“When people speak to you about a preventive war,
you tell them to go and fight it.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
o
Ask her if it was worth it...
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Thursday, May 21, 2026
"The Cry Of Their Mothers..."
"Humanity is the spirit of the Supreme Being on earth, and that humanity is standing amidst ruins, hiding its nakedness behind tattered rags, shedding tears upon hollow cheeks, and calling for its children with pitiful voice. But the children are busy singing their clan's anthem; they are busy sharpening the swords and cannot hear the cry of their mothers."
- Kahlil Gibran
U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman HM1 Richard Barnett, assigned to the 1st Marine Division, holds an Iraqi child in central Iraq in this March 29, 2003 file photo. Confused front line crossfire ripped apart an Iraqi family after local soldiers appeared to force civilians towards positions held by U.S. Marines.
“My heart broke on its shame and sorrow. I suddenly knew how much crying there was in me, and how little love. I knew, at last, how lonely I was. But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no color or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.”
- Gregory David Roberts, "Shantaram"
"A Brief Disagreement"
Full screen recommended.
Steve Cutts, "A Brief Disagreement"
"A visual journey into mankind's
favorite pastime throughout the ages."
"Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe. The advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare. According to Conway W. Henderson, "One source claims that 14,500 wars have taken place between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, costing 3.5 billion lives, leaving only 300 years of peace (Beer 1981: 20).] An unfavorable review of this estimate mentions the following regarding one of the proponents of this estimate: "In addition, perhaps feeling that the war casualties figure was improbably high, he changed 'approximately 3,640,000,000 human beings have been killed by war or the diseases produced by war' to 'approximately 1,240,000,000 human beings...'" The lower figure is more plausible but could still be on the high side considering that the 100 deadliest acts of mass violence between 480 BC and 2002 AD (wars and other man-made disasters with at least 300,000 and up to 66 million victims) claimed about 455 million human lives in total."
"It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human
race proved to be nothing more than the story of an
ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump."
- David Ormsby-Gore
And humanity just never, ever learns from it all...
"Trump Can't Stop What's Coming: Nuclear Weapons"
Larry Wilkerson, 5/21/26
"Trump Can't Stop What's Coming:
Nuclear Weapons"
Comments here:
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Scott Ritter, 5/21/26
"Russia Will Strike One of Europe's
Top Decision Making Centers"
"Russia will eventually strike one of Ukraine's top decision-making centers, along with one in Europe, military analyst Scott Ritter told Rick on his latest livestream. They would discuss not only the Ukraine War, but also the latest from Iran and the high-stakes meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping."
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Col. Douglas Macgregor, 5/21/26
"U.S. Military Reportedly Preparing
for a Much Bigger Conflict"
"Reports of growing military preparations and rising geopolitical tensions are fueling fears that the United States could be preparing for a much larger conflict than originally expected. As instability spreads across the Middle East, global attention is turning toward the Pentagon’s next moves and the possibility of wider military escalation. In this video, Col. Douglas Macgregor analyzes the latest developments involving the Pentagon, U.S. military strategy, Iran, Israel, and the broader geopolitical situation. He examines the risks of escalation, strategic calculations in Washington, and what these developments could mean for global security and international relations. Watch till the end for detailed military analysis, geopolitical insight, and breaking updates on one of the world’s most dangerous international crises."
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“On The Beach”
“On The Beach”
by Nevil Shute
“Nevil Shute’s 1959 novel “On the Beach” is set in what was then the near future (1963, approximately a year following World War III). The conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and killing all animal life. While the nuclear bombs were confined to the northern hemisphere, global air currents are slowly carrying the fallout to the southern hemisphere. The only part of the planet still habitable is the far south of the globe, specifically Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the southern parts of South America.
From Australia, survivors detect a mysterious and incomprehensible Morse code radio signal originating from the United States. With hope that some life has remained in the contaminated regions, one of the last American nuclear submarines, the USS Scorpion, placed by its captain under Australian naval command, is ordered to sail north from its port of refuge in Melbourne (Australia’s southernmost major mainland city) to try to contact whoever is sending the signal. In preparation for this long journey the submarine first makes a shorter trip to some port cities in northern Australia including Cairns, Queensland and Darwin, Northern Territory, finding no survivors.
The Australian government makes arrangements to provide its citizens with free suicide pills and injections, so that they will be able to avoid prolonged suffering from radiation sickness. One of the novel’s poignant dilemmas is that of Australian naval officer Peter Holmes, who has a baby daughter and a naive and childish wife, Mary, who is in denial about the impending disaster. Because he has been assigned to travel north with the Americans, Peter must try to explain to Mary how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with the pill should he be killed on the ocean voyage.
