Full screen recommended.
Larry Johnson, 8/1/26
"Israel Will Pay Price If Trump Makes
Good On Threat To Ramp Up War"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Jeremiah Babe, "Biggest Threat To America, You Should Be Worried"
Jeremiah Babe, 8/1/26
"Biggest Threat To America,
You Should Be Worried"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: 2002, "Time Stands Still"; "Memory Of Tomorrow"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Time Stands Still"
o
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Memory Of Tomorrow"
"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."
"What the Rain Found Them Doing"
Full screen recommended.
Three-Quarter Town,
"What the Rain Found Them Doing"
"In Three-Quarter Town, rain never arrives in a hurry. It finds an old woman by the window, a black cat curled on a blanket, sheep waiting patiently beneath the eaves, and quiet hands still busy with tea, music, letters, and small familiar work. Some stay inside by the fire. Some step out to check the barn. Some simply watch the rain move across the rooftops until evening comes. A gentle rainy-day story about solitude, companionship, and the little things people keep doing when the world turns soft and gray."
Native Elder, "Why the Evil People in Your Life Are Being Exposed One by One"
Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"Why the Evil People in Your Life
Are Being Exposed One by One"
Delta Blues Brother, "Too Many Experts, Too Little Sense"
Full screen recommended.
Delta Blues Brother,
"Too Many Experts, Too Little Sense"
"Saudi Arabia Just Collapsed, The Gulf Strike Nobody Expected"
Scott Ritter, 8/1/26
"Saudi Arabia Just Collapsed,
The Gulf Strike Nobody Expected"
"Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure and geopolitical standing have hit a breaking point. In this critical update, former UN inspector Scott Ritter breaks down how recent escalations in the Middle East are shifting the balance of power, crippling Gulf oil logistics, and leaving Washington with zero good options."
Comments here:
Amb. Chas Freeman, "Middle East in Transition & a New World Order"
Amb. Chas Freeman, 8/1/26
"Middle East in Transition & a New World Order"
"Ambassador Freeman was a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, earning the highest public service awards of the Department of Defense for his roles in designing a NATO-centred post-Cold War European security system and in reestablishing defense and military relations with China. He served as U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Ambassador Freeman discusses the need for the West to rediscover diplomacy and adjust to a very different world."
Comments here:
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, "US - Iran War: This Is Far Worse Than Most People Realize"
Full screen recommended.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, 8/1/26
"US - Iran War:
This Is Far Worse Than Most People Realize"
"In this new interview, Professor Jeffrey Sachs argues that repeated American threats against Iran lack credibility because the military and economic costs of escalation would be catastrophic. He says renewed strikes would provoke retaliation, disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, push oil prices toward $100 a barrel, and create political consequences ahead of the November elections. He also recommends an immediate halt to bombing rather than pursuing an agreement that neither side can realistically accept. Sachs also offers a highly critical assessment of Israeli politics, arguing that the country's political competition is between different shades of hawkish leadership rather than between advocates of war and peace. The video explains that his descriptions of Israeli policy, including allegations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and war crimes, are presented as his own views on issues that remain fiercely contested internationally. The conclusion distinguishes verified data from forecasts and argues that separating evidence from opinion is essential when evaluating major geopolitical claims."
Comments here:
"War..."
“When people speak to you about a preventive war,
you tell them to go and fight it.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
○
"Humanity is the spirit of the Supreme Being on earth, and that humanity is standing amidst ruins, hiding its nakedness behind tattered rags, shedding tears upon hollow cheeks, and calling for its children with pitiful voice. But the children are busy singing their clan's anthem; they are busy sharpening the swords and cannot hear the cry of their mothers."
- Kahlil Gibran
U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman HM1 Richard Barnett, assigned to the 1st Marine Division, holds an Iraqi child in central Iraq in this March 29, 2003 file photo. Confused front line crossfire ripped apart an Iraqi family after local soldiers appeared to force civilians towards positions held by U.S. Marines.
