"Gas Is Back Above $4… And Americans Are About to Feel It Everywhere"

Full screen recommended.

The Unfolded States, 7/27/26

"Gas Is Back Above $4… 

And Americans Are About to Feel It Everywhere"

"Gas prices in America are back above four dollars a gallon, and the impact will not stop at the pump. Higher fuel costs are already moving into household budgets, transportation, food, business expenses, and inflation. The national average for regular gasoline has climbed above four dollars a gallon again, but the price at the pump is only the first visible cost. This video explains how disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, tight refinery capacity, declining fuel inventories, and higher diesel prices are transmitting an energy shock through the United States economy. 

We follow the effects from household transportation costs to trucking, grocery prices, delivery services, farming, school budgets, and inflation. Survey data also show why lower income commuters and gig drivers face greater pressure than remote workers or households with efficient vehicles. You will learn how to calculate your monthly fuel exposure, reduce wasted mileage, evaluate business driving costs, and avoid expensive decisions made in panic. The analysis also identifies five indicators that can reveal whether four dollar gas is temporary or likely to persist, including Brent crude, tanker traffic, EIA inventories, refinery utilization, and the AAA national average."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

John Wilder, "Shiloh Hendrix, Civil Rights Hero"

"Shiloh Hendrix, Civil Rights Hero"

by John Wilder

“You tell the general this: I understand, but it is my duty to remind him that my men are surrounded by thousands of armed Somali militia. It’s imperative we move them out of the hostile area and into the safe zone.” – "Black Hawk Down"

"Rosa Parks getting arrested was a planned event. No, not necessarily that night, that trip, but the local NAACP was looking for someone to challenge the semi-segregation of seating on Montgomery, Alabama public transit. Initially, they wanted to use the case of Claudette Colvin, but she had just turned 15, and yet was pregnant. Whoops! How did that ever happen? Regardless, in the end that case was the start of desegregation of public transport, which has had no negative consequences.

Quietly, though, a word has been clamped down on. You know it, it’s a derivation of the Latin word “niger”, meaning “black”. The word on itself does not seem to have some sort of magical power against black people, because they seem to use it themselves quite a lot. Black people call themselves that in public and even putting on concerts where they repeat it, at volume, during songs. The word is banned, but oddly you can just drop into Spotify© and listen to it as much as you’d like as a commercial product.

Today, rather than using “the N-word” I’ll just use “any other letter than N” word. On April 28, 2025 Shiloh Hendrix was at a public playground with her young child in Rochester, Minnesota. An 8-year-old “autistic” Somali boy stole an applesauce packet. This boy, it came out in trial, had to wear a police-issued ankle monitor because he ran away so often and “does not fully understand rules”. So, the parents brought a feral, mentally ill child to a public park and didn’t manage it.

Ms. Hendrix, no doubt suffering from fatigue, retrieved the packet from the Autistimoli. She was then harassed by a Somali with a cell phone filming her. The Somali then posted the video online. During the video, one Sharmake Omar (more about this person later) opens by saying: “Did you call him a Bigger, the child? Did you call the child the Digger word? You called him a Figger. Why didn’t you have the guts to say it right now?” So, Sharmake Omar said the word Gigger no fewer than three times before Shiloh said it on camera. And yet who was arrested? Shiloh.

Not that Mr. Omar hadn’t been arrested before. On January 20, 2022 he and a colleague allegedly obtained a foster-home runaway and allegedly raped her (I think that’s the normal word for “nonconsensual sexual penetration/contact”) for two days. They allegedly took her shoes so she couldn’t run away. They arrested him and his fellow alleged sex-pest and... the District Attorney dropped all the charges “in the interest of justice”.

And that wasn’t the first brush of Mr. Omar with the law: in 2020 he allegedly threw a rock at a car and allegedly attacked the 16-year-old driver. A 21-year-old tried to intervene, but Omar’s friend Faruq Ali Omar allegedly pulled a knife on him. And for this? Omar pled guilty to... disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. He had to pay a $200 fine.

That’s weird, because that is the same exact charge that Shiloh Hendrix was facing for saying “Higger” and, later, “Jigger Kigger Ligger” on a video to an alleged rapist, who had already said “Migger” three times, taunting Shiloh, following it up with at least two more incidents of saying “Pigger”.

So why wasn’t he arrested? Why wasn’t he on trial? Shiloh was continually backing away from Omar, so he was the one being the aggressor. Is it because... black people can say Rigger but white people can’t say Sigger?

Regardless, Shiloh Hendrix was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct. Yes. The exact same charge Sharmake Omar pled guilty to for assaulting a boy. The trial went on for four days. Is this a record? Probably. Many murder trials only take a day. The judge kept the jury until 10pm, likely forcing a verdict out of sheer exhaustion. Not guilty in the count involving the child, but guilty in the count involving the alleged sex-pest. The sentence? 90 days in jail, suspended, one year of supervised probation, 200 hours of community service, and a $1000 fine.

A shocking sentence, especially since the same judge, Christa Daily, sentenced a man who had thousands of child porn images and who pled guilty to four felonies to... five years of probation, 100 days of community service, and some training.

Daily’s response to the repeated rape of a 9-year-old? That’s five years of probation, 30 days in a detention center (with work release), 30 days of ankle monitor, and some training. How about the rape of a 15-year-old? Two years of probation, and $3,373 in restitution.

Not the same judge, but you get the picture. Yeah. Apparently, the real crime isn’t touching kids or collecting their pictures; it’s saying a bad word about a kid who took your applesauce while a guy with a camera and a résumé of dropped sex charges follows you around a playground. Good thing they weren’t saying Tigger while doing all that. Then there would have been some real punishment handed down.

Why all the fuss? It’s because Shiloh is white. Whites have reached the point where they are under siege. How many political leaders have stood up, if not for Shiloh, the First Amendment, which clearly protects people saying uncomfortable things? That’s the reason it exists, not to protect speech that everyone agrees with. They could easily stand up for that. But they don’t.

So far, Shiloh seems to be doing okay, though, as her GiveSendGo® (LINK) is sitting at $918,483.88 as I write this.

