Full screen recommended.
Gengu AI, "The Gentle Rhythm of Today,"
"A Very Old Town"
"AI was the tool. The story came from human feeling. If this film gave you
a quiet breath, a memory, or a moment of peace, thank you for being here."
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Sunday, July 12, 2026
Native Elder, "Why Happiness Was Easier 40 Years Ago"
Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"Why Happiness Was Easier 40 Years Ago"
"I Can’t Afford Gas Anymore, So I’m Running on Guinness"
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"I Can’t Afford Gas Anymore,
So I’m Running on Guinness"
"Gas tank’s empty… but the spirit’s still got fuel. “I Can’t Afford Gas Anymore, So I’m Running on Guinness” is a cheeky, hard-times Delta King’s Blues tune about rising costs, broke pockets, and finding humor in whatever keeps you moving. A bouncy, rough-edged acoustic guitar kicks up a back-porch groove like a man laughing through bad luck. The harmonica staggers and smiles, half buzzed, half brilliant. The rhythm rolls loose and easy, built for folks who ain’t got much - but still got attitude. This is blues that laughs at being broke. For anyone who’s ever made it through tough times with a grin and a cheap drink. If I can’t fill the tank… I’ll fill the glass."
Free Download: Olaf Stapledon, "Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord"
"But what a universe, anyhow! No use blaming human-beings for what they were. Everything was made so that it had to torture something else. Sirius himself was no exception, of course. Made that way! Nothing was responsible for being by nature predatory on other things, dog on rabbit and Argentine beef, man on nearly everything, bugs and microbes on man, and of course man himself on man. (Nothing but man was really cruel, vindictive, except perhaps the loathly cat). Everything desperately struggling to keep its nose above water for a few breaths before its strength inevitably failed and down it went, pressed under by something else. And beyond, those brainless, handless idiotic stars, lazing away so importantly for nothing.
Here and there some speck of a planet dominated by some half-awake intelligence like humanity. And here and there on such planets, one or two poor little spirits waking up and wondering what in the hell everything was for, what it was all about, what they could make of themselves; and glimpsing in a muddled way what their potentiality was, and feebly trying to express it, but always failing, always missing fire, and very often feeling themselves breaking up as he himself was doing. Just now and then they might feel the real thing, in some creative work, or in sweet community with another little spirit, or with others. Just now and then they seemed somehow to create or to be gathered up into something lovelier than their individual selves, something which demanded their selves sacrifice and yet have their selves new life. But how precariously, torturingly; and only just for a flicker of time! Their whole life-time would only be a flicker in the whole of titanic time. Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold therewill still be time. Oh God, what for?"
- Olaf Stapledon, "Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord"
○
Freely download "Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord",
by Olaf Stapledon, here:
The Poet: John O’Donohue, “In These Times”
“In These Times”
“In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety,
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down,
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home.”
~ John O’Donohue,
from “To Bless the Space Between Us”
○
“Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have"
"Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have"
by John Wilder
"Time. Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list. Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me. The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control. Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially. We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.
Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power. We have used technology to shrink the world. The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days. Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality. Now? The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.
Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom. We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.
We can see at night. We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away. My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance. Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.
But time remains fixed. It flows only one way. And it is the most subjective of our senses. Even Pugsley notices it: “This summer was so short!” He’s in high school. That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood. I’ve long felt that I understood why this was. Let me give it a shot.
For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life. For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more. It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%. For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years. If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years. 1/8 versus 1/20? It’s amazingly different. We don’t perceive life as a line. We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives. Each day you live is smaller than the last.
But that’s not everything. As we age, novelty decreases. When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily. New words. New thoughts. New ideas. That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing. They don’t realize that I can reattach it. Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents. Ever drive a new route somewhere? When I do it, I have to focus my attention. It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.
I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years. I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.
There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive. Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.
Work is similar. Over time, we gain experience. Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them). But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.
The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims. I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life. Finding a new one is... difficult. Life goes faster, day by day for me. Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.
And yet... Each day is still 24 hours. I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling. Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness. I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life. I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.
Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against. Does the flow of time vary? Certainly. But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.
I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this: Time is all we have – it is what makes up life. We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life. We have the hours we have. The only difference is what we do with that time.
I mentioned in a previous post that I often get by on scant hours of sleep. That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days. I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.
Maybe I can settle for that definition of time: a gift. Each moment is a gift. Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them. Just make each moment count. Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time. It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away."
The Alan Parsons Project, "Time"
"You Can’t Have It All"
Emily Levine, January 2019.