Adventures With Danno, "Massive Grocery Price Increases Coming"
Adventures With Danno, 8/1/26
"Massive Grocery Price Increases Coming"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Diesel Shortage is Here"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 8/1/26
"The Diesel Shortage is Here"
"The CEO of Shell has issued a warning that should concern everyone. Diesel supplies are tightening, multiple wars are disrupting energy markets, and nearly everything we buy depends on diesel transportation. In this video I break down why this isn't a future problem - it's happening right now - and how higher diesel prices could impact groceries, medicine, construction, shipping, and the overall economy. We'll discuss what this means for businesses, families, truckers, and consumers, along with practical steps you can take to prepare without panicking. If diesel shortages continue, expect higher prices, slower deliveries, and more pressure on the supply chain. Stay informed with the latest business and finance news from i Allegedly and join the discussion in the comments below."
Comments here:
Kahlil Gibran, “The Farewell”
“The Farewell”
“Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you.
It was but yesterday we met in a dream.
You have sung to me in my aloneness,
and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky.
But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over,
and it is no longer dawn.
The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day,
and we must part.
If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more,
we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.
And if our hands should meet in another dream
we shall build another tower in the sky.”
- Kahlil Gibran, “The Prophet”
Friday, July 31, 2026
Jeremiah Babe, "They're Telling You Everything's Fine While The Empire Falls"
Jeremiah Babe, 7/31/26
"They're Telling You Everything's
Fine While The Empire Falls"
Comments here:
"Companies Know What's Coming... That's Why They're Cutting Jobs"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 7/31/26
"Companies Know What's Coming...
That's Why They're Cutting Jobs"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Little River Band, "Cool Change"
Full screen recommended.
Little River Band, "Cool Change"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away.
Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen at the right of the starry field of view. Inside the nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation. With the eerie hue of dust reflecting bluish light from hot young stars of NGC 7023, the Iris Nebula stands out against the dark just left of center. In the broad telescopic frame, these fertile interstellar dust fields stretch almost seven full moons across the sky."
"Actors..."
“Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have first pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.”
- W.H Auden
"A dog might feel as majestic as a lion, might bark as loud as a roar, might have a heart as mighty and brave as a Lion's heart, but at the end of the day, a dog is a dog and a lion is a lion. "
- Charlyn Khatero
"Challenges..."
"When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. "
- Paulo Coelho
o
"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"INTEL Roundtable - Weekly Wrap 31- John Kiriakou & Scott Ritter"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 7/31/26
"INTEL Roundtable - Weekly Wrap 31 -
John Kiriakou & Scott Ritter"
Comments here:
"Iran Strikes U.S.-Escorted Tankers in Hormuz; 2 Hit, 4 Forced to Retreat"
Col. Larry Wilkerson, 7/31/26
"Iran Strikes U.S.-Escorted Tankers in Hormuz;
2 Hit, 4 Forced to Retreat"
Comments here:
"Iran Became the Graveyard of the U.S. Empire & Israel"
Full screen recommended.
Douglas Macgregor, 7/31/26
"Iran Became the Graveyard of the U.S. Empire & Israel"
Comments here:
“Before the Leaves Fall From the Trees”
“Before the Leaves Fall From the Trees”
by Simon Black
"The morning of June 28, 1914 began like any other normal day. It was a Sunday, so a lot of people went to church. Others prepared large meals for family gatherings, played with their children, or thumbed through the Sunday papers.
At that point, tensions had been high in Europe for several years; the continent was bitterly divided by a series of complex diplomatic and military alliances, and small wars had recently broken out. Italy and the Ottoman Empire went to war in 1912 in a limited, 13-month conflict. And the First Balkan War was waged in early 1913. Overall, though, the continent clung to a delicate peace. And hardly anyone expected that most of the next three decades would be filled with chaos, poverty, and destruction. And then it happened.
That Sunday afternoon, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated during an official visit to Sarajevo. And the world changed forever. Five weeks later the entire continent was at war with itself. But even still, most of the ‘experts’ thought it would be a simple, speedy conflict. Germany’s emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, famously told his troops who were being shipped off to the front line in August 1914, “You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees...” It took four years and an estimated 68 million casualties to bring the war to a close. But that was only the prelude.
Following (and even during) World War I, a series of bloody revolutionary movements took hold in Europe, including in Russia, Greece, Spain, Turkey, and Ireland. Then came the Spanish flu, which claimed the lives of tens of millions of people. Later, Germany sunk into one of the worst episodes of hyperinflation in human history.
Communism began rapidly spreading across the world almost as quickly as the Spanish flu, often through violent fanatics who engaged in murder and arson in order to intimidate their opponents; this became known as the ‘Red Scare’ in the United States.
