Bill Bonner, "Rug Pull Ahead"

"Rug Pull Ahead"

by Bill Bonner

Paris, France - "What’s wrong with peace and prosperity? The press is reporting that the administration is ‘doubling down’ on the very policies that voters seemed to reject last week. CNN: "An outsider might have expected more reflection from Trump and his team after his red wall crumbled and they lost the House and the Senate to Democrats. Surely, the party needs to appeal to a wider audience if it is to reverse its losses and have a chance of winning back Congress and retaining the White House in 2028?"

But revolutions rarely get more moderate. And having lost the political middle, Trump may now be down to his truest believers. Picking up our theme from the last few days, it would have been so easy for Team Trump to throw the swing voters a bone. Not a trumped-up $5,000 bribe...but a real bone, with some meat on it...something they could gnaw on.

A war on inflation, for example. Cut spending. Call off the bombers. At least, Republicans could have pretended to be headed in the right direction. They might even have pretended to rediscover that ol’ Eisenhower-era religion - money in the bank and soldiers in their barracks. Pretending is something they’re good at.

But no! And now they are faced with a Democrat-controlled Congress, and - mirabile dictu! - even more anti-voter policies. In a larger sense, anti-voter policies are almost always what politicians offer. They take money from the taxpayers and use it on themselves and their crony projects. Washington Post: "Funding negotiations stalled over the summer because Democrats refused to support an increase in defense spending without a comparable rise in spending on domestic programs. With Democrats set to regain control of Congress, there is little incentive for them to take a deal weighted toward GOP priorities.

En gros, Republicans favor more for the military. Democrats favor more for domestic giveaways. They compromise...by agreeing to spend more on both of them! The balance shifts...like passengers moving from one side of the ship to the other...but the course continues unchanged. And as we saw last week, they’d rather lose an election than give up on the ‘spend and bomb’ agenda. An election loss is a temporary setback. Money not taken and spent may be lost forever.

And they’re doing this in the face of $40 trillion in debt...$2 trillion deficits...and handwriting on the wall so large that even a blind person can read it with his eyes closed: "Credit Crisis Dead Ahead." When it comes - and it shouldn’t be a long wait - it will almost certainly boost the deficit beyond the $3 trillion mark. If there are any fingers still with a grip on the ledge, that should crush them. And yet, there is zero interest among politicians in avoiding the inevitable fall. How to explain it? We call the gods to the witness stand:

‘Isn’t it true that you amuse yourselves by making fools of mortals?’

‘Yes, of course it is.’

‘And don’t you tantalize us with dreams of wealth beyond our imagination?’

‘Yes'

‘And then, it’s the old rug pull, isn’t it...and we fall on our faces?’

‘Uh huh.’

Pity the poor hapless speculators who bought the Trump family meme coins. The idea was simple enough. The dollar is not real. It is just a marker that entitles its holder to trade it for real wealth. That is the general idea behind all currencies, cryptos...and memes. They have no value in themselves. But if people are willing to buy them...well...smarter people are willing to sell!

Our general theory of Trump is that he is a failure at everything - except at being a success. His enterprises fail. His declarations are untrue, mistaken, or unreliable. His policies are mostly counterproductive. Still, by some magic not yet bottled, he became the most powerful man in the history of the world. And so, he turned his remarkable ingenuity to finding ways to cash in. One way was to be a seller of a meme coin...counting on people to want to have and hold it...bid up its price...and make profits for themselves and, more to the point, for the Trump family. The coin was released on January 17th, 2025 and sold for $75.34. Today it fetches barely one dollar.

Only three days after the Donald’s coin was launched, it was followed by the Melania coin. Surely Trump fans would want both of them...king and queen of the MAGA movement. The Melania coin was never as appealing as Donald’s coin. It sold for only $13.73 when it came out. But now it’s back in the cereal box. Today, the going rate is about 6 cents...a 99.5% loss.

Meanwhile, the US dollar is looking more and more like a ‘meme coin.’ The US is running a $2 trillion deficit in what is advertised as a ‘golden’ year for the US economy. In round numbers, the interest on the federal debt is increasing at twice the rate of inflation…and three times the rate of GDP growth. And the two parties - custodians of the nation’s treasure - are ‘horse-trading’ to spend more money and make inflation worse. Rug pull, still ahead."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

"The Real Hopeless Victims..."

