“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the
hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.”
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Saturday, September 26, 2026
"Al Swearengen's Take On Life"
Strong language alert!
"In life you have to do a lot of things you don't ****ing want to do.
Many times, that's what the **** life is... one vile ****ing task after another. "
○
Strong language alert!
"Pain or damage don't end the world, or despair or f***ing beatings.
The world ends when you’re dead. Until then you got more punishment
in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back.”
- “Al Swearengen”, Ian McShane’s character on “Deadwood”
“Screw The Way Things Are, I Want Out!”
“Screw The Way Things Are, I Want Out!”
by Paul Rosenberg
“This is a beautiful planet, filled, in the main, with decent, cooperative humans. And yet, I want out. Give me any kind of functional spaceship and any reasonable chance, and I’ll take it. This place is anti-human. It chokes the best that’s in us, aggressively and self-righteously. I was struck not long ago by a comment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, in which he expressed the same kind of feeling: “I ought to have become a star in the sky. Instead of which I have remained stuck on earth…”
All of us who’ve had a moment of transcendence - who made some type of contact with what is truly the best inside ourselves - have also sensed that life in the current world is incompatible with it. I think we should stop burying that understanding beneath piles of “that’s the way things are,” “we should be realistic,” and “you can’t fight City Hall.” Screw the way things are, screw “realistic,” and screw City Hall too. I was made for better things than this, and you were too.
Everywhere I turn, some kind of ruler, sub-ruler, enforcer, regulator, or “right-thinking” quasi-enforcer demands not only my money but also for me to make myself easy to punish, thus showing myself to be a good subservient. That’s not just wrong; it’s a disease. I don’t care whether such people are “following orders,” “just doing their job,” or whatever else they tell themselves to soothe their rightly troubled souls. That mode of living is perverse, and these people are enforcing a disease.
Let me make this part very clear: The desire to control others is disease; it is corruption. Willing controllers are a morally inferior class. And the truly deranged thing is that these people rule the world! Forget about why this is so - we can debate that later - focus rather on the utter insanity of this: A minority of moral defectives, who think extortion is a virtue, rule people who are happy to live and let live, by force.
That’s outright lunacy. And to support the lunacy, we have lies, intimidation, and slogans: “In a democracy, you’re really ruling yourself,” “Only crazy people disagree,” “It’s always been this way,” and so on. To all of which I reply, How stupid do you think we are? You drilled that crap into us when we were children, but we’re not children anymore. And if “our way” isn’t as bad as North Korea, that makes it right? Only to a fool.
And the results of “the way it’s always been”… my God, the results… A study from the 1980s found that since 3600 BC, the world has known only 292 years of peace. During this period there have been 14,531 wars, large and small, in which 3.6 billion people have been killed.
This is what I’m supposed to serve with all my heart and soul? A Bronze Age system that can’t keep itself from slaughter? We’re talking about a 5,600-year track record of mass death, and yet fundamental change is considered unthinkable? Well, screw that too, because I think deep, fundamental change is called for, and was called for a long time ago.
Again, this is a wonderful planet and most of the people on it are decent, but it is ruled by insanity, and I want out. Yes, I know, there’s really nowhere to go. Every place I might go is dominated by the same diseased model, and dissent is punished the same, and in some places worse. That’s one of the reasons space appeals to me; it gives me a chance to escape this madness.
I’ll draw this to a close with a passage from C. Delisle Burns’s wonderful "The First Europe," describing why the Roman Empire collapsed: “Great numbers of men and women were unwilling to make the effort required for the maintenance of the old order, not because they were not good enough to fulfill their civic duties, but because they were too good to be satisfied with a system from which so few derived benefit.”
I, for one, am unwilling to expend any effort to maintain the present order. It is by its nature incompatible with the best that is in us, and always will be. Those of us who want to be more and better cannot support the current order without opposing what’s best in ourselves. Screw that.”
"AI for Dummies: AI Turns Us Into Dummies"
"AI for Dummies: AI Turns Us Into Dummies"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"I just got called out by a programmer who uses AI who was furious and wrote "students cheat, always have, tell us something we don't already know". I responded: "did you read the MIT paper or the other link?" Of course he didn't: TL/DR, which proves my point. Even the programmer admitted he has to check AI's work.
The point here is *those who received real educations can use AI because they know enough to double-check it, but the kids using AI as a substitute for real learning will never develop this capacity.* Those who actually have mastery can use AI and not realize the point I'm making isn't that AI is useless, the point is it fatally undermines real learning and thinking. The MIT paper is 206 pages long, the last section being the stats of the research, but the points it makes are truly important. So is the other article linked below."
"That AI is turning those who use it into dummies is not only self-evident, it's irrefutable. ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study "Of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.' Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study. The task was executed, and you could say that it was efficient and convenient," Kosmyna says. "But as we show in the paper, you basically didn't integrate any of it into your memory networks."
AI breaks the connection between learning and completing an academic task. With AI, students can check the box - task completed, paper written and submitted - without learning anything. And by learning we don't mean remember a factoid, we mean learning how to learn and learning how to think. As Substack writer Maalvika explains in her viral essay "Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting, digital technologies have compressed our attention spans via what I would term "rewarding distraction" so we can no longer read anything longer than a few sentences without wanting a summary, highlights video or sound-bite.
