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So, we rise from the rubble...
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Monday, August 31, 2026
"A Gift..."
“The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it.
Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.”
~ Leo Babauta
The Poet: Mary Oliver, "Coming Home"
"Coming Home"
"When we are driving in the dark,
on the long road to Provincetown,
when we are weary,
when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look,
I imagine us rising from the speeding car.
I imagine us seeing everything from another place -
the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea.
And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,
but which we cherish.
And what we see is our life moving like that
along the dark edges of everything,
headlights sweeping the blackness,
believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.
Looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me."
- Mary Oliver
“Mirror Neurons: Mirrors In Your Brain”
by Casey Kazan
“A recent paradigm-shattering discovery in neuroscience shows how our minds share actions, emotions, and experience - what we commonly call "the monkey see, monkey do" experience. When we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing.
Only recently, however, with the discover of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerful sharing of experience is realized within the human brain. In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action. These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the the world's leading experts to predict that 'mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'.
Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" writes that "Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma has elegantly explored the properties of neurons- the so-called "mirror" neurons, or "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. His research indicates that any given cell in this region will fire when a test monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, picking up, grasping, etc. In addition, it appears that different neurons fire in response to different actions."
The astonishing fact is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action. "With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: imitation learning, intentionality, "mind reading," empathy- even the evolution of language." Ramachandran writes.
"Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."
Mirror neurons may also help explain the emergence of language, a problem that has puzzled scholars since the time of Charles Darwin, he adds. "Is language ability based on a specially purposed language organ that emerged suddenly 'out of the blue,' as suggested by Noam Chomsky and his disciples? Or did language evolve from an earlier, gesture-based protolanguage? No one knows for sure, but a key piece of the puzzle is Rizzolatti's observation that the ventral premotor area may be a homologue of "Broca's area"- a brain center associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language. Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California suggest that mirror neurons may also be involved in miming lip and tongue movements, an ability that may present the crucial missing link between vision and language."
To test his idea, Ramachandran tested four Broca's aphasia patients - individuals with lesions in their Broca's areas. He presented them with the sound of the syllable "da," spliced to a videotape of a person whose lips were actually producing the sound "ba." Normally, people hear the "da" as "ba" - the so-called "McGurk effect" - because vision dominates over hearing. To his surprise, he writes, "we found that the Broca's patients did not experience this illusion; they heard the syllable correctly as 'da.' Even though their lesions were located in the left frontal region of their brains, they had a visual problem- they ignored the lip movements. Our patients also had great difficulty with simple lip reading. This experiment provides a link between Rizzolatti's mirror neurons and the evolution of human language, and thus it calls into question the strictly modular view of language, which is currently popular."
Based on his research, Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: "they will provide a unifying framework and possibly even explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."
Only recently, however, with the discover of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerful sharing of experience is realized within the human brain. In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action. These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the the world's leading experts to predict that 'mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'.
Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" writes that "Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma has elegantly explored the properties of neurons- the so-called "mirror" neurons, or "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. His research indicates that any given cell in this region will fire when a test monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, picking up, grasping, etc. In addition, it appears that different neurons fire in response to different actions."
The astonishing fact is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action. "With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: imitation learning, intentionality, "mind reading," empathy- even the evolution of language." Ramachandran writes.
"Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."
Mirror neurons may also help explain the emergence of language, a problem that has puzzled scholars since the time of Charles Darwin, he adds. "Is language ability based on a specially purposed language organ that emerged suddenly 'out of the blue,' as suggested by Noam Chomsky and his disciples? Or did language evolve from an earlier, gesture-based protolanguage? No one knows for sure, but a key piece of the puzzle is Rizzolatti's observation that the ventral premotor area may be a homologue of "Broca's area"- a brain center associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language. Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California suggest that mirror neurons may also be involved in miming lip and tongue movements, an ability that may present the crucial missing link between vision and language."