"You Can’t Have It All"
by Maria Popova
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Rilke wrote in contemplating the most difficult and rewarding existential art: befriending our own finitude. I have been sitting with Rilke, awash in the tidal waves of sorrow and love, in the wake of losing my beloved friend Emily Levine (October 23, 1944 - February 3, 2019) - philosopher, comedian, universe-builder, beautiful soul - who made me fall in love with poetry long ago and without whom there would be no "Universe in Verse" and no "Figuring." (Emily rightfully occupies the first line of the book’s acknowledgements.)
Ever since her terminal diagnosis in 2016, and up until just three weeks before her death, I had been taking Emily for what we came to call our “poetry retreats” - brief periodic respites by the ocean, where we would spend unhurried time in the company of a few other beloved women, reading poetry, cooking, conversing, and just being - with our joys, with our sorrows, with one another. Emily - the most erudite and intellectually voracious person I have ever known, introduced us to classics, many of which she knew by heart: Whitman, Eliot, Yeats, Plath, Rilke. But there was one contemporary poem she especially loved and read for us often: “You Can’t Have It All” by Barbara Ras, from her exquisite and exquisitely titled 1998 poetry collection "Bite Every Sorrow" (public library).
Now that Emily has returned her stardust to the universe she so cherished, and all the words seem too small to fill the void, poetry stands as the only mode of remembrance that can give shape and space to the amorphous largeness of feeling that is grief. In this sweetly lo-fi recording from one of our gatherings, punctuated by the sound of the ocean and the rustle of page-turning, Emily reads the poem that she, in the deepest sense, lived out and modeled for the rest of us with her largehearted life.
"You Can't Have It All"
"But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this."
Complement with Emily’s splendid reading of “On the Fifth Day” by Jane Hirshfield, who often graced our poetry retreats with her Buddhist benediction of a presence, then revisit Mary Oliver - one of Emily’s favorite poets, whom she outlived by seventeen days - on the measure of a life well lived and how to live with maximal aliveness."
Adventures With Danno, "We Buy Stuff At Walmart"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/12/26
"We Buy Stuff At Walmart"
Comments here:
"We Tested Ground Beef From Walmart, Costco, Kroger & 8 Stores, These Failed"
Full screen recommended.
In Plain Bite, 7/12/26
"We Tested Ground Beef From
Walmart, Costco, Kroger & 8 Stores, These Failed"
"For years, food companies have used misleading labels, shrinking portions, fake health claims, and pricing tricks to quietly take more of your money. Most people never notice. We tested ground beef from 11 grocery chains… and eight of them failed a test that just became federal law. Most people assume grocery stores are basically the same when it comes to something as simple as ground beef. Familiar packaging, familiar prices, and millions of families cooking the exact same tray every week. But when you start comparing the label, the sourcing, and how each store actually handles the meat before it reaches the case, some very surprising differences begin to appear. And in more than a few cases, what customers believe they're buying… isn't exactly what's in the package. Some of these grocery chains are trusted by millions of families every single week. But once you start looking at how the beef is ground, where it actually comes from, and what a brand-new federal labeling rule requires them to prove, the differences become impossible to ignore.
A few of the results may surprise even longtime shoppers. In this video, you'll discover: Which grocery chains are actually delivering honest, traceable ground beef, which ones are quietly failing a brand-new federal labeling standard, the surprising three-question test you can run on any package tonight, and what to watch for before your next trip to the meat case. The most surprising part? One of the biggest names in American retail proved it can trace beef almost to the ranch gate - and then chose exactly who gets that honesty and who doesn't."
Comments here:
"People Are Noticing Something at Grocery Stores… And It Confirms Everything"
Full screen recommended.
Across The States, 7/12/26
"People Are Noticing Something at Grocery Stores…
And It Confirms Everything"
"Your grocery store isn't just changing - it's quietly transforming right in front of you. Rising food prices are only one piece of a much bigger story. From AI-powered surveillance and self-checkout to smart shopping carts, shrinkflation, and customer data collection, today's supermarkets operate very differently than they did just a few years ago. Here's the thing… many shoppers notice higher prices but miss the technology working behind the scenes. This video explores how retailers are using artificial intelligence, behavioral analytics, loyalty programs, and automation to reduce costs, prevent theft, and reshape the shopping experience. What most people don't realize is that every trip through the aisles can generate valuable insights that help stores predict demand, optimize inventory, and personalize promotions. We also discuss why stores feel less personal, why products are being locked behind glass, and what these changes could mean for the future of grocery shopping. Watch until the end for a complete breakdown of one of the biggest transformations happening in modern retail today."