Of course there were some good years during the 1920s when people generally felt prosperous and happy; but it all came crashing down at the end of the decade when a severe economic depression strangled the entire world. It lasted for more than ten years, during which time the world was once again brought to an even more destructive war that didn’t end until atomic weapons obliterated the civilian populations of two Japanese cities.
Again – go back to June 1914. Who would have thought that the next 30+ years would play out so destructively? Even for the people who did predict that Europe would go to war in 1914, most leaders thought it would be over quickly. And almost no one expected it would spawn decades of chaos.
Today we’re obviously living in different times and under different circumstances. But we may be standing at a similar precipice as in 1914, staring at enormous trends that could shape our lives for years to come. Covid only scratched the surface.
We now know without a doubt, for example, how governments will respond the next time they feel there’s a threat to public health. They’ll say, “We’re listening to the scientists.” Really? The same scientists who told people they couldn’t go to work, school, or church, but it was perfectly fine for peaceful protesters to pack together like sardines without wearing masks because they’re apparently protected from the virus by their own righteousness? The same scientists who wanted to lock everyone down to prevent Covid, but were happy to accept skyrocketing rates of cancer, depression, suicide, heart disease, and domestic abuse as a result of those very lockdowns and so-called "vaccines'?
The public health consequences from this pandemic and "vaccine" will reverberate for years to come. And that doesn’t even begin to take the economic consequences into consideration. Western governments have taken on trillions of dollars in new debt this year and central banks have printed trillions more. Even with all that stimulus, however, there are still hundreds of millions of people worldwide who lost their jobs, and countless businesses that have closed.
Future generations who haven’t even been born yet will spend their entire working lives paying interest on the debts that are being accumulated today. The long-term consequences of all this are incalculable.
And then there are the social trends – the rise of neo-Marxism that’s sweeping the world so fast. It’s the Red Scare of the 21st century. They despise talented, successful people. They believe it’s greedy for you to keep a healthy portion of what you earn, but it’s not greedy for them to take it from you and spend it on themselves.
Many of the people in this movement, of course, are violent fanatics who routinely engage in arson, assault, and vandalism. Same for the social justice warriors who are just as quick to violence and intimidation; plus they’ve already commandeered the decision-making of some of the largest, most powerful companies in the world. You can’t even watch a football game or a TV commercial anymore without some commentary on oppression and victimization. And any intellectual dissent is met with intimidation or censorship.
In fact the largest consumer technology companies in the world have become our censors. We’re not allowed to share scientific information that doesn’t conform to the Chinese-controlled World Health Organization’s guidance. And news articles that don’t match their ideology are blocked.
Let’s not kid ourselves – these trends are not going away any time soon. It’s great to be optimistic, hope for the best, and enjoy the good years as they come. But it makes sense to at least be prepared for the possibility that we could be at the very beginning of a period of enormous instability that may last a very long time."
○
"The Guns of August"
"In this landmark, Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players."
Freely download here:
○
“It is history that teaches us to hope. It is well that war is
so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”
- Robert E. Lee
But we've learned nothing from history, nothing at all,
and our fondness, no, love of war, has only improved the weapons...
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Numbers are Raising Red Flags"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 7/31/26
"The Numbers are Raising Red Flags"
"The latest economic numbers from the Federal Reserve are here, but something doesn’t seem to add up. GDP, inflation, interest rates, consumer debt, and student loan defaults are painting a confusing picture of the American economy. Are we really seeing an economic recovery, or are there warning signs being overlooked? In this episode of iAllegedly, Dan breaks down the newest economic data, inflation concerns, the growing student loan crisis, rising costs, AI replacing jobs, corporate layoffs, data privacy issues, and why millions of Americans are questioning whether the economy is actually improving. Plus, we look at what these changes could mean for your finances, your job, and your future."
Comments here:
"The Consequences Of Our Choices..."
"Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.”
- Richard Bach, “Running From Safety”
"Diane Ackerman on What Working at a Suicide Prevention Hotline Taught Her About Loneliness and Resilience"
"Diane Ackerman on What Working at a Suicide
Prevention Hotline Taught Her About Loneliness and Resilience"
by Maria Popova
“How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say OK?” Maira Kalman pondered in her visual philosophy. Such is the magnificent resilience of the human spirit. Our culture is haunted by the unholy ghost of suicide; those who succumb to it are mercilessly judged by the media and those who stay behind are at risk of contagion. How, then, do we help those on the brink of self-destruction “get up and say OK?” And what does that act of help reveal about our own trials and triumphs as we learn to be OK?
