So, we rise from the rubble...
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Sunday, November 1, 2026
Dan, I Allegedly, "McDonald's Is In Trouble Again!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 11/1/26
"McDonald's Is In Trouble Again!"
"McDonald's is facing another major consumer controversy, and this time it's the McRib sandwich. A new class-action lawsuit claims the famous McRib contains no actual pork rib meat, raising questions about food advertising, ingredients and consumer deception. A federal judge has allowed key claims to move forward, putting McDonald's back in the legal spotlight. And this isn't the first time major food companies have faced lawsuits over what they're selling. From Subway's tuna controversy to Burger King's Whopper, Taco Bell, Texas Pete, Buffalo Wild Wings and Velveeta, we're looking at some of America's strangest food lawsuits. After McDonald's dynamic pricing controversy, what's next? Business news, consumer protection, personal finance and the latest developments affecting American consumers."
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"25 Foods You Must Hide Before the Disaster (The Cellar and the Hungry Months)"
"25 Foods You Must Hide Before the Disaster
(The Cellar and the Hungry Months)"
by John Walter
Excerpt: "Supermarkets do not store food so much as pass it through. Stock turns over in two or three days in most formats, replenished overnight by trucks from regional depots that depend on diesel, on bridges, and on several hundred thousand drivers deciding to show up. Break one link and the shelves empty from the front backward. Texas went through it in February 2021 with ice and a failed grid, and Tokyo’s suburbs went through it within hours of the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, in a country that had rehearsed for that morning for decades.
The British emergency-planning phrase “nine meals from anarchy” oversimplifies the arithmetic, but it points at something real. Most houses hold somewhere between three and five days of edible calories, a rough figure rather than a measured one and close enough to plan around. Cut the trucks for a week and a household eats through the refrigerator in the first thirty-six hours, then starts rationing crackers.
Push the outage to a month and the question stops being about convenience. A diet, in the physiological sense, is a quantity of energy, protein, fat, and roughly thirty micronutrients arriving on a schedule the body can absorb without degrading, and that is an engineering problem with a calculable answer. Almost nobody calculates it in advance. (Watch this video to learn how to protect your food supplies when shortages hit!)
So run the numbers, because the numbers are the only part of this that stays calm. Four adults at two thousand kilocalories each for ninety days comes to seven hundred twenty thousand kilocalories. Stored as white rice at about sixteen hundred fifty kilocalories per pound, that is roughly four hundred forty pounds before protein, fat, or a single vitamin enters the sum. At something like thirty-five to forty pounds per five-gallon bucket, it fills eleven or twelve of them, which fits under a staircase and represents more food than most households buy in a year of ordinary shopping. Buying it in one weekend is how stockpiles fail: the household picks something it does not like, stores it badly, and quits by March.
Storage has enemies and they are unglamorous. Oxygen oxidizes fats and destroys vitamins in grain. Moisture invites mold and, in corn and peanuts, the molds that produce aflatoxin. Heat above about seventy-five degrees accelerates every decay reaction you are trying to slow, and light bleaches what heat does not finish. Insects and rodents arrive through seams you did not know existed. None of that yields to a bigger cupboard. It yields to Mylar, oxygen absorbers, rigid food-grade containers, a cool dark room, and honest rotation.
Most published lists fail at the selection stage, because they are pantry lists with the volume turned up: canned soup, breakfast cereal, spaghetti sauce, jerky, hard candy. All fine, most of them a poor foundation. A foundation needs calorie density, stability without refrigeration, and enough nutritional breadth that a family can live on it for a season without developing scurvy or losing muscle. Snack food has none of those properties and nothing requiring a freezer has the first two.
What follows is tiered from the calorie floor upward and deliberately unfashionable. It borrows from what carried people through the Leningrad blockade, through four years of siege in Sarajevo, and through every rural winter before refrigeration. Order matters less than completeness, since a skipped tier leaves a hole in the diet and holes are where people get sick. The article covers:
🌾 Staple calories, and why six of them beat sixty novelties.
🐟 Protein that never touches a freezer.
🛢️ Fat, the tier most lists leave out.
🥫 Vitamins and minerals, and the deficiency diseases that live in their absence.
🧂 Salt, sweeteners, and acid.
☠️ Foods that look like insurance and are not.
📦 Packaging, temperature, and rotation.
🧮 Sizing a stockpile with a two-week menu.
🔥 Fuel and water.
⚖️ Cost, and the limits of the whole exercise.
The tiers are load-bearing: each closes a deficiency the one before it opens, so the list reads as a single argument rather than twenty-five separate suggestions. Buy in that order and in the quantities your household actually eats, and the arithmetic closes. Buy the last tier first because the jars are prettier, and it will not."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
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"Stocking Up at Walmart & Sam's, Preparing For The Worst'
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 11/1/26
"Stocking Up at Walmart & Sam's,
Preparing For The Worst'
Comments here:
"Snyder Reports, 11/1/26"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 11/1/26
"Protect Your Money Now:
The Cyber Attack Warning You Need To Hear"
"Cyber attacks are now the biggest threat to your money. After a $6.3 billion Binance hack froze withdrawals and a Wyoming bank went offline for a full week, here's how to protect yourself even if your money is FDIC insured. In this video I break down what happened with Binance, why Hilltop Bank customers lost online banking with debit cards capped at $1,000 a day, and the Pentagon investigation into a suspected cyber attack. More importantly, I give you 3 simple rules to protect your money: spread it across multiple banks, keep cash on hand, and keep your credit card separate from your bank. Whether you have $100 or millions, don't keep everything in one spot. Watch to learn exactly how much cash to hold and how to structure your accounts so one attack can't lock you out."
