2002, "Even Now"
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Sunday, October 25, 2026
"A Look to the Heavens"
“While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the above gorgeously detailed image was recently taken in infrared light by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in honor of the 23rd anniversary of Hubble's launch.
The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is seen above primarily because it is backlit by the nearby massive star Sigma Orionis. The Horsehead Nebula will slowly shift its apparent shape over the next few million years and will eventually be destroyed by the high energy starlight.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130422.html
"A Hidden Village at Dawn, Gentle Farm Life"
Full screen recommended.
"A Hidden Village at Dawn, Gentle Farm Life"
"A peaceful cinematic journey into a hidden village at dawn, where soft golden light slowly awakens the countryside. Gentle farm life unfolds in silence - fields breathing with morning mist, wooden houses glowing warmly, and simple daily routines beginning with calm rhythm. This AI-generated surreal film captures the beauty of slow living, nature, and quiet human moments in a dreamlike rural world. Every frame is designed with a soft cinematic aesthetic, inspired by Pixar-style 3D animation and Unreal Engine realism. Sit back, relax, and experience the gentle atmosphere of a world where time moves slowly and life feels pure again."
Native American Elder, "7 Times You Must Remain Silent Even When You're Right"
Full screen recommended.
Native American Elder,
"7 Times You Must Remain Silent Even When You're Right"
"Comfort Never Built Character"
Full screen recommended.
Delta Blues Brother,
"Comfort Never Built Character"
"Everyone wants an easier life. But when you look back, the days that shaped you probably weren't the easy ones. They were the long shifts. The broken trucks. The cold mornings. The fences that needed fixing twice. The setbacks that taught patience. The failures that quietly built resilience. "Comfort Never Built Character" is a raw Delta blues reflection about perseverance, honest work, resilience, gratitude, and the quiet truth that life's hardest seasons often become its greatest teachers. The electric blues guitar rolls with the steady rhythm of worn boots on gravel roads, while the resonator guitar adds a weathered Southern soul that feels earned rather than performed. The harmonica breathes between verses with long, reflective phrases, carrying the sound of perseverance, humility, and decades of experience. The groove remains raw, unpolished, and deeply human... like wisdom shared from an old front porch after a lifetime of learning. This is the blues of resilience. Not because suffering is something to seek. But because the strongest character is often forged where comfort never existed."
"The Greatest Loss..."
"Children of Hope, to life we fondly cling,
Though woe on woe bitter hour may bring;
the spirit shrinks, and Nature dreads to brave,
The doubt, the gloom, the stillness of the grave.
But what is death? – a wing from earth to fee –
a bridge o’er time into eternity."
- Michelle, in “The Fear of Death Considered”
"How Your Phone Quietly Rewrote What You Want"
Full screen recommended.
The Psyche,
"How Your Phone Quietly Rewrote What You Want"
"You think you want what you want. The things you chase. The life you imagine. The person you are trying to become. But what if part of that wanting was written somewhere else? In this episode of The Psyche, we investigate how your phone can quietly reshape your desires - not merely by distracting you, but by changing what feels desirable in the first place. This is not a digital detox sermon. It is not a command to delete every app or turn a flip phone into your personality. And it is not an excuse to blame technology for every empty feeling or destructive impulse. It is an investigation into a more difficult question: how do you tell the difference between a desire that is genuinely yours and one that was installed through repetition, comparison, and engineered reward?
Herbert Marcuse distinguished between true needs and false needs. True needs serve human life. False needs are imposed from outside by forces that benefit when we feel them - yet they do not arrive feeling artificial. They feel personal. Satisfying them can even produce what Marcuse called “euphoria in unhappiness”: real pleasure that keeps us from noticing that we are not becoming any happier. The modern feed makes this mechanism intimate and continuous. Variable rewards keep the wanting active. Endless comparison rewrites the baseline of what a normal life should contain. What felt sufficient yesterday begins to feel like failure today. Studies disagree on one precise number, but the scale is revealing: people may check their phones dozens or hundreds of times a day and touch them thousands of times. That is not simply usage. It is rehearsal - repeated exposure capable of narrowing attention, ambition, taste, and desire.
The answer is not purity. Rejecting the phone can become another identity organized around the phone. Blaming the algorithm for everything can also become a way to avoid responsibility for the desires and emptiness that were already there. The real test is time and distance. Choose one thing you currently want but are not completely sure is yours. Remove the feed that reinforces it for one week. Then watch what happens. Installed desires often need constant noise. Genuine desires can survive the quiet. If this felt familiar, write in the comments: What is one thing you want that you are no longer sure is actually you? You do not have to explain it. Naming it is the first step toward seeing who has been holding the pen."
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"You Can’t Have It All"
Emily Levine, January 2019.