The characters make their best efforts to enjoy what time and pleasures remain to them before dying from radiation poisoning, speaking of small pleasures and continuing their customary activities, allowing their awareness of the coming end to impinge on their minds only long enough to plan ahead for their final hours. The Holmeses plant a garden that they will never see; Moira takes classes in typing and shorthand; scientist John Osborne and others organize a dangerous motor race that results in the violent deaths of several participants. In the end, Captain Towers chooses not to remain with Moira but rather to lead his crew on a final mission to scuttle their submarine beyond the twelve-mile (22 km) limit, so that she will not rattle about, unsecured, in a foreign port, refusing to allow his coming demise to turn him aside from his duty and acting as a pillar of strength to his crew.
Typically for a Shute novel, the characters avoid the expression of intense emotions and do not mope or indulge in self-pity. They do not, for the most part, flee southward as refugees but rather accept their fate once the lethal radiation levels reach the latitudes at which they live. Finally, most of the Australians do opt for the government-promoted alternative of suicide when the symptoms of radiation-sickness appear.”
o
Freely download “On the Beach”, by Nevil Shute, here:
○
"On The Beach", full movie.
Full screen recommended.
"Now I Am Become Death, The Destroyer of Worlds"
"Now I Am Become Death, The Destroyer of Worlds"
"I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." - Robert Oppenheimer
"There is a striking photo, taken in 2015, of a deactivated nuclear missile at an air and space museum in Tucson, Arizona. Written in dust on this missile are the words, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”. These words, from the Sanskrit scriptural text the Bhagavad Gita, are famously attributed to J Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atom bomb. In Christopher Nolan’s grand biopic, Oppenheimer, the physicist recites these lines not during the Trinity blast (the first detonation of this nuclear weapon) but in a scene with his lover Jean Tatlock.
Oppenheimer later referenced another verse from the Bhagavad Gita when recalling his state of mind as he witnessed the Trinity explosion in the New Mexico desert on 16 July, 1945: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.
These verses refer to the sublime form, “Vishwarupa”, Lord Krishna takes in the Bhagavad Gita when he reveals his divine nature to the warrior prince, Arjuna. “Who are you?” asks Arjuna. “I am Time,” replies Krishna, “powerful destroyer of worlds, grown immense here to annihilate these men”. Arjuna is blinded by Krishna’s radiance even as he quakes with fear at God’s capacity to destroy evil with the fire emanating from his ferocious visage.
The Bhagavad Gita consists of 700 verses (shlokas) and appears in Book Six of the Sanskrit epic, The Mahabharata. At 100,000 verses and seven times the combined length of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mahabharata is the longest poem in the world. Written between 400 BCE and 200 BCE, the epic acquired its written form around the fourth century AD, during the Gupta Empire.
The Bhagavad Gita dramatises a meditative exchange between Arjuna and Lord Krishna, who appears as his charioteer during the momentous battle between two clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. The battlefield is located in Kurukshetra, a town close to New Delhi. Each clan stakes its claim to be the mightiest ruling dynasty of erstwhile Bharat (present day India).
The Oxford philosopher and president of India from 1962-1967, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, once remarked the trauma of the two world wars spurred thinkers to turn to Gita for “its dramatization of a perpetually recurring predicament.” Radhakrishnan’s treatise on the Bhagavad Gita continues to be a revered scholarly source. The “recurring predicament” at the heart of the Bhagavad Gita is this: what constitutes righteous action in the face of moral ambiguity and the inevitability of violence?
Arjuna is fighting to restore the honor and glory of the Pandavas. The Kaurava princes are malevolent usurpers and sadistic rulers. They are also Arjuna’s first cousins. Fighting on their side are Arjuna’s uncles and mentors. Halfway through the battle, Arjuna is paralyzed by anxiety at the prospect of killing his kin. He contemplates throwing away his mighty weapons and fleeing the battlefield.
This is when Krishna, his charioteer and brother-in-law, counsels him with these immortal words: "Your obligation is to the action, and never to its fruits. Do not be motivated by the fruit of your actions. But do not become attached to non-action either. Abandon your attachment and engage in worldly action, Arjuna, while standing firm in discipline. Consider success and failure to be equal. This equanimity is called discipline, Arjuna, since the
action itself is much less important than the discipline."
Krishna in the Gita is none other than Vishnu, Lord of the Hindu trinity who preserves the world. Krishna exhorts Arjuna to fulfil his duty (dharma) as a Kshatriya (warrior) in a spirit of detachment and with steadfast discipline (sthitaprajna). In classical India, these warriors had a monopoly on legitimate violence to preserve social and political order.
The greater good, Krishna tells Arjuna, lies far beyond earthly desires and attachments. The body dies but the soul is immortal. The noblest action is that which recognises the immortal value of the soul and ceases to lament loss and frustrated desire. This action, known as “Nishkama Karma” is taken without any anticipation of a fruitful outcome; action that abjures the myth of control.