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Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 11/1/26
"El Nino Winter Warning:
Why Flooding Could Get Much Worse"
"Urgent Warning for the Southwest: flash flooding could get much worse as El Nino kicks in. Saturated ground, record tides, and 4 inches of rain in one day is a dangerous combo. In this video, I break down the flash flood risk across Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, why San Francisco just saw its highest October tide on record, what El Nino means for this winter, and 3 simple things you can do to prepare now - emergency radio, sandbags, and waterproof boots. This is the start of El Nino. With ground this saturated, any additional rain has nowhere to go. Here's what it means for you and your family."
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"The Dead Among Us Know"
"The Dead Among Us Know"
by Edward Curtin
"Time it was when all we had to remember was yesterday, if that. Then as the years passed, yesterday grew into the double-faced mystery of time that keeps us looking backwards and forward, trying to remember and trying to forget to remember, and remembering truly and falsely, as we wonder in the eternal present what’s coming next.
We can’t keep time, for it is a riddle beyond all grasping, mocking our pretensions. Time-bound creatures that we are, we are taught to tell time at an early age but never know what we are telling. In that regard, it is not much different from everything we are taught that we repeat by rote.
The boys pictured above were fast friends from before the age of seven when they made their First Holy Communion together. The place was St. Brendan’s Parish in the north Bronx in New York City. The year 1951. St. Brendan was an Irish monk (c. AD 484 – c. 577) who was a sailor known in legend for his voyage to find the “Isle of the Blessed.” Some say he reached North America.
As with all legends and often memories, the truth concerning his life is hard to determine, since not just legendary characters but all of us are walking contradictions, partly truth and partly fiction, to paraphrase the remarkable songwriter Kris Kristofferson. As the patron saint of sailors, mariners, travelers, elderly adventurers, and whales, Brendan brings to mind that other Irishman, the poet William Butler Yeats, who, as he aged, wrote in his poem, "Sailing to Byzantium:"
"An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
[…]
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
[…]
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Soul clap its hands and sing – yes!"
A few days ago I found the above photo in an envelope while unpacking after my wife and I had just moved from our home of thirty-eight years to another, a journey I found very hard. I was lost at sea. Shipwrecked. Although the ocean we crossed was two-and-a-half blocks, leaving our home felt to me like Brendan crossing the Atlantic in his little animal-skinned wooden currach. I am ashamed to admit this when so many are homeless and literally lost at sea, seeking shelter from unbearable conditions.
I had never looked closely at the photo before, and there it was just when I, for some uncanny reason, was thinking of Arthur’s life and death. I wonder if my look conveys an early sense of “transcendental homelessness,” in the words of the philosopher György Lukács. And Arthur’s sly grin, did it foretell his life and strange death to come?
October in far western Massachusetts. Dazzling colors ushering in falling leaves in a dying land. Halloween, football and war, all souls drifting down in the crepuscular light of late October, the approaching Days of the Dead and All Saints and All Souls Days and the coming November remembrance of Veteran’s Day, once called Armistice Day and named Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, when the mad slow slaughter of World War I – the war to end all wars with millions dead in rat infested trenches – is commemorated, as if anything has changed and such a war memorial is not a secret celebration of the heroic sacrifices the gullible make for their masters.
As for the civilian victims, whose numbers vastly exceed the military, aren’t we told by the hyenas with polished faces posing as leaders that they are just “collateral damage,” whose deaths are a small price to be paid for “victory”? War is a racket; the ultimate racket. Surely the Fall.
The dead never disappear from our lives, no matter how hard we try to erase them. They are there throughout, and not just at Halloween when the Grim Reaper and ghosts appear in costumes and dead leaves fall, swirling through the air, drifting with the dead in the wind as we wonder whether we are being tricked or treated.
We are surrounded by the dead, despite injunctions not to talk about them. If we say anything about them in our antiseptic language, we say they “passed on,” unconsciously suggesting the reverse – that death might be a failure we could avoid. The Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen wrote a play in 1899 called “When We Dead Awaken.” He was referring to us, “the living.”
When do the dead awaken? Perhaps not until we see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the costumed children having fun on Halloween, or the nihilistic phony politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us – every day. As Holden Caulfield says in The Catcher in the Rye, that quintessentially fall book now celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary, “They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors. It’s hard to explain.”
José Ortega Y Gasset tries in The Revolt of the Masses: "Take stock of those around you…hear them talk in such precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly in any way reflect the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust these ideas to reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ‘ideas’ are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."
Halloween’s symbolism, despite its horrendous commercialism, explains social lying and playacting more than a thousand factual articles. It explains the warfare police state and adults’ refusal to defiantly oppose it. It explains the nihilistic underpinning of American society and children’s fears and wishes to use a magic wand to change the world to one that celebrates life, not death. That is the true treat that their playacting seeks. But the candy the adults give them conceals the poison of denial that the adults can’t face. The poison they have ingested.