Comments here:
"Everyone's About To Run Out Of Fuel In 1-2 Weeks"
Bob Moriarity, 7/12/26
"Everyone's About To Run Out Of Fuel In 1-2 Weeks"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "America's Biggest Brands Are Selling for Pennies"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 7/12/26
"America's Biggest Brands Are Selling for Pennies"
"For decades, these companies were household names, but today many of America's most recognizable brands are being sold for a fraction of what they were once worth. In this video, I break down the shocking sale of Hot Dog on a Stick for just $8 million and explain why bankruptcy sales, distressed assets, and corporate restructurings are creating opportunities that few people are talking about. We'll also look at brands like Stein Mart, RadioShack, Pier 1 Imports, Dressbarn, Linens 'n Things, and more to see why investors are buying struggling companies instead of starting from scratch. Is this a warning sign for the economy, or the opportunity of a lifetime? Let me know in the comments what business you would buy if the price was right. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this video with someone who loves business, investing, and economic news."
Comments here:
Saturday, July 11, 2026
"U.S. Attacks Iran; IRGC Closes Strait"
Full screen recommended.
Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, 7/11/26
"U.S. Attacks Iran; IRGC Closes Strait"
"'Life Doesn’t Owe Anyone a Damn Thing'; or 'Handle Hard Better'"
"'Life Doesn’t Owe Anyone a Damn Thing';
or 'Handle Hard Better'"
by Justin Smith
“We all wait in life for things to get easier. It will never get easier. What happens is you handle hard better. That’s what happens. Most people think that it’s going to get easier. Life is going to get easier. Basketball is going to get easier. School is going to get easier. It never gets easier. What happens is you become someone who handles hard stuff better. And if you think life when you leave college is going to all of a sudden get easier because you graduated, and you got a Duke degree, it’s not going to get easier. It’s going to get harder. So make yourself a person that handles hard well.” ~ Kara Lawson, Head Coach for Duke University Women’s Basketball Team and Graduate of the University of Tennessee [July 5th 2022]
"An incredible number of Americans today have been coddled, pampered and fed a sense of entitlement from birth that continued into their early adulthood, making them always look to others or the government for help in acquiring their needs and wants. They have been raised without a backbone, weak-willed and dependent; and so, whenever they find themselves to be in a minority, they more often than not petition the federal and state governments, protest and riot, in order that their particular concerns are proactively pursued and implemented as favored, privileged and superior, no matter how insane, from destroying humanity by way of transgenderism or energy and job-killing fallacious “climate change” policies.
From my earliest memories, I saw hard men, laughing, loving, fighting hard and playing just as hard, as they’d rise each day to head out to work, in the mines, the forests, office buildings and on the nation’s lines of defense, and in particular I recall learning something of worth from each of them, much as I did from my Granddad Spurge, who was a coal miner and a stone mason. They were a hardy bunch of industrious scrappers, who pulled up their sleeves and worked hard to make a better life for themselves and their children, to build better communities, a better America.
But what passes for young “men” today is but a mere shadow of men of worth from better days gone by, what with their feminine appearances and their aversion to doing anything to break a sweat. And aside from weak bodies, too much coddling has made their minds work in a new, cunning devious manner, in which they waste enormous amounts of effort sidestepping real work and figuring out how to get something for nothing rather than perform an honest day’s work to pay for bills they make, without any intention of ever repaying, such as student loans.
Half of America seems content to allow Uncle Sam to make life better for them and their children via the welfare system and the government cheese, even tho’ it means a life of subsistence, just scraping by. Although today, many have developed gaming the system into a real art, whereby they live just about as good as anyone working a full-time job, complete with HUD homes, EBT cards, late model cars, color T.V.s and government purchased cellphones.
Life doesn’t owe any of us a thing, regardless of the circumstances and station of our birth. The miracle of your birth alone doesn’t mean you are automatically owed a job, a house, a bed or a single meal after you are a grown adult and supposedly capable of doing for yourself. You’re not owed recognition and understanding for simply existing, and neither are you owed success and comfort, abundance and happiness or immunity from the problems, pain and suffering that is simply a part of the human condition, and you certainly aren’t due any money you haven’t earned through your own sweat and effort, not from me, the American taxpayers or the U.S. government.
The only thing anyone should expect from The Government, if we are to accept the Contract found in our Constitution, are those things enumerated in its original form, and in that sense, we are owed a strong, affirmative and fierce defense of our Inalienable God-given Rights, as expressed and defined in the Bill of Rights, to be left alone to our own devices to live and thrive as free born Americans, without interference from The Government and its agents where no real harm is being done.