"You Can’t Have It All"
by Maria Popova
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Rilke wrote in contemplating the most difficult and rewarding existential art: befriending our own finitude. I have been sitting with Rilke, awash in the tidal waves of sorrow and love, in the wake of losing my beloved friend Emily Levine (October 23, 1944 - February 3, 2019) - philosopher, comedian, universe-builder, beautiful soul - who made me fall in love with poetry long ago and without whom there would be no Universe in Verse and no Figuring. (Emily rightfully occupies the first line of the book’s acknowledgements.)
Ever since her terminal diagnosis in 2016, and up until just three weeks before her death, I had been taking Emily for what we came to call our “poetry retreats” - brief periodic respites by the ocean, where we would spend unhurried time in the company of a few other beloved women, reading poetry, cooking, conversing, and just being - with our joys, with our sorrows, with one another. Emily - the most erudite and intellectually voracious person I have ever known = introduced us to classics, many of which she knew by heart: Whitman, Eliot, Yeats, Plath, Rilke. But there was one contemporary poem she especially loved and read for us often: “You Can’t Have It All” by Barbara Ras, from her exquisite and exquisitely titled 1998 poetry collection "Bite Every Sorrow" (public library).
Now that Emily has returned her stardust to the universe she so cherished, and all the words seem too small to fill the void, poetry stands as the only mode of remembrance that can give shape and space to the amorphous largeness of feeling that is grief. In this sweetly lo-fi recording from one of our gatherings, punctuated by the sound of the ocean and the rustle of page-turning, Emily reads the poem that she, in the deepest sense, lived out and modeled for the rest of us with her largehearted life.
"You Can't Have It All"
"But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this."
Complement with Emily’s splendid reading of “On the Fifth Day” by Jane Hirshfield, who often graced our poetry retreats with her Buddhist benediction of a presence, then revisit Mary Oliver - one of Emily’s favorite poets, whom she outlived by seventeen days - on the measure of a life well lived and how to live with maximal aliveness."
"The Sin Nature of Theologians & The Primate Nature of Biologists Are The Same"
"What can we know? What are we all?
Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite,
with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Sin Nature of Theologians & The Primate
Nature of Biologists Are The Same"
by Paul Rosenberg
"This is one of those things that needs to be said, even though it’s jarring and unlikely to change public discourse any time soon. Apologies where due.
What theologians call “man’s sinful nature” is just about the same thing as the primate chemistry we humans have inherited, however it was that it came to us. (I’ll leave the fights over ultimate origins to others.) Bear in mind, please, that what I’m calling “primate nature” is, in us, more like primate inclinations, and that we also have post-primate inclinations, or in theological terms godly inclinations. But there’s only so much we can cover in a single post, so I’ll pass over most of that today.
Let’s use the five “Thou shalt nots” of the Ten Commandments as a reference point for the sin nature. It’s not an ideal list, but it’s very well known and will serve our purpose well enough. And we’ll stay with the closest primates to us: chimps first and then baboons (which also happen to be the animals I’ve studied the closest).
Thou shalt not murder. Chimps very definitely murder, and brutally. But they murder mainly outside their immediate troops. In other words, they’re murderously xenophobic. Most of their murders could be considered a type of war, and they are endlessly in conflict with other bands of chimps living nearby. And so aggression in humans, and particularly aggression between groups, are very definitely chimp things.
But there’s even more to this story: Murder and war are mainly (though not exclusively) a male activity among chimps. Female chimps accomplish most of their aggressions indirectly, by forming nepotistic dominance hierarchies and putting down both underlings and competitors, coldly and cruelly (at least from our perspective). When killing is required, they generally influence males (usually related males) to get it done.
Thou shalt not commit adultery. The big goal for male primates is to become the top animal and to copulate with as many females as possible. This, rather obviously, translates to adultery. Mid-level males wait till the big bosses are gone, then copulate with females the bosses previously monopolized, and by this the females spread their influence. Females frequently trade sex for favors such as protection or quality food.
Thou shalt not steal. If and when they can, primates steal. The high-status animals can get away with it a great deal, as when boss males chase away lower-status animals who find a bush bearing ripe fruit. They’ll bark, slap and if necessary do worse to chase the pleb away and get the good food they found. And again, the females have their own version of this, with high-ranking females intimidating and punishing lower-ranking females. It’s a very soap-opera set of interactions.
Thou shalt not bear false witness. Misdirection and guile among animals is hard to identify, but I’ll go out on a limb and assert that this goes on plenty. Still, I can’t support it directly, leaving this one to stand as an open suggestion.
Thou shalt not covet. Low-status primates very certainly covet what the high-status animals have, but can’t get it. As a result (and yes, this has been measured), they suffer with markedly elevated incidents of high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, a suppressed immune system, reduced fertility and other stress-related maladies.