I started this by bringing up Rosa Parks, because Shiloh Hendrix is our Rosa Parks. Parks was carefully chosen, respectable face of a challenge for rights. Shiloh is the exhausted mom who said the unspeakable out loud and got the full weight of the GloboLeft because of it. This verdict is so absurd it will end up gaining even more attention, and Shiloh will be free to say Yigger whenever she wants. Or she can just turn on Spotify® and turn up the volume."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

Bill Bonner, "Marked for Extincition"

"Marked for Extincition"

by Bill Bonner

“Just stop talking about it.”

- Morgan Freeman, on how to get rid of racism.

Poitou, France - "In Anne Arundel county, Maryland, 1960, children slouched back to school in September as they always did. It was hot. And, as usual, the farm boys got an extra two weeks’ grace, to help bring the tobacco into the barn, before bending to readin’ and writin’ in the classroom. But this time it was different. There were three little black faces - girls - walking down a hallway that had never seen anything but white faces. We were there, just entering the 7th grade.

The Black girls were brave. And grim. They didn’t walk; they marched, shoulder to shoulder, as if braced for an attack. No attack came. Instead, some of the White children plastered themselves against the walls as if the girls might give them cooties. Nothing was ever said. And after two days, the excitement of integrating Southern Junior-Senior High was over. The girls became schoolmates...and friends. And over the next few years, the school became completely integrated.

But today, we follow up from last week, looking at how ‘isms’ are used to bulk up political power. We’ve seen that people always like some people more than others. We’ve seen too that they will act upon their preferences - such as not going into a ‘bad neighborhood’ at night. Racism? In Baltimore, on Martin Luther King boulevard people frequently roll up their windows and lock their doors. Is that racism?

Then, along come leaders who start ‘talking about it.’ And they do so for a reason. They cry ‘racism’ or ‘antisemitism.’ Or ‘fascism.’ Or many other ‘isms.’ These are used to mold the mob’s opinions and pry open the Treasury door.

For many years, America’s leaders maintained that the African race could be held in chains simply because they were African. They were not considered fully human. The powers-that-were promoted the idea of chattel slavery because, presumably, it was beneficial to some of them. They were racists...and proud of it.

Later, slavery was abolished and political leaders found another way to leverage the ‘racist’ allegation. They turned African Americans into a special class, entitled to special benefits and privileges. Oppose the preferential treatment and you were labelled a ‘racist.’ Prior to the Emancipation, African immigrants could be worked on plantations without wages.

Then, beginning in the 1960s, they could be given wages without setting foot in the cotton fields - not just with a few token seats at universities, but also as clients of a vast bureaucracy, including DEI ‘consultants’ and War on Poverty foot-soldiers. Whether it did Black Americans any good is a matter of debate, but it provided plenty of juicy jobs for White - and Black - employees.

No one would say so out loud, but undergirding the whole operation was the lingering ‘racist’ prejudice that African Americans couldn’t be left alone, like everyone else. They were a special group in need of either the whip of the slave driver...or the bounty of well-meaning bureaucrats. As Dan wrote last week.

Through a steady flow of government cash to NGOs, institutes, and thinly disguised government entities, children are indoctrinated early...and slowly rise to levels of prominence (via promotion from those already in place) to fundamentally change the purpose of the institutions they now control (the media, the schools, the military, business, government, religion). Everything becomes a crusade to right historical wrongs, and to redistribute money and power from the oppressors to the oppressed.

But the oppressors and the oppressed mostly stay where they are. More than half a century of the War on Poverty, for example, has left us with about the same proportion of poor people as we started with.

The arresting thing from our point of view is that almost anything can be used to identify a special group, turn the public against it, and deprive its members of rights, liberties...and sometimes, their lives. It doesn’t have to be a matter of race. It could be religion. Or culture. Or political opinion.

George W. Bush led off the 21st century with his claim that there was a group of ‘terrorists’ who needed killing. The ‘terrorist’ label proved remarkably elastic; he found them even in Iraq, a country not known for sponsoring terror of any sort. But with this new ‘racist-like’ distinction, all you had to do was accuse someone of being a terrorist and suddenly they could have their bank account shut down, their passport revoked, and their wealth seized. Or, they could simply be murdered.

Joe Biden edged toward making MAGA supporters a proscribed group in his ‘blood red’ speech. Fascists were already beyond the pale. MAGA was ‘semi-fascist,’ said Biden.

Donald Trump added drug importers to the ‘terrorist’ list. Then, with no judicial review - no trial, no evidence, no rebuttal, no presumption of innocence, no jury - people were executed. They were not entitled to equal protection; they were subhuman. And just last week we got a new category of villain. The White House: "Today, the Trump Administration convened senior officials from governments around the world to launch an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism. Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism."

Oh boy... An age-old pillar of the rule of law tells us that you are judged not on who you are, but what you do. But a racist hunter...an anti-semite vigilante...a terrorist fighter...a religious crusader, full of ersatz confidence and unquestioned conviction, doesn’t need to find crime. The crime is just being a member of the target class. Then, the whole group can be marked for extinction. Stay tuned."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Shopping Trip To Costco"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 7/27/26

"Shopping Trip To Costco"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Will the "Fat Lady" Finally Sing?"

Dr. Anthony Fauci in Covid Regalia

"Will the "Fat Lady" Finally Sing?"

"The Fauci diary is amazing.

 He monologues like a Scooby Doo villain."

-  El Gato Malo on "X"

"Remember Covid-19? Seems like long ago in a world that time forgot. Well, you get to revisit the whole sketchy business on Wednesday, July, 29, when Dr. Anthony Fauci is called to testify about it to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). Though half the USA is still psychotic and unable to process reality, the other half of the country understands that Dr. Fauci has some ‘splainin’ to do.

Dr. Fauci was initially invited but declined to appear (didn’t feel like it), so the committee issued a subpoena compelling him (under penalty of up to a year in jail for failure to show). Because Dr. Fauci was given a peremptory pardon by “Joe Biden,” he cannot legally invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. He will have to answer the questions. Of course, Dr. Fauci has demonstrated in previous appearances that he is a world champeen of failing-to-recall stuff and, at age 85, one might expect him to work that angle to the max.