"“Shouting Match From Hell”: Trump And Netanyahu Bitterly Disagree About New Military Action Against Iran"

by Michael Snyder

"It appears that President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are not on the same page at all. Trump seems to want to give diplomacy another chance, while Netanyahu seems to want immediate military action. Netanyahu realizes that this may be his last chance to do something about Iran, because Gadi Eisenkot could soon become the next prime minister of Israel if he is able to form a government. Eisenkot has until December 6th to do this, although a 14 day extension is possible. If Eisenkot is unable to form a government, Israel is almost certainly headed for new elections, and that would buy Netanyahu more time. But in any event, Netanyahu really wants to take action against Iran while he is still sitting in the prime minister’s chair.

Netanyahu has been ready to bomb Iran for weeks, but Trump convinced him to wait until after the elections. Now the elections are behind us and Trump still wants to wait, and this is greatly frustrating Netanyahu. In fact, it is being reported that Trump and Netanyahu engaged in “a shouting match from hell” over the weekend…

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly became embroiled in a furious telephone confrontation over the war in Iran, with one source describing the exchange as “a shouting match from hell.” The heated call took place over the weekend as the two leaders clashed over whether to resume military strikes against Tehran, according to Israeli outlet Ynet, which cited sources familiar with the conversation. Netanyahu has been pressing for renewed military action against Iran, while Trump has signaled that he wants to give diplomacy another chance amid ongoing negotiations with the Islamic Republic.

Even though diplomatic efforts have not made any progress for months, Trump wants to give those efforts more time… While the Trump administration wants to exhaust the possibility of reaching an agreement with Tehran, Netanyahu believes the nuclear threat cannot be permanently eliminated without the fall of the Iranian regime. Whether and when to resume strikes on Iran has emerged as a central point of tension between the two sides.

The Iranians have been very clear with us. If the Trump administration wants to end the war, the Iranians are demanding that the Trump administration must agree to their seven core demands. And the Iranians never intend to end their nuclear program. In fact, Iranian Security Chief Mohsen Rezaei just stated that no enriched nuclear material will ever leave Iran under any circumstances… This comes after Iranian Security Chief Mohsen Rezaei said that the Islamic Republic will not allow even a single particle of enriched nuclear material to leave the country, and there will be consequences in the event of any new US strikes.

Rezaei was speaking to Lebanon’s pro-Iranian Al Mayadeen TV after US officials downplayed the need for additional military action against Iran, with analysts noting President Donald Trump’s more conciliatory tone since the Republicans’ defeat in the November 3 midterm elections. Rezaei has said there are currently no negotiations taking place between Tehran and Washington. Iran is never going to make the nuclear concessions that Trump is seeking. So there will be more war.

But Trump is insisting that we have already won the war and that it is “just a question of when we want to end it”…President Trump said Wednesday the U.S. has already won the war against Iran, but when the conflict will end is a different question. “America did not start a war with Iran,” he said at a Veterans Day event at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. “Iran has been waging war on America since 1979. This should have been taken care of a long time ago.”

“Under this administration, and it was about time, somebody fought back,” he continued. “All of us fought back. We fought back. And we seriously fought back. And we won. Just a question of when we want to end it. We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93% victory. It’s going to be total. It’ll take them 25 years to rebuild back what we have destroyed, and hopefully we won’t have to destroy any more of that country.”

Of course Netanyahu has a much different perspective. He believes that Iran is still an imminent threat, and his security cabinet has reportedly “directed the military to step up preparations for a possible attack on Iran”… ‘Israel’s’ security cabinet, led by caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has directed the military to step up preparations for a possible attack on Iran, according to a report by public broadcaster Kan News. Kan reported that the directives could lead the military to carry out activities that might trigger a wider war.

Eisenkot is very well aware that this is going on, and he is urging Netanyahu to refrain from taking action…

With each passing day, Eisenkot’s hand is getting weaker. If he was going to be able to form a government, we would have probably seen a breakthrough by now. It is still possible that Eisenkot will be able to cobble together a coalition, but at the moment it is not looking promising. If Eisenkot fails, Netanyahu will continue to serve as a “caretaker prime minister” until new elections can be held. And that would give Netanyahu plenty of time to take action against Iran.

Iranian security chief Mohsen Rezaei is warning that U.S. bases in Europe could get hit if Iran gets attacked again…Iranian security chief Mohsen Rezaei threatened to strike U.S. bases beyond the Middle East, including in Europe, if they are used for attacks against the Islamic Republic. “If American aircraft take off from an American military base, even one located in a European country or some other distant region, to bomb Iran, we will strike those bases as well,” Rezaei told Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen TV in an interview broadcast Wednesday.

The Iranians have also threatened to strike targets in Israel, and that includes the nuclear facility at Dimona. Attacking an operational nuclear reactor would be an unprecedented escalation, and Israel would likely respond with overwhelming force. Sadly, there isn’t going to be peace in the Middle East. Iran is determined to totally defeat Israel, and Israel is determined to totally defeat Iran. Any pauses in the fighting will just be temporary.