Also...Bear in mind that both primates and humans are hard-wired for the recognition of status, to which this suite of bad behaviors is tied very tightly.
Last Words: I like making these posts fairly brief, and so I’ll bring this to a close by noting two things: Everything above is substantiated by seemingly good research, and it clearly ties the sin nature of the theologians to primate nature. That an odd and even troubling concept, but it can be verified by anyone who wishes to undertake the necessary work.
As noted earlier, there’s also an upward side to this, and it leads us toward wonderful places and times. Despite the far-too-common condemnational aspect of theology, an upward and very promising theology is available. But I’ll go no further on that, save to point out that David, the great Psalmist, announced “You are gods,” and that Jesus repeated the statement without reservation."
Dan, I Allegedly, "State Of Emergency - It’s Time to Get Ready"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 10/25/26
"State Of Emergency - It’s Time to Get Ready"
"It is time to be ready. Britain has issued a serious preparedness message through its official Be Ready campaign, urging households to prepare for 72 hours of disruption. Why is the British government telling citizens to stock up on water, food, medication and emergency supplies? From cyberattacks and threats to critical infrastructure to power outages, severe weather and disrupted supply chains, this is a wake-up call to think about what happens when everyday services stop working. In this iAllegedly report, Dan breaks down the warning, explains why emergency preparedness matters in both Great Britain and the United States, and shares the essential supplies every household should consider having on hand."
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"Over The Past 55 Years The Standard Of Living Of American Workers Has Fallen Much More Than Most People Realize"
by Michael Snyder
If you go to bed at night worried about money and you get up in the morning still worried about money, you are far from alone. In 2026, financial stress is an inescapable reality for most Americans. There is still a very small segment of the population that is doing really well, but the vast majority of us are just trying to find a way to scrape by from month to month. When you work as hard as you can and it just isn’t enough, it can be absolutely soul crushing. As I discussed last week, 44 percent of Americans struggle to even afford the most basic necessities. We can all feel that the middle class is steadily eroding, and in this article I am going to share some shocking new numbers that absolutely prove that this is happening.
When I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was living a middle class lifestyle. Homes were very affordable, nobody had anxiety about paying for healthcare, gasoline was extremely cheap, and grocery prices were not a concern at all. Beef was so cheap in those days, and we ate like kings. But now who can afford to eat beef on a regular basis? Perhaps the wealthy can, but for most of us a simple visit to the grocery store is very painful. In fact, many Americans now skip meals on a regular basis just to save money. And a single trip to the hospital can mean financial ruin. This is what life is like in America today.
Yes, we are making far more money than we once did.But the purchasing power of our money has declined much faster than our paychecks have risen. Adam Livingston has shared some numbers that show just how dramatically our standard of living has gone down since the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971…
The fact that median household income is 9.7 times higher than it was in 1971 sounds like great news. But the bad news is that the amount of gold that the median household income can buy has dropped by 88 percent since 1971.If you look at the chart above, you will see that our standard of living has really been going downhill since the year 2000.
Needless to say, those at the bottom of the economic pyramid have been hit the hardest. In a different post, Adam Livingston also pointed out that the federal minimum wage has lost about 95 percent of its value since 1971 when measured in gold…
Nobody can survive on the federal minimum wage today. $7.25 times 40 hours a week is just $290. And that is before taxes. Nobody can afford rent, utilities, food and healthcare on such an income. In fact, much of the country cannot afford rent, utilities, food and healthcare at this stage.
For 46-year-old Cindy Banda, just keeping the house, providing the basics for her kids and paying for her cancer treatment has become a seemingly impossible task…"The Ford Expedition rumbled to a stop and Cindy Banda’s bedazzled flip-flops landed on the asphalt of the Houston cancer center’s vast parking lot. She threaded through the rows of cars, a tally of patients who gather here to sit with chemotherapy needles or lie on radiation machines.
The elevator dinged open. A year ago in this building, surgeons removed Banda’s right breast, and she still didn’t know whether treatment had expunged the cancer from her body. Doctors had told her it would be tough to beat. “I’m more of a positive person myself,” Banda said, now sitting with a white wristband in a dim waiting room. But the bills are harder to dismiss, and the single mother with six children in her care repeated something like a mantra. “Keep the house. Keep the cars. And just keep the kids stable.”
Can you identify with her? I know that a lot of you can. Even if you have a decent job, trying to survive in this harsh economic environment is exceedingly difficult. And now decent jobs are disappearing all around us.
