"Will We Win? Yes. Will It Be Horrible? Also Yes. So, We Might As Well Enjoy It"

Full screen recommended.

Aragorn's Battle Speech

"Will We Win? Yes. Will It Be Horrible? 

Also Yes. So, We Might As Well Enjoy It"

by John Wilder

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day. This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, men of the West!” – "Return of the King"

"The main poison that led to the GULAG was hope. Hope slowed action, and when the KGB or Cheka thugs walked up the stairs of the commieblock apartments, people didn’t react because of the hope that it wouldn’t be them. Soviet soldiers that had flung themselves against the MG-42s of the Wehrmacht or SS Panzer divisions on the Ostfront stood cowering behind their doors because of hope that it might be the comrade next door that the KGB was collecting. And blind hope really is silly because the comrade in the apartment next door has the exact same hope. It also saps willpower.

However, there’s the Blackpill®. Now, my definition of the Blackpill™ is that things can never get better, that all is lost, and civilization is doomed. If anything, the Blackpill© is nihilism on steroids, and is probably worse than hope because it brings with it defeatism. It’s a philosophy for losers. I reject then, both mindless hope, and also mindless nihilism.

I’m not sure what I’d call how I feel. Redpill© isn’t quite enough, because I believe that, indeed, we can and will emerge victorious in the end. The lights won’t go out forever. But victory requires intent. No general ever won a battle intending to lose. Elon Musk didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “Holy shit! I have reusable rockets and nearly a trillion dollars!” And this post didn’t assemble itself out of the luminiferous aether.

No, people drive conditions and drive events so that that victory emerges as a condition. They shape the world and the possibility of what can be through willpower, belief, and intent. Where then, are we headed?

First, Trump didn’t start the MAGA parade. He saw where people were already headed and jumped out in front of the parade. I recall one rally from his latest presidential run when he bragged about creating the Vaxx®. The people in the audience booed Trump. Trump stopped mentioning the Vaxx© after that. He looked back and saw the parade wasn’t going to go that direction. This is, of course, one of the primary distinctions between TradRight and GloboLeft: TradRight is hard to lead, GloboLeft grovels for someone to beat them and tell them what to do and believe as they sniff the glove. So, the movement is there. It’s the oxygen in the room.

Second, there’s France. I don’t know how a Frenchman can look at the country and see that they’re the next best thing to being conquered and not feel anger building inside him. How many murders? How many rapes? How many riots? How many precious symbols of his religion and former nation can he stomach to see destroyed before he snaps? At some point a strong man will look at the burning Louvre, the frolicking invaders, and Macron going to Davos to say the official statement that “Diversity is the strength of France!” and decide that the official statement can use a rake for toilet paper.

This, then is the fuel. The spark? I don’t know. Perhaps something as simple as a man who says, “no”, or a Major in the Army from Montana who sees a crown lying in a gutter, and picks it up, sees the oxygen that is the people, and the fuel that is the anger, and decides to lead the parade to where it must inevitably go: conflict, mountains of skulls, and rebirth.

I do believe that on the other side of this is a rebirth, a new golden age. I also believe that if you’re over 40, the chances of you living to see that new golden age are zero, and it may be that no one alive today will live to see it. I think it will be horrible in more ways than mankind has yet seen on this planet. Yet, this terrible gulf to herald in the future is likely necessary and preferable to the slide into tyranny we’re headed on now.

But I believe, deeply, that the forces of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness will win, and I believe that because, despite all the horrors of the past, they’ve never died. Gone dim? Certainly. But never died. This then is the pill that I choose to take, the pill that will build a future for my grandchildren and their children. I don’t have a color for this pill, but I’ll call it the Victory Pill™ for now.

We don’t get to see the end of this, but we do get to build the foundations, and shape what will follow. I have no illusions that this blog will be read 1,000 years after my death, let alone the 2,300 years that Aristotle’s thoughts have survived. No. But I’ll try to do my part, even if it’s to be the smallest PEZ®-shaped block in the foundations of what is to come. And what wins is someone who believes they can win, who goes out against all odds, sees the crown lying in the gutter, picks it up, and carries the future of mankind. That man may be out there now, and may yet be unborn.

Will we win? Yes. Will it be horrible? Yes. I don’t think anyone will point back on this time and place and call it the ideal, the Golden Age. Those times are in the past. And in the future. We are not done, but hoping our way to victory won’t help. Neither will despair. Building a foundation, however, will. We inherited this civilization from our ancestors, and only hold it in trust for our children. This is our time and place to stand."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

Bill Bonner, "Time To Be Someplace Else"

"Time To Be Someplace Else"

by Bill Bonner

Dublin, Ireland - "This morning, we will give a speech to an International Living group here in Dublin. We will tell them what we told you - sharing our story about getting beaten by police in a Paris riot. “It was a good time to be someplace else,” we will conclude. What follows is a much-abbreviated version of what we will say next.

Imagine that you were living out in one of the western counties of Ireland...a poor tenant farmer, barely scraping by, with a spade and a hog, like millions of others. And then, one year, 1845, your potato crop comes up green and promising...only to wilt suddenly. In just a matter of days, the plants died.

You would get through that year as best you could - eating the pig and pawning your only coat - and look forward to next year’s crop. And once again, the plants came up out of the ground as usual but blacken and die. And now, you have nothing. Even the few farthings in the jar over the fireplace have been spent. The thing to do was to get out...as soon as possible. About 1.5 million people starved to death or died of the kinds of diseases - like sharks after shipwrecked sailors - that follow hunger. Another million left the country. Which were better off?

That was a natural disaster. But man has caused plenty of disasters, too - intentional famines, wars, mass murders, genocides, religious massacres. One of the worst of the sort in history occurred during our lifetimes. In Cambodia. The leader was a man named Pol Pot who had learned Marxist theory. Guess where? Yes, in Paris, where he went on a scholarship.

Once in power, Pol Pot tried to create a real workers’ paradise. Which meant levelling the population. If you had any wealth...or ever read a book...or even wore glasses, Heaven help you; you were considered a class enemy and eliminated. The city slickers were herded out to the country where they could be purified by hard work and fresh air on a collective farm. It was an ambitious application of theory to real-life ...and ended up by killing a third of the entire population, who were either murdered, or died from overwork, starvation, or disease.