Fear of consequences cannot be a justification for inaction. Duty toward the preservation of the moral order is far more important. Self-knowledge, action without attachment and devotion to Krishna as the supreme soul that contains the entire universe is the path to salvation (moksha). This constitutes the essence of Krishna’s message to Arjuna."
Freely download the "Bhagavad-Gita" here:
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
"NATO Drone Strikes Trigger Russia’s Baltic War Plan"
Scott Ritter, 5/20/26
"NATO Drone Strikes Trigger Russia’s Baltic War Plan"
"In this explosive geopolitical analysis, former U.N. weapons inspector and military analyst Scott Ritter warns that NATO’s growing involvement in deep-strike drone operations against Russian territory may have crossed a dangerous red line. The discussion examines how NATO intelligence support, advanced targeting systems, and strategic coordination are reshaping the Russia-Ukraine conflict into a broader confrontation between Russia and the Western alliance. As tensions rise across Eastern Europe, concerns are growing over whether the Baltic states could become the next flashpoint in a rapidly escalating military crisis. This documentary-style political breakdown explores Russia’s evolving military doctrine, the growing fear of direct NATO-Russia confrontation, and the potential consequences of strategic miscalculation by Western leaders. The video also analyzes nuclear escalation warnings, Baltic regional security threats, NATO Article 5 implications, and the geopolitical risks surrounding drone warfare, military retaliation, and global instability. If diplomatic intervention fails, analysts fear Europe could face its most dangerous security crisis since the Cold War."
Comments here:
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John Mearsheimer, 5/21/26
"The Moscow Attack May Have Ended The Last Restrain"
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"Working Class Americans Are Secretly Living In Cars, Storage Units And Tents To Survive"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 5/20/26
"Working Class Americans Are Secretly Living In Cars,
Storage Units And Tents To Survive"
"Across America, a silent collapse is unfolding behind closed car doors and storage unit walls. Millions of working people who once held apartments, careers, and stable lives are now sleeping in parking lots, cooking ramen in bathrooms, and calling Walmart lots "home." This is not the homelessness America used to know. These are not the people America was taught to look away from. These are 19-year-olds with full-time jobs. These are college graduates who lost a parent and never recovered. These are content creators, instructors, and professionals who got hit by one bad month and never climbed back out.
In this video, we go inside the lives of Americans who are doing everything right and still ending up in their cars. We hear from a young woman cooking dinner in a storage unit bathroom because that is the only outlet she has. We hear from a man who slept in a Metro Transit Center for years, pretending to wait for a bus that was never coming. We hear from a 19-year-old in Salt Lake City who turned his Honda into a bedroom because rent prices made an apartment impossible. We hear the same sentence over and over again: I never thought this would happen to me. The housing market broke. Wages did not move. Rent doubled. Groceries doubled. And the safety net that used to catch falling Americans has been quietly cut away, thread by thread. What you are watching is not a lifestyle trend. This is the new American reality, and it is spreading faster than anyone in Washington wants to admit."
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Jeremiah Babe, "Lower Value Humans Are Being Replaced"
Jeremiah Babe, 5/20/26
"Lower Value Humans Are Being Replaced"
Comments here:
"You're Living Through The Quiet Fall Of The American Empire"
Full screen recommended.
Finance Economist, 5/20/26
"You're Living Through The
Quiet Fall Of The American Empire"
"For the first time since the Great Depression, more people are leaving the United States than coming in. 180,000 citizens emigrated last year. The renunciation queue is 30,000 deep. The wealthy are selling million-dollar homes to move abroad. A veteran sleeps in a storage unit. 54% of adults read below a sixth-grade level. The dollar just hit its lowest reserve share since 1995. The Treasury declared the country insolvent. And every empire in history collapsed the exact same way from the inside."
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Jeffrey Sachs, 5/20/26
"This Is The End"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
"The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, third largest in the Local Group of galaxies after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), and our own Milky Way. About 3 million light-years from the Milky Way, M33 is itself thought to be a satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy and astronomers in these two galaxies would likely have spectacular views of each other's grand spiral star systems.
As for the view from planet Earth, this sharp image shows off M33's blue star clusters and pinkish star forming regions along the galaxy's loosely wound spiral arms. In fact, the cavernous NGC 604 is the brightest star forming region, seen here at about the 4 o'clock position from the galaxy center. Like M31, M33's population of well-measured variable stars have helped make this nearby spiral a cosmic yardstick for establishing the distance scale of the Universe."
"Remember..."
“Remember, we all stumble, every one of us.
That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.”
- Emily Kimbrough
Paulo Coelho, "Walking the Path"
"Walking the Path"
by Paulo Coelho
"I reckon that it takes about three minutes to read my text. Well, according to statistics, in that same short period of time 300 people will die and another 620 will be born. It takes me perhaps half an hour to write a text: here I sit, concentrating on my computer, books piled up beside me, ideas in my head, the scenery passing by outside my window. Everything seems perfectly normal all around me; and yet, during these thirty minutes, 3,000 people have died and 6,200 have just seen the light of the world for the first time.