As the Great Middle East war rages on, energy costs will continue to rise. This winter, millions upon millions of Americans are going to get hit with very painful heating bills…Winter heating costs are expected to jump nationwide due to the Iran war – with residential customers across the Northeast who use home heating oil getting slammed with spikes as high as 70%, according to a report.

American households are projected to spend an average of $1,002 on home heating this year – a 7.1% or $66 increase from last winter, according to a new forecast from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA). But households in New York and nearby states that rely on heating oil will see their costs rise to $2,977 this winter – a 70.2% jump from $1,749 last year, according to NEADA.

When I was growing up, most of us just cranked the heat as high as we wanted without ever worrying about it. But now everything has changed. Thanks to the war in the Middle East, we are facing a global energy crisis, a global fertilizer crisis and a global food crisis. Now 2027 is right around the corner, and it appears that it is going to be even more chaotic than 2026 has been."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

o 

11:48 AM, 11/12/26:

"Netanyahu Orders Military To Prepare 

For A New Large-Scale War With Iran"

Adventures With Danno, "Massive Sales At Kroger"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 11/12/26

"Massive Sales At Kroger"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Wait For Me"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Wait For Me"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Massive stars, abrasive winds, mountains of dust, and energetic light sculpt one of the largest and most picturesque regions of star formation in the Local Group of Galaxies. Known as N11, the region is visible on the upper right of many images of its home galaxy, the Milky Way neighbor known as the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC).

The above image was taken for scientific purposes by the Hubble Space Telescope and reprocessed for artistry by an amateur to win the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures competition. Although the section imaged above is known as NGC 1763, the entire N11 emission nebula is second in LMC size only to 30 Doradus. Studying the stars in N11 has shown that it actually houses three successive generations of star formation. Compact globules of dark dust housing emerging young stars are also visible around the image.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130211.html

"A Very Unusual Village, Where Kind Hearts Still Live and Goodness Remains"

Full screen recommended.

Walter’s Puppet Box,

"A Very Unusual Village, 

Where Kind Hearts Still Live and Goodness Remains"

"A quiet story about warmth, care, and human connection. In a small world where time moves slowly, every moment matters. This film invites you into a gentle place filled with soft light, calm rhythms, and quiet beauty. This is not just an animation. It’s a feeling. In this story, life is built around simple, honest work. People care for their cows with patience and love, waking up early, moving slowly, and living close to nature. Milk becomes cheese, work becomes tradition, and everyday routines turn into something meaningful. But this is not only about work. It is about people with kind hearts. About helping each other. About quiet smiles, warm hands, and a life where goodness still exists. Here, happiness is simple. And love lives in small things. About the Film: A surreal AI cinematic story inspired by handcrafted folk worlds, rural life, and slow living. Created to evoke warmth, kindness, and emotional stillness."

Native Elder, "5 Signs Your Soul Is Tired and Not Your Body"

Full screen recommended.

Native Elder,

"5 Signs Your Soul Is Tired and Not Your Body"

The Poet: John O’Donohue, “In These Times”

“In These Times”

“In these times when anger

Is turned into anxiety,

And someone has stolen

The horizons and mountains,

Our small emperors on parade

Never expect our indifference

To disturb their nakedness.

They keep their heads down,

And their eyes gleam with reflection

From aluminum economic ground,

The media wraps everything

In a cellophane of sound,

And the ghost surface of the virtual

Overlays the breathing earth.

The industry of distraction 

Makes us forget

That we live in a universe.

We have become converts 

To the religion of stress

And its deity of progress;

May we may have courage 

To turn aside from it all,

And come to kneel down before the poor,

To discover what we must do,

How to turn anxiety

Back into anger,

How to find our way home.”

~ John O’Donohue,

from “To Bless the Space Between Us”

○

by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to

TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing."

- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"

“My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.

I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.

Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”

- David Paul Kirkpatrick

○

“Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jungian psychiatrist and post trauma recovery specialist, wrote this to social activists. Estes is perhaps most famous for her book, "Women Who Run With the Wolves." The date of the original letter is unknown.

Delta King's Blues, "Time Don't Give A Damn"

Full screen recomended.

Delta King's Blues, 

"Time Don't Give A Damn"

"Time keeps movin’… don’t care who you are, what you lost, or what you’re still holdin’ onto. “Time Don’t Give a Damn” is a raw, hard-truth Delta King’s Blues tune about life moving on, scars that stay, and the cold fact that time waits for nobody. A dark, steady acoustic guitar drags the groove like boots walkin’ through years they can’t get back. The harmonica moans deep and restless, sounding like memories chasing a man who can’t outrun the clock. The rhythm rolls slow and unforgiving, built for late-night thoughts and truths that hit harder with age. This is blues about facing time head-on. For those who’ve learned that time heals some things… and leaves the rest behind. Time don’t stop, don’t care, and sure don’t ask permission."