The corner of the Boul’ Mich and the Boulevard St. Germain was not the best place to be when riots broke out in Paris in 1969. Ireland was not the place to be a farmer in the mid-19th century. Cambodia was not the place to be in the 1970s. Where is not the place to be now?

At our financial publishing group - Bonner Private Research - our main goal is to protect against the Big Loss. It’s what happens when your money, like potatoes in a field with Phytophthora infestans, is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We’ve all seen the videos of Paris burning. Maybe the Big Loss will come from there? But today you can buy the leading French stocks in the CAC 40 for just two ounces of gold. Looking at it historically, the last time the CAC 40 sank to the two-ounces-of-gold level was in 1970. From there, it went down for the next six years to under one ounce of gold. Investors may have been so depressed they were ready to jump off the Eiffel Tower...but if they held on for another 20 years, they would have made a 1,000% profit - in real, gold terms.

That’s how the system is meant to work. You get in when the risk of the Big Loss is low. And you stick with it until you make the big gain. In our approach, in the US, we buy the Dow at five ounces of gold, or less. We sell when we get stopped out over 15 ounces. But that leaves us with long, lonely periods while we’re waiting for the Dow to go down again.

What to do? Should we buy into the French market, at only two ounces of gold for the CAC 40? Maybe. French stocks may not go up, but they don’t look like they will hand you the Big Loss either.

Over the long term, in theory as well as practice, it’s not gold...or silver...or futures...or AI or options...or any other trick, technique or investment genius that adds to wealth. It’s profit-making enterprises. They take raw materials and labor and use them to create products that are worth more than the costs that went into them. That difference is profit. The world then has something it didn’t have before; it is a richer place. The feds take some of it in taxes. The managers squander a fair portion of it, as they always do...and the rest goes to the people who own the company.

We want to own those companies...profit making companies...not resource and capital consumers. Companies like Philip Morris (now Altria) - which, by some reckonings has created more wealth for shareholders than any other company in America. But wait...how do we know which companies will be successful...and which will bite the dust?

We don’t. Individual companies can go ‘to the moon’...or they can go broke. We mortals can never know for sure which will be which. Buy the wrong one and you will take the Big Loss. Instead, we buy ‘the market’...using the Dow as a proxy. The 30 Dow stocks are very unlikely to go broke...all of them at once. So, we avoid the risk of the Big Loss in a single company. And we buy only when ‘the market’ is cheap - in gold terms.

Markets go up and down. And they tend to go up and down for long stretches of time. They get very cheap. And then they become very expensive. That’s the only piece of the market action we want to own - when they are going from cheap to expensive, not the other way around. And we measure it in gold.

Nominal prices don’t tell you if you’re making money or not making it. In the 1970s, for instance, stock prices went up - in dollars, but in gold terms, they went down. So, we wait for the market to go down in gold terms...and then we can buy without worrying too much about the Big Loss. Someone else has already taken it for us.

But let’s go back to the key question. Where is the Big Loss most likely to come from today?

The general rule is that the pricier an investment is...in terms of its real-world earnings...the greater the risk that it could give investors a Big Loss. By that measure, AI-related stocks are an unexploded grenade. They have a market value of tens of trillions, but relatively little in real earnings, so far.

More broadly, the biggest risk to US investors is probably the US itself. Officially, the dollar from 1971 is worth only about 13 cents today. But they changed the way they calculated it in the ‘90s so it wouldn’t look so bad. The real value of the dollar today is probably only about three cents, compared to one from 50 years ago.

And now, it appears that pretty much everyone is ready for more of the same…more inflation. The US is running deficits of 6% of GDP. That’s two or three times faster than the economy is growing. The feds are going to have to do something. Debt can’t grow faster than GDP for very much longer. Either they let inflation run hot. Or they default by suddenly devaluing the dollar. Our guess is that they will do both. And it won’t be the first time.

Most likely, the feds will simply ‘print’ money to cover the $2 trillion-a-year deficits. And they will also have to refinance about $11 trillion of existing debt, over the next twelve months. But when you have to print so much money, the bond markets - that is to say, the people who lend money to the federal government - get very nervous. They see the feds’ IOUs becoming substantially less valuable in the future. So, they - the bond vigilantes - demand higher interest rates to protect themselves.

Higher interest rates are a death sentence to debtors. They have to pay more and more to refinance their loans. And the biggest debtor of all is the federal government. So, when they ‘print’ to cover their deficits, the feds can end up paying more in interest than they printed. In other words, they end up worse off.

Yes, this is a very different kind of arithmetic. When you owe fairly little...and better yet, when interest rates are falling...you can ‘print’ a little extra money...and inflate the money supply by, say, the Fed’s 2% target. Nobody gets too upset about it...even though you are stealing from savers year-in and year-out. But when you have $40 trillion in debt...and interest rates are rising...it’s a whole different ball game. The Fed no longer controls the debt; the debt controls the Fed.

And it just gets worse and worse. The feds print. Interest rates go up. And they have to print more. The gains they get from printing money are largely erased by the bond market. And here’s the punchline. The only way the feds can get ahead is by printing more than the bond market expects.

Inflation only really works as an ambush. Otherwise, investors and consumers take a different route home. The authorities need new tricks...new traps. And what they end up with - what almost no American is prepared for...or can even imagine -- is hyperinflation. The velocity of money speeds up like a NASCAR racer...and the rate of price increases comes even faster than the new money.

And here’s the other part of that surprise. Big price increases increase the demand for big wads of cash. In the early stages, moneyprinting CAUSES inflation…later, inflation takes the lead, and the feds NEED to ‘print’ money to keep up with rising prices. When prices double, the consumer needs twice as much money to stay even.

None of this is new. Other countries had their PhDs just as we do. Many of them went to the same schools - Harvard, Yale, the London School of Economics. They were all smart. They all had studied the same theories. But when inflation got revved up, they couldn’t control it. One of our partners in Sao Paulo told us what it was like: “Dad would come home from his job. He was paid in cash, every day. We’d take the money and rush over to the supermarket to buy everything we could before they marked the prices up. Nobody wanted to hold cash overnight, because everything would be more expensive the next day.”