Where are all those thousands of families who have just begun to weep over the loss of some dear one, or else laugh at the arrival of a son, grandson or brother? I stop and reflect for a while: perhaps many of these deaths are reaching the end of a long, painful sickness, and some persons are relieved that the Angel has come for them. Besides these, in all certainty hundreds of children who have just been born will be abandoned in a minute and transferred to the death statistics before I finish this text.
What a thought! A simple statistic that I came upon by chance and all of a sudden I can feel all those losses and encounters, smiles and tears. How many are leaving this life, alone in their rooms, without anyone realizing what is going on? How many will be born in secret, only to be abandoned at the door of shelters or convents? And then I reflect that I was part of the birth statistics and one day I will be included in the toll of the dead. How good that is to be fully aware that I am going to die. Ever since I took the road to Santiago I have understood that although life goes on and we are eternal, one day this existence will come to an end.
People think very little about death. They spend their lives worried about really absurd things, putting things off and leaving important moments aside. They risk nothing because they believe that is dangerous. They grumble a lot, but act like cowards when it is time to take certain steps. They want everything to change, but they themselves refuse to change. If they thought a little more about death, they would never fail to make that telephone call that they have been putting off. They would be a little more crazy. They would not be afraid of the end of this incarnation because you cannot be afraid of something that is going to happen anyway.
The Indians say: "Today is as good a day as any other to leave this world ." And a sorcerer once remarked: "May death be always sitting beside you. That way, when you have to do something important, it will give you the strength and courage you need." I hope, reader, that you have accompanied me this far. It would be silly to let the subject scare you, because sooner or later we are all going to die. And only those who accept this are prepared for life."
o
"We're all going to die. We don't get much say over how or when, but we do get to decide how we're gonna live. So, do it. Decide. Is this the life you want to live? Is this the person you want to love? Is this the best you can be? Can you be stronger? Kinder? More compassionate? Decide. Breathe in. Breathe out and decide. "
- "Richard", "Grey's Anatomy"
"Meet Joe Black"
“Death twitches my ear; 'Live,' he says...
'I am coming.” - Virgil
"Meet Joe Black"
Bill Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) enters his office and begins speaking to a voice that materializes into a person by the name of Death (Brad Pitt). Death knows Bill is struggling with his mortality, so Death offers Bill time in exchange for acting as his tour guide.
Full screen recommended for all.
"Bill Meets Joe"
"Death Meets with Cancer Patient in Hospital"
"Enough Pictures?"
The final speech from Anthony Hopkins,
“65 years, don’t they go by in a blink?"
"'That Next Place', Final scene."
Food for thought...
"Life's Impermanence..."
"Life's impermanence, I realized, is what makes every
single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here.
It's what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted."
- Wes Moore
The Poet: Czesław Miłosz , “A Song On The End Of The World”
“A Song On The End Of The World”
"This poem was written in Warsaw in 1944. Czesław Miłosz ( 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry - particularly about his wartime experience—and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, "The Captive Mind," brought him renown as a leading émigré artist and intellectual.
Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith. As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience. Miłosz died in Kraków, Poland, in 2004. He is interred in Skałka, a church known in Poland as a place of honor for distinguished Poles."
“A Song On The End Of The World”
“On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.”
~ Czeslaw Milosz
"Great Was It's Fall"
"Great Was It's Fall"
by Edward Curtin
"When it comes, it comes on slowly
The day feels holy, a hush falls down
Whispered names, remembered faces
From desperate places, all gather ‘round"
Tom Paxton, “Come on, Holy”
"Early morning and the first heavy snow is falling. It is beautiful. I walk around the lake in the holy hush. Alone except for two newly arrived ducks swimming on an open patch of icing water. When I stop to watch them, the soft sound of the falling snow grows gradually louder, beating drums, like truly listening to Beethoven, not the lionized one, about whose honored status James Agee wrote “is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas,” but the Beethoven whose music you won’t hear nicely but will hurt you and for which you should be glad.
Although I have come here to flee for an interlude the sound of the world’s anguish and to contemplate its beauty, I am deflected, as usual. How could I not be? Isn’t it true as the poet Rilke said, that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,” and we, with all our strange thoughts inside us, try to swallow the sobs that accompany all our joys. My brother-in-law died unexpectedly a few days ago. I watch the ducks swim so placidly in circles and I wonder.
I realize that my thoughts are meaningless to most but me, a minor writer in a world of screamers, yet I record them here to learn what I may think and to share with a few other human souls the musings of a distraught man in a world made mad and running red like a butcher’s bench with the blood of the innocent shed by ruthless people. I am old but hope I am forever young with a strong foundation that will help me find some insights along this path. Who knows?