In other words, very few people will actually read the MIT paper: TL/DR. Here's the precis: "Your Brain on ChatGPT" (mit.edu). Here's the full paper. "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task."
To understand the context - and indeed, the ultimate point of the research - we must start by understanding the structure of learning and thinking which is a complex set of processes. Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is a framework that parses out some of these processes.
Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), developed by John Sweller, provides a framework for understanding the mental effort required during learning and problem-solving. It identifies three categories of cognitive load: intrinsic cognitive load (ICL), which is tied to the complexity of the material being learned and the learner's prior knowledge; extraneous cognitive load (ECL), which refers to the mental effort imposed by presentation of information; and germane cognitive load (GCL), which is the mental effort dedicated to constructing and automating schemas that support learning.
Checking the box "task completed" teaches us nothing. Actual learning and thinking require doing all the cognitive work that AI claims to do for us: reading the source materials, following the links between these sources, finding wormholes between various universes of knowledge, and thinking through claims and assumptions as an independent critical thinker.
When AI slaps together a bunch of claims and assumptions as authoritative, we don't gain a superficial knowledge - we learn nothing. AI summarizes but without any ability to weed out questionable claims and assumptions because it has no tacit knowledge of contexts. So AI spews out material without any actual cognitive value and the student slaps this into a paper without learning any actual cognitive skills. This cognitive debt can never be "paid back," for the cognitive deficit lasts a lifetime.
Even AI's vaunted ability to summarize robs us of the need to develop core cognitive abilities. As this researcher explains, "drudgery" is how we learn and learn to think deeply as opposed to a superficial grasp of material to pass an exam.
"In Defense of Drudgery: AI is making good on its promise to liberate people from drudgery. But sometimes, exorcising drudgery can stifle innovation." "Unfortunately, this innovation stifles innovation. When humans do the drudgery of literature search, citation validation, and due research diligence - the things OpenAI claims for Deep Research - they serendipitously see things they weren't looking for. They build on the ideas of others that they hadn't considered before and are inspired to form altogether new ideas. They also learn cognitive skills including the ability to filter information efficiently and recognize discrepancies in meaning.
I have seen in my field of systems analysis where decades of researchers have cited information that was incorrect - and expanded it into its own self-perpetuating world view. Critical thinking leads the researcher to not accept the work that others took as foundational and to spot the error. Tools such as Deep Research are incapable of spotting the core truth and so will perpetuate misdirection in research. That's the opposite of good innovation."
In summary: given that AI is fundamentally incapable of performing the tasks required for authentic innovation, we're de-learning how to innovate. What we're "learning" is to substitute a superficially clever simulation of innovation for authentic innovation, and in doing so, we're losing the core cognitive skills needed to innovate. In following the easy, convenient path of AI's simulations of innovation, we are indeed "carefully falling into the cliff." But since this is all TL/DR, and there's no summary, highlights video or sound-bite, we don't even see it. So here's the TL/DR "dummies" summary of AI: AI is turning us into dummies."
Dan, I Allegedly, "Something Always Breaks - It's About to Get Bad"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 9/26/26
"Something Always Breaks -
It's About to Get Bad"
"Rising mortgage rates and higher interest rates are putting another major strain on the economy. When borrowing becomes more expensive, buyers pull back, builders delay projects, businesses feel the pressure, and consumers have less money to spend. The housing market is already showing the effects, and these problems don’t happen in isolation. You have to look at everything as a whole. Higher borrowing costs affect housing, construction, businesses, spending, investment and the financial markets. When all of these pressures start building at the same time, something eventually breaks. This is a warning sign that deserves our attention. Like and subscribe for Business News You Can Use."
Comments here:
"AI the Real Danger?"
"AI the Real Danger?"
by Martin Armstrong
"A lot of emails have come in about the AI will destroy humanity. The difference between Socrates and Neural Nets is that Socrates has only a economic related database and we have more than anything out there on the internet. That’s why back in 1999, the government freaked out and shut down the IPO we were going to do for $3 billion back then. Socrates is what people call classic AI. That was discussed even in open court.
Neural networks are not “rule-free.” They are trained on data with defined objectives, architectures, and constraints set by their developers. That’s the problem. Giving it free access to the internet, they cannot possibly understand all the ways this can function so they cannot create an iron-clad rule to government what they create. The AI models don’t have moral reasoning, but they also don’t operate in a vacuum - they’re tools built and deployed by humans. They have failed to properly control some agents.
They are intending to introduce in a few months the recursive ability to allow AI to rewrite its own code and in essence to design the next generation. This is the danger for there are no rules and they are creating a synthetic electronic lifeform that they have no idea of what will be the result. Giving this access to the internet would be a huge risk that nobody would be able to speculate on what comes next. It would still not be self-aware with morals. A robot just follows orders, it does not make judgements based on morality.
That may be what Zelensky is praying for with their claims to have humanoid soldiers. I guess when he runs out a human soldiers this is his backup. He would love it if they engaged in a Russian genocide – Ukrainian history of ethnic cleansing. This hatred between Ukraine and Russia is ethnically interesting for they are like twin brothers who were separated at birth and grew up in to different houses. This is the same as the Arabs and the Jews claiming to be both the children of Abraham. I guess family feuds are the worst."