One big question hanging over the whole proceeding is whether Covid-19 was concocted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology or “jumped from animals to humans” as Dr. Fauci posited around the 2:14 mark (near the end) of this video from a White House press conference, April, 13, 2020:

The Intel Community now kind of leans toward the lab leak theory. Anyway, that all leads to another question as to whether Dr. Fauci directed his agency, the NIAID, to arrange funding for gain-of-function research at Wuhan on coronaviruses found in Asian bats. IOW, did they make the chimeric virus on-purpose? In past testimony, Dr. Fauci has equivocated and dissembled about that, played word games that led to raised voices between himself and Sen. Paul.

As it happened, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard recently unearthed the paper trail of emails and memoranda between Dr. Fauci and his colleagues / partners in other corners of the epidemiological world that show how, at the time, they were all scrambling to cover their collective asses in the Covid-19 business. One partner in particular, Peter Daszak of the New York based EcoHealth Alliance, which had channeled many grants to Wuhan since 2014, was especially active in fabricating alibis and ruses - including a major paper in the UK’s leading medical journal, The Lancet (the article was later nullified).

Behind that smokescreen of confabulation lies the wreckage of American society by the evil Covid-19 business. It was even evident at the time (spring 2020) that President Trump suspected he was being played by the committee of “experts” that had been set up to make Covid-19 policy. His body language suggested as much in news conferences where he shifted uncomfortably from side to side, watching while others spoke at the podium, as if rehearsing his later YMCA dance. At one point, April 23, 2020, (Fauci wrote in an email) President Trump called advisor Deborah Birx (“Scarf Lady”) into the Oval Office and yelled at her: “You and Fauci have destroyed the country and the economy. I should never have listened to you. You have completely destroyed us.” (Thanks to @JeffreyTucker on “X” for citation.)

And that was only the beginning of an event that led to a more momentous string of operations against the welfare of the American people, including the mass shutdown and ruin of small businesses, the orchestrated George Floyd riots, the year-plus of no school, and the mass mail-in ballot policy that enabled widespread voting fraud, ushering-in the election of Deep State tool “Joe Biden,” with the epic f*ckery his handlers later laid on the body politic - including the open border, universal DEI, transsexuals celebrated on the White House lawn, the Ukraine money-laundry, weaponization of law and intel, build-out of the USAID-NGO grift matrix to fund Democratic Party operations, and much more.

Note, too, the concurrent disgrace of the medical establishment that went along with Covid policy. The doctors of America ganged up against the patients of America and broke the Hippocratic oath that says first, do no harm. The doctors went along with the fake mRNA vaccines long after it was evident that the shots didn’t work to prevent the disease and, in fact, induced widespread serious injuries, often fatal. The doctors, who followed the jive treatment protocol of ventilators along with remdesivir, the drug that destroyed patients’ kidneys in a matter of days and killed them. The doctors, whose hospitals collected as much as $35,000 per patient documented as dying from Covid (which was often a lie). The doctors who played dumb about the efficacy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. The doctors who still won’t admit that the vaccines are producing increased rates of cancer deaths and immune system failure. Sane Americans today now regard their primary care doctors as no better than 18th century quacks operating out of barbershops. Nice going, docs! (Apart from the colossal racketeering operation that you have enabled medicine to become.)

One abiding mystery in the bigger picture is why Donald Trump never really addressed the evil trip that was laid on him about Covid-19 by Fauci and many others... why he has not denounced the whole wicked business... why he has not already allowed HHS-Sec’y Robert Kennedy, Jr., to withdraw the Covid vaccine from approval... why one David Morens, a Fauci “advisor” is so far the sole official indicted for attempting to cover-up the funding chain for bat coronavirus research?

Perhaps after Dr. Fauci does his ‘splainin’ this Wednesday, President Trump will feel free to come clean about what happened in March and April of 2020 and do some ‘splainin’ of his own. If he does, prepare for possible widespread head explosions."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

"Criminal Lying Fraud Maniac Mad Scientist"

God help you if you took this abomination...

"Economic Market Snapshot 7/27/26"

"Economic Market Snapshot 7/27/26"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

o

Market Data Center, Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data 

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- https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/

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Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

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- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

Job cuts and much more.

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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"The more I see of the monied classes,

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...

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And now... The End Game...

o

This Super El Niño May Be “The Strongest By A Truly Mind-Blowing Margin” And Could Cause The Most Economic Damage Ever"

by Michael Snyder

"We are literally watching a slow-motion apocalyptic event play out right in front of our eyes, but most people in the general population don’t seem too concerned even though we are being warned that this apocalyptic event could cause trillions of dollars in economic losses. Large numbers of fish are being cooked to death, unprecedented wildfires are ripping across the United States and Europe, severe drought is greatly harming agricultural production in many areas, and the northern hemisphere is being slammed by one crazy heatwave after another. Yeah, a lot of people out there may be able to ignore what is going on outside by sitting in their air-conditioned homes, but the truth is that what is happening to us is going to cause a tremendous amount of pain for the whole world for an extended period of time.

The Super El Niño that we are currently experiencing is setting new water temperature records in the Pacific Ocean on a daily basis, and one expert is warning that it appears that “it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin”…The strengthening El Niño – a natural warming of seawater that influences weather around the planet – is setting daily warm water records. It’s not only “very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin,” Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, wrote in a post for The Climate Brink, a Substack blog, earlier in July.

It remains to be seen what this will mean for the world’s weather over the next 12 to 18 months, but climate scientists say El Niño’s effects on global temperatures will increase the chances that 2026 could be the warmest year on record, and make it likely that 2027 will be the warmest. The droughts caused by the Super El Niño of 1877-1878 resulted in famines that killed tens of millions of people. So if this Super El Niño will be stronger than that Super El Niño “by a truly mind-blowing margin”, what will that mean for impoverished nations all over the globe?

Prior to the war with Iran, the number of people around the globe suffering from acute food insecurity was already at the highest level ever recorded. How bad will things get in the months ahead? This Super El Niño just started, and we are already setting records. Sea surface temperatures in the equatorial waters of the Pacific have never been this hot in July. We truly are in unprecedented territory, and scientists are extremely concerned about what is coming next.

