools from sinking. But, the increase in the fraudulent unemployment rate from 4.0% when Trump took office to 4.6% today shows the ship is taking on water and it won’t be long before millions are drowning under the waves of debt, delusion, and dumb decisions."
"Scientists Sound The Alarm About 3 Major Fault Zones In The United States"
"Scientists Sound The Alarm About
3 Major Fault Zones In The United States"
by Michael Snyder
"Will 2026 be a year of great shaking for the United States? Coming into 2025, I thought that seismic activity would be a major global theme, and that has certainly turned out to be the case. This has been an extremely unusual year for earthquakes along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and volcanoes that have been dormant for ages are suddenly roaring to life all over the world. Here in the United States, we have been experiencing lots and lots of little earthquakes, but thankfully we have not been hit by a really bad one yet. Will our luck run out in 2026?
According to the Daily Mail, the dozens of earthquakes that have been rattling the New Madrid fault zone since the middle of November are “renewing fears of a catastrophic natural disaster soon”…"A giant seismic zone in the heart of the US has seen dozens of tiny earthquakes break out in the last month, renewing fears of a catastrophic natural disaster soon. Since mid-November, the US Geological Survey (USGS) has detected at least 38 low-level seismic events along the boundaries of the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee."
The threat that the New Madrid fault zone poses should not be underestimated. In a previous article, I discussed the series of catastrophic earthquakes that occurred along that fault zone in 1811 and 1812. Everyone agrees that they were the most powerful earthquakes in the entire history of the continental United States…"The New Madrid earthquakes were the biggest earthquakes in American history. They occurred in the central Mississippi Valley, but were felt as far away as New York City, Boston, Montreal, and Washington D.C. President James Madison and his wife Dolly felt them in the White House. Church bells rang in Boston. From December 16, 1811 through March of 1812 there were over 2,000 earthquakes in the central Midwest, and between 6,000-10,000 earthquakes in the Bootheel of Missouri where New Madrid is located near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
In the known history of the world, no other earthquakes have lasted so long or produced so much evidence of damage as the New Madrid earthquakes. Three of the earthquakes are on the list of America’s top earthquakes: the first one on December 16, 1811, a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale; the second on January 23, 1812, at 7.8; and the third on February 7, 1812, at as much as 8.8 magnitude."
Scientists tell us that it is just a matter of time before another great earthquake strikes this region. Six years ago, the USGS determined that a magnitude 7.7 quake would shake major cities all over the Midwest…"In 2019, USGS scientists modeled what a 7.7 magnitude earthquake would look like if it erupted along the Arkansas-Tennessee border, in an area near Memphis. The shockwaves of this hypothetical mega quake spread for hundreds of miles, reaching cities including Kansas City, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Birmingham."
Buildings in that area of the country are typically not constructed to withstand an event of that size, and so the USGS is projecting that hundreds of thousands of buildings would be damaged and the economic damage would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars…"Since this region is not well equipped to deal with a massive seismic event, studies of such an earthquake projected that a magnitude 7.7 earthquake would cause over 86,000 injuries or deaths, damage 715,000 buildings, and knock out power to 2.6 million homes. That report, by the University of Illinois, Virginia Tech, and George Washington University, also estimated that the cost could hit $300 billion directly, with indirect costs due to lost jobs possibly taking the damage to $600 billion."
An earthquake like that could hit us at any time. But when the “really Big One” finally arrives, it will be much, much worse than the USGS is anticipating. Experts are also urging us to keep an eye on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. We are being told that when it finally goes, “the Pacific Northwest could change in a matter of minutes”…"Beneath Cascadia’s forests and coastlines lies a 600-mile fault capable of producing a magnitude-9 earthquake. The last one struck in 1700, shaking the region for minutes and sending a massive tsunami all the way to Japan. Today, nearly 17 million people live on top of the same silent threat. Scientists warn that when it breaks again, the Pacific Northwest could change in a matter of minutes."
The reason why the Cascadia Subduction Zone is so dangerous is because it has the potential to produce “megathrust” earthquakes…"At depths shallower than around 30 km, the two plates of the CSZ are locked together by friction. Strain (deformation) slowly builds as the subduction forces continue to act upon the locked plates. Once the fault’s frictional strength is exceeded, the rocks slip past each other along the fault in a “megathrust” earthquake." A large enough “megathrust” earthquake could cause a tsunami that is hundreds of feet high to violently slam into the west coast. In such a scenario, the death toll would likely be cataclysmic.
So that is why any seismic activity in the region gets so much attention. On Monday, a magnitude 2.9 earthquake not too far away from Seattle caused quite a stir…"Reports of a massive explosion in Washington state sent residents in the Pacific Northwest into a state of confusion Monday morning. The US Geological Survey (USGS) sent out an alert just before 11.30am ET, warning that an explosion with the force of a magnitude 3.0 earthquake has just taken place near the town of Concrete. USGS quickly retracted the false explosion warning and reclassified the seismic event as a magnitude 2.9 earthquake, less than 70 miles north of Seattle."