Faces, yes. To face the masked faces that we face. At what age do we learn to don the primary masks? For persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask. Another Latin word, larva, also means mask, ghost, or evil spirit. Halloween, the day of double-masks. The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating throughout our days, drifting like dead leaves in the breeze. People speaking sweet nothings through the mouth holes in their masks (Latin personare “to sound through”). “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
I remember my pal Arthur Nickerson, shot dead by a New York City cop with a bullet to his back. I remember a job I had when young. In my early naïve twenties, I was working nights in the 42nd Police Precinct in the Bronx, interviewing arrestees in holding cells at night. There I learned that many were framed by the undercover cops who planted drugs on them; that the precinct had a hoard of illegal drugs for that purpose. Thinking I was his ally, one cop from my neighborhood told me this, and that “we have to get these dirty f*cking bastards off the streets” (by which he meant black and Puerto Rican men).
This was 4-5 years before the honest, courageous NYPD undercover cop Frank Serpico, another pal, was set up by other undercover narco cops to be shot in the face because he wouldn’t take drug money. A few years later, the movie "Serpico," starring Al Pacino, was made about him. The film made Pacino famous but the real man is the one to honor. The man who couldn’t be bought, Francesco Serpico, so unlike all the corrupt cops and slimy politicians in Washington, D. C. who are nothing but bought. Although Artie’s death had rattled me and the news accounts didn’t make sense, it wasn’t until working in the police lockup that a veil started to fall from my eyes.
One night as we were eating dinner, you asked me why I was having so many dreams of being lost as we were moving. You said you thought that this was the first and only time I ever felt lost. I tried to explain. It was hard.
Memories. For years I remembered an incident from the August before I started college. I had just turned 18 years-old. Unlike many of my friends, I had never drunk any alcohol when in high school. Just the smell of it repulsed me, and being in shape for basketball was vitally important to me. But my friends convinced me to meet them at a bar for a little going away party before we all went off to college. The bar was called The Web and was near the corner of Fordham Rd. and Webster Ave across from Fordham University’s Rose Hill Bronx campus. And as young guys tend to do, we made fools of ourselves and got drunk.
Somehow I got home late that night and my father came out and picked me up from the porch where I lay on my face. I remembered the smell of the grey porch paint and my mother standing in the doorway looking forlorn behind him. I remembered him helping me to my feet and into the house and up the stairs to my bedroom. For years I remembered many small details. It was all so vivid.
One day long after when I was with my elderly mother, we got to talking about it and she reminded me that my memory couldn’t be true because by that time we had moved from our original house with the grey porch to another. We both remembered my getting drunk, but my memory of the aftermath couldn’t have occurred as I remembered it, although for decades I was sure of it. Yes, “partly truth and partly fiction.”
Are you keeping some sort of record? “All things are entangled, ensnared, and enamored,” said Nietzsche, including memories. We are tangled up in time’s web, sometimes blue, sometimes grey, and sometimes ravishingly joyous and blithe.
A few years after the photo of Arthur and me was taken between the church and the rectory, we were walking home from school and found two grey cardboard boxes by the side of a house near the sidewalk. They seemed to be for the garbage man. We checked them out and one box was filled with hundreds of round thin discs a few inches wide. The other box had smaller discs. We figured we could use them for some fun and so took the box with the larger discs to my house.
There we stood on the wooden porch which was raised up a dozen stone steps high above the street and laughingly skimmed them like flying sauces down and out. Soon my father came home and saw them flying and the cars and street covered with the discs. He immediately told us to stop and go collect them. Then he asked us if we knew what we were doing, what the discs were. We said no.
They were, he told us, the hosts the priest raises at the Consecration during Mass when the bells are rung and he says, “Hoc est enim corpus meum” (For this is my body), meaning that the bread has become the body of Christ. We never again sailed hosts. We learned our lesson. I later learned from Leonard Cohen’s song, "Suzanne", that “Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water.” And the years have taught me that the body of Christ is broken over and over again and the blood of the innocent shed perpetually.
The ghosts of fall and Halloween return again and again to remind us of what we may have forgotten or wish not to see. “Whenever I take up a newspaper,” Ibsen added, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”
I recently found an old New York Times report from July 10, 1961 about Arthur. I remembered how at the time I found the reports of his death incredulous, and I still do. If you open the link, expand it, and read it closely for its logic, it might strike you the same way. It’s an old story, a cop shoots a teenager in the back and the media report it as simply justified. The report has no by-line, so one must assume it comes from the cop’s report. That, I guess, “is all the news that’s fit to print.”
The patrolman says he stopped Arthur, who is reported to be eighteen years-old at the time (I think 17), at the traffic light uncannily right near the Web bar on Webster Ave. and Fordham Rd. The reason: for driving a car with “bad lights.” Arthur’s companion was a friend who was an Army private. The car was allegedly stolen.
The Times report claims Arthur then tried to kill the cop by running him down. That is the standard go-to excuse for shooting an unarmed suspect, especially in the back, as a highly decorated, renown NYPD detective has confirmed for me. Deconstruct the Report. Eight shots fired. Revolver with six bullets. Time sequence. Suspect springing out of an alley gets shot in the back after the cop fires four more times for a total of eight rounds. Update it to today and it will sound familiar.
