“Is our Milky Way Galaxy this thin? Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the spiral galaxy's boxy, bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane.
An assortment of other background galaxies is included in the pretty field of view. Thought similar in shape to our own Milky Way Galaxy, NGC 4565 lies about 40 million light-years distant and spans some 100,000 light-years. Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.”
“Nobody does. The crowd never thinks. People are only comfortable in a pack, and they’re most comfortable in one that’s racing off a cliff.” Deacon Bainbridge to Daniel Durand, "The Golden Pinnacle," Robert Gore, (2013)
"The pack is racing off a cliff. There is a vast complex telling them that they are not, and that they won’t be hurt when they smash on the rocks below. How does the human mind deal with the contradictory? One way is through discovering facts and rational analysis to resolve the contradiction. A vaccine is presented as safe and effective. However, its legal status shields its makers from legal liability for any vaccine-induced injuries. Why would legal immunity be necessary if the vaccine is safe and effective? The rational person questions the premise of safety and effectiveness, and either foregoes the vaccine until further data confirms the premise, or foregoes it permanently if it doesn’t.
The other way to deal with contradiction is to evade it. If the crowd - the government, the pharmaceutical companies, the media, the academics, the corporations, the celebrities, your employer, your friends, and your family - is telling you the vaccines are safe and effective, they must be so. Unfortunately, the rocks below hurt; they may even kill. And it’s no consolation that the comforting crowd shares your fate. Perhaps, if there’s an afterlife, you can commiserate with fellow unfortunates there.
The Institutional Insanity Complex (IIC) wants to separate you from your mind. Now it talks openly of doing just that, inserting microchips and wiring in your brain, so that you can be reprogrammed to run with the crowd and never question it. Destroy the mind and you destroy humanity, but the IIC is more insane than those it would reprogram. It, too, shall be destroyed.
Debt must be repaid in a medium of exchange creditors trust, even when the debtor is a government. When debt increases, interest payments increase and the debt service burden compounds. The interest rate necessary to secure credit often increases, adding to the burden. This is all happening in real time with Western governments and China. The global economy floats on an ocean of debt, but unlike a real ocean, debt can shrink into a puddle almost instantaneously. When it can either not be repaid or repaid in a debased medium that creditors no longer trust, debtors and creditors alike go bankrupt, and multiple and conflicting claims are made on income streams and real assets.
Anyone who insists that present debt trends will lead to disaster is derided as reactionary, enslaved to outmoded ways of thinking. At least it’s thinking; obliviousness is not, Consequences have begun their inevitable cascade as interest rates rise and debt implodes.
Interest-rate sensitive industries like commercial real estate and banking have been the first to register the tremors from what will be an unprecedented financial earthquake. Individuals, businesses, governments, and financial and derivative markets will tumble into an expanding fissure of global insolvency, illiquidity, and bankruptcy. Derivatives, the sum of which (measured in the quadrillions), is a double-digit multiple of global GDP, will live up to Warren Buffett’s appellation as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”
Obliviousness is one thing; taking actions that make the threats you’re ignoring even worse is insanity. Yet the IIC is spending money it doesn’t have on two wars - both of which could expand - and lobbying for a third (Iran) and fourth (Taiwan). There are no plans for negotiations for what would, among other salutary outcomes, staunch the financial bleed from the first two.
At home, the IIC ups the ante on the welfare state, inviting the whole world to partake in its already unaffordable benefits. Parts of the U.S., particularly in Democratic and gang-controlled (a redundancy) cities, are third-world enclaves that will continue to expand as third-world invitees flood in. The U.S. is fast becoming a third-world nation. Much of Europe is confronted with the same insanity, as its rulers have also put out the welcome mat for unaffordable migrants.
Personal morality is regarded as a quaint anachronism, a liability that hinders one’s pursuit of power and payola. By now, many realize that there’s a sub rosa explanation for much of what transpires in the political realm. The shorthand phrase: bribes, blackmail, and bullets.
Look again at the U.S.’s two wars. Ukraine is a cesspool of corruption, and the Clintons and the Bidens have rancid ties to its oligarchic power structure. These ties are so sensitive that President Trump was impeached for asking Ukrainian president Zelensky about Hunter and Joe Biden, and Ukrainian energy company Burisma. There are also Ukraine’s under-reported and under-investigated bioweapons research facilities.
It’s certainly not a stretch to hypothesize that Ukraine has lined a lot of powerful Americans’ pockets; that many of them, particularly the Bidens, are vulnerable to blackmail, and that nobody involved in these sordid affairs would be too squeamish about bullets, if necessary. That accounts for the desperate efforts to obtain huge funding packages for Ukraine to prolong the war. The money that hasn’t disappeared has been squandered on ineffectual military strategies that haven’t prevented Russian victory; yet, Biden has pulled out all the stops to secure another big appropriation. Throwing good money after bad on a lost cause is almost the definition of insanity.