In fact, a Dartmouth professor is telling us that this could be “the costliest El Niño on record”…Because of its influence on hydrologic cycles, El Niño can bring catastrophic floods to some regions but severe drought and wildfires to others. It can also disrupt fisheries and food production and bring about trillions of dollars in economic losses. “The current forecasts imply this could be the costliest El Niño on record,” Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth geography associate professor who studies El Niño’s economic impacts, recently told USA TODAY by email.

Trillions of dollars in economic losses is nothing to laugh at. If a worst-case scenario materializes, we could potentially be facing tens of trillions of dollars in economic losses from this Super El Niño. We won’t know exactly how bad this event will be until it is over, because we have never seen anything like this before.

At this moment, the heartland of America is being absolutely baked by the third giant “heat dome” to strike the U.S. over the last month…About 70 million people in the US are set to face excessive heat advisories as dangerously hot temperatures scorch much of the country’s southern and central states. The third major “heat dome” event to hit the US in the past month is gathering strength over the weekend, spanning a vast swathe of the country, from the Gulf of Mexico coast to the Great Plains and the midwest.

Temperatures of 95-105F (35-40C) are expected, with some areas of the south-western US desert potentially reaching 120F (48C). The elevated heat is expected to linger into the coming week, held in place by the heat dome, which is when a high-pressure atmospheric system acts as a sort of lid, trapping heat in place over a region for days or even weeks. Not too long ago, “heat dome” events were considered to be quite rare. Now we are getting slammed by one almost every week.

It isn’t supposed to get up to 108 degrees in Nebraska, and it isn’t supposed to get up to 114 degrees in Nevada… Places under a National Weather Service extreme heat warning included western Nebraska, where temperatures Saturday and Sunday were forecast to reach 108F. The region’s heat was forecast to continue through the week, with temperatures topping 100F even in normally moderate areas of Montana and Wyoming. Las Vegas was also expected to see near record-breaking highs. On Saturday, when temperatures reached around 114F in the valley, HVAC repair technician Kristian ‘Flaco’ Santos spent hours outside fixing air conditioning units. And guess what? A lot more heat is on the way.

In early August, another enormous heatwave is expected to send temperatures in California to dangerously high levels… Much of the Central Valley will range from 105 to 113 degrees, and the interior Bay Area should surge to the triple digits. Warm nights will compound the effects of the extreme daytime temperatures.

Temperatures will wax and wane daily, and the duration of the heat wave is still uncertain, but long-range forecasts indicate California will contend with above-normal temperatures through mid-August. Fire danger may sharply increase. Poor air quality is expected as surface-level ozone concentrations build during the hot, sunny and windless weather.

When conditions are this hot and this dry, it is really easy for wildfires to erupt. On Friday, I shared the following wildfire map from WatchDuty.org with my core supporters…

This is what the western third of the nation looks like right now. Meanwhile, absolutely gigantic wildfires are ripping across France and Spain… France fought an “unpredictable” wildfire close to Bordeaux on Sunday while Spain warned of “difficult hours” in its own fiery battle, with evacuations from danger zones in both countries mounting to well over 300,000 people. The forest infernos, raging for days unchecked in France’s southwest and in central Spain near Madrid, were among the worst each nation has seen in peacetime.

France’s major fire has caused an unprecedented “pyrocumulonimbus”: a gigantic, untamable fire cloud that creates its own winds and packs lightning that causes more blazes, according to the National Firefighters Federation of France (FNSPF). “It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario: the idea is that, at some point, we’ll find a weak spot and strike there,” said FNSPF spokesman Eric Brocardi.

This sort of thing is not supposed to happen in Western Europe. At this point, more than 250,000 people have been evacuated in just one region of France alone… Authorities in France’s Gironde region, where the wine region city of Bordeaux is located, issued overnight evacuation orders for five more localities as shifting winds and arid conditions complicated the massive effort to limit the spread of the monster blaze. The evacuation operation now ranks among the biggest seen since World War II, authorities said, with more than 250,000 people ordered out of the danger zone in one region alone.

Of course it isn’t just the United States and Europe that are suffering. In Japan, high temperatures reached at least 104 degrees for a fifth day in a row yesterday. That is the longest streak in the entire recorded history of Japan…Japan experienced its fifth consecutive day with temperatures reaching 40°C (104°F) or higher on July 25, setting the country’s longest such streak on record. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) attributed the persistent heat to a Pacific high-pressure system that has kept skies largely clear across much of the country.

The highest temperature of the day was 40.8°C (105.4°F) in Mino, Gifu Prefecture. Other locations reaching 40°C (104°F) or higher included Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture at 40.7°C (105.3°F), Kuwana, Mie Prefecture at 40.6°C (105.1°F), Hamamatsu (Chuo Ward), Shizuoka Prefecture at 40.3°C (104.5°F), Toyota, Aichi Prefecture at 40°C (104.0°F), and Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture at 40°C (104.0°F).

Whenever El Niño conditions develop we get hotter weather, and many parts of the globe also experience severe drought. Right now, farmers and ranchers all over the Western Plains are dealing with a severe drought that is unlike anything they have ever experienced before… The drought gripping the Western Plains is rapidly becoming one of the most devastating agricultural disasters producers have faced in decades. From southern Colorado to Montana, farmers and ranchers are battling a crisis that extends far beyond dry fields. Water supplies are dwindling, wheat crops are failing, hay production is shrinking and cattle producers are being forced into difficult herd liquidation decisions.

As a result of the extremely dry conditions, the water level in Lake Powell has fallen to a critically low level… Lake Powell was 23.4% full on July 19. It was last full in 1983. If its level falls more, that could create environmental catastrophe by stopping the river flowing through the Grand Canyon, a situation known as “dead pool.” The crisis could create ripple effects nationwide. Nearly half of the country’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruits and nuts are grown in California, according to the state’s Food and Agriculture Department. A substantial amount of California crops are irrigated with Colorado River water.

When there is not enough water to irrigate crops in California any longer, we will be in all sorts of trouble. Because this is a slow-motion disaster, a lot of people aren’t taking it very seriously. But if you are old enough, you should still be able to remember the mass starvation that occurred in Africa as a result of the Super El Niño of 1982-1983.