Adventures With Danno, "Unbelievable Prices at Aldi"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 9/26/26
"Unbelievable Prices at Aldi"
Comments here:
"Is Donald Trump the New Commodus?"
"Is Donald Trump the New Commodus?"
by Larry Johnson
"During my long trek returning home to Florida from Russia, I watched a three hour documentary on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and I gained an appreciation of why Trump is often labeled as a reincarnation of various leaders of the Rome. Caligula is the favorite of those who see caprice and cruelty, the emperor who reportedly planned to make his horse a consul, invoked whenever loyalty seems to outrank competence. Nero is summoned for the performer-ruler, the emperor-artist blamed for fiddling while Rome burned. Julius Caesar is the go-to for warnings about a strongman crossing the Rubicon and hollowing out a republic’s norms.
Each comparison captures something, and I think each overreaches. Caligula and Nero are remembered mainly for murder and madness. Caesar destroyed a republic with his legions. The comparisons say more about their authors’ fears than about the man.
After watching the documentary, I think the most apt comparison is Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled from 180 to 192 AD. Ridley Scott’s movie, "The Gladiator", brought Commodus to life via the actor Joaquin Phoenix. Commodus is less famous than the others, but the parallel rests on something more concrete than temperament. Unlike Trump, Commodus inherited a stable order from a revered predecessor. However, Commodus governed as a showman, and above all compulsively stamped his own name on the institutions of the state while he held power.
He renamed the twelve months after his own titles. He refounded Rome as Colonia Commodiana and renamed the Senate, the legions and the African grain fleet after himself. He had the colossal statue near the Colosseum recut in his own likeness as Hercules. All of it stood until he was strangled in his bath on the last day of 192. Only then did the Senate declare damnatio memoriae and strip his names from the city, the calendar and the army. Rome had no way to check an emperor’s self-glorification except to kill him.
Donald Trump has revived the Commodus habit of renaming things and putting his name on a variety of public symbols. What is different, and what matters, is that the American system is not waiting for him to die to undo it.
The renaming campaign: In his second term, Trump has put his name on public institutions in the Commodus manner: first take control of the institution, then rename it. In March 2025, DOGE entered the U.S. Institute of Peace, replaced its leadership, fired its staff and took over the building. In December, the State Department put “Donald J. Trump” in silver lettering above the institute’s engraved name.
The Kennedy Center followed the same pattern. Trump purged the board and named himself chairman. In December 2025, a board made up entirely of his appointees voted unanimously to rename it the “Trump Kennedy Center.” His appointed president then renamed the Kennedy Center Honors after him too.
The list goes further: “Trump-class” battleships, “Trump accounts” for newborns, and his portrait on national park passes next to Washington’s. Allies in Congress have introduced bills to rename Dulles Airport after him, put his face on the $100 bill, and add him to Mount Rushmore.
The impulse to rename by decree reaches beyond his own name. On his first day back in office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” On August 27, 2026, in the middle of a trade war with Canada, he signed another renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately, and suggested the Atlantic or the Pacific could be next. Neither body of water carries his name, but both show the same instinct Commodus had: the ruler redraws the map by personal fiat. Commodus renamed Rome; Trump renames the waters around America.
Then there is the coinage. Roman emperors put their faces on the money, and Commodus had himself shown on his coins as Hercules. Days before his second inauguration, Trump went further in one respect: he launched the $TRUMP meme coin, a cryptocurrency that turned his name into a tradable asset. It is a private venture, not state currency, but it is the most literal version of the Commodus habit on this list. This is where the comparison with Rome ends.
The courts moved first. Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty sued over the Kennedy Center renaming within days, calling the board vote a “thinly-veiled sham.” On May 29, 2026, US District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled the renaming unlawful: Congress named the Kennedy Center, so only Congress can rename it. He ordered the signage removed, and it came down in June. Trump’s response looks more like Commodus than like a modern president. The Kennedy Center is now temporarily closed, and he has suggested it could be demolished unless the courts let his name go up.
The Institute of Peace fight is live this week. On September 17 and 18, the ousted board asked a federal appeals court for emergency relief to stop the administration from carving Trump’s name into the stone facade of its Constitution Avenue headquarters. For now his name is only bolted on. Their motion argues that the administration would suffer no harm at all if the carving were blocked.
Elected officials are acting too. Fifteen House Democrats, led by Reps. Jared Huffman and Pramila Jayapal, filed a brief supporting a lawsuit against Trump’s image on park passes. They argue the law requires a yearly contest to choose the image. Meanwhile, the Dulles renaming, the “Trump Train,” the $100 bill and Mount Rushmore bills have all stalled in a Republican-controlled Congress. Federal law also still bars putting a living person on US currency.
The battles in the judiciary rage on. The Institute of Peace name is still up, and the underlying case over the institute’s seizure has been stayed on appeal since 2025. The geographic renamings also stand inside the federal government. The Gulf of America name has never been tested in Congress, which has stayed in Republican hands, although Canada has rejected “Lake America” and no other country is bound by either name. But the direction is clear. In Rome, the names came down after a funeral. In Washington, they’re coming down through court orders, lawsuits and a Congress that simply declines to act.