I have spent many decades lost in beauty and an intense scholar’s study of the propaganda the world’s rulers use to convince the gullible that their intentions are pure and their actions are carried out for the common good. Few have heeded my findings. Why should they?
While the rulers’ endless lies should be apparent, they are not, for too many people have built their own lives upon foundations made of sand, and though they are shaking, few believe they will fall. And to think the official doll’s house of fabricated reality within which they dwell and upon whose words they build their lives will also fall – that is deemed impossible.
William Saroyan, in his 1939 play “The Time of Your Life,” (winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award) has a minor character, the Arab, repeat, “No foundation. All the way down the line.” That is all he has to say. “No foundation. All the way down the line.” Concise and cutting to the bone. True then, but much, much truer now.
Then came World War II and the defeat of Germany, Japan, and their allies with the United States dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after fire-bombing Tokyo, Dresden, Cologne and dozens of other Japanese and German cities, intentionally killing vast numbers of civilians.
And if that wasn’t enough, the future CIA Director Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and colleagues brought nearly 2,000 Nazis scientists, engineers, biological weapons experts to the U.S. to work in government programs, while helping thousands more flee justice by helping them escape to South America and other places along the “rat lines.”
Thus the U.S. became the evil they denounced in others, and it could rightly be said Hitler triumphed in defeat. Upon this evil foundation, which is now crumbling, the U.S. empire was built despite its alleged Christian underpinnings.
There’s an old saying: "And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes." Mathew 7:21-29
Being alone on my walk helps me focus on the elementary truth that we are all mortal and that beauty is terrifying since it evokes the anguish of its and our endings. And when we go, end, pass on, or die – take your pick – all the secret thoughts, hopes, memories, lives, and dreams we have had will vanish with us, if we have not, while living, found a way to tell the truths we harbor in our secret hearts. We will be but mysterious melodies others might hum without grasping our lyrics, as the Gershwin brothers referenced in their song “They Can’t Take that Away From Me.” Our melodies may linger on for a while once our songs have ended, as the songwriter says, but who we really were will vanish with us into the mists of time.
In quiet moments of timeless reflection, everyone knows we are complex creatures; just as they quickly don their masquerades when time resumes to face the faces that they face to deny such complexity.
When I left the ducks to their circle games, I continued on my way along the lake. The snow blew from the north into my face and made it hard to see. The lake and the neighboring woods disappeared and so did my thoughts as I constantly wiped my eyes of snow. But I felt a certain joy beyond telling.
As the snow and wind eased up, I saw up a hill through a cut in the woods a large doe with her three fawns grazing under some sheltering pine trees on posted property owned by a local college. A smart mother, I thought, since I knew shotgun deer hunting season was underway.
It was then that the hushed peace of the morning was broken by a few shotgun blasts from the western woods. Did the doe and her fawns, who in days past I would often meet and converse with at very close range along the road, take heed? Can such creatures learn to avoid men with guns? Why were the hunters on the prowl for deer to kill? Did they need the meat to eat, or did they just get their kicks from the killing and slicing and gutting of once living creatures who never did them any harm?
I wondered – and leave that wondering to you – as my mind turned to the genocide in Gaza and the murder of the innocent in so many other places by men with guns and weapons more amazing in their killing power, manufactured in spotless factories by people indifferent to how their bread is buttered. But I knew that the workers on the factory floors were no more guilty than those whose butter comes from investments in these ghoulish places. Yes, Thoreau knew: "Do not ask how your bread is buttered, it will make you sick if you do – and the like. A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. If within the sophisticate man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil’s angels."
When I was about four years old, I went with my mother to the local butcher shop. When Sol the butcher came to wait on my mother, I noticed his white apron was covered in blood, so I asked him if he cut himself. He laughed and asked me if I would like a slice of liverwurst. Didn’t Hitler claim to be a vegetarian because of animal suffering?
The shotgun blasts increased on my way home. I stopped to gather some long-needle pine and wild red berry branches for our mantle since it was December and the birth of the Prince of Peace was approaching. My knife slipped and I cut my finger, the blood dripping onto the white snow matched the berries’ redness. It was startlingly beautiful, but the cut was painful as I stanched it with a few tissues.
When I got home and was bandaging my finger and my wife was decorating our mantle with my cuttings, I recalled an analysis of our current situation offered by the French demographer, Emmanuel Todd, “The Dislocation of the West.”
Todd is an all facts guy, an historian, a sociologist, a middle-of the roader, far from a romantic dreamer, an analyst of the extensive data that he gathers. Years back, based on data analysis, he correctly predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. Now he is predicting the fall of the West based on certain specific variables that he considers key. When I read his work and heard him talk, I concurred completely, for I had for years, based on my work in the sociology of religion, reached the same conclusion without all his data to back me up.