That’s precisely what Diane Ackerman explores in the gorgeous essay “A Slender Thread” in the anthology "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times," adapted from her altogether sublime 1998 book "A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis" (public library | IndieBound), which recounts her time working as a volunteer crisis counselor at a suicide prevention hotline, performing a “slow tango of life and death” that demands of its dancers impossible “grace and cunning.”
Ackerman - scientific sorceress of the senses and supreme historian of the human heart - marvels at the humbling, uniquely human notion of the very concept of a suicide prevention hotline: "We use only a voice and a set of ears, somehow tied to the heart and brain, but it feels like mountaineering with someone who has fallen, a dangling person whose hands you are gripping in your own."
Ackerman recalls one particularly poignant call, with Louise - a frequent caller with “many talents, a lively mind, a quirky and unusual point of view, and a generous heart” - whom she had reeled back from the brink of suicide many times before. Louise’s anguish, like that of many on the downward spiral of the psyche, stems from feeling, as Ackerman puts it, bereft of choices. (Which is why Kerkhof’s pioneering suicide-prevention technique is so effective both in clinical contexts and in controlling our everyday worries.) Ackerman reflects on this uniquely human dance with possibility:
Choice is a signature of our species. We choose to live, sometimes we choose our own death, but most of the time we make choices just to prove choice is possible. Above all else, we value the right to choose one’s destiny. The very young and some lucky few may find their days opening one onto another like a set of ornate doors, but most people make an unconscious vow each morning to get through the day’s stresses and labors intact, without becoming overwhelmed or wishing to escape into death. Everybody has thought about suicide, or knows somebody who committed suicide, and then felt “pushed another inch, and it could have been me.” As Emile Zola once said, some mornings you first have to swallow your toad of disgust before you can get on with the day. We choose to live. But suicidal people have tunnel vision no other choice seems possible. A counselor’s job is to put windows and doors in that tunnel.
Talking to Louise, Ackerman contemplates the enormous and vulnerable and terrifying responsibility of the crisis counselor as a torchbearer of luminous choice amid the darkness of the tunnel: "Every call with Louise has seemed this dire, a last call for help, and she has survived. But suppose tonight is the exception, suppose this is the last of last times? What is different tonight? I’m not sure. Then it dawns on me. Something small. I’m frightened by how often she has been using the word “only,” a word tight as a noose."
Assuring Louise that she would stay with her, Ackerman flickers a sidewise beam on the other meaning of “only” - that of the lonesome one, gripped with our civilizational anxiety of being alone: "So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there’s a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself."
When Louise laments her own weakness, Ackerman invokes her acts of everyday heroism, shared during previous calls - like volunteering during the flood, “filling sandbags and making sandwiches” for the victims. “Broaden the perspective,” Ackerman writes. “The hardest job when someone is depressed.”
Because something feels different about the call - because Ackerman feels the tar-thick darkness of that particular tunnel - she alerts the police while on the line with Louise, who had made her promise not to bring in the authorities. When they arrive - faster than expected - Louise swells with the rage of betrayal, screams at Ackerman, calls her a liar, hangs up. Ackerman loses Louise — loses the call, that is, which holds the grim possibility of losing the life. She writes:
"Knowing and not knowing about callers, that’s what gets to me. My chest feels rigid as a boat hull, my ribs tense. Taking a large breath and letting it out slowly, I press my open palms against my face, rub the eyebrows, then the cheekbones and jaw, and laugh. Not a ha-ha laugh, a small sardonic one, the kind we save for the ridiculous, as I catch myself slipping into a familiar trap. I did fine. I did the best I could. Maybe the best anyone could tonight."
Ackerman circles back to the question of choice, so human and so riddled with perplexity: "Helping Louise survive is always an ordeal. Tonight she sounded even more determined and death bound than usual. It was the right choice. I think. Maybe. On the write-up sheet, under “Caller,” I write “Louise,” put the letter “H” for “high” in the box marked “suicide risk,” attach a yellow Lethality Assessment sheet, and add a few details of the call. Pressing my fingertips to my face, I push again on the brow bones, as if I could rearrange them, but they ache from a place I can’t reach with my hands."