People aren’t created equal in the very real definition of the word and life has never been fair to anyone, and yet, the constant refrain heard all across all levels of American society today, from the ranks of the Mau Mau Marxist-Maoist totalitarians, those lovers of “democracy”, is “the world is so unfair”. They were evidently raised to believe “all men are created equal” in the context of the Declaration of Independence meant they are somehow guaranteed equal outcomes in everyday life, instead of the simple “equality under the law” as intended. And their voices are now amplified by an out-of-control regime that seeks to use their envy to complete the fundamental transformation of America, by any means necessary, no matter how unconstitutional or illegal they might be and are currently proving to be.
Standing on one’s own two feet and making your way through the merit of your own knowledge and work are now a thing of the past, as the poorest results in school and on the job are given the same weight and worth as the best and everybody gets a participation trophy. And in its place, envy, greed, sloth, gluttony, lies, sex and murder, the destroyer of worlds, are the rule, for a generation indoctrinated through Marxist-Maoist multiculturalist doctrine and propaganda, taught from kindergarten through university, who are now driven by an unhinged hate and anger directed at white society and capitalism.
This, in part, is the reason we see whole cities, controlled by the Marxist-Maoists and the totalitarian minded, enacting new “laws” that make the theft of anything $900 or less a misdemeanor, giving way to thousands of groups of poorly taught, undisciplined, predominantly black “youths” rampaging, rioting and looting numerous times a day, taking $900 dollars worth of merchandise nine times a day, if not more, taught racism and hatred and driven by envy and greed. It’s the reason cities across America are folding up, shriveling like a crop attacked by locusts and dying on the vine where once they thrived, back when our people, indeed our youth, had more pure hearts and moral directions and had not strayed far and away from America’s Christian roots.
Over the past thirty years, the nutcases of the Democrat Party have advocated a pathologically negative agenda for America that is based on destroying the Founding and revising history to portray early America as evil and worth casting on the ash-heap of history. Accelerating their plans through the public education system, an entire generation of America’s youth have been brainwashed to believe our planet is dying due to manmade CO2 and “climate change”, in defiance of actual science, and as if that isn’t enough, we are all constantly inundated with one alarm after another raised over racism - even as reverse racism against whites is now advocated, capitalism - which hasn’t really existed in America for over 100 years, homophobia / gender bigotry, capitalist oppression - even tho’ our system is economic fascism, and the fallacious assertion that White Supremacist Nazis are ascending in every community in America.
The real problem found within the ranks of the Takers? They just can’t face the fact that life isn’t easy for anyone, especially the Makers; and it never has been, although exceptions can be found in those born into wealth. But even the wealthy are weighted with life’s problems, if of a different variety, much as the old adage says that “money can’t buy you love or happiness”, even if it does buy you a line of coke and hookers, in a sad sort of dystopian world of a different immoral construct.
The routines many of us indulge in daily have made the largest percentage of Americans, a fairly large majority, complacent and apathetic, caring next to nothing on matters of government and whether or not they are actually living free.
Americans rise each morning, check their emails and cellphones, shower, shave and maybe brush their teeth, to rush off to their same, everyday, boring regular job that may or may not quite pay the bills, grabbing their $7 dollar cup of Starbucks special latte of the day, to do a job they find meaningless. At day’s end, they may grab some overpriced fast-food on the way home, to relax and maybe drink a cheap beer or glass of whiskey, while they watch The Voice - or is it porn [?] - call some friends to complain over how bad things are, and then simply watch some news, ’til they call it a night, sleeping fitfully and rising the next morning to do it all over again, and everyday afterward, year after year, until one day someone hands them their walking papers or a copper watch upon their “retirement”.
Too many live under the delusion that they should be able to drive brand new $60k cars, own $400k homes complete with the most exquisite adornments and furniture on their $15 per hour paycheck at McDonald’s, having never put forth the effort to gain useful knowledge demanded by skilled and professional career positions, in order to make themselves more valuable to society on the whole, and thus able to demand a salary that would allow them to buy all the trappings of such success. Instead, they cast an envious eye in the direction of the Makers and scheme on how to take what they want, by any scheme, any illegal act, any means necessary. They believe their mere existence entitles them to other people’s property, just because deep down in their black little souls, they really, really want it - just not enough to go after it the right way.
Our youth have lost all sense of shame and seem fine with getting anything they want, right when they want it, no matter how they come to acquire it. They never learned that something worth having is worth the work it takes to purchase, as if stuff is just supposed to fall from the heavens and land in their lap. Things of real worth don’t come easy.
Sure. Not everyone has the intelligence and capability to become a surgeon, but if that’s your dream, you will never know if you could have been one, until you try - same for anything else that any of you are dreaming of being, no matter if you dream of being a content farmer or a successful writer. Whatever you want in life, put forth the effort to achieve competency in that field and then go do it.
If you want something of worth in life, stop depending on others. Venture out on your own in some business or capacity you love, rather than settling to work for someone else your entire life. And for your own sake, quit wallowing in self-pity over bad circumstances created by your own bad choices.