To test his idea, Ramachandran tested four Broca's aphasia patients - individuals with lesions in their Broca's areas. He presented them with the sound of the syllable "da," spliced to a videotape of a person whose lips were actually producing the sound "ba." Normally, people hear the "da" as "ba" - the so-called "McGurk effect" - because vision dominates over hearing. To his surprise, he writes, "we found that the Broca's patients did not experience this illusion; they heard the syllable correctly as 'da.' Even though their lesions were located in the left frontal region of their brains, they had a visual problem- they ignored the lip movements. Our patients also had great difficulty with simple lip reading. This experiment provides a link between Rizzolatti's mirror neurons and the evolution of human language, and thus it calls into question the strictly modular view of language, which is currently popular."
Based on his research, Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: "they will provide a unifying framework and possibly even explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."
- http://www.dailygalaxy.com/
oRelated:
"The Mind's Mirror", Excerpts
"For years, such experiences have puzzled psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers, who've wondered why we react at such a gut level to other people's actions. How do we understand, so immediately and instinctively, their thoughts, feelings and intentions?"
"The mirror neurons could help explain how and why we "read" other people's minds and feel empathy for them. If watching an action and performing that action can activate the same parts of the brain in monkeys- down to a single neuron- then it makes sense that watching an action and performing an action could also elicit the same feelings in people."
"This neural mechanism is involuntary and automatic," he says. "With it we don't have to think about what other people are doing or feeling, we simply know. It seems we're wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different," Gallese says. "At the root, as humans we identify the person we're facing as someone like ourselves."
“Life, Explained To You”
“Life, Explained To You”
Author Unknown
“On the first day God created the dog. God said, “Sit all day by the door of your house and bark at anyone who comes in or walks past. I will give you a life span of twenty years.” The dog said, “That’s too long to be barking. Give me ten years and I’ll give you back the other ten.” So God agreed.
On the second day God created the monkey. God said, “Entertain people, do monkey tricks and make them laugh. I’ll give you a twenty-year life span.” The monkey said, “Monkey tricks for twenty years? I don’t think so. Dog gave you back ten, so that’s what I’ll do too, okay?” And God agreed.
On the third day God created the cow. “You must go to the field with the farmer all day long and suffer under the sun, have calves, and give milk to support the farmer. I will give you a life span of sixty years.” The cow said, “That’s kind of a tough life you want me to live for sixty years. Let me have twenty and I’ll give back the other forty.” And God agreed again.
On the fourth day God created man. God said, “Eat, sleep, play, marry and enjoy your life. I’ll give you twenty years.” Man said, “What? Only twenty years? Tell you what, I’ll take my twenty, and the forty the cow gave back, and the ten the monkey gave back, and the ten the dog gave back, that makes eighty, okay?” “Okay,” said God, “You’ve got a deal.”
So that is why the first twenty years we eat, sleep, play, and enjoy ourselves; the next forty years we slave in the sun to support our family; the next ten years we do monkey tricks to entertain the grandchildren; and the last ten years we sit on the front porch and bark at everyone.”
“Life has now been explained to you.”
“Too Much Rain Will Kill Ya”
“Too Much Rain Will Kill Ya”
by Bruce Krasting
"My first week on Wall Street was in August of 1973. I was newbie to NYC. My office was on the south side of 100 Wall, on the second floor, looking out over Front Street. There was a tremendous thunderstorm one afternoon. I looked out the window as the street filled with water. The flood poured into a street gutter and overwhelmed it. With the gutter flooded, the rats were drowning. They came out of every hole. In twenty minutes, 500 came out of the one gutter I was watching. The rain stopped and the flooding abated. The rats on the street followed the receding water back into their holes. A memorable first impression of life in the financial district."
"Spreading My Ashes in the Twisting River"
"Spreading My Ashes in the Twisting River"
by Edward Curtin
“You may be right, I may be crazy,
but it just might be a lunatic you’re looking for...”
- Billy Joel, "You May Be Right"
"They say a stitch in time saves nine. They say it is always good to be prepared. They say Preparation-H is good for hemorrhoids. They say that Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” They say the Girl Scout motto is “Be Prepared.” They say so many things like that that make me feel ashamed for my lack of preparation.
I think I heard one of “they” say that despite some people who think that death is a failure, there are far more who now say you are passing the big test as you “pass” on. I hope so, for the night before last I dreamed I was back in high school, heading to school on the subway. I had a big math test but had fallen asleep while studying the night before.