A few weeks after that fateful call with Louise, the Crisis Center received a postcard from her, thanking the counselor - always anonymous, as was Ackerman to her caller - for, essentially, illuminating her tunnel. After the police had taken her to the emergency room, she had checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania for three weeks of “palatial bedlam.” Upon returning home, she had found a new job to replace the one she had lost and begun volunteering again, reporting that she was finally “in a good place.”
Ackerman’s closing words emanate far beyond the grimly glimmering grace of suicide prevention and into the broader and immeasurable beauty of asking for help. Beholding that postcard in disbelief, she writes: "She blesses the soul who “took my life in her hands that night,” thanks us all for our good work, is just writing “to let you know what happened - I bet you don’t hear that very often.” We don’t.
People take our lives in their hands all the time - parents, mentors, lovers, teachers, patrons. How often do they hear from us?
"The Impossible Will Take a Little While," which also gave us Victoria Safford on what it really means to “live our mission,” is a soul-raising read in its totality. Complement this particular excerpt with Bukowski’s beautiful letter of gratitude to the man who changed his life, then revisit Ackerman on what the future of robots reveals about the human condition and a fascinating look at how the psychology of suicide prevention can help us control our everyday worries."
"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to
whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
John Wilder, "Winter Is Coming"
"Winter Is Coming"
by John Wilder
"The last few years have seen more change than the last twenty years, combined. This is to be expected, especially if you give Strauss and Howe’s "The Fourth Turning" idea any credence. A short version of The Fourth Turning (also known as Kondratieff Wave Theory) is that there is a roughly 80-year cycle of human affairs. Let me use the life of my Dad, Pa Wilder, to describe it:
When Pa Wilder was young he spent most of his childhood in Winter, the first defining experience of his life was the Great Depression. Back then, they had printed versions of the Internet that they would get delivered to their house every day, called newspapers. They also had cell phones that never needed charging, and that you could never lose because they were in the living room and conveniently connected by a cord to the wall.
I’m sure all of the kids on the playground talked with Pa about how obvious it was that the Federal Reserve’s® monetary policy, combined with bankers lending to anyone with a pulse led to near financial collapse. Oh, and how their parents couldn’t afford shoes. Thankfully, Pa lived in a farming community, and every little house in town had a very large garden out back. Food from the grocery store?
Why would you spend money on food when you had to pay for the mortgage? That’s the sort of lesson that bored itself into Pa Wilder’s mind. As a kid, he saw people lose houses, he saw people lose fortunes. He saw a nation nearing collapse.
Click image for larger size.
Economic collapse led to the second thing that defined Pa Wilder’s youth: World War II. Not long after Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor he was in boot camp in Ft. Sill and before long was a 2nd lieutenant in the Army. The next four years he spent on an all-expenses-paid European vacation
The end of the war was the end of Kondratieff Winter. What followed was Spring. In post-war United States, growth and unrivaled prosperity followed from 1945-1965. Pa Wilder, like the rest of the G.I. generation, came back and built families and factories and farms. They looked out at a world that was shattered, and they made fortunes rebuilding it. They even found Dean Martin’s favorite eel. Don’t remember that? It’s a moray.
Spring was characterized by extreme faith in government institutions – sure the government had fumbled the ball in the Great Depression, but it had unified the country for World War II. It stayed back enough to allow growth, and Eisenhower’s America got out of North Korea and planted the seeds for the Super Science® projects that would provide unmatched weapons systems and the seeds of space exploration.
Spring gives over to Summer. Around 1965, the spiritual awakening was followed in 1975 by the “Me” decade. In Summer, the economy is humming along, the weather is great, and the first questioning of the previous ideas that led to the success of the country begins. It’s probably no coincidence that the disastrous Immigration Act of 1965, the arguably unconstitutional Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Lyndon Johnson’s voter-plantation Great Society acts (1964 and 1965) took place at the start of Summer when Americans were questioning their values, questioning the things that made America great.
Pa Wilder was an established businessman, working as the president of a very conservative farm bank. You could get a loan, but only if you had collateral and a good income stream. Pa Wilder told more people “no” than “yes” for loans. That bothered him, with the exception of the fact that he told me, “I’ve never had to foreclose on a house, son.” To him, it was a moral duty. Thankfully Pa never served in the paratroopers, otherwise, they would have called him “debt from above.”