Americans are prepared for steady, docile, housebroken inflation - 2%...maybe even 4% or 5%. They are not prepared for runaway prices. So, that is what they might get. And, much worse than people expect, it will also crash the stock market...if not in nominal terms, almost certainly in gold terms.

But there’s good news, too. The coming hyperinflation will cause millions of people to take a Big Loss. So will the crash of the stock market. But - if we’re able to stay on the sidewalk...and not get beaten up by the police or the rioters - we could have the opportunity of a lifetime...to buy real companies at the cheapest real prices we’ll ever see."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/l

"Trump’s Iranian Body Count Grows on Its Own While He Ignores What Israel Has Done in Gaza"

"Trump’s Iranian Body Count Grows on Its Own 

While He Ignores What Israel Has Done in Gaza"

by Larry C. Johnson

"Donald Trump has discovered a remarkable statistical phenomenon. In Iran, the dead multiply on their own, unassisted, between speeches. You don’t need a morgue, a name, a death certificate or a human rights group. You need a microphone and a rally.

Let me walk you through it, because the trend line is breathtaking. In mid-January, while the Iranian regime was crushing protests in the streets, the President offered no number at all. He said he had been told “on good authority” that the killing had stopped and the planned executions were off. Fine. Then the counting began.

On February 20, at a White House press briefing called to complain about the Supreme Court striking down his tariffs, Trump announced that Iran had killed 32,000 protesters. CBS News noted, politely, that he “did not offer a source.”

By mid-April, in the middle of his public spat with Pope Leo, the figure on Truth Social had become “at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed, protesters in the last two months.” Ten thousand more dead in eight weeks, with no new massacre to explain them.

On June 16, sitting with the Emir of Qatar, it was still 42,000. The number rested for the summer. Then on August 31, Truth Social again: “now over 100,000 people dead.” The toll had more than doubled since June. Where did the other 58,000 come from? No one asked, and no one was told.

And on October 19, at a rally in Kansas, the President declared that “in the last eight months, they’ve killed 75,000 minimum protesters.” So in seven weeks, 25,000 dead Iranians came back to life. It is the first resurrection on record to be announced at a campaign rally. Thirty-two thousand. Forty-two thousand. One hundred thousand. Seventy-five thousand. That is not a death toll. It is a stock chart for a meme coin.

What the people who actually count say: Before anyone accuses me of whitewashing Tehran, let me tell you what the President leaves out. January’s unrest was not simply a spontaneous uprising of unarmed citizens. It was an attempted color revolution, and Western intelligence had its fingerprints all over it. In my assessment, the CIA and Mossad were actively involved in recruiting protesters and getting weapons into their hands, and those weapons were turned on Iranian government forces. The Israelis barely bothered to hide their role. Mossad’s own Persian-language account told the protesters, “We are with you - not just from afar and in words.” On January 3, former CIA director Mike Pompeo publicly alluded to Mossad operating alongside them. Israeli press reports claimed outside actors were arming dissidents.

The casualty records reflect that this was a fight, not an unprovoked massacre. HRANA, the U.S.-based Iranian human rights group that no one mistakes for a friend of the Islamic Republic, has verified the deaths of 178 members of Iran’s police, Revolutionary Guard and Basij. Tehran’s own count of 3,117 dead classifies roughly 670 of them as armed “terrorists.” Governments do not lose nearly two hundred security personnel to peaceful sit-ins.

None of that means no innocent people died. They did, and the people who sent guns into crowds share the blame for it. But it means the honest tallies are far lower than anything Trump says. HRANA claims 7,007 deaths by late February, with nearly 12,000 more cases under review. Iran Human Rights counted 3,428. The highest figure anyone has floated, from the UN Special Rapporteur in January, was that the toll might pass 20,000. Those counts are built from names, dates and places, and they cover a few days in January, not the “eight months” Trump now describes. The President’s 75,000 is nearly four times the most extreme estimate on record and more than ten times what has been verified. He is not counting the dead. He is counting the votes he thinks the dead can get him, and he never mentions who armed the crowds.

Meanwhile, in Gaza: Now let’s look at a place where the dead do get counted, one by one. As of October 13, Gaza’s health authorities report 74,389 Palestinians killed and 175,423 wounded since October 7, 2023. Since the October 2025 ceasefire that was supposed to end the killing, another 1,498 have been killed.

For two years, Washington and Jerusalem told us not to trust those figures, because they came from the “Hamas-run health ministry.” Then, in January of this year, the Israel Defense Forces accepted them. The IDF said that approximately 70,000 Gazans had been killed in the war. That is not a Hamas talking point. That is the army that did the killing, checking the books and agreeing with the total.

The IDF also says roughly 25,000 of the dead were Hamas fighters. Take that at face value, which is generous, and do the subtraction the IDF itself has declined to do in public. That leaves about 45,000 people who were not combatants by Israel’s own reckoning. Forty-five thousand. Using Israel’s numbers, not Hamas’s, not the UN’s, not mine.

So here is the comparison. In Iran, the President offers numbers with no source, no names and no consistency, which swell by tens of thousands between appearances and then shrink when he forgets what he said last time. In Gaza, there is a documented, name-by-name count that the Israeli military itself has accepted, and which by Israel’s own math includes tens of thousands of non-combatants. Guess which one the President talks about at his rallies.

The double standard isn’t subtle: I spent years in government watching officials pick which dead to count. It’s an old trick. You inflate the victims of your enemies and you erase the victims of your friends, and you never mention your own role in creating either. Iranian protesters are useful, because their deaths justify a war Washington has already started, even when Washington helped put the guns in their hands. Palestinians are inconvenient, because their deaths were caused with American bombs and paid for with American money.

If the President truly believed every innocent life lost to state violence demanded a response, he would not need to inflate Iran’s toll, and he would ask who armed the crowds. And he would not need an Israeli general to tell him what happened in Gaza. The figure is already there, accepted by the IDF, sitting on a desk in his own government.

Instead we get an Iranian body count that rises and falls like a carnival game, and a Gaza body count he pretends not to see. Somewhere in Kansas, a crowd cheered for 75,000 dead Iranians who, by the President’s own record, were 100,000 just seven weeks ago. Nobody in that crowd was told that 70,000 Palestinians are dead, and that the IDF agrees. That isn’t a mistake. That’s the point."