As Ms Lawson notes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDzfZOfNki4) at one point: "Any pursuit in life, if you want to be successful, it goes to the people that handle hard well. Those are the people that get the stuff they want. People that wait around for easy, you probably see them at the bus stop. They’re waiting on the easy bus to come around. Easy bus never comes around. Go handle hard.”
Too many parents, too many schools, too many churches have failed America by failing to teach them that hard times won’t break you if only you have the right state of mind on life - that there is a loving God - and no one will ever find a fulfilling or positive way of life by looking to The Government for answers and solutions. Our society stopped teaching the youth how to be strong and independent somewhere along the way, as the tyrant-wannabes persisted in teaching “everyone is a victim”; but the fact remains today, anyone can be a proud survivor of hard times, if only they persevere and never give-up and never give-in to defeat, choosing to ultimately succeed and live good, prosperous and happy lives."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can appear quite thin. Some spiral galaxies appear even thinner than NGC 3717, which is actually seen tilted just a bit. Spiral galaxies form disks because the original gas collided with itself and cooled as it fell inward. Planets may orbit in disks for similar reasons.
The featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a light-colored central bulge composed of older stars beyond filaments of orbiting dark brown dust. NGC 3717 spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 60 million light years away toward the constellation of the Water Snake (Hydra)."
"Getting Old Ain’t for Sissies"
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"Getting Old Ain’t for Sissies"
"Growing old ain’t gentle… it’s a test of grit. “Getting Old Ain’t for Sissies” is a raw, straight-talkin’ Delta King’s Blues tune about stiff mornings, long memories, and the stubborn strength it takes to keep going. A gravel-toned acoustic guitar grinds out a slow back-porch groove, steady as boots on worn wood. The harmonica wails low and weathered, like it’s felt every mile of the road itself. The rhythm stays slow and tough, built for folks who learned life doesn’t hand out easy years. This is blues about surviving the long haul. For people who may creak when they stand up - but never back down from another day. Getting old ain’t for the soft… it’s for the strong who kept showing up."
Native Elder, "What the Old Ones Knew About Regret That No One Makes Peace With"
Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"What the Old Ones Knew About Regret
That No One Makes Peace With"
"The Devil’s Work"
"The Devil’s Work"
by The Zman
"There is an old expression that has fallen out of favor in the post-scarcity age, but it may be the key to understanding the current crisis. That expression is, “Idle hands do the Devil’s work.” When people do not have anything productive and useful to do with their time, they are more likely to get involved in trouble and criminality. A variant of this is “The Devil makes work for idle hands.” The idea there is if you want to avoid Old Scratch, then make sure you keep yourself useful to God.
The source of these proverbs is unknown, but variations of them go back to the early middle ages, so it is probable they evolved with Christianity. It is not unreasonable to think the idea is universal to civilization. After all, every human society has had to deal with the idle, lazy, and troublesome. Making sure these people are kept too busy to cause trouble is one of those primary challenges of civilization. Every ruler has known that too many idle young men is bad for his rule.
Even in the smaller context, this is something we instinctively know. In the workplace, people with too much free time get into trouble. If the IT staff has too much free time, they start tinkering around with the stuff that is working and before long that stuff stops working and the system goes down. A big part of what goes on inside the schools is to keep the kids and the teachers busy. Home schoolers have known for years that the learning content is just a few hours a day. The rest is busy work.
The point here is that people of all ages need a purpose, something that occupies their mind and their time. If something useful and productive is not filling that need, then something useless or unproductive will fill the void. For most people this may be a hobby or leisure activity. For others, it often means a useless activity is turned into something important. Elevating the mundane to the level of the critical and then creating drama around the performance of the mundane activity.
This is what we see in our political class. The ruling class of every society has a ceremonial role, a procedural role, and a practical role. Outside of a crisis like a war or natural disaster, the political class is performing its duties in the same way a line worker in a factory preforms his role. In popular government this means the pol shows up at public events. He performs the tasks his office requires like signing papers and casting votes. He helps grease the wheels when they need grease.
Into the 20th century, most of our political offices were part-time jobs. State legislatures met for a short period during the year. Otherwise, the legislators were back home doing their jobs. Executive positions like governor and president were fulltime jobs, as they were in charge of the civil service and in the case of president, commander-in-chief of the military. Within living memory, Washington DC would empty out in the spring and remain empty until the fall when Congress returned.
What we see today is politics at all levels has become a full-time job, but one with less to do when it was considered a part-time job. Congress, for example, is something close to a 24-hour drama now. The politicians and their retinues are now doing politics as a full-time obsession. Yet almost all of what they do is unnecessary. In fact, much of what they do is harmful. Very few things passed by Congress enjoy the support of the majority of the people or even a large plurality.