In society, however, the big splits had started in 1965. The subversion of colleges started and would be nearly complete by the 1980s. Religious decline started, and Nixon got tired of hiding the fiscal shenanigans of the country that gold was exposing. His solution? Get rid of gold.
But Summer was still a good time. Autumn, however, is harvest. Pa Wilder was pretty close to retirement at this point, and the real economic power had moved to the Boomers. Pa’s natural fiscal conservatism led to a strong and stable business. The people that took over from him, however, would “give a loan to anyone with a pickup and a backhoe.” They even loaned out money on haunted houses, places they were sure were going to be repossessed.
Inertia is important in an economic system. But in 1985 the financial systems of the United States began to be harvested. “Greed is good” became the motto, and systems were run entirely for near-term economic benefit. Everyone from Pa Wilder’s generation was dead or retired – the new people in charge had no living memory of the national crisis brought on by The Great Depression.
The end of Autumn is the first chill of Winter, and the end result was the Great Recession (right on time!) in 2007-2008. In the Winter, things fall apart. I’ve been really quite amazed that things have held together so well since that first cold snap. Obama was, well, a disappointment. Trump seemed (in many ways) overwhelmed by the system and couldn’t figure out how to move the levers of power in any significant and lasting ways – which makes sense on a failing system.
That was the starter’s gun on the crisis, the date Winter began. We should have been a long way through it by now, but this Winter is different: The United States had a uniquely dominant position at the start of Winter, having both complete military dominance as well as a strong economic dominance of the world. The Federal Reserve© decided to just print all the money that it could to spend its way into continued prosperity.
Sure, sometimes government wants to stop a crisis so that the citizens can have a stable country. Sometimes. But other times, governments are waiting for the crisis, looking forward to it. Planning on it. In one article titled Sometimes the world needs a crisis: Turning challenges into opportunities, the Brookings Institute lists the things they love about crises. I admit that some of them are positive, but here are a few that I think are a bit more ominous – these descriptions are directly from Brookings:
Systemic Change: Global crises that crush existing orders and overturn long-held norms, especially extended, large-scale wars, can pave the way for new systems, structures, and values to emerge and take hold. Without such devastation to existing systems and practices, leaders and populations are generally resistant to major changes and to giving up some of their sovereignty to new organizations or rules.
Dramatic Policy Shifts: Sometimes the fear generated from a crisis and corresponding public outcry enables and even forces leaders to make bold and often difficult policy moves, even in countries not involved in or affected by the crisis.
COVID-19 was the big crisis they were waiting for. As the economic systems unwinded under the unsustainable debt the ‘Rona was the perfect opportunity. Imagine the tapestry of that you see was planned. What end was being sought? Well, they told us already. Systemic Change. Changes to virtually every system in the United States. Want to have a nice, neat, prosperous, and orderly community? Too bad. That’s not a thing that’s going to happen. The police will be neutered. How badly will communities suffer? Here’s how bad it was:
● Leftist controlled Chicago: arrests/stops were down 53 percent, murders are up 65 percent.
●Leftist controlled New York City: arrests/stops were down 38 percent, murders are up 58 percent.
●Leftist controlled Louisville: arrests/stops were down 35 percent, murders are up 87 (not a typo) percent.
●Leftist controlled Minneapolis: arrests/stops were down 42 percent, murders are up 64 percent.
●Leftist controlled Los Angeles: arrests/stops were down 33 percent, murders are up 51 percent.
● Leftist controlled St. Louis: in 2020, the murder rate hit “a 50-year high, with 87 out of every 100,000 residents being murdered.”
When there is murder and mayhem there is control. This is their plan. This is the crisis. Remove police – replace with ideological commissars that aren’t bound by law. Now, if they see a “crime” that they feel is wrong, they can punish it however they see fit. Most commonly, this will just be by removing the protection of the law and letting the mob do the rest. The biggest crimes? The crimes against the Left. That’s just the first of the planned Systemic Changes. There are more planned.
● Universal basic income.
● Boards to approve hiring at private companies.
● Equity everywhere.
●More rules than you can imagine. All of them will be based on some fear – guns in rural areas will be restricted because people in the city can’t stop killing each other.
● Climate change lunacy: to meet climate goals, Americans would be restricted to four pounds (344 milliliters) of meat a year. This will be walked back.