I am sure Arthur was no saint. How could a seven year-old with that mischievous look be one? How could a boy who flew Jesus-to-be flying saucer hosts all over the street be one? How could I?
Everyone eventually disappears. Gone. And are often forgotten. But that doesn’t mean they forget us while we are living. We are haunted by ghosts. It is uncanny. Did you ever sense that they are lurking in the shadows all around, urging us to tell their stories? To remember. To be nostalgic for the future, theirs and ours. Let’s stop pretending. At a certain stage and on the stage of life, masks are lies. It’s not hard to explain.
“Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Kierkegaard long ago. “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?” Where is Brendan’s Isle of the Blessed? Do you know? Between us, I swear, it is here and everywhere, if we make life a treat for everyone."
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Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His new book is "AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope" (Clarity Press) and his website is edwardcurtin.com. You can read more of his writing for OffG HERE
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Full screen recommended.
Michael Bennett's Soul-Stirring "After I'm Gone Son"
"Pandora’s Box"
"Pandora’s Box"
by William Schryver
"In Greek mythology, Pandora’s Box (it was actually a jar) is the story of how suffering entered the human world. After the Titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, Zeus determined to afflict mankind with trials and tribulations. He ordered the craftsman god Hephaestus to fashion the first woman. The other gods endowed her with gifts: Athena taught her various practical skills, Aphrodite gave her beauty, Hermes instilled cunning. They named her Pandora, “all-gifted.”
Zeus sent Pandora to Earth as a gift for Prometheus’ brother, Epimetheus. Despite Prometheus’ warning never to accept anything from Zeus, Epimetheus welcomed her. Along with Pandora came a sealed jar that Zeus had filled with every kind of evil - sickness, old age, unrequited toil, war, and all manner of other miseries.
Zeus commanded that the jar must never be opened. But curiosity overcame Pandora. She lifted the lid, and the evils flew out into the world, forever afflicting humanity. When she saw what she had done, Pandora rushed to close the jar. But it was too late. Only one thing remained inside: Hope.
Rumors abound this evening that the masters of empire have set in motion a plan to severely punish the Iranians for their perceived impudence in defying imperial decrees, and challenging the imperial order of things upon the earth. Many interpret these rumors to suggest the Americans will unleash thermonuclear fire upon a nation and a people they have pronounced enemies which must be destroyed in the interest of the common good.
But it is no longer 1945. Promethean fire has proliferated upon the planet. Iran possesses this knowledge and power, and the means to exercise it. Other more powerful countries will stand aghast and outraged if the Americans were to again release the nuclear genie from its bottle.
I remain thoroughly convinced that Russia, China, and North Korea will interpret such an action as an existential threat against all of them - for it will demonstrate that the still very dangerous but rapidly declining empire has completely lost its mind.
It is a very small step between attacking a military target with a nuclear weapon, and attacking a city wherein military activities are believed to take place. That was, of course, the path of rationalization that led to the targeting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Have the masters of fading empire arrived at the desperate state of mind where they are willing to set fire to the world with the aspiration to rule over the ashes? I sure hope not. But I fear we are racing to the point in time where hope is all that’s left."
"Academy of Ideas: Kakistocracy – Are We Ruled By the Worst?"
Full screen recommended.
"Academy of Ideas: Kakistocracy –
Are We Ruled By the Worst?"
By Matt Morgan
"Summary: The narrator argues that modern governments have degenerated into kakistocracies, rule by the worst, where corrupt and power-hungry individuals dominate the highest levels of government and use political power to enrich themselves rather than serve the public. The narrator explains that the state’s inherent structure, which divides society into rulers and ruled and grants special powers to those in authority, attracts manipulative and ruthless individuals who outcompete principled people in the struggle for power, and over time these kakistocrats reshape institutions to protect their privileges while forming alliances with wealthy collabortakers who use lobbying and central bank monetary expansion to extract wealth from ordinary citizens. The narrator concludes that when the judiciary is co-opted and laws protect the corrupt rather than the honest, society is doomed, as Ayn Rand warned in "Atlas Shrugged."
Top 5 Key Topics:
ͦ The nature of kakistocracy: The narrator defines kakistocracy as rule by the worst, derived from the Greek words kakistos (worst) and kratos (power). In a kakistocracy, the highest levels of government are populated by corrupt, dishonest, power-hungry, manipulative, and sometimes sociopathic individuals who use political power to advance their own interests and enrich themselves and their cronies while the average citizen is impoverished and society deteriorates.
ͦ Why the worst get on top: The narrator explains that the state divides society into rulers and ruled and grants those who rule powers and privileges unavailable to ordinary citizens, attracting not only those motivated by public service but also those seeking wealth, power, and control. Friedrich Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom that {{the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power}} and {{the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful}}, giving manipulative and ruthless individuals an advantage in the struggle for political power.
ͦ Jobbery and collabortakers: The narrator describes how kakistocrats engage in jobbery, the exploitation of public office for private gain, receiving modest official salaries yet becoming extraordinarily wealthy through immoral and criminal dealings behind the scenes. They form alliances with collabortakers, wealthy individuals and institutions in the private sector who spend billions of dollars each year on lobbying to buy access to kakistocrats, using campaign contributions, political favors, gifts, and promises of lucrative post-office employment to shape laws, regulations, and economic policy in their favor.