- https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/

o

Tell me, what do you do with a ferociously uncontrollable, 

viciously rabid mad dog who constantly attacks whoever is near?

You know exactly what, and who... Inshallah!

"America’s Breadlines Are Back! Working Families Wait Hours For Food"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 10/22/26

"America’s Breadlines Are Back! 

Working Families Wait Hours For Food"

"America's new breadlines are here and the people standing in them aren't who you'd expect. Teachers working two jobs. Part-time receptionists raising kids alone. Young parents who just paid rent and have nothing left for groceries. Families waiting an hour and a half in a car line with a toddler in the back seat, just to get a box of food. In this video we watch real stories from food bank lines across the country, and talk about what's actually driving them: grocery prices that jumped about a third since 2020 and never came back down, millions of families dropped from food stamps (SNAP) in under a year, and food banks receiving less food to hand out at the exact moment more working families are showing up, many of them with a pay stub in hand. The food bank used to be the emergency. For a lot of households it's now part of the monthly budget. That's the part nobody is planning for. If you've ever stood in one of these lines, you're not alone and there's no shame in it.'

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com

"Food Shortages In 2027: The ICC Warns That Global Food Prices Could Rise By Close To 70%"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 10/22/26

"Food Shortages In 2027: The ICC Warns That

 Global Food Prices Could Rise By Close To 70%"

"The global food system is heading for serious trouble. For years, farmers have depended on gigantic shipments of fertilizer from the Persian Gulf. Now that flow is no longer reliable, and costs are absolutely skyrocketing. U.S. urea jumped more than 28 percent in just three weeks this spring, and the ICC warns food prices could rise close to 70 percent in some regions. That is really bad news for ordinary American households. This video shows why rice, oats, pasta, flour and dried beans belong in your pantry, because cereals are under the most pressure right now. We also cover canned meats and fish for protein, plus water, at least one gallon per person per day. During the months ahead, the damage locked in this spring will hit grocery shelves, and the USDA's own range for 2027 tops out at a 9.2 percent increase. Families will likely need to build their pantries now, before prices climb even higher."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com

"Earnings Report Crushes Markets, Oil Prices Explode, War Escalates"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 10/22/26

"Earnings Report Crushes Markets, 

Oil Prices Explode, War Escalates"

"Markets are taking a hit as economic and geopolitical pressures mount. Earnings reports crush stocks, oil prices explode, Treasury yields climb, and Brent crude hits a five-month high. Meanwhile, rising interest rates are hammering an already struggling housing market as home sales fall. Gerald Celente breaks down the trends behind the turmoil and what they signal for the economy, markets, and the escalating wars shaking the world."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help people prepare for what's next in these increasingly turbulent times." 

- https://trendsjournal.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "Scorching Oil Prices Fuel More Inflation"

Jeremiah Babe, 10/22/26

"Scorching Oil Prices Fuel More Inflation"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Gas Prices Skyrocketing, This Is Getting Ugly"

Adventures With Danno, 10/22/26

"Gas Prices Skyrocketing, This Is Getting Ugly"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Gov't Mule, "Forevermore"

Gov't Mule, "Forevermore"

Singer: Warren Haynes

"Where the Light Returns"

Full screen recommended.

Evelyn AI Art, "Where the Light Returns"

"Sometimes, beauty appears where it should not exist. A fish floats through the open sky. A garden grows inside glass. Water becomes architecture. Flowers, crystal, silk, gold, and light form a world that feels impossible, yet somehow familiar. Where the Light Returns is a surreal fantasy music film created for those of us who still enjoy being surprised by something beautiful. There is no single story you need to follow here. Instead, each scene is a small visual dream: strange landscapes, impossible objects, elegant figures, reflective oceans, glowing skies, and quiet moments of wonder. I wanted this film to feel like stepping somewhere outside ordinary life for a few minutes, where imagination is allowed to become real and there is still something new waiting beyond the horizon. You do not have to understand every image. Sometimes it is enough to simply look, listen, and let yourself wonder again."

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Where did this big ball of stars come from? Palomar 6 is one of about 200 globular clusters of stars that survive in our Milky Way Galaxy. These spherical star-balls are older than our Sun as well as older than most stars that orbit in our galaxy's disk. Palomar 6 itself is estimated to be about 12.5 billion years old, so old that it is close to - and so constrains - the age of the entire universe.

Containing about 500,000 stars, Palomar 6 lies about 25,000 light years away, but not very far from our galaxy's center. At that distance, this sharp image from the Hubble Space Telescope spans about 15 light-years. After much study including images from Hubble, a leading origin hypothesis is that Palomar 6 was created - and survives today - in the central bulge of stars that surround the Milky Way's center, not in the distant galactic halo where most other globular clusters are now found."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211019.html

"A Farm Too Peaceful to Be Real"

Full screen recommended.

Wayward Town,

"A Farm Too Peaceful to Be Real"

"Welcome to WayWard Town. "A Farm Too Peaceful to Be Real "is a surreal AI-generated short film set in a quiet countryside where time seems to move a little slower. Follow the gentle rhythm of farm life through peaceful meadows, old barns, caring hands, and the simple beauty of everyday moments. Inspired by nostalgic rural villages, this film explores kindness, community, animals, and the comfort of a slower world."

Native American Elder, "How to Walk Away From Everything That Stole Your Peace"

Full screen recommended.

Native American Elder,

"How to Walk Away From

 Everything That Stole Your Peace"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Stupid Don't Learn"

Full screen recommended.

Dust & Strings, "Stupid Don't Learn"

“A fool can talk all night long till the rooster starts to crow... You can teach an old dog new tricks, but stupid don't learn, Lord, stupid don't learn.” "Stupid Don't Learn" is an authentic, raw Mississippi Delta blues ballad about stubborn fools, hard-learned lessons on backroad dirt, and front-porch grit. Recorded with a crying vintage National steel resonator guitar, stinging bottleneck slide, aching harmonica sighs, and worn gravelly baritone vocals."

"This 'Tree Rule' Teaches The Hardest Skill In Life"

"This 'Tree Rule' Teaches The Hardest Skill In Life"

by Thomas Oppong

"A tree doesn’t know what spring looks like when it lets go in winter. It just trusts that it’s coming again. Throughout the year, it goes through cycles. Novelist May Sarton said something that teaches one of the hardest skills in life: the art of letting go. I have a name for it: the “tree rule.”