The Commodus comparison is usually offered as a warning that America is sliding toward imperial decadence. The naming record suggests the opposite lesson. A sitting president has tried to do what a Roman emperor did, and the institutions he tried to capture have pushed back while he is still in office. The judiciary told him that a name Congress gave belongs to Congress. Members of Congress went to court. Ordinary legislative inertia, which is usually a flaw, has served as a defense. Rome needed a conspiracy of the palace guard to erase Commodus’s name. The United States needed a district judge.
Trump’s defenders argue that the renamings were approved by boards acting within their authority, that honoring a president who brokered peace deals is legitimate, and that the lawsuits are partisan. They also point out that appellate courts and the Supreme Court may yet see the board and removal questions differently. I note that the Institute of Peace case, in particular, is still unresolved.
But even if Trump ultimately wins some of these cases, the contrast holds. He will have won them in a courtroom, under law, and not because nobody was able to challenge him. And, given Trump’s disdain for exercise, he is unlikely to meet the fate of Commodus, who was strangled by his personal trainer on New Year’s Eve in 192 CE."
Friday, September 25, 2026
"Americans Are Being Completely Unrealistic About Everything!"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 9/25/26
"Americans Are Being Completely
Unrealistic About Everything!"
"Millions of Americans are refusing to face reality about jobs, housing, and the American Dream in 2026. If you're waiting for your dream job, you're making a huge mistake. In this Snyder Reports update, we break down why so many Americans have unrealistic expectations in today's job market and housing market. From 7+ months applying for mortgage lender jobs with no offers, to truck sales crashing and bank branches turning into ATMs, to 7%+ mortgage rates and soaring home repair costs - times have changed since 2019. We also cover why young adults waiting for a dream job that may not exist for 6, 12, or 18 months, AI job loss, and unaffordable home prices mean you need to adapt and delay, not quit."
Comments here:
"Something Is Going To Break, You've Been Warned; This Is A Perfect Storm And It Will Be Brutal"
Jeremiah Babe, 9/25/26
"Something Is Going To Break, You've Been Warned;
This Is A Perfect Storm And It Will Be Brutal"
Comments here:
"Donald Trump and the Age of Evil"
"Donald Trump and the Age of Evil"
by Chris Hedges
"Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths - superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt. But is he evil?
If, as the philosopher Susan Nieman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters. In her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that evil “isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.” She continues:
"There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures - at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot - and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.
Trump crosses line after line. He declares wars on a whim. He enriches himself and his family in crypto schemes, from which he has made over a billion dollars. He orders assassinations and the kidnapping of heads of state. He uses billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain genocide in Palestine and since January 2025 has provided over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel. He guts government departments designed to lift up the vulnerable and bloats the war budget. He builds rogue paramilitary forces to terrorize citizens and immigrants. He attacks and attempts to censor the news industry.
In short, he does what all who commit evil do. He fosters a world where nothing is sacred and where democracy and civic virtues do not exist.
Concepts of fairness, decorum, justice and empathy are imploded by the Trump administration. His threat to annihilate Iran – i.e. carry out genocide – announced of all places at the United Nations, is greeted with indifference by a public rendered numb by his moral vacuity.
“Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect,” Neiman writes. “Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.”
The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality - including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class - swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.
To an enraged public Trump’s transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy. Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.
“Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior,” Neiman writes of Trump: "Nor does he appear to understand any other. Though he recognizes that other people, aka losers, have norms, he has no idea of how norms work, moving people to override self-interest in order to honor them. In acting on the international stage like Richard Dawkins’s ruthless genes, he has attracted millions of followers who tell us they admire his authenticity. This doesn’t mean his followers are deplorable. They may not be evil at all, but in a world where implacable self-interest is usually camouflaged in soft colors, they find his candor refreshing. They have so often heard that people conceal the raw self-interest that really moves things, they’re relieved to watch a man who never hides it."
The worst evil, Neiman argues, “may be the denial of evil – as well as disdain for any goodness that might oppose it. When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself. It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”
This evil leads us down the familiar road to fascism. It was Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s first term, who warned us, calling Trump “fascist to the core.” The media — too spineless to label Trump a fascist - prefers the word “authoritarian,’ which Neiman notes may be a more bearable word, but “will not make fascism more bearable.”
Authoritarianism, she notes: "Is a word that can be useful for describing certain German professors, and the softer sort of Latin American military regime. But a country where masked men deport people to wastelands they’ve never seen? Combat troops occupy major cities and shoot peacefully protesting citizens? A government that coerces media, universities, and other countries to suit its will? A military that blows fishermen to bits with the meagerest of justifications, then begins the kind of wars the International Military Court at Nuremberg condemned? As it wrote in 1946, ‘To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It would be easy to go on, but counting crimes is pointless. Before these words are printed, the administration will have found countless new ways to flout the rule of law.
We are in deep trouble. The moral rot in our society preceded Trump. He is its logical conclusion. He is the apotheosis of a culture where greed, exploitation and self-interest, the core tenets of neoliberalism, are held up as the defining forces of human existence.