I was not prepared. I was trying desperately to catch up on my numbers when two pretty girls entered at the next stop and sat opposite me. My test preparation ended there, as my mind slipped from one plus one equals two, to which of the two would be mine. Then a further thought, as if from God, maybe one plus one does equal two, and they could both be mine. I failed the math test.
God knows, I don’t want to fail in life, so when I woke up this morning, all “they” have said flashed like lightning through my mind. I realized that all these profound past sayings were pushing me into a future for which I wasn’t prepared but must prepare now, get my ass in gear, as they say.
Since they say Franklin invented the lightning rod, I figured he must have known where lightning was before it flashed, a question that had long disturbed me to no end and whose answer left a blank in my mind until I realized it wasn’t. If you think that isn’t so, maybe you would clarify it for me, or should I look in Ben’s Poor Richard’s Almanac for an answer in one of his mathematical exercises that he included. I know how smart he was and he predicted that in the future we would be able to freeze the dead – cryonics – and resurrect them later on. I wonder where Ben Franklin is tonight. AI should know.
I realize that all desires are born in a lack, and when satisfied, they give birth to new lacks. It is a truth hard to swallow. But I still desire to be prepared despite such warnings. Weirdly, I think back to something I read in the past as I consider how to prepare for the future. Not exactly my future since – you guessed it, I’ll be dead – but I hope it’s yours. We know how to count, but for all the predictive power of numbers and calculations, we don’t know when we will die. So many people wear conventional masks to hide this and other disturbing questions. They act as if all is copacetic when it isn’t.
In his book about his passionate life, "Report to Greco," Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek writer well-known for Zorba the Greek, recounts a time when he was looking at fierce African masks in a museum. They were made of wood, hide, and human skulls. He tells us:
"In an effort to unravel the mystery of masks, I said to myself, the mask is our true face, we are these monsters with their bloody mouths, hanging lips, and horrifying eyes. A repulsive mask howls behind the beautiful features of the woman we love, chaos behind the visible world, Buddha behind Christ’s gentle face. Sometimes in the terrible moments of love, hate, or death the deceptive charm vanishes and we view truth’s frightening countenance…I pretend to believe in mankind’s faces, and in this way I am able to live with my fellow human beings."
Then this great pretender, this great disbelieving believer, this modern Odysseus, this genius writes that a girl came and stood next to him. He was not prepared for what happened next, but you can imagine. It’s an old story, masks or not. It often happens that when you look ahead too much, no matter how smart you think you are, you fail to see who is standing beside you, and when you focus on planning the future, filling in all those little squares on the calendar, the present goes out of focus, and you are ensnared in the uncanny.
Kazantzakis ends his book with a dream of his beloved Cretan grandfather who came from the land of the dead to find him. Nikos is old now, dark hair has whitened. ”In the atmosphere of love,” he writes, “who can distinguish a flash from eternity…My entire lifetime I was a bow in merciless, insatiable hands. How often those invisible hands drew and overdrew the bow until I heard it creak at the breaking point! ‘Let it break,’ I cried each time.” He ends by telling his grandfather that he has come to recline as dust by his side, “that the two of us may await the Final Judgment together.”
It was that word “dust” that brought me back to the thought of my ashes and my preparations. I don’t want to fail. Mathematics was never my strength, so even if I could understand the relativity stuff, the meaning of e=mc2 and so on, I wouldn’t believe it. And I could study it all my life but I still wouldn’t care. I could have kept my head in the math book on the subway without looking up to see the girls smiling at me. Maybe I saw their masks. But I liked what I saw. As Kazantzakis’s great character Zorba the Greek tells his friend, boss, the uptight writer, to be free you need to cut the string that ties us to the calculating mathematical mindset:
"You need a touch of folly to do that; folly, d’you see? You have to risk everything. But you’ve got such a strong head, it’ll always get the better of you. A man’s head is like a grocer; it keeps accounts. I’ve paid so much and earned so much and that means a profit of this much or a loss of that much! The head’s a careful little shopkeeper; it never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string. Ah no! It hangs on tight to it, the bastard! If the string slips out of it grasp, the head, poor devil, is lost, finished! But if a man doesn’t break the string, tell me, what flavor is left in life? The flavor of chamomile, weak chamomile tea! Nothing like rum – that makes you see life inside out!"