She writes, “I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep… Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.” Most people spend their whole lives avoiding the skill of releasing what we must let go: attachment to identities, the past, grudges and everything that makes us suffer unnecessarily.

When a tree lets go of its leaves, it’s being strategic. It’s protecting itself. And improving its roots. It’s also choosing to recover better. To get stronger for the next season. The roots go further down in winter than they ever do in summer. It’s preparation. Holding on to past or present pain is costly. It wears you down even more.

Pain, Sarton says, doesn’t stay. “Nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.” Let time do what time does. And when it’s time, let go of what keeps you up at night.

Renewal only happens after the release. You can’t become stronger for your next life (build better roots) while you’re still holding onto leaves that already turned. “Learn to lose in order to recover.” You don’t have to figure everything out or feel okay right away. You just have to stop holding on so hard. Let the season turn. Trust the roots. Renewal finds you when you finally get out of its way.

“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know…nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched.” -  Pema Chödrön

- https://postanly.substack.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Athens, New York, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Charles Bukowski, "Darkness Falls"

"Darkness Falls"

"Darkness falls upon Humanity

and faces become terrible things

that wanted more than there was.

All our days are marked with

unexpected affronts - 

some disastrous, others less so,

but the process is

wearing and continuous.

Attrition rules.

Most give way,

leaving empty spaces

where people should be.

And now,

as we ready to self-destruct,

there is very little left to kill,

which makes the tragedy

less and more,

much, much more."

- Charles Bukowski

"I'm Sure..."

"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life.

It's just been too intelligent to come here."

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the

Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

- Arthur C. Clarke

"Violence: The Starting Point Of Civilization"

"Violence: The Starting Point Of Civilization"

by John Wilder

"Violence is something that society has been built to avoid. Historically, violence has been much higher – I recently wrote about the Yanomami people and how half of their men died in combat up until recently. This is an ugly fact.

One of the myths that has been force-fed to us is that native peoples are nice and peaceful and reverent. I had heard that people like the Blackfoot tribe “used every part” of the animals they killed. But that same tribe would kill them by making a herd stampede over a cliff, mashing themselves as they fell – it’s what’s called a “buffalo jump”. Yes, I imagine they used a lot of the buffalo, but I’m fairly certain that practice resulted in a lot of waste just by the sheer nature of gravity and the rocks below. Likewise, the Aztecs were worse: they sacrificed 4,000 actual humans for one party in 1487.

Yet, now the world is much safer, though places like the United States are getting less safe by the day. Why? Not enough violence. At least, not enough violence in the right places.

While Western Civilization certainly didn’t start the idea of laws, they’ve been embraced wholeheartedly since laws work. Although the number of laws in our current system far exceeds the number we need for a functioning society, laws are still important. But laws are just words. Ultimately, enforcement of the law means that someone has to be willing to employ violence to follow up on the law, up to and including killing the violator. That’s where the sheer number of laws gets silly. Should we really face imprisonment for a broken taillight?

Yes, I know that’s not the penalty, but try not paying the fine and see what happens. Eventually, people with guns will come and put you in jail and if you resist, they will shoot you. The reason I think we should consider very carefully what laws we as a society have is that ultimately the threat of violence is what underpins them all. The Feds ended up putting dozens of people to death at Waco over novelty paperweights. That is, of course, a ludicrous overuse of force, done by bureaucrats so that they could justify their funding at the congressional level.

I think we can agree, though, that laws are necessary. And laws gain power through their enforcement. If a law isn’t enforced, it loses all of its power. If the penalty is too small, then the law will be ignored. As I read once, “If a law is only punishable by a fine, that means it’s legal for a price.” Likewise, if attempted murder is punishable by six months in the slammer (I recently read about a murderer who was out after that length of time for attempted murder), the penalty is less severe than the fifteen years that a man received in Iowa for burning a pride flag.

If there is no penalty for crossing the American border and then taking over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, why, people will do exactly that. And why stop at one apartment building? Martha Raddatz of ABC® seems to think that five is a perfectly acceptable number of apartment complexes to be taken over by criminal Venezuelan gangs.

This is the outcome of the propaganda that “violence is never the solution”. Violence, or the threat of violence is often the only solution to many problems. An example is if a thief is attempting to break into my house and do Heaven knows what. My answer isn’t to politely state that what the thief is trying to do violates the laws.

Nope. In order to protect my house and family, I may have to use violence at that point. Certainly, it will be a reluctant use, but the reason why homes don’t experience much burglary around here is because people have guns and burglars know that, and also know that juries around here are made of people just like me.

The law doesn’t keep houses in Modern Mayberry safe, the threat of violence keeps people safe. But all the world isn’t Modern Mayberry. Places like Chicago or Baltimore have ongoing violence levels that are at multi-decadal highs. Why? The criminals have gotten the message that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. And if someone tries to step in and protect citizens? Well, like the Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny, who restrained a potentially dangerous man in a way he thought would keep everyone safe, they’ll be put on trial. Yes, and the trial was expected to take six weeks. At $1,000 an hour for lawyers, that’s $40,000 a week. Or $240,000 for all six. Maybe he’s got a coupon?

Regardless of if Penny was found guilty or not, his trial sends the same message as New York has always sent to its citizens: you’re not allowed to protect yourselves. Criminals threatening violence have the upper hand. Just ask Bernie Goetz, who decided he refused to be a mugging victim again.

We’re at the point where the criminals will start using violence – not because they have any political objective, but just because no one is stopping them, and those who would attempt to stop them are punished very visibly.

The way forward is obvious. At some point, decent people will have no other place to flee, and will have to stand and fight. When I review history, the pattern is pretty clear that civilization does return, though it does take the reestablishment of violence to get us there, and probably a few more buffalo jumps. And it’s been 200 years since the last organized buffalo jump, I hear. I guess that makes it a bison-tennial. And maybe Penny can get an Aztec lawyer – they get right to the heart of the problem."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

Full screen recommended.

Steve Cutts, "A Brief Disagreement"

"A visual journey into mankind's favorite pastime throughout the ages."

"Is Violence Embedded in Our DNA?"

There's just something profoundly wrong with the DNA...