We must fight back while we can. But to do so requires that we recapture the language of good and evil. It requires us to make moral choices and to accept self-sacrifice. It requires us to name the bleakness before us, not turn our faces from the fascist monolith being cemented into place. Denying these truths and refusing to defy evil will ensure our enslavement. Speaking these truths and standing with the oppressed and the marginalized, even at the cost of our own financial and physical security, will set us free."
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "Una Mattina"
Full screen recommended.
Ludovico Einaudi, "Una Mattina"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Why does this galaxy have such a long tail? In this stunning vista, based on image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Dragon (Draco). Its eye-catching tail is about 280 thousand light-years long and features massive, bright blue star clusters.
One story goes that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of Arp 188 - from right to left in this view - and was slung around behind the Tadpole by their gravitational attraction. During the close encounter, tidal forces drew out the spiral galaxy's stars, gas, and dust forming the spectacular tail. The intruder galaxy itself, estimated to lie about 300 thousand light-years behind the Tadpole, can be seen through foreground spiral arms at the upper right. Following its terrestrial namesake, the Tadpole Galaxy will likely lose its tail as it grows older, the tail's star clusters forming smaller satellites of the large spiral galaxy."
Myrasor, "Grains Of Sand"; "Ocean of Home"
Full screen recommended.
Myrasor, "Grains Of Sand"
"Days slip through our fingers softer than we realize. This song is a gentle reminder to dance a little in the light, to seek the magic close at hand, to love this life before it becomes memory. Let it play once - without trying to make sense of it. The visuals are dreams I had with my eyes open: hourglasses pouring through floating islands, a wise old man drinking the universe from a cup, a woman dancing on a spiral of sand while waves rise behind her. Some scenes feel like memories. Others feel like dreams someone else had. Best with headphones, in a quiet moment."
o
Full screen recommended.
"Ocean of Home, A Journey to Finding Home"
"'Ocean of Home' is an original cinematic music story about the search for the place where the heart finally feels at peace. Some people find home in a city. Some find it in another person. Some discover it beneath an open sky, surrounded by the endless sea. Through quiet mornings, distant horizons, and an unforgettable voyage across impossible oceans, Ocean of Home tells a story about freedom, hope, love, and the journey back to yourself. Thank you for listening and becoming part of this journey."
"What the Old Ones Knew About the Worry That Steals Your Peace"
Full screen recommended.
Native American Elder,
"What the Old Ones Knew About
the Worry That Steals Your Peace"
"A Fool Gets Older Just Like Everybody Else"
Full screen recommended.
Blues Masterpiece,
"A Fool Gets Older Just Like Everybody Else"
“A Fool Gets Older Just Like Everybody Else” is a sharp, humorous blues about the simple truth that getting older doesn't automatically make a person wiser. Years pass, hair turns gray, knees start complaining - but some folks keep making the same foolish choices they made when they were young. Driven by gritty blues guitar and the soulful cry of the harmonica, this old-school blues mixes sarcasm, life experience, and a little Southern humor. The weathered voice knows that age can teach you a lot - but only if you're willing to learn. Getting older is guaranteed… Growing wiser is apparently optional."
"When the Soul Realizes There Is No Going Back"
"When the Soul Realizes There Is No Going Back"
Comments here:
"On Apples and Armageddon"
"On Apples and Armageddon"
Reports of mankind’s extinction are greatly exaggerated...
by Joel Bowman
“If I knew that tomorrow the world would end,
I would plant an apple tree today.”
~ Martin Luther (attributed)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Where were we, dear reader? Ah, yes... the end of life on Earth as we know it. The absolute annihilation of our species. Simultaneously fascinating and terrifying, exhilarating and humbling, it is at least modestly reassuring to consider that the extinction of the human race is also the least common event in all known history. Sure, we’ve had our brushes with the great beyond... our eleventh-hour escapes... our flirtations with collective fate... but by hook or by crook, mankind has always managed to wiggle his way into the future. (Not individually, of course... on that count history is unequivocally not in our favor. As the late, great Jim Morrison famously said, “No one here gets out alive.”)
And yet, our morbid fixation with the end times makes a certain amount of sense. If we conceive of time as a kind of arrow (as opposed to, say, a circular formation, as favored by some of the Ancients, or as a sort of Nietzschean “eternal recurrence”), then we really are standing on the edge of history, the past at our backs and nothing but the unrealized future before us. Is it any wonder that, staring over the precipice, we might be prone to the occasional bout of apocalyptic vertigo, in spite of the overwhelming statistical improbability that we would be the first (and necessarily last) generation ever to read history’s final sentence? Some might even say that would be making a bit much of ourselves. All of which is not to suggest our forebears didn’t have a few close calls...
Apocalypse, Never! A genetic study conducted in 2023 suggests our distant ancestors went through a serious population bottleneck about 900,000 years ago, during which period our headcount whittled to just 1,280 “breeding individuals.” (That’s the number of specimens capable of reproducing, mind you, not a term for confused cavemen who identified as cavewomen or gender fluid “cavethems.” One doubts we would have made it this far had they been that lacking in basic intelligence.)
According to the study, published in Nature magazine, “The population didn’t expand for more than 100,000 years, after which it bloomed again and the progenitors of our species and of our extinct relatives, the Denisovans and the Neanderthals, emerged.” Phew!