"The End of 'Luxurious Languor'”

"The End of 'Luxurious Languor'”

by Brian Maher

“'Luxurious languor'…We hazard the epoch of luxurious languor - 18th-century philosopher David Hume’s delicious expression - is closing. It acquired its existence through the post-2008 imposition of artificially reduced interest rates. Rates at or near zero reigned for an entire decade and longer. Credit was essentially… costless.

The United States economy got accustomed to it - even dependent on it. Projects that would prove juiceless at higher rates of interest may yield juice at zero rates of interest. And so they were undertaken at zero rates of interest. This unnatural epoch fattened a particular group of the languorously luxuriant…

Nothing Changes but the Date: In 1752 the abovesaid Hume authored an essay, “Of Public Credit” by title. From which: "In this unnatural state of society, the only persons, who possess any revenue beyond the immediate effects of their industry, are the stock-holders, who draw almost all the rent of the land and houses, besides the produce of all the customs and excises.

These are men, who have no connexions with the state, who can enjoy their revenue in any part of the globe in which they chuse to reside, who will naturally bury themselves in the capital or in great cities, and who will sink into the lethargy of a stupid and pampered luxury… Adieu to all ideas of nobility, gentry and family."

Switch 1752 for 2012 or 2022. Are they not the same? Yet the reign of zero rates is ended. The reign of luxurious languor will likely end with it. Not today perhaps. Perhaps not even tomorrow or the tomorrow after that. Yet end it will.

This week yields on the bellwether 10-year Treasury note scaled 5%. They have since receded some… as the daily and tides recede routinely from their heights. Yet in the natural cycle the tide reacquires its height. As with nature, so with markets. We believe yields will once again attain the 5% tidal mark. They will likely exceed it. And the sand structures erected in low tide - under luxurious languor - will go washing away under high tide. We shall label this phase “non-luxurious rigor.”

Time and Tide Claim All Ultimately: These structures remain largely intact. Yet the tides run to lagging cycles. And expiring debt - acquired at the low tide of zero rates - must be refinanced under higher tide. At this point sandy foundations begin to give way… and luxury is not nearly so langourous. It is perilous. It is non-luxurious rigor.

Mr. Dan Amoss is Jim Rickards’ senior market analyst. He is an authentic market crackerjack with a skull ear to ear and chin to crown with knowledge. From whom: "Corporate debt is about $40 trillion. The longer yields stay at 5% or higher, the more corporations will have to refinance at that rate. It’s going to have a depressing effect on the economy. There’s a huge difference between an economy that has a zero cost of capital, and one that has a 5% cost of capital. It changes everything."

It puts a period to the languorously luxurious epoch. That is what it does. The business reduces ultimately to fundamental mathematics - and its iron laws.

There’s a Limit: Take a 200-pound man. Place 100 pounds upon his back. If he is a somewhat stout and hearty fellow, this burden he can withstand. It is merely half his weight. Now place 200 pounds upon his back - his own bodyweight. He may quake some. He may perspire some. Yet if he is a man of normal construction, if his muscles have not atrophied under languorously luxuriant living, he can absorb the load. He can even stagger ahead some. Not much perhaps - yet some.

Now load an additional 50 pounds upon his back. You have exceeded his capacity. The additional 25% of his weight proves too much. He can retain the vertical, the burden will not buckle him or bring him heaping down. Yet he is unable to advance. He can merely stand where he is.

Now you understand the economy of the United States. Ample evidence indicates that an economy can withstand a 90% debt-to GDP ratio. Once that ratio exceeds 90% the economy proceeds to strain and stagger. The United States debt-to-GDP ratio runs presently to 126.8%, roughly. It is the normal 200-pound man with 250 pounds upon its back. It can stand, it is true. Yet it cannot walk. It is overloaded.

“More Is Not More”: Mr. Matthew Piepenburg is a money man at Matterhorn Asset Management. Here he cites the abovesaid Hume: "The folks at the big banks… who never bothered to study economics (or frankly basic history) forgot to tell voters and investors that beneath the last [14-plus] years of “luxury” and “recovery” lies a market secret (and economic virus) of which Hume warned in 1752…

Specifically, Hume said this of debt: “More is not more.” That is, more debt does not create long-term growth; in fact, it mathematically destroys it. To confirm this market secret, one only needs to look at the history of what happens when government debt exceeds 50% of its income, or GDP. Once that ratio hits 50% of GDP, this is bad. And when that ratio hits 90%, the economy loses one-third of its growth rate.