"My Best Friend of 57 Years Just Died... I'm 80, Here's What I Learned"

Full screen recommended.

Before It's Too Late,

"My Best Friend of 57 Years Just Died... 

 I'm 80, Here's What I Learned"

"After years of living and learning the hard way, I'm sharing the life lessons I wish I knew when I was younger. In this video, I talk about time, relationships, regrets, success, and what truly matters in life. If you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, or beyond, this wisdom could save you decades of mistakes. This is raw, honest advice from someone who's lived long enough to know what actually matters. Don't waste years figuring it out like I did. Learn from my mistakes and make better choices while you still have time. Subscribe for more life wisdom from people who've been there. Real stories. Real advice. No filters. No regrets left unspoken. Leave a comment and tell me what lesson hit you the hardest. What's one thing you're going to change after watching this? I read every comment and love hearing your stories."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"

And how about you, Good Citizen? How's that job going? Current with all the bills? Health insurance affordable, keeping you well? Nice low gas prices? And if you qualify of course your own food stamp balance and available cash balances look like this, right?

10 MILLION illegals in 2024 alone automatically got $5,000 pre-paid debit cards and free transportation wherever they liked? Free health care and housing? While 700,000 Americans are homeless, including 60,000 veterans, 22 of whom commit suicide EVERY day?! Hungry children in the United States of America! The elderly can't afford life-saving medicines,150,000 drug overdoses in the last year! $350 BILLION for Ukraine, God knows how many secret BILLIONS to Israel, and you, Good Citizen, what do they do for YOU?!

WTF, and I repeat WTF is wrong with this country?!

- CP

"Both Sides Are Preparing To Greatly Escalate The Great Middle East War, And So The Global Energy Crisis And The Global Food Crisis Will Both Intensify"

by Michael Snyder

"For months, the skeptics kept assuring us that peace was coming to the Middle East. They were wrong. Anyone that believes that there will be peace in the Middle East has a fundamental misunderstanding of what is at stake. Israel and Iran consider one another to be existential threats. The Iranians will never stop until Israel is completely defeated, and Israel will never stop until the current regime in Iran is gone. As for the U.S., President Trump keeps telling us over and over again that Iran will never be allowed to produce nuclear weapons, but the Iranians will never make the nuclear compromises that he is seeking. So more conflict is coming. In fact, both sides are feverishly preparing to greatly escalate the Great Middle East War, and that is going to have enormous implications for every man, woman and child on the entire planet.

I have been telling my readers that the next chapter of the Great Middle East War is not likely to erupt until after the midterms, but if one side suddenly decides to make a really dramatic move more fighting could erupt at any time. Let me give you an example.

The IRGC just announced that if commercial vessels continue to attempt to travel through the southern route through the Strait of Hormuz near the coast of Oman, the Iranian military will respond by striking U.S. bases in the region…Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatens to strike American bases across the Middle East if the US military continues to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. “The US military must know that if this trend continues, the conflict will extend to its bases in the region,” the Guards say in a statement on their Sepah News website. The Iranians know that if they launch missiles at our bases, the U.S. military will strike back really hard. But apparently they are quite serious about this…

This isn’t going to stop tankers from trying to get through. Overnight, Iran attacked four more oil tankers, and three others that were attempting to sneak through the southern route hit Iranian mines… Iran said Thursday its navy hit seven oil tankers traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to exacerbate regional tensions and the global energy crisis that is driving inflation. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) navy claimed in a statement to have hit four tankers that were transferring oil. The other three ships hit naval mines and were immobilized as a result, according to The Associated Press. The IRGC added in its statement that some of the vessels remained ablaze as of Thursday morning.

Iranian state TV also reported that seven ships were hit while traversing the strait. If confirmed, it would mark the largest single-day incident involving vessels in the waterway since the start of the war in February.

Now we shall wait to see if Iranian attacks on U.S. bases begin. If they actually follow through on this new threat, there will be fireworks. General Mohsen Rezaei just told Drop Site that Iran has already selected valuable U.S. targets to hit in case more fighting erupts…Iran’s top security official, Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and personal representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, told Drop Site that, in the event of an attack, Iran still has capacity to continue launching missiles and drones at various U.S. assets across the region in retaliation and that it would expand its range of targets.

“If the question is whether Iran still has the ability to continue missile and drone operations, the answer is yes,” Rezaei said in an exclusive written interview. “The United States has valuable assets in the region. In the event of war, cables, data centers and artificial intelligence facilities could also come within range. If the conflict begins again, we will have a broader plan.” And Rezaei is also warning that Iran still has “capabilities” that it has not shown yet… Rezaei said Iran did not use all its capabilities in previous stages. It introduced more capabilities into operations in proportion to the intensity of the war and is ready for the next stage.

I have written about these capabilities over and over again. But the mainstream media wants all of us to pretend that they don’t exist. In the end, we shall see who was right and who was wrong.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been pulling staff from embassies all over the Middle East and evacuating troops from bases that are likely to get targeted by the Iranians…The US military has been quietly evacuating its troops in the Middle East and the State Department is reducing its staff at diplomatic posts across the region amid ongoing threats and as President Donald Trump considers launching a major strike on Iran. Troops stationed at bases in Jordan, Qatar and Kuwait have been ordered to move in recent days, a US official and two people familiar with the orders told NBC News. Meanwhile, the chiefs of mission at multiple diplomatic posts in the Middle East were notified on Wednesday that their posts would begin operating with a reduced staff, two US officials told the outlet.

This reminds me so much of what we witnessed just prior to previous rounds of fighting with Iran. Obviously preparations are being made for something big. An anonymous U.S. official that is being quoted by Drop Site has admitted that “CENTCOM is putting all the pieces into place to renew major combat operations”…

"A U.S. official confirmed to Drop Site that military assets are being moved rapidly into place in preparation for an expected green light from Trump. Among the American officials pushing for renewed attacks is U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Bradley Cooper, the official said. “CENTCOM is putting all the pieces into place to renew major combat operations,” added the official, who is not authorized to discuss war plans. He was skeptical the war would resume before the Israeli elections, but conceded, “We did start Epic Fury without all our assets in place.”