We in the West, he says, are living at a time when nihilism, meaninglessness, and zero religious belief is the norm. It has come on slowly over a century and a half to the point where nothing seems holy. We have passed from a Zombie religious state when traditional religious values, but not belief, survived somewhat, to a time when nihilism undergirds everything. A nihilistic foundation, meaning no foundation. Reality has been undermined and a zombie state of lostness prevails, and irrational pure evil state nihilism lives for endless war. Moral values have disappeared behind a façade of fake belief.
If Thoreau were around, he might ask people what they really believed about God, death, and moral values, and the stuttering responses would befit the times. But no one is asking. The song is over but only the melody lingers on, even as Bing Crosby sings “O Little Town of Bethlehem” on a cyber sale at Amazon.
Todd is a data man, a non-believer, a normal academic, and yet from his research he probably sounds to many as if he is unhinged. But he is just repeating what Jesus, Saroyan’s character, and the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (in 1948) all said was happening with the shaking and undermining of the Western foundation. Hell would break loose. Nihilism would triumph.
And it did, of course, and will unless... I don’t know; Todd has no answer. "I think of all the blood in the woods, on the tracks, all the blood being shed everywhere, the killers licking their chops, the earth indifferently drinking all the blood, and the words of the French poet Jacques Prevert’s “Song in the Blood”:
"Where’s it going all this spilled blood?
Murder’s blood, war’s blood, misery’s blood,
And the blood of men tortured in prisons,
And the blood of children calmly tortured by their papa and their mama,
And the blood of men whose heads bleed in padded cells,
And the roofers blood when the roofer slips and falls from the roof,
And the blood that comes and flows in great gushes with the newborn,
The mother cries,
The baby cries,
The blood flows,
The earth turns,
The earth doesn’t stop turning,
The blood doesn’t stop flowing,
Where’s it going all this spilled blood?
Blood of the blackjacked,
Of the humiliated,
Of suicides,
Of firing squad victims,
Of the condemned,
And the blood of those that die just like that by accident."
But then my wife suggested that Todd and I may be wrong. When religious belief was strong in the West, weren’t nations and people slaughtering their enemies in the name of religion? Don’t many social scientists use data to argue points that lack counterpoints? Haven’t people long been fanatical killers in the name of religion and for their gods? When did morals or religious belief ever stop the shedding of blood? Such times are few and far between. Perhaps religious belief is not the explanatory variable that Todd thinks it is and seemed so to me when I first read his work and even concurred with it a few minutes ago.
Could not the key be that mysterious human attribute – love – that like despair cannot be measured, that finds in every other living creature a part of oneself, just the inkling in our hearts that everyone is us and should always be treated as an end and not a means, especially at a time when the spiritual has been subordinated to the technical, everything has become means, and the ends have disappeared.
It may sound laughable to suggest that Fyodor Dostoevsky explained it better than all the data gatherers in his story “The Dream of A Ridiculous Man”: "It is so simple: in one day, in one hour, everything would be settled at once. The one thing is – love thy neighbor as thyself – that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live."
Or as Jesus said and other great religious leaders affirmed: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity [love], I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." - Corinthians 13
Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Not this fool. I can only wonder as I wander in the beautiful falling snow. Like Dostoevsky, “I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men. Yet all of them only laugh at my belief.” It’s understandable."
"The Dislocation of The West", by Emmanuel Todd, here:
"The Average Person in America Is Running Out of Money'
Full screen recommended.
The Unfolded States, 5/20/26
"The Average Person in America
Is Running Out of Money'
"The average person in America is feeling more financial pressure than they did just a few years ago. Rising housing costs, expensive groceries, higher insurance premiums, growing debt, and stagnant purchasing power are reshaping everyday life for millions of households. In this video, we break down why so many working Americans feel financially stretched despite low unemployment and continued economic growth. From housing affordability and credit card debt to wage pressure and the changing reality facing Millennials and Gen Z, this documentary-style analysis explores how the modern cost of living crisis is affecting the American middle class. We also examine why younger generations are delaying homeownership, relying more on side income, and struggling to build long-term financial stability in today’s economy. Sources referenced throughout this video include the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Federal Reserve, Redfin, Apartment List, Realtor.com, New York Federal Reserve, Census Bureau, and publicly available economic reporting and consumer data."
Commente here:
"McDonald's Collapse Is Bigger Than You Think As It Causes A Fundamental Issue With Local Economies"
Full screen recommended.