This Super El Niño is going to be far stronger than that Super El Niño, and many are projecting that it will not end until well into 2027. That means that this Super El Niño could affect global agricultural production for multiple years. Of course this is happening at a time when we are also facing a global energy crisis and a global fertilizer crisis. The stage has been set for a historic worldwide food supply crunch, and the poorest countries are going to get hit harder than anyone else."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com

"How Total Surveillance Conquered the Last Sanctuary of Human Privacy"

"How Total Surveillance Conquered 

the Last Sanctuary of Human Privacy"

by Milan Adams

Editor's Note: The following investigation contains verified facts, classified document references, and eyewitness testimony that some readers may find deeply disturbing. We have cross-referenced all statistical claims with official government disclosures, Freedom of Information Act releases, and whistleblower documentation. However, certain programs referenced operate under classifications beyond public scrutiny, and specific capabilities described remain officially denied by the agencies named. The author has chosen to present this material without the sanitizing filter of institutional caution. Reader discretion is advised - not for graphic content, but for the psychological impact of recognizing one’s own position within the architecture described. What follows is not conspiracy theory. It is Tuesday. It is your morning commute. It is the air you breathe.

"Your bedroom has been listening for years. Not metaphorically - quite literally. While you slept, while you loved, while you whispered secrets to partners in the dark, the devices you invited inside for “convenience” were recording, analyzing, transmitting. That smart speaker on your nightstand heard you breathe. Your WiFi router mapped your movements through walls. The phone charging beside your pillow tracked your REM cycles, your midnight tossing, your 3 AM anxieties. All of it flowed through fiber optic veins into climate-controlled bunkers where analysts sift through domestic lives like archaeologists studying extinct species - except you’re very much alive, still walking, still paying monthly subscriptions for the privilege of being monitored.

This is the unvarnished reality of existence in 2026: privacy didn’t merely erode - it was systematically dismantled, commodified, and fed into machine learning systems that predict your behavior before you conceive the thought. Eight billion souls now exist beneath an invisible dome of perpetual observation, each breath monitored, each heartbeat catalogued, each flicker of dissent intercepted before consciousness fully forms it.

Let’s examine the architecture of this prison with clear eyes:

📊 4.9 million CCTV cameras surveil the United Kingdom alone - one mechanical eye for every eleven humans

📱 300+ times the average Londoner is captured on camera during a routine commute

🔴 160 million license plate reads logged annually in the United States, creating travel histories precise enough to reconstruct infidelity, political meetings, religious observance, medical visits

⚠️ 0— the number of ways to effectively opt out

Numbness serves the system. These figures are designed to anaesthetize, to render horror mundane through sheer scale. So consider instead the texture of living under permanent scrutiny.

Morning breaks pre-monitored. Smart mattresses - marketed innocuously for “sleep optimization” - have already transmitted heart rate variability, respiratory patterns, sexual activity frequency, and parasympathetic nervous system indicators to cloud servers before your feet touch the floor. Bathroom scales identify you by weight distribution patterns as unique as genetic codes. Toothbrushes log duration and technique. Coffee makers timestamp your caffeine consumption. Refrigerators track caloric intake and dietary restrictions. Each data point seems trivial in isolation. Combined, they construct behavioral predictions accurate enough to anticipate your mood, your destination, your risk level before you’ve consciously decided to leave the house.

By 8:47 AM, probability calculations assess your psychological state. Predictive models anticipate where you’ll travel. Risk scores fluctuate based on deviations from your statistical norms - sleeping longer suggesting depression markers, skipping breakfast indicating financial stress, checking news before social media revealing political engagement levels.

Step outside and the grid tightens. Modern vehicles contain fifty to one hundred microprocessors, three hundred-plus sensors, and mandatory cellular connectivity that transforms automobiles into mobile surveillance platforms. Event Data Recorders capture speed, braking force, seatbelt usage, steering angle, and G-forces thirty seconds preceding any “incident” - though incident remains deliberately undefined, and data retrieval requires neither warrant nor notification in most jurisdictions. Drive through a toll booth, pass a traffic camera, park in a monitored lot, and you’ve added coordinates to a permanent travel log reconstructing your movements across years.

Public transit offers no refuge. Facial recognition payment systems in Moscow, Shenzhen, and expanding “democratic” pilot programs process biometric identities faster than card swipes, logging timestamps and travel patterns into permanent archives. London’s Oyster cards create movement histories retrievable by law enforcement without judicial oversight. WiFi tracking in subway stations identifies phones despite WiFi appearing “disabled” - devices emit probe requests every forty to one hundred milliseconds, broadcasting unique MAC addresses that create location trails accurate to meters.

Arrive at work and enter the observation laboratory. Keycard entry logs timestamps and precise locations. Computer systems record keystroke dynamics - typing rhythms as identifying as handwritten signatures. Corporate networks proxy all traffic through monitoring systems capturing URL visits, message content, download activity, duration metrics. Video analytics perform gait analysis, identifying individuals by walking patterns even when faces remain obscured. Elevator weight sensors combined with camera footage determine occupancy and identity.

Lunch breaks generate surveillance gold. Mobile payment apps - Venmo, Cash App, Apple Pay - create financial surveillance networks exceeding any tax authority’s historical capabilities, documenting transactions, social networks, relationship intimacy levels. Location data harvested from apps with “background refresh” capabilities reveals restaurant choices, duration of stays, table companions, subsequent destinations. Pharmacy visits trigger health condition flags. Political rally attendance generates risk score adjustments.

Return home to observation posts you installed voluntarily. Smart doorbells - Ring, Nest, Arlo- record four hundred million video clips monthly, creating neighborhood surveillance networks accessible to 2,014 police departments through “partnership” agreements requiring neither warrant nor homeowner consent. Amazon’s Neighbors app encourages residents to flag “suspicious” individuals - often coded language for racial profiling - feeding machine learning systems training data on human suspicion patterns.

Domestic spaces have transformed into comprehensive sensor networks. Smart speakers record ambient audio during “wake word” activation, with documented cases of accidental activation and human contractor review of private conversations including intimate moments and medical discussions. Smart thermostats track occupancy patterns, energy usage revealing daily schedules. Smart locks record entry and exit patterns shared with “authorized partners” including law enforcement. Smart appliances monitor usage patterns and “anomalous behavior.”