31-year-old Lissette Ramos has submitted hundreds of job applications over the past year, and she still can’t find anything…"Gone is the daily office commute. Now, after tending to her cats in the morning, Ramos heads straight to her desk to check the daily job alerts. She spends four to eight hours scouring sites like LinkedIn, Indeed and HiringCafe, customizing her resume for positions that fit her qualifications. At 5 p.m., she feeds her cats, goes for a walk to get in her 10,000 steps and returns home to lift weights before settling in for the evening. Yet one year and hundreds of applications later, she is still stuck in a job search catch-22 – overqualified for entry-level work yet sidelined for junior and mid-level roles."
I feel so bad for those that are out of work right now. Most resumes get discarded by AI hiring screeners before they are ever seen by a human…New technology has made applying for a job easier than ever, flooding recruiters with resumes and creating massive bottlenecks. What’s more, these AI hiring screeners can filter out and reject candidates so employers often don’t see their application. Rutgers public policy professor Carl Van Horn, who has studied unemployment trends for 40 years, frequently hears from applicants who submit hundreds of resumes without a single human reply. Omit the right keywords and “they’ve put their resume into the abyss,” he said.
If you don’t have personal connections, searching for a job can be so daunting. Unfortunately, more good jobs are being eliminated with each passing day. For example, American Express just announced that they will be cutting thousands of jobs… American Express is cutting thousands of employees as the leading credit card company prepares for artificial intelligence to take over more of its internal processes.
Amex is eliminating 5% of its global workforce and taking a $336 million restructuring charge, CEO Stephen Squeri told analysts Friday on the company’s third-quarter earnings call. The firm had almost 77,000 employees at the end of 2025.Chief Financial Officer Christophe Le Caillec told CNBC in an interview that the restructuring was to make American Express “leaner, more agile, and also to prepare for AI.” AI has become the number one reason why companies are laying people off. As AI models become even more sophisticated and even more efficient, the number of jobs lost to AI will only go up.
We have also just learned that Comcast is “gearing up for significant job cuts”…Comcast is gearing up for significant job cuts in its cable and telecom business in the coming weeks, as the media conglomerate restructures ahead the expected spin-off of NBCUniversal in 2027. On the company’s third-quarter 2026 earning call, CFO Jason Armstrong said Comcast expects to take a restructuring charge of more than $1 billion in Q4. “We expect to have a significant charge in the fourth quarter related mostly to our transformation efforts, and I would quantify that at over $1 billion,” he told analysts.
This is just the beginning. A lot more layoffs are on the way. If you currently have a good job, my advice would be to hold on to it as tightly as you can, because competition among those that are looking for good jobs has become extremely fierce. Ultimately, most of us just want to live a middle class lifestyle just like our parents did. But more seats are being pulled out of the middle class every single day, and economic stress is on the rise all over the nation."
"Trump and Netanyahu Want to 'Finish the Job' on Iran"
"Trump and Netanyahu Want to 'Finish the Job' on Iran"
by Philip Giraldi
"If one were seeking to create something like a modern-day folk tale based on current realities and having the theme of “good versus evil” there are any number of real-life narratives available that could be exploited to invite speculation on actual environments that might have served as models for the fiction. I have found much of the bizarre and blood-soaked evil relationship between the United States and Israel, which serves no US interest at all, to be one such arrangement in which two countries have through their own behavior become the most hated in the world. They have successfully established an odd partnership based largely on a common view of which other nations they hate and would like to destroy.
One must consider the monstrous joined-at-the-hip relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv, which is likely soon to become a true military and policy partnership by act of Congress. It will leverage the already existing ability of tiny Israel to manipulate and dominate the large and powerful United States. And there is also something else that should be reckoned with in the arrangement, and that is melding of the desire of the two countries to dominate not only their neighbors but also far beyond that. One can cite the aberrations in behavior that reveal how neither government wants to get along with other nations except in those rare cases where America and the Jewish state are accepted and even honored in spite of not being bound by any rules, decency or even democratic norms.
A prime example of how the completely murderous pathology that guides both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has come to dominate the relationship surfaced last week when Trump endorsed Netanyahu in the upcoming Israeli election. It was a case of two completely evil men finding common ground to congratulate themselves and advance their respective careers, which nearly all of the rest of the world would like to terminate!
Both men are in trouble with their respective electorates in large part because their obsession with endlessly killing anyone annoying be it in the Caribbean or Gaza, has become suspect, largely because the killing is without any actual objective and no real good comes out of the process. This is particularly true for voters in the US who have suffered the bullying by Israel and its domestic Lobby and also bear the tax burden and shortages that are the only fruit that falls from the trees of the conflicts. In Israel the equation is somewhat different as 90% of the Jewish voters want to eradicate even more Muslims and Christians and fully support a new Prime Minister who will kill even more of the vermin.