So nine minus five equals four, or so they say. It means nothing to me. They say we live forward and remember backwards. They say time is a river that ends at the sea. They say there is a 34% chance of rain tomorrow at 1 P.M. I’m sick of they; the hell with them! How are you with they?
Yet I’m still taking no chances. My ashes have been accumulating is a small custard cup for a year now, burnt down from the incense that is in the bathroom to make shit smell like roses. We like to make believe. So I’m getting ahead of my life and going down to town to the twisting Housatonic River to scatter my ashes in advance. I too like to make believe. Ahead of what, you might wonder: one year, five, ten, fifteen, fifty? Math can’t tell us. I just hope the stench from the waste processing plant on the other side of the river doesn’t spoil the ceremony. I prefer roses.Say what you want, call me an ashhole. Say this is all folly.
You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for. But you can’t say I’m not preparing..."
Billy Joel, "You May Be Right"
"Americans Are Finally Seeing What's Coming Next, SCARY Times"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 8/31/26
"Americans Are Finally Seeing What's
Coming Next, SCARY Times"
"People are finally seeing what's coming next - and $20 is the new $5. From grocery bills to rent, insurance, and gas, Americans making $50,000 or even $250,000 say they're broke. In this report I break down the real $50K budget math ($150 left), the US-Canada trade war tariffs hitting electricity & everyday goods, and why experts say financial pain could last until mid-to-end of 2027. • Why $20 has replaced the $5 purchase • The $50,000 take-home breakdown that leaves just $150 • Why even $125K-$250K earners feel like they're going backwards • How the US-Canada trade war will raise prices on everything • 3 moves to make NOW before everyone else does. What tough choice are YOU facing right now: is it this OR that?"
Comments here:
"Banks Are Closing Credit Cards of People Who Never Missed a Payment"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 8/31/26
"Banks Are Closing Credit Cards of
People Who Never Missed a Payment"
"Nobody in this video stopped paying. That is the part that does not fit the story we are told about credit card debt. A woman calls her bank for a hardship program and is offered one option: permanent closure. A man loses all three Amex cards after twenty-five years, because he paid people through PayPal. A card with a $1,600 balance never goes down, because a third party has been pulling $24.99 out of it twice a month for years. A $5,880 balance becomes $6,000 the week after a payment, on $143 of interest. And a score that took three years to build falls from 803 to 570 in six months. The pattern is that the payment is not the thing that decides. Interest is charged on the average daily balance, so a payment made after the statement closes barely moves what gets reported. Fees post before payments in most agreements. And the score measures utilization on the day the bank reports it, not the day you paid. What actually changes the math: pay before the statement date, not the due date. Read the line items on your statement every month, because a recurring charge you never authorized will not announce itself. And if you call for hardship, ask in writing what happens to the account afterwards, because "closed" and "closed and reported" are not the same thing. None of these people were careless. Most of them were doing everything they were told to do."
Comments here:
"Why Are There So Many People Living In Third World Conditions In The United States?"
by Michael Snyder
"There are tens of millions of Americans that are currently living in third world conditions, and poverty, hunger and homelessness are growing all around us. Many of our most important urban areas have become rotting, decaying, drug-infested hellholes. Meanwhile, there are vast stretches of rural America that look like they have been totally left behind by the rest of our society. But if you live in the version of America that is still shiny and beautiful and clean, you may be wondering what all of the fuss is about because life still seems pretty good to you. For those at or near the top of the economic pyramid, it feels like the party will never end. Of course those that are impoverished can’t afford to live anywhere near those that are thriving. Today, 35.9 million Americans (including 10.4 million children) live below the official poverty line. Tens of millions of others make enough to be above the poverty line but are deeply suffering too.
We are a nation of contrasts. We are the wealthiest nation on the entire planet, and yet we have also piled up the most debt in the history of the world. We have more billionaires than anyone else, and yet poverty is rampant. We have luxuries and electronic gadgets that previous generations could not have even imagined, and yet much of the population is living in almost unbelievable squalor and filth.