It is not just that these part-time jobs have been made into full-time obsessions. It is that much of what we used to need from government is now filled by individuals, ad hoc networks, and the private sector. Much of what government does is actually done by private contractors on government contracts. One of the ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the federal workforce has declined relative to the population, while the number of people employed in politics has gone up.
Then there is the fact that much of what government does could be automated or simply eliminated entirely. The services that are required like renewing licenses and paying fees can all be automated. In many cases they have been, but that did not result in fewer people, as we see in the dreaded private sector. Instead, it resulted in more idle hands looking for a purpose. On the political side, much of what Congress does could also be eliminated or automated.
What has happened in the last 30 years is we have grown the idle class at the top of our society and while decreasing their necessity. Much of what goes on in our politics is make work designed to get public attention. Think about it. If the cable news channels were shuttered and the social media platforms run by the oligarchs were closed, what would change in America? Nothing of practical importance. Our world would get quieter and there would be a boom in forgotten hobbies.
American political culture evolved during the Cold War to fight communism and prevent a nuclear war. Those were important tasks that occupied the minds and hands of the political class. Once those things went away, those idle hands searched about for a new crisis. Health care, Gaia worship, Islam and now invisible Nazis have been used to keep the idle hands of the political class busy. In the process, the political class has been driven mad and is threatening the rest of society."
The Poet: A. J. Constance, "All of Us Here On This Spinning Blue World"
"All of Us Here On This Spinning Blue World"
"Let's not plan too much
or expect
or promise
or say how much
or how little
or outline how things must be
or how they must not be.
All of us here on this beautiful
spinning blue world,
let's just love each other
from one millisecond to the next
as much as we can."
- A. J. Constance
o
Full screen recommended.
The Moody Blues, "Blue World"
"You Can Never Tell..."
"You can never tell what people have inside them
until you start taking it away, one hope at a time."
- Gregory David Roberts
"You Think..."
"That's why crazy people are so dangerous.
You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage."
- Michael Buckley
"The Artifacts That Should Not Exist"
Click image for larger size.
"The Artifacts That Should Not Exist: Experts Are Quietly
Raising Concerns About Artifacts That Do Not Fit Our History"
by Milan Adams
"There is a strange pattern in archaeology that no one officially talks about, yet anyone who spends enough time digging through old reports, forgotten journals, and obscure museum records will eventually notice it. Every few decades, somewhere in the world, an object is discovered that does not quite belong to the time it is found in. Not dramatically out of place in a way that screams impossibility, but subtly wrong in a way that makes experts uncomfortable. Too precise. Too advanced. Too refined. Too… early.
Individually, each discovery is easy to dismiss. A dating error. A misinterpretation. A hoax. Contamination of a site. The explanations are always reasonable when viewed in isolation. But when you start lining them up side by side, across continents and centuries, the pattern becomes harder to ignore. The same types of anomalies appear again and again, discovered by different people, in different places, in different eras, all pointing toward the same unsettling implication: there are objects in our historical record that do not fit the timeline we teach.
What makes this particularly unsettling is not the objects themselves, but the reaction they tend to provoke. These are not celebrated discoveries. They do not become the centerpieces of museums. They are rarely the subject of documentaries. They are mentioned briefly, cautiously, in academic literature, and then quietly fade into obscurity. Not because they were debunked, but because discussing them too openly creates questions that lead somewhere uncomfortable.
Questions about when certain knowledge really appeared. Questions about how advanced ancient people truly were. And eventually, questions about whether the story of human progress is as linear and straightforward as we have always assumed.
One of the most telling examples of this discomfort can be seen in the way certain discoveries are described. When historians encounter a normal artifact, the language is confident. Direct. Precise. But when they encounter something that challenges the framework, the wording becomes careful, almost defensive. Words like “anomalous,” “uncertain,” “unusual for its time,” begin to appear. The object is not denied, but it is linguistically softened, wrapped in layers of cautious phrasing until its implications no longer seem threatening. Because the real issue is not what these artifacts are. It is what they imply.
Over the past century, a quiet category of objects has accumulated in museum archives and academic footnotes. Objects that appear to skip entire stages of technological evolution. Objects that seem to appear fully formed, with no visible developmental history leading up to them. Objects that suggest that at certain moments in the past, people possessed knowledge that, according to our timeline, they should not have had yet.Devices of surprising mechanical complexity found in ancient shipwrecks, capable of tracking astronomical cycles with a precision that rivals early modern instruments.