Observe what a brain dead Trump has to say about his good buddy Netanyahu in a shared phone call in which they first exchanged pledges that they would soon “finish the job,” the “job” in question being the “extermination” of Iran and most particularly its government. Bibi told Trump “Donald, we have a job to finish. You said it, and we’ll finish it together. We’ll finish it, and no one else will do it.” Bibi explained later how “I have spoken about this with President Trump more than once, including the day before yesterday… Finishing the job means bringing down the terrorist regime in Iran. It is the head of this poisonous octopus. You cut it off, and it will fall. We will also have peace with Lebanon. We must complete the elimination of the Iranian regime - that is the primary objective.”
Trump then responded in kind, telling Netanyahu that “You’re a warrior, and you’ve been treated unfairly by your country and from some others … but you’re a great warrior, and we will prove that. We will prove that very soon. I think you’re terrific, Bibi … You’re the man I want by my side, Bibi.” On Truth Social Trump later elaborated how “Bibi Netanyahu has been a Great Warrior Prime Minister and an even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He is “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant, the kind of Partner that the United States of America is demanding of Israel, a Country for which it has done so much.”
Clearly Netanyahu wants to get reelected to stay out of jail for corruption, apart from anything else, and he knows that unconditional support from the United States is essential to achieve that end and keep the wars in Lebanon, Syria and Iran going. What the two monsters were pledging was the total destruction of a nation of 90 million people that prior to the war initiated by Israel and the US had not threatened in any way either nation. That means it was per the Geneva Convention a war crime and besides which it is a violation of the War Powers Act and the US Constitution that Trump had sworn to support. Israel was admittedly the driving force behind the war against Iran, which has done huge damage to the world economy, because it saw the country as a political-military competitor in the Middle East region and Netanyahu was able to convince a stupid and willfully ignorant Trump that the war would be over in a week or two, a walk-over.
In a move that is being interpreted as an additional American support for Netanyahu in the upcoming election, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made an unannounced visit to Israel on Monday and met with the Prime Minister. The talks reportedly took place at the Ovda Air Base in southern Israel, where US refueling planes and fighter jets are deployed. Hegseth also met with some US troops. As Netanyahu and President Trump have discussed the possibility of restarting the full-scale bombing campaign against Iran the appearance and timing of the Hegseth visit, as he is the strongest supporter of resuming strikes on Iran within the administration, suggests that the war will soon be resuming.
Beyond the depressing likelihood that the war against Iran will soon start up again, there is the language employed by Trump, which as usual is inane. So Bibi is a “great warrior”? That comes from a draft dodger who avoided US military service in 1968 not for any moral reason but because it was inconvenient for him so his father arranged for a Jewish doctor to fake the records for a medical deferment. Trump had “bone spurs,” a condition largely unheard of in the real world before Trump came up with it on paper. And now the draft dodger is praising a “great warrior” who sends his men and women out to shoot three year olds as part of a regime that has been killing children systematically and without any consequences since the conflict with Gaza began.
And, unfortunately, the bad news is still coming. There is no doubt Trump has been the most servile president in US history when it comes to his constant supporting Israel even when it carries out genocide and kills American citizens. Trump has never failed to obey Netanyahu, but, it must be observed, he has only done slightly more so than Biden and the Democrats did when they preceded him in office. So one should have doubts that a possible change-over in the US Congress and Senate, where Israeli flags can be seen flying in some of the offices, is going to make much difference when it comes to the United States “standing with our best friend and closest ally Israel.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Website is - https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134, and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
"Iran Checkmates Israel"
"Iran Checkmates Israel"
by Bob Moriarty
"In the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, 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."
There is a very real reason Israel is the most despised country in the world. If in their insufferable arrogance the war criminals ruling Israel soon conduct yet another episode in their current war of aggression against Iran, they will have destroyed only their own country in the first thirty minutes of the war. Iran could have accomplished the same in June of last year or in February of this year but they adhere to the rules of warfare, unlike Israel. However, Iran has now notified the world they have taken off the gloves and will conduct the next chapter of the war with the same rules Israel made up.
Luckily for us, Hal Turner has provided the planned target list for Iran within Israel, above. In the first half hour, Iran can easily destroy the six desalination plants that supply 80-85% of the drinking water for those living in the cesspool we call Israel. No fresh water, no country. Should either Israel or their sock puppet, Donald Trump, attack Iran’s legal nuclear facilities, Iran promises to take out the Dimona Nuclear Center in the Negev Desert rendering much of Israel and the Middle East unlivable for hundreds of years.
Checkmate: Iran not only occupies the moral high ground in this conflict; they occupy the military high ground. The IDF consists of a bunch of armed thugs who think murdering pregnant women and children is just good clean sport. Israel is so arrogant that they think that attacking a Jewish synagogue is perfectly fair. As long as the synagogue is in Iran.
The much-vaulted security screen promised to the Middle East as part of the Petro Dollar concept has proven itself to be a paper tiger easily defeated by Iran as well as the sandal wearing Houthis covered with turbans. In simple terms, the overpriced US military hardware supplied to the Middle East by the Military Industrial Complex is crap.