"

No exceptions exist, says this Piepenburg fellow. That is because the dilemma reduces to mathematical equation. It is science: "This is not just true some of the time. It’s true all of the time, because economics, when understood, is not an art; it’s a science. Debt, when overextended, always kills growth. As of today, U.S. government debt to GDP, at [126.8%], is well past the point of no return."

We fear he is correct. Again, the mathematics is the mathematics and the science is the science. We refer not to “the science” of Dr. Fauci - but to the demonstrable science - to the authentic science. And the science says a 126.8% debt-to-GDP ratio is economically lethal.

Nixon Started It: When did the United States begin to flout the mathematical laws? When did its debt addiction and ultimate descent into languorous luxury commence? In 1971 says Mr. Piepenburg: "[It all] went downhill when Nixon famously declared, “I guess we’re all Keynesians now,” meaning we all ignored the market secret and became enamored by (addicted to) debt."

Why? Because debt is fun. It buys a lot of shopping sprees and “luxurious languor,” from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.  But Hume’s market secret reminds us that any nation that doesn’t produce and earn as much as it spends is heading mathematically for a real moment of “uh-oh.”

Let us then conclude with Mr. Hume himself: "Either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation. It is impossible that they can both subsist… The entire economic and financial apparatus is constructed upon public credit. The nation will not destroy it - not voluntarily that is. Thus option one goes emptying into the hellbox. Only one option remains. And that is option two…"

- https://dailyreckoning.com/

"In The Last Analysis..."

"When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity;

 since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the

 madness on which the whole world happens to agree."

   - George Bernard Shaw

The Daily "Near You?"

Clarkston, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Iran Agreed to Meet Vance in Doha.Then Tehran Called Beijing,We’re Looking at WW3"

Full screen recommended.

Pepe Escobar and Larry C. Johnson,

"Iran Agreed to Meet Vance in Doha.

Then Tehran Called Beijing,We’re Looking at WW3"

"Iran had agreed to meet JD Vance in Doha. Then, sources in Tehran say, its leadership called Beijing and Moscow and both said withdraw. Host Zulfiqar Ali explains what changed since Monday; Pepe Escobar and Larry Johnson on what Washington does next, why choking Iran runs into Russian ships on the Caspian, and why Tehran won’t wait. What you’ll learn: how Iran’s leadership said “go ahead and talk” - and why it then withdrew - who Tehran called before deciding - what Pepe Escobar says Rubio told the G7 behind closed doors - why “the Qatari spin” promised a deal that did not exist - what Iran has decided to do next, with or without Trump."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Schrödinger’s Escalation: War Trump, Peace Trump"

"Schrödinger’s Escalation: 

War Trump, Peace Trump"

by Larry C. Johnson

"F. Scott Fitzgerald said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still function. By that standard, Donald Trump spent Sunday and Monday proving he is a genius. In the space of 48 hours, the President told us the war with Iran is winding down and that the military is “locked and loaded.” Strikes are “highly unlikely,” and he has picked out 38 bridges to blow up. A deal is close, and the blockade should stay. I have spent much of my career reading intelligence reports written to please several masters at once. I have never seen anyone do it this well in public, with no notes.

Meet Peace Trump: Peace Trump gave an interview to 60 Minutes on Sunday. He said he was “not looking” to escalate the war: “I don’t think there’s any reason to.” He told CNN that new strikes were “highly unlikely” to be necessary. He conceded that voters “didn’t like the war” and were angry about gas prices. Asked about JD Vance’s post blaming the war for the midterm rout, he said, “I don’t disagree with it.”

On Monday, after a meeting with Qatar’s prime minister, Peace Trump was even sunnier. “We are seeing positive momentum toward an end to this Conflict,” he wrote. Then he walked into the White House briefing room and announced that the Iranians were “talking very politely,” that there was a “good chance” of a deal, and that the war was “ending quickly.” That is a man who has read the election returns.

Meet War Trump: War Trump appears in the same interviews, sometimes in the same paragraph. In that same CNN call, he explained that a deal “depends on whether or not they sign a very strong agreement.” If not, US forces have identified 38 Iranian bridges “that we can knock down in literally one hour.” On Truth Social, he announced that Task Force Iron Gate, the operation to choke off Iranian weapons shipments, “is in full force and effect,” right alongside the naval blockade.

In Washington, War Trump declared, “we are locked and loaded and ready to go.” He explained that strikes were “quite unlikely” only because Gulf allies “would prefer the status quo.” The status quo, for anyone keeping score, is a naval blockade of Iran. He insisted American troops must stay in the region or our allies “would be hurt.” He also assured us Iran “will never have a nuclear weapon,” a threat he says he has already eliminated, yet apparently one that requires a permanent garrison.