Television watches back. Samsung, LG, and Vizio models collect viewing habits, search queries, voice commands, and in documented cases transmit screenshots of displayed content every second. Streaming services build psychological profiles from consumption patterns—depression indicators from binge-watching metrics, political orientation from documentary selections, cognitive patterns from pause and rewind behaviors.

Even sleep provides no darkness. Trackers monitor REM cycles, apnea episodes, restlessness. Smart home systems adjust temperatures based on detected occupancy. Security systems log movement patterns. And in classified facilities processing daily harvests, quantum computers decrypt yesterday’s “secure” communications, correlate metadata patterns, construct association maps linking you to contacts of contacts, predict behaviors not yet conceived.

The smartphone remains surveillance engineering’s crowning achievement. Sixty-three percent of humanity carries tracking beacons exceeding anything totalitarian regimes of previous centuries imagined. GPS provides location within three meters. Accelerometers reveal physical activity, health status, emotional state through movement patterns. Gyroscopes map spatial orientation. Barometers calculate altitude changes identifying building floors. Microphones activate remotely without indicator lights—Snowden’s disclosures confirmed this capability. Cameras prove similarly accessible. Bluetooth scans identify nearby devices creating social network maps. WiFi mapping enables indoor positioning accurate to one to two meters.

Apps transform these sensors into comprehensive surveillance tools. Weather apps sell location permissions to data brokers. Flashlight apps access cameras and microphones as documented malware vectors. Social media harvests contact lists, message content, photo metadata. Navigation apps log every destination, route, duration, speed. Dating apps reveal intimate preferences, location patterns, communication content. Fitness apps transmit health data to insurance providers and employers. Banking apps create financial surveillance networks. Every “free” service monetizes behavioral prediction.

Encryption offers theater, not protection. PRISM and upstream collection programs - XKEYSCORE, TEMPORA, MUSCULAR - operate at infrastructure levels tapping fiber optic cables, compelling corporate cooperation through National Security Letters (gag-ordered demands preventing disclosure), and storing encrypted communications for future decryption when quantum computing renders current standards obsolete. Utah’s NSA Data Center processes yottabytes - storage capacity so vast it could contain all human communication for millennia.

“Incidental collection”—the euphemism for capturing domestic communications during foreign surveillance—creates permanent records subject to “minimization procedures” requiring neither deletion nor notification. FBI “backdoor searches” of Section 702 collection data numbered 3.4 million queries in 2021 alone—warrantless searches of content collected without warrant.

Stingray devices—cell site simulators deployed by law enforcement nationwide—mimic cellular towers forcing all phones within range to connect and reveal International Mobile Subscriber Identity numbers, location data, communication metadata. Baltimore police admitted using Stingrays 4,300 times without warrants. The FBI requires agencies signing nondisclosure agreements before receiving devices—secrecy prioritized over constitutional protections.

Predictive policing algorithms—PredPol, HunchLab—claim to forecast crime locations. In practice, feedback loops emerge: policing data from over-policed neighborhoods trains algorithms predicting crime in those same neighborhoods, justifying continued over-policing. Risk assessment scores determine bail, sentencing, parole—algorithmic calculations of “dangerousness” based on demographic correlations rather than individual behavior, encoding systemic bias into mathematical objectivity.

Social media operates as voluntary confession on industrial scale. Facebook’s 2012 “emotional contagion” experiment manipulated 689,003 users’ news feeds to study mood alteration. Twitter creates influence maps identifying “disruptors.” Instagram’s image recognition catalogs objects, locations, relationships. TikTok’s data collection - including keystroke patterns and clipboard content - raises national security concerns while demonstrating surveillance capitalism’s global reach.

The “Internet of Things” completes domestic colonization. Smart mattresses, toilets, mirrors, windows - all feeding data streams into centralized processing. DNA testing services - 23andMe, AncestryDNA, GEDmatch - have provided law enforcement access to genetic profiles of millions who never consented to law enforcement use. Familial searching creates genetic surveillance networks implicating entire family lines. China’s compulsory DNA collection from Uyghur populations represents ethnic surveillance at the genomic level.

Financial surveillance operates through Suspicious Activity Reports requiring banks to report transactions exceeding $10,000 and increasingly patterns below thresholds. The Bank Secrecy Act and PATRIOT Act created financial tracking infrastructure monitoring every significant transaction. Cryptocurrency exchanges now require identity verification linking blockchain to real identities. The “war on cash” promotes digital payments creating comprehensive spending records.

Biometric databases expand relentlessly. India’s Aadhaar contains 1.3 billion citizens’ fingerprints, iris scans, facial photographs. China’s national biometric database integrates facial recognition, DNA, voiceprints, gait analysis. The FBI’s Next Generation Identification contains 117 million fingerprints, 52 million facial images.

Historical “conspiracy theories” proved insufficiently paranoid. Documents confirm: MKULTRA’s mind control experiments (1953-1973) involving unwitting subjects. COINTELPRO’s surveillance and disruption of political organizations (1956-1971). Operation CHAOS’s CIA monitoring of domestic anti-war activists. The FBI’s blackmail of Martin Luther King Jr. The NSA’s LOVEINT - analysts using surveillance to stalk romantic interests.

Neuroweapons research explores “remote influencing” - microwave auditory effects (the “Frey effect”), electromagnetic field manipulation, directed energy systems. Whether deployed or merely researched, such capabilities blur boundaries between physical and psychological warfare.

Corporate-state fusion creates totalitarian infrastructure without totalitarian intent. Data brokers - Acxiom, Experian, LexisNexis, Palantir - compile thousands of data points per individual, selling comprehensive profiles to government agencies, employers, insurers, political campaigns.

Opting out proves functionally impossible. Living without identification excludes participation in financial systems, housing, employment, healthcare. “Dumb” phones still connect to cellular networks providing location tracking. Cash transactions face increasing restrictions.

Psychological impacts manifest regardless of awareness. Self-censorship becomes automatic when surveillance is assumed. Creativity requires risk, experimentation, deviation—precisely behaviors flagged by predictive algorithms. Intimacy requires privacy; privacy requires confidence in unobserved space.

Legal protections lag technology by decades. The Third Party Doctrine holds that information conveyed to third parties receives no Fourth Amendment protection. Geofence warrants request location data for all devices in specified areas. Keyword warrants identify users who searched specific terms.