Megalithic stone constructions in South America and elsewhere, where blocks weighing dozens of tons are cut and fitted together with a mathematical precision that modern engineers still struggle to replicate using only the tools those cultures supposedly had. Metallic or manufactured objects reportedly found embedded in geological formations far older than the civilizations that could have produced them, documented in 19th and early 20th century reports before quietly being dismissed as errors. Taken alone, each of these can be explained away. But taken together, they begin to suggest that something is missing from our understanding of the past.
Consider the mechanical device recovered from an ancient Mediterranean shipwreck in the early 1900s. At first it looked like a lump of corroded bronze. Only later did researchers realize it contained a complex system of interlocking gears. After decades of study, it became clear that this was a form of ancient astronomical calculator, capable of predicting celestial movements with astonishing accuracy. The official explanation today acknowledges its sophistication, but what is rarely emphasized is the absence of any evolutionary trail leading up to it. There are no simpler prototypes. No earlier versions. No gradual technological buildup that we can point to and say, “this is how they got there.” It appears in history fully realized, like a machine that had no childhood. That is what makes experts uneasy. Not that it exists, but that it exists without a clear lineage.
Full screen recommended.
A similar unease surrounds certain stone structures in the Andes. Tourists marvel at the perfectly cut stones, the seamless joints, the walls that have withstood centuries of earthquakes without collapsing. Guides explain that ancient builders used primitive tools and immense patience. But engineers who study the sites often admit, quietly, that the precision is difficult to explain. Some stones appear shaped in ways that suggest they were not simply chiseled, but manipulated while in a state we do not fully understand. Local legends speak of stones that could be made to “flow” or “soften.” Modern science dismisses these stories as myth, yet no one has conclusively demonstrated how the stones were shaped with the tools we believe were available. Again, the site is not hidden. It is famous. Photographed. Studied. But the deeper question is avoided: what technique was used here, and why do we not recognize it?
Then there are the stranger reports, the ones that rarely make it into modern discussions. Accounts from miners in the 1800s who claimed to find manufactured objects inside solid coal. Reports of metallic spheres discovered in ancient mineral deposits in South Africa. Nails allegedly found embedded in sandstone. These stories are usually dismissed immediately as hoaxes or misunderstandings, and perhaps many of them were. But what is striking is how often similar stories appear, told by people with no connection to one another, separated by geography and time, all describing the same unsettling detail: objects where they should not be.
The academic approach to these cases is consistent. Treat each one individually. Isolate it. Dismiss it. Never allow them to be viewed collectively as a pattern. Because if even one of them were genuine in its original context, it would imply something deeply destabilizing. Either our methods of dating geological layers are flawed, or human history is far older and more complex than we believe, or there were advanced cultures before recorded history that left almost no trace behind. Any of these possibilities would require rewriting history books across the world. And history, once established, is not easily rewritten.
This is where the discomfort becomes understandable. History is not just a record of the past. It is the foundation of education, national identity, academic authority, and entire scientific disciplines. To suggest that this foundation might be incomplete is not a small academic correction. It is a structural problem. It threatens credibility. And credibility is the currency of academia.
So the safer path is to keep these artifacts in a category that is neither fully accepted nor fully rejected. They are curiosities. Anomalies. Interesting footnotes. Never central pieces of the narrative. But the pattern remains. Across cultures that never had contact with each other, we find evidence of unexpectedly advanced astronomical knowledge. We find massive constructions that challenge our understanding of ancient engineering. We find myths from different continents describing lost knowledge, lost civilizations, and catastrophic collapses that forced humanity to start over from a primitive state.
These stories are treated as legend. But what if they are memory? Distorted by time, yes. Exaggerated, perhaps. But rooted in something real that has been slowly eroded by thousands of years of forgetting. Because the real danger of these artifacts is not that they are mysterious. It is that they suggest we may not be at the beginning of human progress. We may be somewhere in the middle of it. And if that is true, then the most unsettling question is no longer how these objects were made. It becomes: what happened to the people who knew how to make them?
The Quiet Disappearance of Evidence, Institutional Memory and Selective Attention: If the first layer of discomfort surrounding anomalous artifacts lies in their existence, the second lies in what happens after they are discovered. Contrary to popular imagination, these objects are rarely hidden in any dramatic or conspiratorial sense. They pass through official channels. They are documented, photographed, sometimes even displayed briefly. For a moment, they exist fully within the light of academic scrutiny. And then something more subtle occurs.
Attention shifts. Not abruptly, not suspiciously, but in a way that mirrors the natural rhythm of institutional research. Priorities evolve. Funding is redirected. New discoveries emerge that fit more comfortably within established frameworks, drawing focus away from those that do not. Over time, the anomalous becomes peripheral, and the peripheral becomes forgotten - not erased, but effectively removed from active discourse.