And on the war itself? It was a “very good decision,” historically speaking. “Is it a good decision for today and tomorrow? Maybe not.” It is the first time I have heard a commander in chief ask history to grade his war on a curve.

Five ways to make it all add up: In fairness to the President, I have tried to reconcile these statements. Here are the best explanations I could come up with:

Schrödinger’s war. The war is both ending and continuing until someone opens the box. The box, presumably, is the 38 bridges.

The war is over, militarily. It is merely continuing navally, economically and on Qeshm Island, where Iranian authorities say US strikes hit overnight on Sunday. Washington has not acknowledged them, which is one way to keep a war “highly unlikely.”

The blockade is peace. If Gulf allies “prefer the status quo,” then the status quo must be peace. Tankers stranded, Hormuz choked and diesel at $6 a gallon is simply what peace looks like now.

Iran is polite, and Rubio is rude. Trump says the Iranians are “talking very politely.” His own Secretary of State said Sunday night that the two sides are not “at the verge of a breakthrough,” that Iran’s demands are “unacceptable” and that the talks have not been “very productive.” Perhaps Marco is being cc’d on a different email thread.

Vance was right, and wrong. Trump said, “I don’t disagree” with Vance’s verdict that the war cost Republicans the election. He also told reporters that “a lot of people did not like Vance’s comments on Iran.” Both can be true if the people who did not like them include the President.

My favorite came last. Asked why he has been predicting for months that the war would end soon, Trump denied it. “I made the claim that they won’t have a nuclear weapon,” he said. Then, in the same appearance, he repeated that the war was “ending quickly.” That is not a contradiction. It is a tradition.

The audiences, not the policy: The serious explanation is less amusing. Trump is not describing one policy. He is talking to four audiences at once.American voters fired his party last Tuesday over the war and gas prices. They get Peace Trump: momentum, politeness, a war “ending quickly.”

Tehran gets War Trump: locked and loaded, 38 bridges, the blockade tightening under Iron Gate. That is leverage, or at least an attempt at it. The Gulf monarchies are terrified of another round of Iranian missiles on their oil terminals. They get the “status quo,” meaning no new strikes but no lifting of the blockade either Benjamin Netanyahu, who is reportedly calling Trump every day to push him to resume the war, gets the reassurance that Iran “will never have a nuclear weapon” and that American forces are staying put.

The trouble with talking to everyone is that everyone hears everything. Tehran heard Peace Trump too, and concluded that he wants out. Mohsen Rezaei, fresh from three hours with Putin, told Washington to “fold your hand” and dismissed the whole business as “imaginary” negotiations. Iran’s chief negotiator accused Israel of dragging the United States deeper into the war. Those are not the words of a side that feels pressured to sign “a very strong agreement” this week.

Next week, Trump expects to meet Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in China, with Iran on the agenda. Both men will arrive knowing exactly which Trump they would prefer to deal with, and how to encourage him.

Pick One: There is an old military maxim that you cannot be strong everywhere at once. The same is true of messages. A president who threatens and pleads in the same breath does not project strength. He projects indecision, and every adversary at the table can tell the difference.

So here is my modest proposal for the President. Pick one Trump and stick with him. If it is Peace Trump, lift the blockade, take Qatar’s mediation seriously and stop counting bridges. If it is War Trump, explain to the voters who just fired the Republican Congress why they should pay $6 a gallon for diesel for another winter. What he cannot do much longer is be both. Until then, the official US position on the war with Iran appears to be that it is ending quickly, it was a very good decision, it may not be a good decision today, it is highly unlikely to resume, and we are locked and loaded. Fitzgerald would be impressed. The Iranians are merely taking notes."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"90% of the US Population Would Die If the Grid Went Down for Six Months: The Sequence, in Order, and Why Nobody Would Stop It"

"90% of the US Population Would Die If the Grid Went Down

 for Six Months: The Sequence, in Order, and Why Nobody Would Stop It"

by John Walter

Excerpt: "Trace what half a year without current does to a country that has arranged its water, food, medicine, money, heat and light as children of a single machine, dependency by dependency, and then count who is still breathing at the end of the tracing.

90% of the population dead before the sixth month closes. That is the proposition, and the case for it does not rest on any single catastrophe. It rests on a hundred ordinary dependencies, each one rational on its own, which together make a country that cannot survive its own power supply going quiet. What follows is a rehearsal first, because the closest thing to a controlled experiment happened in Europe less than two years ago and it lasted ten hours.