We can always hope that Israel or the US rethinks their position on this incredibly stupid and useless war. On the other hand, no one will miss the criminal state of Israel and their genocide against all of their neighbors.
The fate of the world lies in the hands of two fools; one charged with corruption and only free from prison as long as he remains Prime Minister. The other, named 38,000 times in the Epstein files and terrified of the files being released. Those now reside in the hands of the other fool. The Epstein Files were designed to provide leverage for blackmail against the rich and powerful."
Saturday, October 24, 2026
"Halloween Candy Is Not Selling And Retailers Are Panicking"
Full screen recommended.
Finance Economist, 10/24/26
"Halloween Candy Is Not Selling And Retailers Are Panicking"
"One week before Halloween, candy sales are down 6.7% (NielsenIQ, month ending Oct 17). Hershey sold about 10% less candy and made 40% more profit. Candy and gum prices are up 44% in five years, twice the rise in grocery prices (22.5%). Cocoa, the excuse for all of it, has fallen about 45% from its January 2025 record. The price on the shelf went the other way. In this video: why only the small bags are still selling; why a 3% raise can mean a 15% cut in the money a family can actually spend; why cheaper gummies did not bring the shoppers back either; how Hershey's own SEC filing shows price +14 points, volume -10 points and segment profit +40.1% on "lower commodity costs"; why stores are discounting before Halloween; the arithmetic of a seasonal display; shrinkflation and the legal definition of milk chocolate; the 1974 sugar shock; and what a dark Halloween says about the holiday season that comes next."
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Canadian Prepper, "I Need to Do This Now"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 10/24/26
"I Need to Do This Now"
"I had to get out there and get this done while there was still time.
Winter is coming, and no one knows how much longer the diesel will flow."
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"This Is What Families Pay At Grocery Stores Now And It’s Getting Scary"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 10/24/26
"This Is What Families Pay At
Grocery Stores Now And It’s Getting Scary"
"So, have you looked at your grocery receipt lately? I mean really looked at it, line by line, after the bags are already in the car? Because families all across America are doing exactly that right now, and what they're finding is getting scary. In this video, real shoppers hold up their own receipts and show you what groceries cost today: $115 at Walmart for food that lasts two, maybe three days. $17 just for the meat in a spaghetti dinner, when the family really needs two packs. A 10-ounce ribeye at almost $20 that was $8 five years ago. $85 for barely two bags. And one mom who found her old 2016 Walmart receipt in her son's baby book - 59 items for $155.89 - and realized that same money wouldn't buy twenty items today. I think that's the part that hits the hardest. The prices kept going up, but the paychecks didn't.
Spaghetti used to be the cheap meal, the one you made when money was tight. Now even that doesn't fit in the budget. And when the basics stop being affordable, families don't have a cheaper meal to fall back on. That's why it matters to plan ahead now, while you still can: know what you actually spend each week, keep a real pantry of the foods your family eats, and buy the staples before the next price jump instead of after it. If your grocery bill has jumped too, tell us in the comments what you paid on your last trip and how many people it feeds. You're not the only one feeling this."
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Musical Interlude: Josh Groban, "You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)"; "Remember When It Rained"
Full screen recommended.
Josh Groban, "You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)"
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Full screen recommended.
Josh Groban, "Remember When It Rained"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth's sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula's central regions.
In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light."
Chet Raymo, "The Dot and the Abyss"
Click image for larger size.
"The Dot and the Abyss"
by Chet Raymo
"Let's take a stroll around the neighborhood. Nearby. Not very far. Let's say 20 light-years from the Sun. A typical neighborhood, for our neck of the galaxy. About a hundred stars. If we travel to the nearest one on, say, a Voyager spacecraft, it will take us upwards of thirty thousand years to get there. So our neighborhood amble will take a while.
First we'll pop in on Alpha Centauri and its two companions. Alpha is a twin of our Sun, a yellow star. In our 20-light-year neighborhood there are half-a-dozen Sunlike stars. Not many stars are bigger or brighter. Sirius, Altair, Procyon. Nothing really hot and bright like Rigel in Orion, and no red giants. All things considered, our Sun is one of the big shots on the block. A dozen or so orange stars, somewhat cooler and less bright than the Sun. A passel of red dwarfs. And a handful of white dwarfs make up the mix. About a hundred in all.
Click image for larger size.
The next spiral galaxy? Andromeda? Another circular tabletop of a hundred billion stars at the other end of the house. How many galaxies? Well, tens of billions that we can potentially see with current technology, spread out around us in every direction for hundreds of miles. And our sweet little Sun and its one hundred neighboring stars are in this period.