But our forefathers weren’t out of the proverbial woods just yet. Fast-forward to “just” 70,000 years ago and the Sumatran volcano, Toba, threw forth fire and brimstone from the depths of the planet, ushering in a volcanic winter of the kind that would frighten Cormac McCarthy himself. Although researchers no longer consider it a “near extinction” event, our primitive progenitors probably dwindled in number to between 100,000 and 150,000. Uncomfortably close to celebrating Cousins Day on Valentine’s Day, in other words.
Speaking of close relatives, it was around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago that scientists reckon our remaining rival in the Last Man Standing competition was eliminated... or rather, absorbed. It was around this time that Homo floresiensis made his exit from the Indonesian island of Flores... and Homo luzonensis checked out from the Philippine island of Luzon... leaving Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and the mysterious Denisovans (from whom, we assume, people named Dennis hail) to duke it out for top spot.
Being Human: Like these distinct “breeds” of humans, theories compete to explain how the smaller, weaker sapiens were able to better their Neanderthal relatives who, despite their name having since fallen into the pejorative “knuckle-dragger” realm, had already tamed fire, made sophisticated tools, hunted large animals, used pigments and fashioned decorative ornaments, and even buried their dead, at least in some circumstances. Researchers reckon climate, random demographic fluctuations, difficulty finding mates, inbreeding, and local catastrophes probably contributed to their end days. And yet, even our closest competitors didn’t disappear entirely.
Recent studies suggest something like 2–3% of the genome of most people with predominantly non-African ancestry is Neanderthal-derived. And it’s widely distributed among existing “gene machines.” The Max Planck Institute estimates that about 40% of the Neanderthal genome is represented somewhere among living humans today, even though any one person carries only a tiny percent. That’s approximately 20,000 consecutive human generations without a single extinction event, oftentimes despite our political overlords’ best efforts. Yes, yes, past performance doesn’t guarantee future results... but it’s not such a lamentable track record, is it?
“Ah,” we hear the crepehangers moan, “but what if you’re wrong, Joel?” Indeed. What if all of history, the tens of thousands of generations spanning hundreds of thousands of years, through ages of great wars and hard-won peace, times of plenty and times of want, of plague and blight, flood and drought, of fire and hail and common heartache... what if they’ve all led to this, the final denouement for mankind?
Leaving aside the breathtaking egocentrism required to place us, the present-day cohort, atop the incomparably vast expanse of human existence heretofore, the question remains: What if we knew that tomorrow the world would end? Then we plant an apple tree, dear reader. Not because we expect to enjoy its fruit, but because there is hope in the seed. Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."
Free Download: Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States”
"Since its original landmark publication in 1980, “A People’s History of the United States” has been chronicling American history from the bottom up. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, “A People’s History” is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of - and in the words of - America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles - the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality - were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term, “A People’s History of the United States" features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.
Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s iconic “A People’s History of the United States” “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way American history is taught and remembered."
Freely download “A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present”,
o
“A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:
1492.
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.
The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.
Color was everything.
Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.
The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions"
Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable: Weekly Wrap 25-Sept."
"Farewell to my Faithful, Incomparable Dog Riley"
"Farewell to my Faithful, Incomparable Dog Riley"
There’s a new beauty in doggie heaven.
by Donald Jeffries
This has been a year of tremendous loss. Starting in January, with the deaths of my sister Janet and her special daughter Denise, four days apart. Then one of my dearest friends, John Barbour, passed away. My good friend and next door neighbor Dan died, too. And now perhaps the cruelest cut of all: my Golden Retriever Riley.
My parents wouldn’t allow me to have a dog when I was growing up. No one in my immediate family was a pet person. They consented to let me have a cat, who I named Lucky. They wouldn’t permit him in the house, but he used to meet me at the bus stop after school. One day he didn’t come. I saw him lying paws up on the side of our yard. He’d been run over by a car during the night. What a tragically ironic name. That was it for me, except for the tropical fish they let me have. But what I really wanted was a dog. I knew my first dog would have to be a collie, like Lassie. And would have to be named Dino, because I loved The Flintstones. Dino turned out to be a pure breed sheltie. He was a good dog. Always came when you called him. He used to go outside with me and the kids (they were very little), and I never had to put him on a leash. That was the ‘90s, the last gasp of America 1.0. I probably would be arrested if I tried that now. Perhaps shot by an aggressive cop, looking for a dangerous criminal like me.
Then came TJ, who was a mutt. But a really good-looking mutt. You could see the Lab and the cocker spaniel in him. He barked incessantly, perhaps even more than Dino, who really barked a lot. There must be something about me, because I always have loudmouth dogs. Well, I’m pretty loud myself. After we lost TJ, I was crushed. Sadder than I’d been with Dino. We waited a year or so, and then my daughter really wanted another dog. We searched and searched, hoping to find a rescue animal. But my shallow, superficial emphasis on physical appearance got in the way. Basically, every rescue dog we saw was full or part Pit Bull. I don’t find Pit Bulls attractive. In fact, there are only a few breeds of dogs that I find attractive. My desire at the time was to find a Golden Retriever, and my daughter liked that idea, too. So we wound up getting a pure breed puppy. The runt of the litter, as the breeder described her. My daughter named her Riley, because one of the Jonas Brothers had a dog with that name.