ͦ Central banks as tools of theft: The narrator argues that central banks are among the most powerful tools of a kakistocracy because their ability to expand the money supply finances government spending and debt on a scale impossible through taxation alone, allowing kakistocrats to access vast sums without directly raising taxes. Murray Rothbard explained that monetary inflation acts as a hidden tax by which early receivers of newly created money expropriate wealth from late receivers, enriching the kakistocracy while transferring purchasing power away from ordinary citizens whose wages and savings buy less as prices rise.
ͦ Corruption of the judiciary: The narrator contends that in Western democracies the judiciary was established to serve as an independent check on political power, but in a kakistocracy it has been absorbed into the corrupt system it was meant to restrain. William Kovacs writes that individuals are appointed or denied appointment to courts based on political belief and affiliation, and under the present legal structure kakistocrats have laws that protect them from the people, allowing them to enact policies that protect their privileges and advance their selfish interests."
"Doug Casey: The Collapse of Western Civilization Is Accelerating"
"Doug Casey: The Collapse of
Western Civilization Is Accelerating"
Full screen recommended.
By Matt Morgan
"Summary: Casey argues that Western civilization is collapsing under the weight of its own complexity, corruption, and ideological subversion, with both Islamic migrants and woke progressives working to destroy the foundational values that made the West exceptional. He contends that the world has become economically fascist, with governments controlling production through taxes and regulations while citizens are taxed at 30 to 40 percent or more, leaving them unable to save or advance, and that the destruction of petroleum infrastructure and the fragile electric grid could trigger a systemic collapse. Casey warns that recent government advisories for citizens to stockpile supplies and Pentagon plans for military bases to become self-sufficient for 90 days signal imminent threats, whether from cyberattacks, terrorism, or war, and urges individuals to insulate themselves by securing food, water, energy, and financial assets before the system breaks down entirely.
Top 5 Key Topics:
ͦ Collapse of Western civilization: Casey identifies 12 core characteristics of Western civilization now under attack, including free thought, free speech, free markets, limited government, individualism, rationality, liberty, progress, privacy, property rights, rule of law, and entrepreneurship. He argues that both Islamic migrants seeking Sharia law and woke progressives indoctrinated with Marxist ideas are working to destroy these values, and that the average person no longer holds them in esteem, leaving no real opposition to this vanguard of thugs.
ͦ Economic fascism and taxation: Casey defines fascism as private ownership of the means of production with total state control through taxes, regulations, and public-private partnerships, and asserts that every country in the world now operates under this system. He notes that citizens in most countries pay 30 to 40 percent in income taxes plus 20 percent VAT, leaving nothing to save, and that monetary inflation destroys what little remains, making it impossible for the average person to elevate themselves.
ͦ Fragility of infrastructure: Casey warns that civilization runs entirely on petroleum for transportation, plastics, and agriculture, and that the destruction of refineries in three ongoing wars plus attacks on the electric grid could cause a collapse. He cites Pentagon plans requiring all US military bases to be self-sufficient for 90 days in food, water, and energy, and notes that studies show taking out four to six key electrical facilities could bring down the entire grid for two years or more, killing two-thirds of the population.
ͦ Government preparedness warnings: Casey discusses recent advisories from the UK and Japan telling citizens to stockpile three days of food, water, and cash, and a leaked Pentagon plan approved in September mandating 90-day self-sufficiency for military bases using small modular nuclear reactors. He interprets these moves as evidence that authorities expect a major disruption, whether from cyberattacks, terrorism, or infrastructure failure, and emphasizes that military bases will not open their gates to desperate civilians if the grid goes down.
ͦ Personal resilience and preparation: Casey advises individuals to identify their real dependencies and mitigate risks by securing food, water, energy, and financial assets, much as military bases are doing. He mentions owning a farm with 150 head of cattle, dairy cows, chickens, and pigs as a hedge against systemic collapse, and recommends that anyone with space plant a garden and stockpile supplies, because even financial success may not matter if the system disappears entirely."
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Most highly recommended.
"The Pendulum of History"
Saturday, October 31, 2026
"I Can't Believe This Is Happening... Be Ready For The Collapse"
Adventures With Danno, 10/31/26
"I Can't Believe This Is Happening...
Be Ready For The Collapse"
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"Warning: U.S. Prepares For Massive Grid Down Event; No One Is Coming To Save You"
Jeremiah Babe, 10/31/26
"Warning: U.S. Prepares For Massive Grid Down Event;
No One Is Coming To Save You"
Comments here:
"Governments Around The World Are Preparing For Something - What Is It?"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 10/31/26
"Governments Around The World Are
Preparing For Something - What Is It?"
"What do governments around the world know that citizens don't? 14 countries are now warning citizens to prepare for chaos. In this update, I break down which 14 countries and regions are urging households to stockpile food, water, backup power and emergency supplies - from 3 days to 10+ days - and what threats they list: power failures, cyber attacks, natural disasters, sabotage and war. Plus the Pentagon's Fortress Initiative, the 5 US Army bases slated for nuclear micro-reactors, and the lesson from COVID about why governments wait to warn us. This is about emergency preparedness and what it means for you and your family. I’ll keep bringing updates as this develops."