Let me give you an example. Not too long ago, authorities in Ohio discovered sixteen children that were “found living in conditions that even livestock don’t live in”…Sixteen kids, ranging from 1 year old to 18, were found living in conditions that even livestock don’t live in, described Vinton County Sheriff Ryan Cain. The sheriff, along with Vinton County Prosecutor William Archer and Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson, held a press conference Wednesday to discuss the arrests of four family members: Gary Siders Jr., Gary Siders Sr., Christina Siders, and Elizabeth Siders.
We should be so thankful that those children were rescued. Apparently most of them had been isolated in a 12 foot by 12 foot area for the last four years…Most of the kids were kept in a 12×12 area of the home for the past four years, Sheriff Cain said. He called the area “disgusting,” adding that “our livestock were kept in better conditions than these children.” AG Wilson said it looked like a “third-world” country inside the home. “It’s not the type of thing we’re used to seeing in America,” he said.
This isn’t how Americans are supposed to be living. Once upon a time, even impoverished people in this country tried to keep their homes clean and dressed nicely when they went out. But those days are long gone. Just take a stroll through your local Walmart and observe how people are dressed.
And as far as keeping our homes clean, the truth is that in 2026 millions upon millions of Americans live in communities that are drowning in squalor and filth…Thanks to mass migration, conditions in our inner cities are particularly bad. Earlier today, I came across an article about street food vendors in Los Angeles that made my stomach turn…
The proliferation of rogue street food vendors - largely run by illegal migrants - is not only hitting Los Angeles with third-world-like blight, Democratic leaders have decided to do nothing despite being aware of horrifying health hazards, their own previously unreleased records reveal. “A dog eating meat out of a street vendor’s bag before it was served to customers. Cockroaches crawling out of a food truck. Mice scurrying beside open salsa. Raw meat baking unrefrigerated in the heat. People urinating around cooking equipment.”
Those are just some of shocking allegations listed in a staggering 662-page dossier of 9,746 public health complaints about street food vendors filed across Los Angeles County from 2023 until early 2026, according to the California Post, which obtained the list only after it made a public records request.
Los Angeles was once such a beautiful city. But now there are rats wherever you go. According to Orkin, Los Angeles is now the “rattiest city in America”… Historically, Chicago has occupied the No.1 spot every year that Orkin has released its annual rankings, which it has been reporting for over a decade. But this year, there is a new city being crowned the “rattiest” - Los Angeles.
Orkin cites that growing warm climates can help a rat’s survivability rate, so hotter cities are seeing themselves fly up the rankings, giving Los Angeles the slight edge over Chicago this year. Chicago falls to No. 2 in the rankings, followed by New York and San Francisco.
I really detest rats. I also really detest dirty food. Unfortunately, we have reached a stage where it is really difficult to know what is safe to eat and what is not safe to eat.
I want to share a story with you that I shared with my core supporters on Friday. All over the country, millions of Americans won’t eat lettuce right now because of the nationwide cyclosporiasis outbreak…The massive cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce and thousands of illnesses has expanded to three new states, federal health regulators announced Thursday. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said the outbreak, which has been linked to hundreds of hospitalizations and two deaths since illnesses were first reported in July, has now been detected in Georgia, Tennessee and Texas. There have now been 11,458 illnesses reported across 20 states, according to the FDA.
I wish that I could tell you that this is an isolated incident. But I can’t. Almost every day, a new food recall is in the news. And there is a reason for that. If you actually went inside many of the facilities where our food is made, it would make you sick. We shouldn’t have to live like this.
Our schools are in deplorable condition as well. In Richmond, Virginia an elementary school that was named after Barack Obama has been forced to shut down because mold is out of control and rodents are running all over the place…Like its namesake, Barack Obama Elementary has something rotten under the surface.
The school of 285 students is now shut down for an undisclosed period after it was discovered that the buildings were testing positive for mold. The facility also had reports of rodents (mice or rats) in several rooms, alongside the more prominent mold health issue. The mold and rodent problems were noticed by staff as they prepared for the start of the new school year.