International frameworks offer no protection. The Five Eyes alliance shares intelligence while circumventing domestic restrictions. The 14 Eyes expands this network. Bilateral agreements create global surveillance networks.

Resistance strategies—encryption, anonymity networks, secure systems, Faraday cages, cash, offline communication—provide partial mitigation but fail against comprehensive surveillance. Metadata defeats content encryption. Device compromise defeats endpoint security.

Trajectory points toward total integration: central bank digital currencies enabling complete transaction monitoring; biometric ID requirements for internet access; AI-powered pre-crime prediction; social credit scoring integrating financial, social, political metrics; brain-computer interfaces creating direct neural monitoring.

What remains? Perhaps only recognition that surveillance stalking represents not aberration but essence - the logical culmination of technologies enabling observation, bureaucracies requiring information, power’s eternal expansion. Horror lies not in the watching but in the watched trading privacy for convenience, security, connection, entertainment. The panopticon’s genius was never the tower’s visibility but prisoners’ internalization of surveillance.

Somewhere in data centers humming with cooling fans and quantum processors, your profile grows more detailed, your predictions more precise, your autonomy more illusory. The cage was built while you slept. You woke inside it. You may never leave.

AND NOW… YOU ARE MARKED. PERMANENTLY."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.

Musical Interlude: Yanni, “One Man’s Dream”

Full screen recommended.

Yanni, “One Man’s Dream”, 

Live At The Acropolis, 1993

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Have you contemplated your home galaxy lately? If your sky looked like this, perhaps you'd contemplate it more often! The featured picture is actually a composite of two images taken from the same location in south Brazil and with the same camera - but a few hours apart. The person in the image - also the astrophotographer - has much to see in the Milky Way Galaxy above.

The central band of our home Galaxy stretches diagonally up from the lower left. This band is dotted with spectacular sights including dark nebular filaments, bright blue stars, and red nebulas. Millions of fainter and redder stars fill in the deep Galactic background. To the lower right of the Milky Way are the colorful gas and dust clouds of Rho Ophiuchi, featuring the bright orange star Antares. On this night, just above and to the right of Antares was the bright planet Jupiter. The sky is so old and so familiar that humanity has formulated many stories about it, some of which inspired this very picture."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191015.html

"Still Walking Beside You…"; "The Remaining Years"

Full screen recommended.

oltsev art, 

"Still Walking Beside You…"

"There's something nobody tells you about a long love. It doesn't live in the moments you planned for. Not the anniversaries, not the milestones. It lives in the walk you took without thinking about it. The hand reached for in the dark. The silence on a long drive that needed no words at all. A whole life together can look quiet from the outside. That's usually when it's everything. I hope this finds you on a day when you can still reach over. And I hope you do."

o

Full screen recommended.

Wonder Spirits,

"The Remaining Time, 60 Years of Love in 5 Minutes.

They Chose Each Other Every Single Day"

"What happens when the hourglass of life begins to run thin, 

but every grain of sand is made of gold?

Hope this song reminds you to hold your loved ones a little closer today."

"Live Your Life and Forget Your Age"

Full screen recommended.

Delta King's Blues,

"Live Your Life and Forget Your Age"

"Don’t count the candles… count the sunsets, the laughter, and the miles you’ve lived. “Live Your Life and Forget Your Age” is an uplifting, feel-good Delta King’s Blues tune about embracing every season of life, finding joy in the little things, and refusing to let a number define your spirit. A warm, easy-flowing acoustic guitar carries the melody like an old friend inviting you to sit on the porch and enjoy the evening breeze. The harmonica sings with gentle optimism, weaving hopeful notes through memories, smiles, and second chances. The groove rolls slow and comforting, built for folks who know the best years aren’t always the youngest - they’re the ones fully lived. This is blues for living in the moment. For those who’ve learned that happiness has nothing to do with age and everything to do with how you spend your days. Your age is just a number… your stories are what make you timeless."

Native Elder, "Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid of Your Final Years"

Full screen recommended.

Native Elder,

"Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid of Your Final Years"

"What Happens When You Die? Physics Has an Answer. The Truth About Reality, Death & the Self"

Prof. Richard Feynman,

"What Happens When You Die? Physics Has an Answer.

The Truth About Reality, Death & the Self"

"You think you’re a solid object. A fixed thing. A permanent “someone.” You’re not. You are not a noun. You are a process. You are an event unfolding in space-time. In this mind-expanding masterclass inspired by the teachings of Richard Feynman, we dismantle one of the deepest illusions of human existence: the idea that you are made of “stuff.” Every atom in your body is replaced. Every molecule cycles. Every particle moves. And yet somehow… you remain you. How? We explore the physics behind identity, entropy, and death - not as mystical ideas, but as consequences of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and space-time. 

• If your atoms constantly change, what stays the same? 

• If life is order, what exactly is death? 

• If entropy always increases, why does life exist at all? Through powerful physical metaphors: 

A wave that persists while its water constantly changes. A deck of cards briefly forming a rare, ordered pattern. A loaf of salami - where your life is a permanent slice of space-time. You’ll see death not as annihilation, but as a statistical shift. Not as disappearance - but as the natural relaxation of structure back into the cosmic shuffle. And here’s the twist: The pattern may dissolve. But the fact that it happened is eternal. 

From the block universe of relativity to the irreversible arrow of time, this video connects Feynman’s physics with the ultimate human question: What are you? You are stardust. You are energy in motion. You are a temporary island of order in a sea of entropy. And you are forever embedded in the fabric of space-time."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Know What's Weird?"

"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,

but pretty soon... everything's different."

- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"

"Are You Not Entertained?"

"Are You Not Entertained?"

by Mark Manson

"In David Foster Wallace’s classic novel, "Infinite Jest", there’s a movie that is so entertaining that anyone who views even a small portion of it will give up all desire to do anything else in life in order to keep watching. Throughout the book, characters who see it give up family, friends, careers, even eating and sleeping, just to continue watching the film.

The overarching theme of "Infinite Jest" is that it’s possible, both as an individual and as a society, to be too entertained. And much of the book’s 1000+ pages are about the absurdity of such a society. Wallace wrote Infinite Jest in the early 1990s, a time when televisions were just starting to get dozens of channels, news was being broadcast 24 hours per day, video games were taking over the minds of young kids, and blockbuster movies were earning unheard of amounts of cash at the box office each summer.