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Canadian Prepper, "If You're in a Major City You Must Prepare Now"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 10/31/26
"If You're in a Major City You Must Prepare Now"
Comments here:
Delta Blues Brother, "Some Fights Ain't Worth Winning"
Full screen recommended.
Delta Blues Brother, "Some Fights Ain't Worth Winning"
"Not every argument deserves your voice. Some people don't want the truth. They want your attention. "Some Fights Ain't Worth Winning" is an original Delta blues song about choosing peace over pointless conflict, protecting your time, and learning that silence can be the strongest answer of all. Featuring soulful resonator guitar, heartfelt harmonica, and the seasoned voice of Delta Blues Brother, this song delivers an old lesson that's more relevant than ever: not every battle is worth your energy. This is the blues of quiet strength. Peace is worth a whole lot more... than proving what I know."
Native American Elder, "5 Signs You Carry Fire in Your Spirit, Only Few Do"
Full screen recommended.
Native American Elder,
"5 Signs You Carry Fire in Your Spirit, Only Few Do"
Musical Interlude: 2002, "Chrysalis"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Chrysalis"
“Oceans of strings and choirs, flutes and keyboards lift us
out of the trials and tribulations of our daily lives as though
we were on a ship with gossamer sails, sailing on the moonlight.”
– Steve Ryals
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Point your telescope toward the high flying constellation Pegasus and you can find this expanse of Milky Way stars and distant galaxies. Centered on NGC 7814, the pretty field of view would almost be covered by a full moon. NGC 7814 is sometimes called the Little Sombrero for its resemblance to the brighter more famous M104, the Sombrero Galaxy.
Both Sombrero and Little Sombrero are spiral galaxies seen edge-on, and both have extensive central bulges cut by a thinner disk with dust lanes in silhouette. In fact, NGC 7814 is some 40 million light-years away and an estimated 60,000 light-years across. That actually makes the Little Sombrero about the same physical size as its better known namesake, appearing to be smaller and fainter only because it is farther away. A very faint dwarf galaxy, potentially a satellite of NGC 7814, is revealed in the deep exposure just below the Little Sombrero.”
"No Room For Cowards..."
“Life has no victims. There are no victims in this life. No one has the right to point fingers at his/her past and blame it for what he/she is today. We do not have the right to point our finger at someone else and blame that person for how we treat others, today. Don’t hide in the corner, pointing fingers at your past. Don’t sit under the table, talking about someone who has hurt you. Instead, stand up and face your past! Face your fears! Face your pain! And stomach it all! You may have to do so kicking and screaming and throwing fits and crying – but by all means – face it! This life makes no room for cowards.”
- C. Joybell C.
o
“How Buster Douglas Beat Mike Tyson”
"The image that comes to mind is a boxing ring. There are times when... you just want that bell to ring, but you're the one who's losing. The one who's winning doesn't have that feeling. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you are willing to give. And then you say, 'Life is not something that should have been. I'm not going to play the game. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to call "out". There are three positions possible. One is the up-to-it, and facing the game and playing through. The second is saying, Absolutely not. I don't want to stay in this dogfight. That's the absolute out. The third position is the one that says, This is mixed of good and evil. I'm on the side of the good. I accept the world with corrections. And may [the world] be the way I like it. And it's good for me and my friends. There are the only three positions." - Joseph Campbell
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“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact,
it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are,
what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
- Maya Angelou
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“How Buster Douglas Beat Mike Tyson”
by johnnysmack7
“Going into the fight, Mike Tyson was the undefeated and undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. He held the WBC, WBA, and IBF titles. Despite the several controversies that marked Tyson’s profile at the time, such as his notorious, abusive relationship with Robin Givens; the contractual battles between longtime manager Bill Cayton and promoter Don King; and Tyson’s departure from longtime trainer Kevin Rooney, Mike Tyson was still lethal in the ring, scoring a 93-second knockout against Carl “The Truth” Williams in his previous fight. Most considered this fight to be a warm-up bout for Tyson before meeting up with then-undefeated number 1 heavyweight contender Evander Holyfield (who was ringside for the fight). Tyson was viewed as such a dominant heavyweight that he was not only viewed as the world’s top heavyweight, but often as the number one fighter in the world pound-for-pound (including by “Ring Magazine”), a rarity for heavyweights.
Buster Douglas was ranked as just the #7 heavyweight by Ring Magazine, and had met with mixed success in his professional boxing career up to that point. His previous title fight was against Tony Tucker in 1987, in which he was TKO’d in the 10th round. However, a string of six consecutive wins gave him the opportunity to fight Tyson. In the time leading up to the fight, Douglas faced a number of setbacks, including the death of his mother, Lula Pearl, 23 days before the fight. Additionally, the mother of his son was facing a severe kidney ailment, and he had contracted the flu on the day before the fight.”
- http://www.knockouts2sleep.com
“The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back.
That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.”
- Vince Lombardi
At 2:40 of this video Douglas takes a tremendous uppercut and goes down, kneeling to clear his head; you can see him wondering to himself if he should get up. No one at all expected him to, but he reached for something deep inside himself, found an inner strength perhaps even he was unaware of, and got back up to continue the fight. The rest, as they say, is history… and real glory. – CP
Full screen recommended.