Officials say they hope to reopen the building in a week, though this has proven to be an overly optimistic goal after earlier “clear” air-quality tests were quickly contradicted by new visible mold discoveries (behind bulletin boards, on computers, in the art room, etc.), forcing repeated delays. A more realistic time frame is one month or more.
How did this happen? We are supposed to be the wealthiest nation on Earth, but we can’t even keep our military installations in livable shape…A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that the maintenance backlog for military installations has ballooned to more than $285 billion - leaving many facilities in disrepair, while risking readiness and service members’ quality of life. This figure is a jump up from 2022, when the maintenance backlog was about $137 billion. But the backlog continues to grow, because the services only request about 80% of the funds they need for installation repairs and maintenance.
We spend about a trillion dollars a year on our military, and so this is inexcusable. In many cases, mold issues and water damage go unaddressed for years… Indeed, service members face a range of issues at the facilities where they work and live. Barracks at Naval Station Norfolk, for example, have had suspected mold since 2023. But the installation office declined requests to test the growth observed there “due to the cost of testing and potential remediation.” Another highly used facility at that Naval station had evidence of asbestos and significant water damage, GAO found. While all the station’s piers require renovation, the Navy was “actively improving” only one - leaving the rest to operate in a “degraded condition.”
If conditions are this bad now, what will they be like once the economy really starts tanking? Thanks to our seemingly endless cost of living crisis, our standard of living has been steadily declining throughout this entire decade. Millions of Americans now live in their vehicles because they simply cannot afford homes any longer. According to the Federal Reserve, approximately one out of every ten Americans is now missing meals because they can’t afford to buy enough food.
When I was growing up, many would mock the “third world conditions” in other countries, but the truth is that “third world conditions” can now be found all over the United States. This is what societal collapse looks like, and if we do not take dramatic action our society will just continue to deteriorate."
"The Next Election May Be Our Last"
"The Next Election May Be Our Last"
by Chris Hedges
"The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope - should the election be rigged or stolen - is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression. Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.
If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections. The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.
Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican. Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.
Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 - will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.
The Republican majority in the House - regardless of the vote - will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition. Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.
Trump - who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost - ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
When Volodymyr Zelensky - whose presidential term ended in May 2024 - informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump responded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections…So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans – but voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night. Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud,, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.” This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.
I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists are enemies of the open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security. These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.
Power - as in all dictatorships - is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.
The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs. Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education - from kindergarten to graduate school - will be indoctrination. Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.
Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy - unlike anything seen in U.S. history - makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”
Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.” “The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:
The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.
FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local ‘election integrity’ group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”
This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November. Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.
First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations. “At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”
The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House - including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security - make these institutions unreliable.
We can only save ourselves. This means shutting the country down. Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut."
Jim Kunstler, "Oh, Canada?"
"Oh, Canada?"
by Jim Kunstler
“Carney increasingly reminds me of Fauci.
He has that exact same air of technocratic infallibility.”
- Hans Mahncke on X
"You go for decades without even thinking of the place. The Great White North. Very polite people, somewhat Scottish, seems like. There’s poutine! Une invention Québécoise - an indigestible mélange of French fries, gravy, and cheese curds, like something you’d cook up at 4am after a toga party in a frat house. Ice hockey (of course, but was it necessary?) Polar bears. Puffins on the Labrador cliffs. Tar Sands. Plaid upholstery . . . .
Years ago, we used to go up there from college in the farthest reaches of upstate western New York just to get a half-fake buzz of being in “a foreign country.” Niagara Falls was like Times Square without the charm. Bunch of squalid wax museums and ashtray shops. Toronto was Rochester on steroids, beyond forgettable.
I once took a choo-choo train from Seattle to Vancouver just to take in the scenery along the Pacific Coast. Bald eagles galore all the way up feeding on stuff out in the Pacific tidal mud-flats. Got to Vancouver. They yanked me out of the customs line and stuffed me in a back office. A female immigration officer swaggered in, said they found a nine-year-old DUI conviction for me on some computer (well...okay...a night of fishing with rum). Said she could keep me out of the country if she was in a bad mood. I couldn’t help wising off: “Nice to know Canadian immigration policy depends on your mood.” Whoops. They detained me for an extra two hours just to make me feel the pain. But I was eventually released into that boring city. Thank God for the Chinese restaurants.