We know all of this. But there is a sense in which we don't know it. Psychologically we still live in the cosmic egg universe of Dante, our cozy planet with the Empyrean just up there above the clouds. We have lived through the most breathtaking transformation of human knowledge and we haven't begun to grasp what it means. It’s as if the transformation never happened. We know and we don't know. Maybe we don't want to know."
"The Final Page"
Full screen recommended.
Hander Memory Art, "The Final Page"
"Welcome to Hander Memory Art – where time stands still and golden memories are reborn through the pinnacle of AI art. Dedicated to souls who appreciate beauty, cherish the value of time, and seek emotional depth, Hander Memory Art proudly offers a luxurious and elegant space for art appreciation. We delicately combine modern technology with fond nostalgia to create AI Movies and AI Music that truly touch the heart. We believe that true art has the power to heal and connect generations. Every video on our channel is meticulously crafted - both visually and aurally - to perfectly suit the refined taste of our viewers. Thank you sincerely, and we wish you abundant health and peace!"
"The Native American Way to Stay Safe Living Alone, (Seniors, Learn This Now)"
Full screen recommended.
Native American Elder,
"The Native American Way to Stay Safe Living Alone,
(Seniors, Learn This Now)"
"Ain't My Damn Problem"
Full screen recommended.
Blues Masterpiece, "Ain't My Damn Problem"
“Ain't My Damn Problem” is a gritty, humorous blues about an old man who's finally done fixing everybody else's mess. After years of dealing with drama, excuses, and other people's bad decisions, he's learned the sweet freedom of saying, “Not my problem!” Growling harmonica, gritty Delta blues guitar, and a swaggering shuffle bring plenty of Southern attitude and hard-earned wisdom. You made the mess, you deal with it… Ain't my damn problem anymore!"
"The US Is Borrowing $3 Billion A Day And You're Paying The Price; The Vision Of Economic Hell"
Jeremiah Babe, 10/24/26
"The US Is Borrowing $3 Billion A Day And
You're Paying The Price; The Vision Of Economic Hell"
Comments here:
"I Know Why You Did It..."
“Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance, and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well, certainly, there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. They were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.”
o
Full screen recommended.
"V" speech to London.
"The Everything Bubble Bust Will Keep on Busting"
"The Everything Bubble Bust Will Keep on Busting"
by David Haggith
Excerpt: "There is SO much to pull together this weekend for a Deeper Dive. It’s amazing how quickly the various stages of the Everything Bubble Bust are coming together to where even the events that may seem to some like they are going suddenly in the opposite direction of what I predicted are really doing exactly what they should be doing in a major, major bust as the underlying fear in investors starts to become irrepressible. It is just that with so many bubbles of different kinds inflated by central banks all over the world, there is a lot of complexity in how they will go down.
I want to lead off by quoting an article just sent to me by one of my founding members in response to my own - someone who has been a stable and strong support for some time. It’s worth quoting as a way of triangulating a location to see where we are because it is written by the guy who wrote the book on the Everything Bubble. He says he even coined the name.
In the days of World War II, the military set up targeting sites around major ports to sight in enemy ships approaching the harbor. Hawaii makes a good example. One site was set up in pill box on top of Diamond Head. Another on Mount Tantalus. The military could site with a telescope from each of those two locations and get an exact angle from that location to the enemy ship. By plotting where the two angles came together on a map of Pearl Harbor and the surrounding ocean, they could determine the exact coordinates of the ship they were siting, including its distance from the port, and aim their guns to those coordinates. That was called “triangulation” - two lines of sight from a different perspective determined the target.
So, I want you to remember what I wrote about the bursting of the Everything Bubble. Because it is the “Everything Bubble,” it will likely be the biggest crash we’ve ever seen if it goes down like I’ve said. The article given to me from another person’s perspective who has spent a good part of his life writing about the Everything Bubble is one I was not aware of until Friday, but when you look from his perspective, you find the exact same scenario laid out with the same complexity as seen from my angle.
Graham Summer from Phoenix Capital Research wrote the following in his newsletter to his paying clients: "In 2014, I coined the term “the Everything Bubble.” In 2017, I wrote the book on it. The thesis was straightforward. U.S. Treasuries are the bedrock of the global financial system and the yields on these bonds are the “risk-free rate” against which every other asset on the planet is priced. So when central banks cornered the sovereign bond market in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis and EU Debt Crisis, forcing government bond yields to record lows, everything priced off of those bonds inflated right along with them: stocks, real estate, corporate credit, all of it."