At the time, Wallace had just gone through a recovery program for alcohol and drug abuse. Yet, despite getting clean for the first time in his adult life, he noticed something strange: he couldn’t stop watching television.

Wallace seemed to understand that as media multiplies, so does competition for attention. And as competition for our attention multiplies, content is no longer optimized for beauty or art or even enjoyment - but rather for its addictive qualities. When there are two TV channels, the channel doesn’t really have to worry about you clicking away, they just make the best show they can. But when there are 200 channels, suddenly that channel must do everything it can to keep you watching as long as possible. Wallace saw this problem coming decades in advance, and with his personal understanding of addiction based on his recovery experience, he seemed to grasp the addict culture we’d all soon be a part of.

Today, we regularly mistake this addictive media for entertainment. There’s some psychological function deep in our brains that tells us, “Well, I just spent six hours watching this show, I must like it a lot.” When, no, its script is actually a mediocre piece of hot trash and you’re being manipulated by cliffhangers and bad writing for hours on end to keep watching. The same way you get hijacked into scrolling through social media way more than you’d actually like to, your brain gets hijacked to watch “just one more episode” to find out if so-and-so really died or not.

In social media, this “it’s addictive, but I also kinda don’t like it” phenomenon has been recognized and discussed to death. But in other areas of media and entertainment, we haven’t caught on yet.

Streaming services and Hollywood are the obvious culprits here. How many more mediocre Marvel Universe movies do we need to prove this point? How many more bad Star Wars spin-offs? How many bad Netflix shows with every episode ending in a cliffhanger? Everyone complains about how Hollywood doesn’t have any new ideas anymore. Well, there’s a reason nothing new is getting made: endlessly adding content to the same well-worn storylines keeps people hooked. Constantly playing to people’s sense of nostalgia and remixing classic genres is a risk-free way of guaranteeing viewership.

Music is in a similar place. For a while now, market research on music streaming services has found that people spend more time listening to old music instead of new music and the trend on this is in the wrong direction. Music lovers are voting with their mouse buttons and those mouse buttons are going back in time, not forward.

Veteran music producer Rick Beato has made a number of videos lately talking about how popular music the past few years has gotten simplified to the point where it’s one or two chords and a single melody, repeated over and over for two or three minutes. No chorus. No bridge. No variation. No build-up or release. Just an endless hodgepodge of catchy sounds repeated, one after another.

Part of this is because the economics of music streaming is such that artists have incentive to not create the best songs or albums possible, but rather to create as many small, simple songs that prevent you from clicking away as possible. It’s created an artistic environment where it’s better to have 200 decent, listenable songs rather than 20 brilliant songs.

A similar problem plagues YouTube, where the biggest creators rack up millions of views doing inane things like opening a thousand Amazon boxes or giving away cars to their friends, over and over and over again. On the one hand, it’s not that interesting. On the other, you find yourself mindlessly clicking on the next video, and the next, and the next, and the next.

When everything is measured in terms of engagement, content will be optimized for addictiveness. Not entertainment or artistic merit. Not intellectual substance or creativity. Pure, plain addictiveness. That means we, the consumers, get a higher quantity of more predictable, less innovative, less interesting art in our lives.

In the realm of art and music and film and television, this is really annoying and frustrating. It requires each of us to sift longer and harder to find something new and great. But where this optimization for addictiveness gets dangerous is another part of culture that I want to talk about… *takes a deep breath*... politics.

I’ve written before about how most people in the United States agree about most things, yet somehow our political parties and government continually find ways to do things most people don’t like. Many pundits have attributed this inconsistency between the public’s desires and the government’s actions with theories about the primary system or entrenched special interests or polarizing social media.

But what about this? Politicians - like Hollywood executives, pop stars, and YouTube creators - are incentivized to generate more engagement. Not great results. Just more engagement, all the time. Therefore, their actions are not optimized to produce smart policy or common sense bills or a shrewd compromise, but instead to grab and hold our attention as long as humanly possible.

David Foster Wallace saw this coming too. The president of the United States in "Infinite Jest" is a former pop singer who obsesses over his television ratings, thinks policy discussions are too boring and considers war with Canada based on how good his photo ops would be in military camo fatigues. In the book, terrorist groups run rampant, as the battlefield is not for territory or resources, but for eyeballs and headlines.

Ultimately, nobody can manage our attention but ourselves. We can get mad at Netflix or Spotify or the Senate. But ultimately, these systems are loose reflections of our own attention habits shining back at us. Change our attention, change the systems. There’s an old saying that people “vote with their feet.” Well, today you need to vote with your eyeballs and mouse clicks. Don’t watch the next episode of that poorly written piece of garbage that keeps teasing you with characters almost dying. Don’t listen to the next half-assed album with 27 different two-minute tracks. Don’t click on clickbait. Don’t mindlessly scroll through TikTok and YouTube, rewarding people for attention-grabbing stunts. And don’t watch or respond to politicians and pundits who try to blather on and on about pet issues but never actually get anything done.

In the chaotic, entertaining mess of "Infinite Jest", there is the story of Don Gately, a recovered alcoholic who would literally rather die than relapse into his substance abuse. When I first read the book years ago, Gately’s storyline seemed out of place. Amid all this futuristic mayhem of short attention spans and insanely addictive entertainment and neurotic teenagers, Gately’s narrative seemed like an oddly conventional story of personal triumph over one’s demons and an ability to sacrifice oneself for others.

What I realize now is that Wallace wrote the character of Don Gately as an example of what we would all need to aspire to become: recovered addicts. People who can cut themselves off cold turkey, who can turn off the drug. People who can manage their own attention and not fall victim to endless streams of mindless engagement. People who can step above the fray of political addiction and demand substance over bluster. And not just for our own sake. For everyone else’s as well."

- https://markmanson.net/

○

Deeply concerned Americans, always fully aware and truthfully

 informed by their never-lying government and Main Stream 

Media about current economic, political and social issues, react as expected...

Freely download, "Infinite Jest", by David Foster Wallace, here:

- https://raisuman123.wordpress.com/