And now... Mark Carney! He’s a beauty. A refined ectoplasmic manifestation of all the Globalist huggermugger working tirelessly to upend Western Civ. He has a weird glow of semi-transparency - not in the sense of revealing any truths, but more like you can partly see through him... he’s only half there... a ghost in the geopolitical machine.
More to the point, Mark Carney has made himself a pain-in-the-ass for President Donald Trump. On the surface, this US/Canada rift appears to be all about trade relations. Naw. It’s about Mark Carney being a tool for merry old England attempting to capture the resource base of northern North America to collateralize what little remains of the UK’s once-sprawling, now sinking, empire. England is not so merry these days. It has somehow managed to issue a fatwa on itself and entered a gruesome process of assisted economic and cultural suicide. You can’t even raise a British flag there anymore without risking weeks in the slammer. The home folks get stabbed and beheaded. It’s all blight, rape, kebabs, and hijabs over there. Not a good look if you still want to be that country you dimly remember.
Plus, they want to kick off a big war with Russia. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Really? Lacking much of a military, Ukraine was Britain’s tool for that. Trouble was the huge expense of that project. Thought they could work-around it by turning Ukraine into a money-laundry, washing, rinsing, and disbursing US-sourced funds to Mr. Zelenskyy, with giant kickbacks to the Democratic Party’s money apparatus. Worked nicely when the phantom “Joe Biden” haunted the White House. He and his sicko son, Hunter, were already in so deep in Ukraine since JB’s felonious veepdom that Mark Carney - then chief of the Bank of England - could hang the Bidens out to dry anytime, if required.
Lo, these many years, then, Britain and NATO have sponsored all that drone-making and missile-launching action from Ukraine deep into Russia - in case you wonder how Zelenskyy carries on this stupid war, considering there are no young men left in Ukraine eligible to reinforce the battle lines in Donbas. Britain and NATO probably also furnish the satellite targeting of Russian assets. You must doubt that the USA is involved in that anymore. Luckily, Mr. Putin has the Christian patience of a true saint.
Our president is sick of Ukraine and the festering geopolitical disease it has been infected with by our increasingly-former allies in Europe. NATO’s aim with Russia is exactly the same as Britain’s push in Canada - a resource grab for the failing nations of Europe, who are getting choked to death by Ursula von der Leyen and her EU flying monkeys. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain... all whirling around the drain. Our president sees all that. (You don’t need magic glasses.)
Maybe it’s time to just send the 82nd Airborne into Ottawa. Flight time: under two hours from Fort Bragg, NC. Drop them on Parliament Hill. Let them hang around a few hours. Then, declare the whole thing a gag and fly them home. It’d be worth it. Or maybe go in and snatch Mark Carney like we did Maduro. Stuff Carney in an adjoining cell at the MDC in Brooklyn. I’m sure the two could amuse each other, swap satisfying gripes and sob stories.
Really, why stop at just re-naming Lake Ontario. Take the whole darn thing like a pie that has been left on the windowsill too long. The Canadian people would get over it in five minutes. Everything is easier in the USA. Running a company, especially. They could keep their poutine and their hockey, learn to have a little fun once in a while. Quebec could become a theme park (what else have they got going there?). No more tariffs to get hung about. Honk if you like the idea."
Dan, I Allegedly, "Bank of America Sees Trouble Ahead - Huge Warning!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 8/31/26
"Bank of America Sees Trouble Ahead - Huge Warning!"
"Bank of America is warning investors about trouble ahead in the semiconductor market, while major banks and financial companies are preparing for a major transformation in the way money moves. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan and other financial institutions are exploring digital dollar systems, while companies such as DoorDash, BlackRock and Visa are becoming increasingly involved in the changing financial landscape. What does this mean for the banking system, your money and the economy? Are we watching the beginning of a new financial system? This video looks at Bank of America, semiconductor stocks, the economy, banking instability, bank runs, digital money, stablecoins, cryptocurrency, tokenized deposits, credit markets, inflation and the risks facing consumers and investors. I Allegedly covers business news, financial news, economic warnings, banking problems, market trends and the issues affecting your money and financial future."