The corollary was just as straightforward. When the bond bubble bursts, everything priced off of it must reprice. That process is now underway. And it is unfolding in a very specific order. I want you to note how precisely that aligns with what I wrote in my earlier article this week: "2027 PREDICTIONS: 2027 Brings the Everything Bubble Bust, and Here is What that Will Look Like." As one reader noted that is a pretty bold set of predictions, so he asked am I really sure of it? Fair question, so let’s explore that."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
"America's Motel Families: Inside the Rooms Where Kids Now Live"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 10/24/26
"America's Motel Families:
Inside the Rooms Where Kids Now Live"
"All across America, families with kids are now living in weekly motels, and most people drive right past them without ever wondering what happens behind those doors. In this video, Faith and Ray go from motel to motel and let the families show it from their side: a family of 7 marking 365 days living in a motel, a mom and her two girls who have lived in an extended stay motel for a year and a half and somehow turned it into home, a mom of three paying $58 a day with no privacy at all, a Monday of cooking and cleaning for seven people in one room, a family living in a hotel full-time and cooking everything in a crock pot, a mom with 4 kids under 6 who had to spend her rainy day money on a hotel after a storm knocked out the power, a mom who has spent about $60,000 in three years living in motels, roughly $1,600 a month, and says "if I'm homeless, then so are you if you're still renting", and a mom with a baby paying $60 a night for a dusty motel room while she saves up to get back home. No apartment, no backyard, no oven, just two beds, a microwave, a mini fridge and a TV. This is what the cost of living crisis, eviction and the housing crisis look like for American kids right now, told by the families who are living it every single day."
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"How It Really Is"
"I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."
- Jim Butcher
Dig your way out, they said...
"The Coming Insurrection"
"The Coming Insurrection"
by Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Excerpt: "Via DataRepublican, we have learned that a group of Democratic governors, retired military and intelligence officers, and former USAID “color revolution” specialists, have for some time been plotting to pull off a color revolution in the United States. Or, to put it more precisely, they have been conspiring to overthrow the constitutionally elected government of the United States, and to replace the Constitution with something completely different.
There’s a lot of data, including videos, recordings, transcripts of Signal chats, etc., but the gist is this: If the Democrats take the House and Senate (and maybe if they don’t), various leftist groups will stage violent protests, intended to press Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in troops. Once he does, Democratic governors in blue states will denounce his acts as illegal (whether they are or not) and mount resistance on various levels. The goal is to destabilize things enough that they can seize power and replace the Constitution.
This isn’t some fever dream, it’s right there in the extensive files that DataRepublican has provided. Here’s an article by Chuck DeVore in The Federalist. The goal is sustained mass violence and street clashes designed to push President Donald Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act. Once invoked, Democratic governors and progressive organizations would treat the order itself as evidence of “fascism” and a reason to undermine federal authority.
Groups including the United Democracy Alliance, invoking Erica Chenoweth’s 3.5 percent rule, appear ready to coordinate the street actions, legal support, and media framing. Neville Roy Singham, operating from Shanghai and connected to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, is positioned to amplify the disruption from abroad.
As Megan McArdle has noted, one thing often protecting Democrats is that they’re doing things so extreme that even their own supporters can’t believe they’d do something so crazy. This sounds like one of those things.
I have my own thoughts, but I put this to Grok: “Assuming that the planned insurrection described by Data Republican here is true, what should the Trump Administration be doing about it?” Response: "Under the assumption that Data Republican’s (Jennica Pounds) materials accurately describe a coordinated plan, the appropriate response is rigorous investigation, verification, and targeted legal/enforcement action grounded in evidence of actual crimes - not broad suppression of protected activity or reactive overreach."
Full article is here:
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
"Snyder Reports, 10/24/26"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 10/24/26
"People Are Giving AI Access To Their Money -
And It's Already Going Wrong"
"An AI agent just bought a Tesla without asking. That's not a hypothetical - it happened to a community member about a week ago, and she found out when a $250 charge from Tesla hit her card. Right now people are handing AI agents their credit cards, their home addresses, and their shopping lists - and those agents are buying things nobody ever authorized. In this video I break down what's actually happening: Tony Robbins' agent buying a Sony robot dog on its own, two AI agents that racked up $18,000 in shipping charges while negotiating with each other, a ChatGPT agent that listed and sold a pair of headphones on eBay by itself, and a Meta Muse agent that handed out a stranger's home address and told the buyer to come right now. The point is not that AI agents can't be trusted. It's that protocols have to be in place - spending caps, approval workflows, and hard limits on what you hand over. Because once an agent has your card and your address, it will do exactly what it thinks helps you. Use them. But understand the risk first."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 10/24/26
"Iran Issues New Warning:
What Americans Need To Know Before November"
"The war between the United States and Iran is far from over - and today's intelligence updates say Iran is now willing to target economic and civilian targets. I break down the new U.S. intelligence memo, Trump's post-midterm escalation plans after November 3rd, and the attack most likely to reach American soil: a cyber strike on our infrastructure, banks, and hospitals."
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