John Wilder, "How Did We Get Here?"
"How Did We Get Here?"
by John Wilder
“Dividing and mutating at the same time?”
– "The Andromeda Strain"
"I think it’s fair to look around and ask a very simple question: How did we get here? Certainly, the United States is in a heck of a mess in almost any way one can look at it. When it comes to cohesion, half of the country is like dad sitting on his easy chair after a hard day working at the PEZ® mines. The other half just wants to pester him because he doesn’t care enough about The Current Thing. They have been careful to not make dad put the paper down. Yet. Because that’s when the spanking hand comes out.
The ability of our economy to manufacture critical goods has been outsourced around the world, because, let’s face it, no one is better at sewing up a soccer ball than an 8-year-old Pakistani kid. And if we took the time to teach them and spent the money to build the factories, no one is better at making iPhones™ than Chinese women who are locked in those factories who have to put up nets to keep people from actually killing themselves when they try to jump off that same factory roof. I think the Chinese even charge the women an “amusement park ride fee” when they jump.
So, how did we get here? The United States has always had an ornery streak. I think Andrew Jackson would have happily had every single central banker in the United States executed – of course, the central bankers retaliated by putting his face on the $20 bill, but I assure you they waited until they were certain he was dead.
How, then, do you take a country that has divided in a massive War Between The States, been brought back (mostly) together, and divide the nation again? In many ways the three items I’ll bring up are intertwined and feed off of each other, but I’ll take each one in turn.
Propaganda. The first part is to skew the definition of America. America was a nation even up into the 1960s, where most (85%-90%) of people had a common ancestry in northwestern Europe, with Great Britain having the largest contribution. Scots may have had problems with the Irish, and the Irish with the English, they might have been neutral about the Swiss, and all of them might have been irritated by the French and Germans, but the common bounds of country and culture were there.
What changed? The idea that if you came to America, it would be expected that you would assimilate to America. Sure, your name might have been Giuseppe, but your grandkid’s name might be Colin, or Brandon, or Brayden. You left that old world behind and consciously gave it up for the new culture. The American culture.
The first lie is the lie that there is no American culture. I can understand that from the point of view of most of the world. How would a fish know about water when he’s swimming in it? American culture (with due credit to Great Britain for kickstarting it) became the most pervasive in the world, spinning off ideas and music and clothes and food at an amazing rate.
Now, of course, propaganda would tell us that we have no culture, and it is evil for us to expect people who come to our country to learn our language, and respect our culture first. No, that’s inverted. It does no good to a person who would divide a country for that to happen. Instead? It’s evil to ask people to learn English. If they kill chickens to sacrifice to Gorbo and marry off their eight-year-old kids to 32-year-old first cousins? We are expected to celebrate that.
No. That’s an inversion. They came here. If they can’t assimilate into American culture and American norms? Out. And take the chickens.
Other ways that propaganda has hurt America are numerous, probably enough for a book. One that’s still hurting us is the idea that nuclear power is evil. It isn’t. It’s funny that all the Green® power seems to be either more polluting or require those 8-year-old kids in Pakistan to learn how to mine lithium rather than sew up soccer balls to make batteries for cars fueled on pure Hopium. No, if you don’t like oil and gas, the only real solution is either condemning the country to an unending abject poverty or to build nuclear power plants.
The warfare culture post 9/11 has also been difficult. What, exactly, were we doing in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden assumed ocean temperature? Don’t know. Why did we go into Iraq? Don’t know. Why did we overthrow governments in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?
Don’t know. But the propaganda that accompanied all of those divided the country, though it’s not nearly as bad as the race grievance industry that’s been in full tilt in the last two decades – but I’ll save that for a future post.
Pathological Altruism. If I have a puppy, and it piddles on the floor and everyone laughs and it’s cute, well, when it’s a big dog no one laughs. Then the dog wonders why I’m beating it for something I was laughing about. No one wants to be the bad guy and say, “No, you have to be punished for your actions so you won’t do it again.” Everyone wants to give people another chance.
A friend of mine had his house broken into. They were able to catch the criminals, and he attended the trial. Result of them stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of his property? A suspended sentence for one guy (who had multiple prior felony convictions) and two years for the other. What message, exactly, is that sending?
The Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (plus the amnesties that have followed and will follow) are horrifying in their pathological altruism and use of propaganda. The composition of the country has changed - it's no longer a nation. Where once there was a central culture, now every viewpoint is expected to be equally valid, and (I’m not making this up) the incoming medical school class pledged to honor “all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”
Let’s go kill some chickens, because that will get rid of the gunshot wound. Oh, right, don’t forget the Ouija® board.
Corruption. The United States has always been corrupt, let’s get that out first. But the beauty of the corruption early on is that, mostly, it was limited because the scope of the Federal government was limited. Sure, Sheriff Smith over in Mount Pilot would take bribes, but he’d eventually be caught. And did several members of the state legislature take bribes to get the “right” senator into office?
Sure. That happened, too. Three events ushered in eras of nearly unfettered power for the Federal government: the Civil War, the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the New Deal. The Civil War ended the idea that the Several States were sovereign – they became mere political subdivisions of the United States. The 16th and This level of corruption concentrated power at the Federal level and made the farces we see today where people who are on the Right receive massive sentences at the Federal level for minor crimes, but people on the Left are not even indicted, and almost anyone who has power has a free pass for anything but killing someone on-screen at halftime during the Superbowl™, and that only counts as a delay of game penalty.