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Bill Bonner, "All Bubbles End in Deflation"
"All Bubbles End in Deflation"
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "We begin this week’s perambulations with a stroll into the future. So far...the Bubble in the US is broader than any in history. It has been inflating everything it touched for the last 30 years. All bubbles pop, of course. How they pop is the confusing whirlwind we enter today.
But don’t worry. Even in the worst crash, real wealth doesn’t disappear, it just changes hands. When the stock market goes down, those with stocks have less paper wealth...and less of a claim on real wealth. They are ‘poorer.’ That leaves those without stocks relatively richer. They have a bigger claim on the real goods and services the economy produces.
The feds and their elite cronies have a good racket going...diddling markets so as to shift more and more wealth away from the public and towards themselves. They own most of the capital assets...and they control the US budget. Pressuring interest rates lower, and backing up the stock market with bailouts and ‘put’ options...they’ve gotten richer and richer. As we saw last week, at today’s prices the stockholding class can theoretically buy twice the GDP...and have $10 trillion left over.
It wasn’t capitalism that made them so rich; it was a corrupt money system. And if the dogs of capitalism were unleashed, they’d have their fake money fortunes for dinner. Interest rates would be set by honest savers and borrowers - not by Fed policy decisions. Prices would be determined by buyers and sellers; the budget would be balanced; the debt would be cleaned up; the troops would come home; inflation would disappear; and the Baltimore O’s would win the World Series. But of course, we’re dreaming. Sticking to the real world...
Our high confidence guess is that the bubble will deflate. Everything will fall in price. Then, the feds will panic. They will do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop markets from doing their work - with more fake money, lower interest rates, yield curve control, quantitative easing. And probably some tricks we haven’t heard of yet. After an initial sell-off, gold will go up. It will sniff out what is coming - more inflation. Other real asset prices too - from hot dogs to hotels - will get a whiff of the coming price hikes. Consumer prices will rise as ‘inflation expectations’ increase.
The feds really only have one tool - fake money. In a crisis, they will produce more of it...a lot more. And, in addition to the quantity of money coming into the economy, there’s another key inflation variable: the velocity of money. A dollar spent two times in a year is counted twice. When people think the feds are going to print money, the dollar becomes a hot potato. They aim to get rid of it as soon as possible. Sales go up in the short run. In the longer run, the economy is destroyed.
And here’s an important addendum. We say ‘inflate or die.’ But those are just policy choices. In the long run, you can inflate all you want. The bubble will still die - a later, more gruesome death. In the fight between markets on one side...and politicians, grifters, fixers and central planners on the other...markets always win, eventually. They win by deflation.
Even in an inflationary blow off - with prices soaring - real prices fall. Consumer prices rise, in nominal currency. But gold - real money - typically rises even more...so that in gold terms, real things actually become cheaper. Prices deflate in real terms.
Observers in Germany’s record-setting hyperinflation remarked that foreigners were able to use dollars - then, backed by gold - to buy things at absurdly low prices. By November, 1923, a dollar was equal to 4.2 trillion marks. This made American visitors trillionaires (in marks) allowing them to buy whole houses for the price of a magazine subscription. In real terms, prices had deflated down to almost nothing.
We witnessed it, ourselves, in Argentina. In pesos, consumer prices more than doubled every twelve months...but dollars (even with a dodgy dollar) made them cheaper than ever. We would go to a restaurant, for example, and feel guilty about paying so little for such a good meal.
The same phenomenon is already taking place in America, too. Housing has gotten much more expensive, right? And the stock market is much higher too, right? But looked at in terms of gold, stocks are less than half of what they were worth in 1999...and the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, expressed in gold, shows house prices down about 80% over the last quarter century. In real terms, all bubbles deflate...but you need real money to see it."
Adventures With Danno, "This Is Only Gonna Get Worse, What We're Doing"
Adventures With Danno, 8/31/26
"This Is Only Gonna Get Worse, What We're Doing"
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"Economic Market Snapshot 8/31/26"
"Economic Market Snapshot 8/31/26"
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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
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Market Data Center, Live Updates:
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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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Job cuts and much more.
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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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...
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