● And your ideas: they probably won’t be as bad as the real plans.
To be clear: Winter is here. The Left has an endless list of Leftist goals to accomplish during the crisis to come. The Winter will be dark. Where are our goals? The Right cannot just have the goals of “what the Left wants, but less,” or, “the opposite of what those guys want."After that? Organization. And leadership. And longjohns. Winter is here."
"The Fourth Turning Is Here: The Old Order Is Breaking Down"
"The Fourth Turning Is Here:
The Old Order Is Breaking Down"
by Chris MacIntosh
"In 1997, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe published "The Fourth Turning," a cyclical theory of Anglo-American history built around generational archetypes and recurring saecular rhythms of approximately 80 to 100 years - roughly the length of a long human life. Their framework identified four "turnings," each lasting roughly 20 to 25 years, that repeat in sequence.
The First Turning, the High, is an era of institutional confidence and community solidarity following a great crisis. The rules work, people trust them, conformity is rewarded - think the post-WWII boom, or the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.
The Second Turning, the Awakening, is a spiritual and cultural awakening that challenges the institutional consensus of the High. Individualism resurges; the establishment is questioned - the consciousness revolution of the 1960s-70s, the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s-30s.
The Third Turning, the Unraveling, sees institutions weaken, individualism reach its apex, and civic order decay. Trust collapses in government, media, corporations, each other as it did through the Culture Wars era of the 1980s-90s, or the Gilded Age of the 1870s-90s.
The Fourth Turning, the Crisis, is a decisive era of institutional destruction and reconstruction, typically catalysed by an existential threat - war, economic collapse, or civilizational rupture. The old order is swept away; a new one is forged. The Great Depression and WWII. The Civil War. The American Revolution.
"History is seasonal, and winter is coming."
- William Strauss and Neil Howe, "The Fourth Turning," 1997
The Current Position: By Strauss and Howe’s reckoning, the current Fourth Turning began around 2008 - the Global Financial Crisis being its catalytic spark - and will likely reach its resolution sometime in the 2025-2030 window. We are, in other words, in the heart of it. The battles being fought now - over monetary systems, institutional legitimacy, national sovereignty, and the nature of truth itself - are the defining conflicts of the crisis era.
What Fourth Turnings produce is not predictable in detail but consistent in structure: the old institutions are exposed as either corrupt or incompetent, a battle ensues between competing visions of the replacement order, and the outcome is determined by which faction can mobilise sufficient force - social, political, economic, or military - to impose its vision. The process is neither clean nor just. Fourth Turnings historically produce enormous suffering alongside the reconstruction.
The GFC was Act One: the revelation that the financial system was not a wealth-generation machine but a debt-recycling mechanism sustained by regulatory capture and central bank intervention. The quantitative easing programmes that followed - printing roughly $20 trillion across major central banks between 2008 and 2022 - bought time at the cost of massively inflating asset prices, concentrating wealth, and making the eventual reckoning worse.
Covid was Act Two: a simultaneous crisis of public health, institutional credibility, and civil liberties, weaponised by an apparatus of state control that had been building for decades and found in the pandemic a perfect justification for deployment at scale. More on this shortly.
Act Three is visible on the horizon: the currency crisis that follows years of money creation, the geopolitical realignment driven by a rising China and a fragmenting Western alliance, and the social rupture of populations that have been systematically lied to discovering the magnitude of the deception. Fourth Turnings do not end until the crisis is resolved. We have not arrived there yet."
Jim Kunstler, "The Curse It is Cast"
"The Curse It is Cast"
by Jim Kunstler
“I have nothing to hide. I can explain and validate everything that I’ve done.”
- Dr. Anthony Fauci, recorded for TV in 2022
"However you cut this Fauci business, one thing Americans have learned is how slippery and treacherous this thing called The Law has become. You saw it in the sundry Trump prosecutions of 2024, too - a marvelous demonstration of how to play Hide-the-Salami with the truth about anything and everything. You saw it in the structured failure to adjudicate election fraud in 2020. You saw it in the Jan-6 prosecutions and the Congressional Jan-6 Committee charade that followed. And much more.