Riley was beautiful enough to turn my head a million times a day. I loved looking at her. She was a gorgeous puppy who grew into a gorgeous full sized (but small for a Golden Retriever) dog. I had more names for her than I ever came up with for the kids. Golden Girl. My Super Model. Pretty Girl. Little Girl. Rye. Riley-Piley Poo. Riles. Fluffy Butt. I loved to say that she put the gold in Golden Retriever. Unlike our previous dogs, she really had the run of the house. She ran the place. We gave up trying to keep her off of the furniture. She slept in my daughter’s bed. When my daughter moved out, it essentially became Riley’s bedroom. But you never knew where she was going to sleep. For the past year or so, she had been coming up and laying next to our bed. We really spoiled her, like so many pet owners spoil their pets. She loved human food, especially chicken. We had to watch even saying the word. She loved to lay on the sofa, and she didn’t particularly want you to sit next to her.
That was the thing about Riley; she was needy, and clingy, but in a very unconventional way. She liked to be petted, but would always kind of distance herself, so that you had to lean forward to do it. She wouldn’t cuddle up next to you, although sometimes she would jump up and lick your face. But not very often. She had, in fact, a lot of feline characteristics. She could be aloof, and territorial. I used to say that I hadn’t wanted a cat, I wanted a dog. One who would jump up on me, and rest her head on my lap. That wasn’t Riley. And she certainly didn’t live up to her breed’s name; you couldn’t get her to fetch anything. She might go retrieve a ball one time, but after that, she’d look at you as if to say, “What, do you think I’m that stupid?” When she was young, she spent everyday running around our good sized backyard. She would even sometimes slide down the slide on our playground. She probably got more use out of that playground than the kids ever did. It was a lot of fun to watch her.
But Riley eventually yearned for bigger pastures, and started jumping the backyard fence, and disappearing into the neighborhood. It wasn’t easy to find her, and when you did, she wouldn’t come to you. She never came when you called. She thought we were playing a game with her. Other neighbors would come out and help. It usually took a few hours, and then finally she’d come back with us. We hated to ban her from the backyard, but we didn’t want to lose her, or have her get run over by a car. So for about the last half of her life, she became an inside dog. That’s when we started walking her regularly. Very infrequently, she’d want to walk a good distance. Most often, however, we took what I called “Riley walks.” These would consist of lots of zig zagging, backtracking, sudden lunges towards a passing squirrel, and craziness when any of the other countless neighborhood dogs appeared on the scene. And, of course, lots of sniffing. Rolling in the grass. But I’d give anything to have one more Riley walk.
After I was fired unfairly in 2018, I was around Riley constantly. I stopped traveling, so I was always the one left with her. Riley and me. I’ve become probably too much of a homebody. More radical and controversial than your average homebody, but a homebody nonetheless. Riley became a homebody, too. I built my days around her. When I went outside, she was almost always with me. She’d get upset if I took my neighborhood walk without her. So I’d have to come back, and bring her. So we could have a Riley walk. Which meant very few steps for me. Riley was less destructive than many dogs, but if she was angry, I’d come home to find my slippers moved around. She didn’t really chew them up, just moved them to let me know that she could. When she was anxious, which was often, she’d keep trying to get under my desk, and tangle herself in my computer wires. She disconnected me more than once. I tried to get her on camera for my podcast, and one time I was able to get her to cooperate briefly.
Riley had two speeds. Maximum overdrive and park. If she was parked, usually on the couch, it was hard to get her going. If she was in overdrive, it was hard to stop her from pacing about, often panting as she did so. This was most often in response to the weather. Especially the wind. Riley was obsessed with the wind. I know I’ll probably tear up again on the next really windy day. She would want to go outside and stand in it. Just stay motionless and feel it. If she was inside, she’d be inconsolable. She’d hide in a closet, or one of the bathrooms, panting all the time. You couldn’t calm her down. She wouldn’t stay still to pet or hug her. The vet said she had doggie autism. In her final days, she was panting and pacing about more often, even in nice weather. I relive her last night, and feel tremendous guilt, because she was pacing about our bedroom, scratching at the carpet, and I lost my cool. I had to shut the door on her. I didn’t consider that this was something different from her regular neurosis.
I dreamed of her last night. She came up to my side of the bed, and I exclaimed, “Look, honey, Riley’s here!” I held her up, but my wife couldn’t see her. I’m sure I’ll have more dreams about her. I dreamed about her a lot when she was alive. One recent one involved her barking at the hippos who’d invaded our house. Have I mentioned how fascinated I am by hippos? I really tried to figure out Riley, but she was an incredibly complex character. I wanted so much to talk to her, for just a few minutes. To find out what made her so high strung. To ask her what I could do to be a better master. Her tail was always wagging, even when she was anxious. Even on that last day at the vet’s office. I had to leave. I couldn’t watch. I couldn’t say goodbye. My wife is a lot stronger emotionally than me. I just hugged and kissed her, told her I was sorry for being impatient with her, and how much I loved her. Then I paced back and forth outside, sobbing, maybe panting like her, until my wife texted me, “she’s gone.”