Scientists assure us that a “megathrust” earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone is in our future. And when it finally occurs, it could also trigger the San Andreas fault system… "Successfully predicting earthquakes sounds like a dark art. However, new research hints it may be possible: Sediment cores extracted from the Pacific seafloor suggest that two major fault systems along the western coast of the United States and Canada might be partially synchronized. After an earthquake on the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone, an earthquake soon after on the northern part of the San Andreas fault appears to occur roughly half of the time, the new findings reveal. These results, published in Geosphere, provide evidence of stress triggering, which has long been invoked to explain how activity on one fault might lead to activity on another nearby."
Fault zones persist across wide swaths of our planet, but the one that stretches onshore and offshore from California to British Columbia, Canada, is particularly complex. The vertical strike-slip San Andreas fault, in the south, intersects the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of Northern California at a point known as the Mendocino Triple Junction. When the San Andreas fault system finally rips wide open, the geography of the state of California will be permanently altered.
And it won’t just be Southern California that is affected. Over the past couple of months, Northern California has been getting pummeled by literally hundreds of sizable quakes…"While California ranks second in the US in seismic activity, most quakes are small and go largely unnoticed. That has changed in recent weeks with two swarms impacting the Bay Area: one is east of San Francisco near San Ramon; the other is north of San Francisco near The Geysers.
Over the last 30 days, USGS has reported 1,470 earthquakes around The Geysers; in just the last 7 days, there have been 286. Most of these have been weak, with only 5 earthquakes rated a magnitude 2.0 or higher intensity over the last week. While the volume has been eyebrow raising, the intensity hasn’t. The opposite has been the case near San Ramon. There, over the last 30 days, there have been 139 earthquakes reported by USGS; over the last 7 days, that number has been 25. But the intensity of these earthquakes have been greater, with 39 rated magnitude 2.0 or greater and 6 rated 3.0 or greater over the last 30 days."
This is definitely not normal. San Ramon has been getting shaken so frequently that one social media user has compared it to “a massage chair”…“Wee bit nervous,” one person wrote on Threads, adding that she planned to stock up on water and earthquake supplies. "San Ramon is basically a massage chair today … but like, the stressful kind,” another person wrote on the social media site. “Dear Earth: we get it, you’re active. You can stop now.”
The Calaveras Fault is a major branch of the San Andreas fault system. This is the fault that has been causing so much shaking in San Ramon lately, and it has the potential to produce very large earthquakes…"Historically, the southern half of the central segment of the Calaveras Fault has been the most seismically active segment of the fault. It produced the 6.2 Morgan Hill earthquake in 1984. The 5.9 Coyote Lake earthquake in 1979 ruptured slightly to the south of these other earthquakes."
When you are driving your vehicle and one of those little warning signals on the dashboard lights up, what do you do? Hopefully you take it to a mechanic or you fix it yourself. Ignoring a warning signal like that is a really bad idea. Similarly, the New Madrid fault zone, the Cascadia Subduction Zone and the San Andreas fault system have all been sending us lots of warning signals lately. Sadly, it appears that most of the population will continue to ignore those warning signals until it is too late."
"How It Really Is"
“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either. It happens to be my view, but it doesn't challenge any of the findings of Darwin or Huxley or Einstein or Hawking.” - Christopher Hitchens
"Real Courage..."
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."
~ "Harper Lee", "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Adventures with Danno, "Rope-Dropping Kenwood Mall Right Before Christmas"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 12/20/25
"Rope-Dropping Kenwood Mall Right Before Christmas"
"Adventures with Danno tackles a pre-Christmas Kenwood Mall, seeking parking hacks and the ultimate chicken sandwich. The journey includes a Pandora shopping spree and a food court exploration, with unexpected surprises and festive cheer. A Cheesecake Factory visit and peppermint cheesecake tasting complete this holiday adventure."
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"Heavy Snowfall Christmas Night Walk In Moscow"
Full screen recommended.
Window To Moscow, 12/20/25
"Heavy Snowfall Christmas Night Walk In Moscow"
"Experience a festive Christmas night walk through the heart of Moscow during a heavy snowfall. Red Square Christmas Market, the ice skating rink, glowing holiday lights, and the magical atmosphere of Nikolskaya Street create a true celebration of winter in Russia before Christmas and New Year 2026."
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Friday, December 19, 2025
"Americans Are Trapped as Prices Keep Rising"
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 12/19/25
"Americans Are Trapped as Prices Keep Rising"
Comments here:
"Christmas Shopping At An Alabama Walmart - Shelves Packed, Shoppers Not Spending"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 12/19/25
"Christmas Shopping At An Alabama Walmart -
Shelves Packed, Shoppers Not Spending"
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Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern Weekly Wrap 19-Dec"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 12/19/25
"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson &
McGovern Weekly Wrap 19-Dec"
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"A Christmas Musical Interlude, With Placido Domingo"
Placido Domingo, "La Virgen Lava Pañales"
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Plácido Domingo, Wiener Sängerknaben,
"Ave Maria" (Franz Schubert)
"A Look to the Heavens"
A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.
The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
"The Only Time..."
"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call
you could make, who would you call and what would you say?
And why are you waiting?"
- Stephen Levine
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