This process creates a form of selective memory, not enforced by any central authority, but produced organically by the structure of academia itself. Systems that depend on consistency tend to favor information that reinforces existing models. Data that introduces friction -especially unresolved friction - is gradually deprioritized, not because it is false, but because it is inconveniently incomplete.
What remains, decades later, is a scattered trail of references. A paper from the early 20th century noting an unusual metallic composition. A geological report mentioning an object embedded deeper than expected. A museum record describing an item that no longer appears in the public catalog. Each fragment, taken alone, is insignificant. Together, they form something more difficult to dismiss: a pattern of quiet disappearance.
It is important to emphasize that this does not require intentional suppression. It is, in many ways, more unsettling than that. It suggests that the system does not need to hide uncomfortable data - it simply needs to outlast it. Because attention is finite. And what is not actively discussed eventually ceases to exist in any meaningful sense.
Cartographies of the Unexplained: If one were to map these anomalies - not geographically alone, but temporally and typologically - a striking structure begins to emerge. The objects cluster, not randomly, but along faint lines of correlation that are rarely explored in mainstream analysis. What this simplified table suggests is not proof of a lost civilization or hidden technology, but something more structurally intriguing: repetition without continuity. The same categories of anomaly - precision, complexity, material inconsistency - appear across different regions and time periods without a clear evolutionary bridge connecting them.
In conventional models of technological development, innovation leaves traces. Early attempts, failed designs, gradual refinements. A progression that can be followed, even if imperfectly. But in these cases, that progression is either missing or incomplete. Instead, what we observe are punctuated appearances - moments where something unexpectedly advanced emerges, only to vanish from the developmental record.
If visualized as a map, the pattern would not resemble a steady expansion of knowledge, but a series of isolated peaks rising from an otherwise uneven landscape. Peaks that do not connect to one another in obvious ways, yet share underlying characteristics. This raises a question that is rarely addressed directly: are these truly isolated events, or are we only seeing fragments of a larger structure that has not survived intact? Because absence of evidence, in this context, does not necessarily imply absence of reality. It may simply reflect the limits of what has been preserved, discovered, or recognized. And if what we are seeing are fragments, then the full picture - whatever it once was - has been reduced to scattered signals, barely coherent, and easily ignored.
The Hypothesis of Interruption, Non-Linear Histories: The dominant model of human development is built on continuity. A gradual progression from simplicity to complexity, from primitive tools to advanced systems, from isolated knowledge to interconnected understanding. It is a model that works well because it aligns with most of the evidence we can clearly observe. But it is not the only model that fits the data.
There exists another possibility - one that is rarely formalized, but often implied in the margins of anomalous research. A model not of continuous growth, but of interrupted cycles. Periods of advancement followed by disruption, where knowledge is not steadily accumulated, but periodically lost. In such a framework, the anomalies cease to be anomalies. They become survivals.
Residual artifacts from phases of development that did not continue long enough to establish a visible lineage. Technologies that existed briefly, perhaps locally, perhaps more widely, before being erased by events that left little trace in the conventional archaeological record. This would explain why certain objects appear without precedent. Why techniques seem to emerge fully formed. Why myths from unrelated cultures describe similar narratives of collapse - floods, fires, darkness, the loss of knowledge, the need to begin again. Not as literal historical accounts, but as cultural echoes of real disruptions, filtered through memory and transformed over generations. In this model, history is not a straight line. It is a series of partial resets.
The Problem of Survival Bias: To understand how such a pattern could exist without dominating our current historical framework, one must consider a simple but powerful concept: survival bias. What we know about the past is not a complete record. It is a filtered one. Materials decay. Structures collapse. Knowledge stored in fragile mediums - organic matter, oral traditions - disappears far more easily than stone or metal. Catastrophic events, whether environmental or otherwise, do not erase everything equally. They select. They preserve some things while eliminating others.
If a period of advanced knowledge relied on systems that were not designed to endure - complex devices, perishable materials, localized infrastructure - then the likelihood of that knowledge surviving in recognizable form decreases dramatically over long timescales. What might remain are precisely the kinds of objects we now struggle to explain: unusually durable, structurally resilient, or accidentally preserved artifacts that outlasted the context that gave them meaning.
This creates a distorted picture. We do not see the system - only the fragments that survived its collapse. Imagine attempting to reconstruct modern civilization thousands of years in the future based solely on what is most likely to endure: a handful of engineered structures, scattered mechanical components, and incomplete records stripped of their context. The result would not resemble a coherent narrative. It would appear fragmented, inconsistent - perhaps even anomalous. Much like the record we are currently examining."
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