Riley would sometimes “sit” and “stay.” Even “lay down.” But it wasn’t automatic. I’ve read that Golden Retrievers are very smart, with an IQ that translates to about 90. In other words, higher than too many humans. Maybe most ‘Murricans at this point. So she probably knew what we wanted, but didn’t feel like performing like a trained seal. Riley was pretty well behaved, but she wasn’t trained. I’m not sure she could have been trained. Maybe the Dog Whisperer could have done it. I don’t know how to train dogs. I talk to them like they’re human, which I know is ridiculous. Riley and I had constant one-sided conversations about everything. She was my silent, golden sounding board. We got her before my first nonfiction book was published. I called her a super model, which she was. And like most super models, she was a diva. If she could have, she probably would have made some Smoking Gun-type backstage demands. No brown M&Ms or something. But we always aimed to please her.
I’ve always had trouble with endings. Anything ending, or anyone leaving, makes me very sad. I get sad when a restaurant closes. I hate goodbyes. I fear change. My life is full of routines, and for more than a decade, most of those routines revolved around my beautiful Golden Retriever. When I went outside today, I realized how much everything reminds me of her. Every blade of grass or flower that she took excessively long to smell. The gate that doesn’t close all the way, leading us into what my wife called “the backyard tour.” Riley loved backyard tours. It probably reminded her of when she was young, footloose and fancy free. When we trusted her not to jump the fence and keep running away when we called her. Sometimes we’d see a fox, and Riley would want to chase it. Other than my increasingly rare time using the grill, I only visited the backyard with Riley. We used to have a lot more cookouts and family gatherings at our house. But now so many have died or moved away.
Dogs have kind of a raw deal. One of their years equals seven human years. A human life is far too short; what must a dog’s life seem? Riley lived a pretty long life; she was over 91 years old in human years. It strikes me that the lifespan of a dog is basically what the lifespan of childhood is. Our children are kids for 10-12 years, and then the eye rolling starts. Then you suddenly go from being their hero to the stupidest person in the world. It’s hard to take. Just like losing one of these precious creatures is. They become one of the family. Loud, demanding, but irresistible. Riley was a fixture in the house. She was always there, in some part of it. She used to come down to the basement when I did my podcast, and lie there calmly. I like to think she was listening. She stopped doing that a while ago, however. Maybe she got tired of all the non-Irish talk. She used to sit there while we were listening to Alex Jones, many years ago, when he was doing good work. So she was steeped in the conspiracy world.
Writing this is cathartic for me. As I’ve said before, it helps me cope with loss. Losing my favorite dog in the world is not something I’ll recover from quickly or easily. I keep expecting to hear her walking around, or her distinctive bark. I keep expecting her to appear around every corner. I don’t think we’ll get another dog. We’re old now, too, and it’s just too painful to let them go. I knew she was 14, and I could do the math. But the house seems empty now. And much quieter. I’ll probably still be finding her clumps of fur everywhere when I vacuum, for a long time. I had them shave off a bit of her golden coat, which I plan to put in a keychain or something. That way, I’ll carry a piece of her with me everywhere, just as I carry a bit of my niece Denise, as they made her thumbprint into a silver medallion I have on my keychain. I will think about her every time I pass a spot outside that she used to particularly like. I’m having withdrawal pains, knowing that we’ll never again have those little outdoor rituals.
Please forgive me for writing another eulogy. I don’t enjoy writing them. I feel like Jackson Browne; no one ever wrote about losing someone better than he did. Warren Zevon specifically demanded that Browne not write a song about him when he died. Browne didn’t, to his credit. Riley’s presence is everywhere, in the house, in the yard. I can’t look at the sofa without picturing her there, raising her head to stare back. The spot where her food and water used to be. The leftover food and treats we’ll give to the neighbors. And now, when I see another dog outside- and seemingly everyone in my neighborhood has a dog- I’ll miss her even more. Because now I’m walking alone. Without her leash. Without her. I’ll move on. We have to, don’t we? I brood about lost loved ones all the time. And I’m brooding up a storm about Riley. Will I see Riley in heaven? Do all dogs go to heaven, like the movie suggests? I’d like to think so. I want her to tell me that she understands that I did my best. I tell myself that we must have made her happy, because that fluffy golden tail was always wagging.
Jimmy Stewart was not only my favorite actor, he was a talented poet, who wrote the best tribute to a dog every written in my view. Fittingly, his dog Beau was also a Golden Retriever. He read it on the Tonight Show in 1981, and it brought me to tears then. Even though I had yet to own my first dog. I somehow sensed that it might become personally meaningful one day. And now it has. Stewart wrote that, “He never came to see me when I would call…but mostly he never came at all.” He closed with: “And there are nights when I think I feel that stare And I reach out my hand to stroke his hair And he’s not there. Oh how I wish that wasn’t so I’ll always love a dog named Beau.” Oh how I wish it wasn’t so. That Riley was still here. Still not listening to me. Still not letting me cuddle with her. At the center of my life. I’ll always love a dog name Riley."
The Poet: e e cummings, "Humanity I Love You"
"Humanity i love you because when you’re hard
up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink..."
"Humanity I Love You"
"Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death
Humanity, i hate you"
- e. e. cummings
o
"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there. Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home."
- Rumi, "The Tavern," Ch. 1:, p. 2, from "The Essential Rumi"
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