The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier and the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit are heading to the Middle East, bringing approximately 10,000 additional sailors and Marines to the region. The Roosevelt, which departed Japan on Monday, could reach the region by the end of next week ahead of its initially expected deployment slated for late November. It will join the USS George H.W. Bush and USS George Washington, both currently in the Arabian Sea."

It appears that it is just a matter of time before we start bombing Iran again. According to The New York Times, plans have already been drawn up for a massive campaign of airstrikes following the midterm elections…The United States and Israel have drawn up plans for renewed military strikes on Iran following the American midterm elections on November 3, according to a Wednesday report. Citing US officials and others briefed on the matter, The New York Times reported that the US and Israel have ramped up military drills ahead of what it said would be “a short but intensive operation,” including flyovers of Iran’s western neighbor Iraq to simulate strike maneuvers.

Possible targets are Iranian energy sites, nuclear facilities, and arsenals of missiles and drones, the report said. Officials quoted by the newspaper claimed another major round of strikes could crater the Islamic Republic’s economy and, in doing so, force Tehran into diplomatic concessions.

It is being reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t want to wait until after the midterm elections for fighting to resume. He intended to conduct airstrikes on Iranian targets earlier in October, but that move was vetoed by President Trump… Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu planned to carry out strikes against Iran earlier this month, but US President Donald Trump opposed reigniting the fighting before the US midterm elections, the Financial Times reported Wednesday, citing anonymous sources.

Three people familiar with the matter told the UK newspaper that the Israel Defense Forces was ready to carry out strikes on the weekend of October 10 to target Iranian nuclear facilities and regime sites, as well as civilian infrastructure including energy plants. However, the unnamed sources said that Trump decided not to restart the conflict before the US midterms on November 3. Israel is also imminently heading to the polls, with Netanyahu facing a tough reelection battle in next Tuesday’s Knesset election.

So for now we wait, but without a doubt Israel is ready to go.

In fact, the Times of Israel is reporting that dozens of Israeli aircraft just flew toward Iran as part of a “military exercise”…Dozens of Israeli fighter jets and refueling aircraft reportedly flew over Syria and Iraq toward the Iranian border earlier this week, following a flight path resembling an attack on Iran. The aircraft turned around shortly before reaching Iranian territory and returned to Israel, according to an Axios report citing unnamed US and Israeli officials, following an earlier Fox News report on the matter. Israel informed Washington of the sortie in advance, saying it was a military exercise and a show of force intended to deter Iran from attacking ahead of next week’s election, the sources told Axios.

If the Iranians had decided that a huge wave of airstrikes was imminent, they could have responded by launching dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel. We came far closer to a major incident than most people realize. Of course it is inevitable that more missiles will soon be flying back and forth. This week, Netanyahu once again publicly stated that ending the regime in Iran is the goal…

Overthrowing the Islamic Republic is the only way to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday, accusing Tehran of trying to revive its nuclear program. Speaking at a military officers’ graduation ceremony, Netanyahu said Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and had “pulled the pin.” “There is only one way to remove this threat: toppling the regime in Iran,” Netanyahu said.

Israel is not going to stop. Neither will Iran. A lot more fighting is on the horizon, and the global energy crisis is going to get even worse.

On Thursday, the price of Brent crude briefly hit $113 a barrel…Oil prices climbed Thursday on worries over a possible escalation in the Middle East conflict as the U.S. reportedly plans to resume strikes against Iran. Brent crude futures rose 2.8% to $111.81 a barrel as of 11:07 a.m. ET after nearly reaching $113 earlier. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude gained 1.7% to $98.83 after breaking $100 earlier.

Needless to say, the global food crisis is going to get even worse too. Painfully high fuel and fertilizer prices are financially crippling farmers, and the Super El Niño in the Pacific is causing widespread droughts in key agricultural areas all over the globe. For example, just check out what is happening in France…

France’s 2026 grain-maize yield is forecast to fall to 6.3 tonnes per hectare (2.81 short tons per acre), its lowest level since 1991, after repeated heatwaves and persistent drought damaged crops. Agreste estimates production, including seed maize, at 7.3 million tonnes (8 million short tons), nearly half the 2025 level, as grain-maize area fell 28% and yield declined 27%.

The world is not going to grow enough food this year, and hunger will intensify. Already, severe hunger is at historic levels in nations such as Sudan and Afghanistan…Drought tied to the El Niño weather pattern has hit over half the country, causing crop failures in some places and costing households food and income, the IPC said. Crops are growing poorly on 64% of farmland in North Darfur, and on roughly half the land in West and South Kordofan and South Darfur.

In May, close to 19.5 million people, over 40% of Sudan’s population, faced acute food insecurity at high levels, the IPC found. The IPC placed 135,000 of them at Phase 5, its worst category, which means starvation, very high malnutrition and people dying of disease or hunger. In Afghanistan, malnutrition has reached record levels and more than a third of the population is going severely hungry, the United Nations warned earlier this month.

We are facing a global energy crisis, a global fertilizer crisis, a Super El Niño and World War III all at the same time. And every single one of them is expected to intensify during the months ahead. We really are in unprecedented territory, and I have a feeling that global events will soon spiral completely out of control."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"Background Assumptions"

"Background Assumptions"

by Edward Curtin

"What is the explanation for the brainwashing of so many Americans when it involves the nefarious, unspeakable deeds of their government? Why are so many so easily duped time and again? Why is there such a vast ignorance of the truth behind national and international affairs?

I would suggest that the answer lies not just with the specific issues themselves and the lies and propaganda used to befuddle people, but with the cultural and social background assumptions that frame their thinking. The latter serves to cut to the root of people’s belief in their own power to think freely and clearly about the former. Invade people’s minds over many years with an ongoing series of interconnected memes, keep their attention focused on trivia, occupy their minds with alleged facts that induce a frenzied depression, and then fooling them on specific issues – e.g. Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Palestine, Syria, elections, etc. – becomes much easier.

I am a retired philosophically informed sociology professor whose specialty is the sociology of knowledge, which is indebted to the early work of Marx, Nietzsche, Scheler, and Mannheim, among others. This sociological specialty is rooted in a very long philosophical tradition into the nature of “knowledge,” “reality,” and illusion, a notable example being Plato’s allegory of the cave. The sociology of knowledge is the study of how we know what we “know,” why we think what we think we know is “real,” and how knowledge is historically situated and conditioned and therefore relative to time and place. Since it presumes to be an empirical discipline similar to other sciences, it itself is open to the epistemological questioning of its own validity since it presumes that knowledge is historically relative, which would include itself. For example, we know that much of what was “true” for biologists in 1875 is not “true” today and what is ”true” now probably won’t be in the future, since all science (Latin, scire, to know) is a process, not a product.