The Economic Ninja, 5/20/26
"McDonald's Collapse Is Bigger Than You Think As It
Causes A Fundamental Issue With Local Economies"
McDonald's CEO has admitted to a double-digit sales drop among lower-income customers, with middle-income sales also significantly declining. This marks the first sales decrease for the company in years, impacting locations geographically and reflecting broader economic challenges for the fast food industry. The shift in fast food sales indicates a significant change in consumer spending habits and the overall economy, suggesting that many people are struggling with their money."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
In Plain Bite, 5/20/26
"10 US Restaurant Chains Customers Can't
Stand Anymore (And 2 Rising Stars)"
"Eight thousand restaurants wiped off the map - and the people who did it still collected dividends. Most people assume the restaurant chains they grew up with are still the same companies they remember. Same food. Same values. Same deal. But when you trace the ownership behind the signs, follow the money behind the menu boards, and read the bankruptcy filings most customers never see, a very different picture starts to emerge. And in some cases, the people running these chains have already decided you are not the customer they are building for anymore. Some of these brands have served millions of loyal customers for decades. But once you start looking at who actually owns them today, what happened to the food, and why thousands of locations have quietly disappeared, the story behind the familiar signs becomes much harder to ignore.
A few of what we found will surprise even people who thought they already knew what was happening. In this video, you will discover which chains are still delivering real value, which ones quietly changed the deal without telling you, what private equity ownership actually looks like on your receipt, and two chains that are doing the exact opposite of everything on this list. The most surprising part of this video? One chief executive broke two separate chains in the same year — collected nearly a hundred million dollars doing it - and is still running a company you probably visited this week. If you want to know what is actually happening behind the counter before you spend another dollar, subscribe to In Plain Bite and turn on notifications. Every video goes behind the menu, behind the marketing, and behind the ownership to show you what the press releases leave out."
Comments here:
"The Worst Invention of All Time?"
"The Worst Invention of All Time?"
by J.D. Breen
"We love to mind each other’s business. And, unlike our benighted ancestors of a hundred years ago, we have just the tool to do it. I’m holding it in my hand, and most of you have it in yours. Has any century started worse than this one?
It’s a question typical of our short-sighted, self-centered, attention-deprived age. The answer seems obvious, and can be sought by looking a hundred years into the rearview mirror. There we see… closer than they appear… Theodore Roosevelt, the San Francisco Earthquake, the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the direct election of Senators, Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu, the Treaty of Versailles, the Black Sox, and Prohibition.
Peak America: But let’s give this century its ignominious due. It has its own litany of self-inflicted calamity, exacted by meddling sculptors and know-it-all painters whose only tools are jackhammers and spray guns. And, to be fair, their work isn’t done!
In retrospect, the 1990s might have been Peak America… the blowoff top of a great bacchanal. The Soviets fell and prosperity reigned. History was at an end. The party was on. The US then succumbed to what economics calls the law of diminishing returns, and approached what Calculus refers to as the limit.
After running up the credit card and hitting the casino, America raided mom’s wine cellar and ransacked dad’s liquor cabinet. Then it passed out on the lawn, empty bottles and smoldering cigarettes strewn across the yard as the morning sprinkler sprayed its face. It’s been hungover and searching for its car keys ever since. Along the way, it’s tripped and stumbled into expensive errors. Thousands died in reckless wars. Millions were impoverished by rigged capital markets. Lockdowns closed countless small businesses while enriching big competitors. Medical mandates evicted millions from jobs.
And many Americans are just fine with this refrain of disaster that resembles a classic Bradbury book or a bad Billy Joel song. The Fourth Turning seems to be upon us. Not only is the pretense of liberty vanishing, the desire for it seems to be as well. Live and let live is dead. To each his own is not for us.
Sunlight to an Ant: We love to mind each other’s business. And, unlike our benighted ancestors of a hundred years ago, we have just the tool to do it. I’m holding it in my hand, and most of you have it in yours.
This century, we’ve become an hysterical people. Everything is over the top, overdone, overblown, and overreacted to. Even (or especially) regarding people we never met and would never care to meet, or things we know nothing about and about which, in a sane world, we’d not be able to care less.
The smartphone brings “news” to us the way a magnifying glass transmits sunlight to an ant. It hits us more intensely, and less beneficially, than we initially believe. It allows little or no time to think, and often leaves us worse off than had we not been exposed to it at all. We receive so much information that we usually know less than we did before. Our brains slowly fry.
Public opinion can be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks, which inevitably influences what people think they are supposed to think. The smartphone fans these flames, which often burn out as quickly as they ignite.
Silent and Listen: Social media and instant news are not conducive to subtlety and nuance, but rather to instant reaction and plenty of noise. Smartphones stunt reflection and shorten time horizons. It’s appropriate that “silent” and “listen” are spelled with the same letters. But in social settings, our phones encourage the former yet discourage the latter. They “connect” us superficially from a distance, yet push us apart in proximity.
A random buzz, beep, post, photo, like, link, text, or tweet is sufficient pretext to disrupt a conversation or ignore someone in our presence. Digital correspondents become highest priority. The world of the real, the tangible, and the personal fades into the background. And, after wading mindlessly thru the self-selected cheer and artificial abundance of other people’s posts, it often feels inadequate.