At 12:33 on the afternoon of 28 April 2025, voltage in the Spanish transmission system began to oscillate. Oscillation is routine on an alternating-current network, corrected within seconds by generators trimming their excitation or by transformers stepping taps up and down, and on an ordinary afternoon nobody outside a control room ever learns it happened. That afternoon the corrections arrived late and then arrived pointing the wrong way, and a grid that had been damping its own disturbance began instead to chase it, generators coming off the bus in clusters until the peninsula had shed essentially its entire load and sixty million people from the Algarve to the Costa Brava stood in the abrupt quiet of a country with the machinery switched off. (Most americans aren’t prepared for what’s coming! when the world grinds to a halt. Watch this video to find out why.)

Spanish and Portuguese dispatchers had drilled for this. Every transmission operator in Europe runs restoration exercises, the procedures are written down by people who assume the worst day will arrive, and that afternoon the manual was executed by men and women who had read it before and rehearsed it under supervision while French and Moroccan capacity pushed current back through the interconnectors and did most of the labour of hauling the system up off the floor. Ten hours, near enough, from the first oscillation to a ragged approximation of normal.

A working day. Long enough, all the same, to stop trains in the open between stations and send passengers down the ballast in the heat, to evacuate the Madrid metro by hand one staircase at a time in the dark, to extinguish every traffic signal in two countries at once and reduce each junction to an improvised negotiation between strangers, to take out card terminals and the payment networks behind them so that shops which stayed open took cash or took nothing in a country where most people had stopped carrying cash years earlier. Aircraft were thinned to a handful, people were trapped in lifts that would not move and could not be opened without a key and a strong arm, and a small number of patients died through the ordinary attrition of machines that stop at the wrong moment. Their deaths were reported as footnotes.

Four hundred and forty of those afternoons, laid end to end, is what half a year amounts to, and the comparison is tidy and slightly misleading, because the same ten hours repeated four hundred and forty times would be a series of recoverable shocks rather than a collapse. Duration works on a disaster the way salt works on water - a little at a time, and then completely, until the thing in the glass has stopped being the thing you poured there. Every dependency in the country crosses from strained to dead on its own schedule, and each crossing strips away the tools needed to service the next one. Water goes before the hospitals can be resupplied, fuel goes before the water can be pumped, money goes before the fuel can be bought. The order is not random and it does not yield to improvisation at the scale of a nation, and the reason is arithmetic rather than psychology: a country of 335 million people has roughly 335 million separate arrangements for staying alive, and almost every one of them terminates in a wall socket.

Unforgiving is the word for that arithmetic, and what makes it so is that the American grid is not merely large. It is the load-bearing member of a structure built on top of it across a century, and the structure has grown so used to the member that it no longer carries any weight of its own. Water districts, hospital pharmacies, supermarket depots, dialysis chains, payroll processors, sewage authorities, grain elevators, cell networks, fire departments, the trucking firms that move everything - all of them were designed, decision by decision, on the premise that current is a utility in the older sense of the word, something always on tap and never worth insuring against. Each choice was rational in isolation. Taken together they amount to a single enormous wager on the continuity of one machine, and the wager has never been called.

Recent history supplies a rough and unsentimental ledger of how that machine behaves when something injures it. All of these happened. All of them ended, and the ending matters more than the severity, because in every case there was an outside world still working, with crews and spares and fuel trucks and a telephone number to ring."

Full, most highly recommended article is here:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"How It Really Is"

"Ah, You Miserable Creatures!"

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great!

You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything!

Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."

- Frederic Bastiat

How much more evidence do you need to 

realize we as a society have lost our collective minds?

"Oh! Had I The Ability..."

"Oh! Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced."

“I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued.”

- Frederick Douglass

Todd Hayen, "Loss of Depth"

"Loss of Depth"

by Todd Hayen

"What in God’s name has happened to our youth? Not all of them, not yet - but the affliction is spreading fast. What contagion has taken hold? I could name a dozen, but the one that troubles me most - and the one that flows from all the others - is the loss of depth. By that I mean the quiet abandonment of any real pursuit of meaning, the evaporation of purpose, and the slow death of genuine passion.

Am I merely an alarmist? Would most people push back and say I’m exaggerating? Possibly. People have probably been saying similar things about the young for centuries - about my generation fifty years ago, about the one before that, and so on, stretching back a thousand years or more. Maybe this drift toward spiritual shallowness began generations ago.

I suspect humanity has been sliding along a very slow trajectory toward inner emptiness for a long time, though the decline wasn’t steady or steep until perhaps the mid-19th century. Since then, especially with the erosion of spiritual awareness, it has accelerated dramatically. The causes are tangled and overdetermined. It’s hard to pin the blame on any single cultural shift - the fading belief in God, the moral unravelling of society, or the rise of smartphones and social media. I sound like an old preacher on a soapbox, Bible in one hand, fist shaking at the sky, preaching fire and brimstone.