This modern sense of the relativity of knowledge permeates the modern world. The theological and existential question it raises is whether there are absolute truths distinguished from relative ones. I came to sociological study from theology. I came to theological studies from the Classics. I came to the Classics from faith. I have passed through multiple stages, and life has taught me that there are a few absolute truths amid all the changes. That God is reality is the primary one. It is truth to me, although it is beyond the parameters of the sociology of knowledge or any science.

As you can see, some questioning can open up a circle game without end. So let me keep the following at a more mundane level with practical consequences. Let’s stay within the parameters of sociology and logic.

My students would always laugh when during a discussion of memory, social and personal, I would ask them about their forgetties (the actual word is forgetteries, but the shorter one gets more laughs). They’d think I was joking. Maybe you do too, but I am not. But when I suggested that if we assume that they “possess” the faculty to remember, then they must “possess” the faculty to forget, they were astonished.

You can’t forget, they replied; you just don’t remember; you can’t retrieve the memories that are stored in your brain. Who the “you” is who did the storing and can’t do the retrieving is left unaddressed. In other words, there are no forgottens, just temporarily unavailable memories. From there we would proceed to a discussion of retrieving (I think of dogs), processing (their word for thinking and mine for making American cheese), and all the computer lingo that has been at the core of their lives. Like fish in water, the mechanistic computer memes have been their environment since birth. They were shocked at the suggestion that there might be more outside the cultural water, and that they could go there. And they have a lot of company. These assumptions are commonplace.

This may sound flippant, but it’s crucial for understanding why so many Americans can’t comprehend and pay attention to the ways their minds are scrambled and confused about life and death issues, how their country has fallen victim to the military-industrial-intelligence apparatus that operates deep in the shadows, and with Trump in office, oftentimes right in the open. How the mass media are their accomplices.

If we examine the social and cultural context of the last thirty or so years, we can see a number of issues that have dominated Americans’ “thinking” as background assumptions. These issues have been promulgated and repeated ad infinitum by the corporate media, the professional classes, and schools at all levels. We have been swimming in these issues for years. I suggest the following few are key: the inability to concentrate or pay attention (ADD/ADHD), memory/forgetting (dementia, Alzheimer’s, technological memory devices), people’s lack of time and constant busyness (a recent email I received from a company read: crazy-busy? AI is here to help), drugs legal or illegal as problems or solutions (over 6 billion prescriptions written in the U.S.A. yearly), and technology as our savior. There are many more, of course.

Together with shopping and the weather, these five topics have been the stuff of endless conversations and media chatter over the years.

When people are questioned about major issues of war and peace; political assassinations, such as those of JFK, MLK, or RFK; the overthrow of elected governments in the Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Venezuela, Honduras, etc.; the events of September 11, 2001; government spying; economic robbery by the elites; the Covid propaganda – the list is long, it’s common for people to echo the government/corporate media, or, if pressed, to say, I don’t know, I can’t remember, no one knows for sure, it’s impossible to know, we’ll never know, etc. The confused responses are replete with an unacknowledged despair at ever arriving at clear and certain conclusions, not to say being able to do anything about them. On many issues they bounce between the twin absurdities of Democrat and Republican talking points, thinking they are being perceptive. They don’t know but they do, since they need to grasp at straws and can’t admit the system is rotten to the core,

Just yesterday there was another No Kings rally in my town and around the country. While I fully agree that Trump is an evil monstrosity, most of these demonstrators have great faith that the Democrats will restore a phantasmagoric delusion of democracy that they have swallowed whole.

If we set aside the substantive issues, and examine the aforementioned cultural memes, the answers are not hard to find. Here most people speak as if they are certain. “Of course there isn’t a forgettery.” “Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance.” “Memories are all stored in the brain.” “I really am so busy all the time.” “Facts are just opinions.” Americans have internalized the ethos presented to them by the elites. At the core of this is the propaganda of scientific materialism and biological determinism that we are not free but are victims of our genes, neurotransmitters, brain/computers and chemicals, technology, etc. Having lost our minds and fixated on our brains (bodies), we have been taught to be determined to be determined, not free. And whether consciously or unconsciously, most have obliged. The linkages between memory, attention, distraction, drugs, technology all point to the brain and the obsessive cultural discussion of brain matters. 

We have been told interminably that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and the next to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump - what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world.

For years we have been fed philosophical presuppositions smuggled in as facts. It’s an old trick, ever young. Tell people over and over and over again that life is in essence a mindless material/biological trap and over time they will believe it. Of course there are unspoken exceptions - those who are the masters of this con-game, the few, the elite, those who make and reinforce the case. And even some of them are too ignorant to comprehend their questionable presuppositions. They hoist themselves by their own petards while cashing in at the bank.

My students couldn’t forget because they didn’t believe in it. But they couldn’t remember either. They didn’t know why. So, like the older generation, they fell into the careless habit of inaccuracy, to turn Oscar Wilde on his head. They had downloaded their memories, uploaded their trifles, and been tranquilized by trivia.

As the great American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote over sixty years ago, “Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.” That is truer today than then. A sense of entrapment and determinism pervades our culture. And it extends to public issues as well. We are told either to accept official explanations for public events or be dismissed as crazies.

I would suggest that for people to break through to a true understanding of the important public events of our time, they must also come to understand the false memes of their culture, the way they have been mind-washed to believe that at the most rudimentary level they are not free.

Maybe the first best step toward free thought and escape from the propaganda trap would to accept that you “possess” a forgettery, not as a body part but as a capability. Listen to the American philosopher Paul Simon sing, “When I think back to all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” Use your forgettery and forget the crap.

Make haste slowly to question everything. Remember that the corporate media work hand in glove with the ruling elites on two levels of propaganda - cultural and political, and it is necessary to understand how they are entwined. Freedom is indivisible. That’s worth remembering."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

o

Paul Simon, "Kodachrome"