Don’t get me wrong. The smartphone is one of the most useful, powerful, consequential, disruptive, convenient, informative, miraculous, and remarkable inventions of all time. But in some ways, it is among the worst. Like most anything else, it just depends how we use it. Or don’t."
"Weapons Of Mass Distraction And Booze Jokes"
Several generations, actually...
"Weapons Of Mass Distraction And Booze Jokes"
by John Wilder
"2026 is the 24th year of the smart phone, as the CrackBerry® was introduced way back in 2002. To put that into perspective, 23 years before 2002, Jimmy Carter was president and Hillary Clinton had only eaten six children.
But the BlackBerry© didn’t take over immediately – it was mainly a hit with the executive-set at first, since it allowed them to get emails while they were on the slopes at Gstaad or write ANGRY EMAILS IN ALL CAPS while munching on bigfoot filet roasted over Moonrocks at the beach down in Monaco.
The real killer smart phone, though, was the iPhone©. It was introduced just 18 years ago in 2007. The design standards for the iPhone™ quickly became the standard for cell phones, and it knocked BlackBerry® into oblivion within just a few short years because teenaged girls liked it much better because, selfies. To be fair, it was a pretty big jump in functionality and aesthetics.
The impact, though, of smart phones, however, is undeniable. They became the single most effective way to distract a person. Ever. You’ve seen the effect enough that it’s cliché – walk into a restaurant and it’s not a group of people talking to each other. Instead, it’s a group of people eating near each other while they take in content produced with the explicit objective of taking over their attention.
And, it has certainly worked if the goal was to distract. People now spend more time doomscrolling on their phones than they spend with their children, spouses, and friends. Combined, and Tinder™ has led to more one-night stands than wine coolers.
The reason smartphones grab our attention is somewhat seductive: every time a new notification hits, it sets off a small hit of dopamine in the brain. Just like lab rats, we love our dopamine. And the designers know it. On earlier versions of Twitter©, if I got multiple “likes” on a Tweet®, they would be delayed and doled out so that the action-anticipation-reward loop was optimized to keep me engaged.
And the format of Twitter© (that X™ retained) of scrolling through content, why, something super interesting might be at the bottom of the next swipe of my finger on the screen. So, I’d better just go two more minutes. And then an hour goes by . . .
X© is an attention harvester – they built the perfect trap to stick the rat to the app. And so is Facebook™. And Instagram©. And Snapchat®. These are designed to meld into our nervous system, and keep our eyes focused on the screen, day after day. I know this, because it works, and it worked on me.
After I realized that, though, I decided on a strategy: I would jealously guard my attention like CNN™ guarded information on Joe Biden’s ability to remember, you know, the thing. The reasons are many: Information overload leads to depression and anxiety. I had to ask myself, “Can I do anything about this?” and “Is this something I really care about?”
Here’s where I draw the line: Consciously, I decided I really don’t care about Ukraine and Russia. And you can’t make me care about them. I also decided the same thing with Israel and Gaza. They’re not here, and if I’m going to spend my attention and emotion, I’d rather do something to make the United States better, first – like doing everything I can to get as many illegals deported as possible and shutting down as many H-1B visas as possible so maybe someone at a call center could be intelligible. Or I could spend my time spreading the word about the wonders of PEZ™.
I also make a conscious decision (mostly) on what media I’m going to consume and when. I do personal emails three times a week because my inbox isn’t a slot machine for spam. I browse non-news websites three times a week (mostly – there are exceptions).
I have, at least at my age, also decided that multitasking isn’t something I’m going to count on unless the task is really mindless. I try to focus more on just one thing at a time – then I’m really there. The problem in 2025 isn’t time management, it’s attention management. And I have to have time to:
Think deeply, so I’m not just reacting to stimulus and so I can better see propaganda. Honestly, I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t trust any media unless I can verify the claim.
Relax, so I’m not so wound up about things. Life shouldn’t be so tense. That’s what caffeine is for.
Create, because I really enjoy it, and because that’s the way that maybe I can change the world. Without distractions, I can crush out a first draft of a post in about an hour. Pounding and sanding the result takes one or two more, and then I gotta add memes. To do any of those things requires attention.
We are the sum of what we spend our attention and effort on. If I’m distracted, I know that I simply won’t have the focus I need in order to make the best decisions. Who, indeed, would like the American public distracted and not paying attention to what exactly is going on in the world?
Smartphones have become weapons of mass distraction. Yet each time we’re distracted by one, it’s the result of a choice. So, why let them win? I’ve got to look forward to 2048, 23 years into the future from now. I imagine Barron Trump will be in his third presidential term by then..."
Full screen recommended.
Steve Cutts, "Are You Lost In The World Like Me?"
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