To be fair, in some measurable ways humanity has improved. We no longer tolerate the routine horrors once considered normal: the systemic subjugation of women, the open acceptance of slavery, the casual use of torture as public spectacle, or the brutal treatment of children and the mentally ill. Life expectancy has risen, literacy is widespread, and basic human rights have gained ground in many parts of the world. Yet I struggle to reconcile these gains with the deeper rot I see. Maybe I’m just an incorrigible doomster. Or maybe, after the apparent optimism following World War II - when it seemed we might finally make peace with centuries of ugliness - things quietly went off the rails.

Look around today: the Epstein scandal and its lingering shadows, what many describe as genocide in Gaza, the explosion of powerful synthetic drugs, widespread child trafficking, rampant pornography that has warped entire generations, endless foreign wars, the normalization of surveillance states, and what appears to be a reckless, almost wanton effort to injure or kill large swaths of the global population through a novel pharmaceutical intervention pushed with unprecedented coercion. It feels as though the devil has finally claimed the throne he has coveted for millennia.

But I digress - or do I? Let’s return to the young and their apparent surrender of purpose and the search for meaning. In my practice, I see many people between eighteen and thirty. The majority show signs of this peculiar zombie-itis. Don’t misunderstand me - by conventional modern standards, many are “successful.” They chase high-earning careers that promise shiny toys, luxury homes, expensive cars, and attractive partners. Yet beneath the surface, their relationships are often dysfunctional, their own children seem headed for the same void, and real contentment is rare.

Yes, therapists mostly see the troubled ones, so I can’t claim a perfect sample. Still, I witness the same pattern in my personal life, on social media, in films and television, and in the broader culture. It’s everywhere. These young people fixate on making as much money as possible with the least effort, dressing in the finest clothes they can afford, acquiring the biggest house and flashiest car, and securing the most physically appealing partner available.

Few show interest in the deeper workings of the world they inhabit - beyond having convenient targets for outrage (Trump, naturally, and nearly everything associated with him). Hobbies rarely extend beyond gym routines. Learning for its own sake, travel as genuine exploration, or any serious engagement with religion or spirituality for inner growth? Almost nonexistent. The conscious pursuit of meaning and purpose simply isn’t on the menu.

Are they happy? I don’t believe so. Some convince themselves they are, as long as the stream of instant material gratification keeps flowing. For brief intervals, the dopamine hits mimic happiness. But the feeling fades quickly, leaving them emptier than before.

How long can a culture sustain itself on such shallow soil? Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World" offers a chilling blueprint. In that dystopia, society engineers happiness through genetic conditioning, consumerism, casual sex, and above all, the drug soma - a perfect pharmaceutical that delivers euphoria without hangover, physical dysfunction, or disruption. Soma doesn’t just numb pain; it erases any need for depth, reflection, or struggle.

Citizens remain placid and productive precisely because they never confront discomfort, loss, or the big questions of existence. The “happiness” it provides is stable and endless - until the rare Savage from outside the system introduces real feeling, at which point the fragile illusion cracks. In our world, the modern equivalents of soma (endless scrolling, consumption, pharmaceuticals, and curated outrage) seem to work much the same way: they sustain a zombified equilibrium far longer than one might expect, precisely because they starve the soul of anything real.

That said, there are bright exceptions. Not every young person has been fully captured by the mold the prevailing agenda has cast. Many who pursue serious art or music operate from an entirely different paradigm - one that values creation, beauty, and inner exploration over external metrics.

The same often holds for those drawn to skilled craftsmanship, deep philosophical inquiry, genuine community service rooted in compassion, or any disciplined spiritual path that demands self-confrontation. And then there are those rare souls who, for whatever mysterious reason, simply never swallowed the poison - perhaps protected by family, temperament, or sheer stubborn grace.

Still, the trend is unmistakable and accelerating. A society that loses depth in its young eventually loses its future. Without purpose, passion, and the willingness to wrestle with meaning, we drift toward a Huxleyan stasis - comfortable, efficient, and profoundly hollow. The real question isn’t whether this loss is happening. It’s whether enough of us still remember what depth feels like, and whether we can model it fiercely enough for those coming after to recognize its absence - and begin, once again, to seek it."

- https://off-guardian.org/

Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here.

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Freely download "Propaganda", by Edward L. Bernays, here:

-https://www.voltairenet.org/

"What This Country Needs..."

"What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they'll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough."

- William Styron, "Set This House On Fire"

And what this country really needs is just beginning, watch and see...

God help us...