And one thing it’s good for is demoralizing the whole citizenry to the max. Who in this land was not mortally depressed watching Rand Paul’s Senate hearing Wednesday starring Dr. Fauci? (One last time, the center of attention!) We have become a procedural republic, slipping into an impotence of legalistic self-f*ckery the way old folks slip into dementia, one lost memory at a time. There sits the murderer of millions cloaked in the banality of his evil - as it was at Nuremburg eighty years ago - and this time, you just have to lump it, America. The law can’t touch him at all.
Dr. Fauci ran his own titanically corrupt fiefdom out of the nation’s public health complex. Half-a-million a year wasn’t enough for - let’s call him what he was - an executive bureaucrat. He doled out millions in grants to universities, drug companies, and putative public service orgs, and extracted his vig, about a million bucks in prize money during the Covid-19 episode, not counting his share of royalties from drug patents. A modest million. He must have thought: who will even notice. . . who would ever be bothered by that tiny number when Congress, the Federal Reserve, and everybody else is drowning in numbers with so many zeros it gives them tachycardia just to glance at the balance sheet.
Plus, the thoroughly dishonorable news media was busy making Dr. Fauci a rock-star. He had everything but the stadiums. The grand old gals of Hollywood were going all moist over him. “Julia Roberts sent me flowers today,” he typed into his government-issue diary. Barbra Streisand called him on the phone. “I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA,” He gushed. His work resulted in the deaths of millions and the injury of millions more. Neverminding that, he carefully tracked and marveled at his burgeoning fame:
“Big front-page article abut [sic] me appeared in the Washington Post, [Dr. Fauci wrote]. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.”
Did Dr. Fauci know that his work-product, the Covid-19 episode and the operations around it, were aimed at setting up conditions to get President Trump bum-rushed out of office in favor of the vacant and pliable tool that was “Joe Biden?” Did others on the White House Covid Task Force know how that would work? Did they know who or what they were in league with?
Anyway, it didn’t turn out as well as they’d planned, of course. The four years of “Joe Biden” only proved how much that coalition of Deep Staters, globalists, and domestic riffraff hated the old American republic and its pain-in-the-ass Constitution. But when they foundered in 2024 - when old Joe-from-Scranton finally gave away the game on that fatal debate stage - and the party had to stuff his idiot veep into the nomination, the Democratic Party crossed an event horizon into total detachment from reality, where they remain to this day.
So then, where did the Democratic Party get the idea that going balls-out Bolshevik-Jacobin would be their salvation after what they already did to try to wreck our country? And by Bolshevik-Jacobin I mean the marriage of murderous envy with civic psychosis. The line it is drawn; the curse it is cast, Dylan prophesied half a century ago. They’re in your face now. Just listen to them. They mean it. They want all your stuff and they want you dead. They want to put your sons in a cocktail dress. They want mutts from savage lands slavering on your daughters in a drainage ditch. Will half the people in this country really vote for that again?
Yet great forces unseen just now are driving the nation to an autumn reckoning, and the main thing to be reckoned is the survival of the USA as a functioning republic with the credibility of law restored and the demons of lawfare crushed. The possibility of legislated election reform slips away day by day, it’s true. But, please understand, this president will not allow the coming election to get pounded down a rathole. If nothing else, we are going to get an intervention under a national security executive order, on the president’s constitutional duty (and his oath) to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
The ensuing fight over this will be short and decisive. These mad dogs will be put down, as mad dogs must be. We are going to take our country back. Depend on it."
"Alert! World War Z Is Unfolding! Russia Nuclear Time Bomb! Middle East Chaos!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 7/30/26
"Alert! World War Z Is Unfolding!
Russia Nuclear Time Bomb! Middle East Chaos!"
Comments here:
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Gerald Celente, "Media Censorship, Market Bubble, Endless Wars"
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 7/30/26
"Media Censorship, Market Bubble, Endless Wars"
"The headlines keep changing, but is the truth being buried? In this episode of Trends in the News, Gerald Celente breaks down the forces shaping today's world: media silence on the biggest stories, markets soaring one day and sinking the next, echoes of the dot-com bust, false ceasefires fueling endless conflict, China's rise as a global leader, the impact of interest rate policies, and why Gen Z may be becoming the true voice of the people. As economic uncertainty grows and geopolitical tensions escalate, Celente connects the dots between government policy, financial markets, media narratives, and the growing push toward war. When all else fails, they take you to war. Don't miss Gerald Celente's hard-hitting analysis and trend forecasts you won't hear from the mainstream media."
Comments here:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)