Amendments made it possible to tax and ended the appointment of Senators. Now, Senators became Representatives with six-year terms, rather than appointed representatives of the Several States – a huge difference.
I originally had more items here, but had to delete them because otherwise this could become a book. I’m certain, though, that the top three cover it well enough for now. I do think that America is getting ready to get out of the easy chair. And the spanking hand is getting ready. "
The Poet: Wendell Berry, The Circles Of Our Lives"
The Circles Of Our Lives"
"Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon,
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.
Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.
And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone
into the darker circles of return,
Within the circles of our lives..."
- Wendell Berry
"Everything We Assume Is Permanent Is Actually Fragile"
"Everything We Assume Is Permanent Is Actually Fragile"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"The great irony of the past 75 years of expanding consumption is the belief that all these decades of success prove the system is rock-solid and future success is thus guaranteed. The irony lies in the systemic fragility that's built into the large-scale industrial production that generates endless surpluses of energy, food, fresh water, etc. and the global financial system that delivers endless surpluses of capital and credit to be distributed by public authorities and private owners of capital.
The key driver of increasing efficiencies has been scaling up production by concentrating ownership and capacity into a few quasi-monopolies/cartels. In industry after industry, where there were once dozens of companies, there are now only a handful of behemoths with outsized market and political power which they wield to retain their dominance.
For example, where there were dozens of large regional banks in the U.S. not that long ago, relentless consolidation has led to a handful of supergiant too big to fail banks which can take extraordinary risks (and undertake criminal skims) knowing that the federal government will always bail them out and leave the banks' corporate criminals untouched.
Two of these too big to fail banks recently paid fines in the billions of dollars, yet no one went to prison or even faced criminal charges. This highlights the systemic problem with concentrating capital and power in the hands of the few: too big to fail means corporate wrongdoers have a permanent get out of jail free card while the small-fry white-collar criminal will get a fiver (five-year prison sentence) for skimming a tiny fraction of the billions routinely pillaged by the too big to fail banks.
The net result is a two-tier judicial/law enforcement system: the too big to fail "essential" companies get a free hand and the citizenry get whatever "justice" they can afford, i.e. very little.
This concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few corporations is of course state-cartel socialism in which the public good has become subservient to the profits of corporate owners and insiders, and the skims paid to the state's insiders. The state enables and enforces this concentration of private wealth and power in a number of ways: regulatory capture, the polite bribery of lobbying, the revolving door between government and private industry, and so on.
The public good would best be served by competition and transparent markets and regulations, but these are precisely what's been eliminated by relentless consolidation and the paring down of the economic ecosystem to a handful of too big to fail nodes which work tirelessly to eliminate competition, transparency and meaningful public oversight.
This ruthless pursuit of efficiencies and profits has stripped the economy of redundancies and buffers. Production supply chains have been engineered to function in a narrow envelope of quality, quantity and time. Any disruption quickly leads to shortages, something that became visible when meatpacking plants were closed in the pandemic.
Supply chains are long and fragile, but this fragility is not visible as long as everything stays within the narrow envelope that's been optimized. Once the envelope is broken, the supply chain breaks down. Since redundancies and buffers have been stripped away, there are no alternatives available. Shortages mount and the entire system starts breaking down.
Quality has been stripped out as well. When markets become captive to cartels and monopolies, customers have to take what's available: if it's poor quality goods and services, tough luck, pal, there are no alternatives. There are only one or two service providers, healthcare insurers, etc., and they all provide the same minimal level of quality and service.
The moral rot in our social, political and economic orders is another source of hidden fragility. I'm constantly told by readers that corruption has been around forever, so therefore nothing has changed, but these readers are indulging in magical nostalgia: things have changed profoundly, and for the worse, as the moral rot has seeped into every nook and cranny of American life, from the top down.
There is no "public good," there is only a rapacious, obsessive self-interest that claims the mantle of "public good" as a key mechanism of the con.
As I discussed in "Everything is Staged", everyone and everything in America is now nothing more than a means to a self-interested end, and so the the entirety of American life is nothing but 100% marketing of various cons designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. That America was a better place without endless marketing of Big Pharma meds and "vaccines", and colleges hyping their insanely costly "product" (a worthless diploma) has been largely forgotten by those indulging in magical nostalgia.
What few seem to realize is all the supposedly rock-solid permanent foundations of life are nothing more than fragile social constructs based on trust and legitimacy. Once trust and legitimacy have been lost, these constructs melt into the sands of time.
A great many things we take for granted are fragile constructs that could unravel with surprising speed: law enforcement, the courts, elections, the value of our currency -- these are all social constructs. Once legitimacy is lost, people abandon these constructs and they melt away.
It's clear to anyone who isn't indulging in magical nostalgia that trust in institutions is in a steep decline as the legitimacy of these institutions, public and private, have been eroded by incompetence, corruption, dysfunction and the rapacious self-interest of insiders.
What we've gotten very good at is masking the rot and fragility. Masking the rot and fragility is not the same thing as strength or permanence. The nation is about to discover the difference in the years ahead."
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