You have to be hopelessly naïve to believe that the political class’s unshakeable fealty to Israel doesn’t stem from the three Bs. Bribery? Nobody spreads more money around Washington than the Jewish lobby. Blackmail? We have the late Jeffrey Epstein’s honey-trap operation and his and Ghislaine Maxwell’s well-documented ties to Israeli intelligence. If the investigative reporting of Whitney Webb is to be believed, Epstein is just the tip of a massive iceberg of corruption and criminality that’s operated for decades. Bullets? There’s no shortage of Mossad-linked disappearances and murders.
Whatever keeps Washington’s Corruptocracy in line, it’s leading to disaster as the U.S. IIC supports Israel’s campaign to expel the Palestinians from what was once their homeland (then known as Palestine). The Israelis don’t have any justification for their slaughter, just a few recitations endlessly repeated and amplified in the Western mainstream media, and epithets of “anti-Semitism” thrown at those who question, criticize, or protest against the government’s barbaric campaign. Nobody in the Biden administration will do anything about it, even if means the death or displacement of two million Gaza Palestinians. The campaign may well extend to Israel’s five million Palestinians living outside Gaza, and that, too, will receive IIC acquiescence.
Even if moral considerations never enter into their bloodthirsty calculations, aiding and abetting this Nakba is not just a crime, but an epic mistake. The danger that it leads to a conflagration that engulfs the entire Middle East and perhaps the world is clear. Hamas has received the support of Yemen’s Houthis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, various Syrian and Iraqi insurgent groups, and Iran. That support has been calibrated - the only sanity on display in the region so far - but they will match Israeli escalation with their own.
U.S. neocons have been promoting a war against Iran for over two decades. In a world with even a smidgeon of justice they would, best case, be straitjacketed and involuntarily committed, worst case, spend the rest of their lives in the kind of super secure solitary to which they want to confine Julian Assange.
Whatever respect the U.S. government once received as “leader of the free world” is gone, replaced by contempt and antipathy from the 7 billion outside the West’s golden billion. First Ukraine and now Gaza have coalesced the multipolarity movement led by Russia and China. Strengthening one’s adversaries and needlessly creating new ones are the opposite of rational.
What else can be expected from people who believe in a double-digit number of genders, all interchangeable? The federal government, academia, corporate America, and Hollywood are ruthlessly promoting doctrines whose essence is that people’s gender, sexual proclivities, race, and ethnicity are their most important attributes, not their ability, competence, ingenuity, productivity, judgment, or character.
Nasty old capitalism that rewarded the latter has been replaced by crony socialism that rewards the former. Hierarchies are filled with people who can’t even be said to have reached their level of incompetence. They were incompetent to begin with, but secured their positions because they ticked the right DEI boxes, mouthed the prevailing platitudes, and slithered their way up the ladder. Anyone who points this out is smeared and cancelled. Truth must be discarded if it hurts the wrong feelings and exposes the wrong agendas.
Pretend is the order of the day. So, Washington pretends: that it can have an empire when its military hasn’t won a war since 1945; that it can jump into two major wars and potentially two more and it will win them all; that the unrelenting immigrant flow and crumbling, dangerous cities aren’t hallmarks of the U.S.’s regression into the third world; that the death-trap medical system promotes health; that the debts it cannot pay and commitments it cannot meet can just keep piling up, and that the corrupt ruling class, riddled with incompetents with no real world experience or useful skills, heads stuffed with nonsense, is entitled to rule by virtue of its hypocritical preening and ineptitude. Meanwhile, the mainstream media peddles the official propaganda and pretends all is well.
How does one preserve one’s sanity amidst this pervasive lunacy?
You can act like a man (or woman, the only other gender), cherish what you are, and take responsibility for your own life. You can refuse to turn away from an insane world, seeing it for what it is, but holding to your own sanity with all your strength. You can refuse to pretend. To preserve your mind is to preserve your immortal soul; abandon either one and you abandon the other.
In "The Gray Radiance", the main character, Nick Wozniak, contemplates soul, mind, God, and the insanity in which he finds himself. He’s in Saigon in 1968. He felt a savage satisfaction in what he’d said. Franklins did their best to insulate themselves from such encounters. They lived in bubbles, and how often did you get a chance to pop one? God, how could you live like Franklin?
God. A concept that might be more than a concept. He was a twice-a-year - at most - Catholic and had never considered himself devout or faithful. God was an abstraction before whom you genuflected, prayed, sang, took communion, and put an offering on the plate. He got as much out of church as he would watching Indian tribal dances or voodoo rituals, and he put them all in the same category.
Yet, he couldn’t account for that strange feeling as he carried Quang in My Tho, the certainty that the boy would make it. Nor could he account for the conviction that he would find the truth about his father, that he had to do so. Both were the kind of things that God presumably would want to encourage. You’d think with God that actions spoke louder than genuflecting and the other folderol. You worshipped God by doing the right things, not just showing up at church. He couldn’t conceive of an insecure God, one who needed the folderol.
And you think he’d help you do the right things, if you asked him. Truth and wisdom - distilled truth - came to those who sought them. That was reasonable, and God would be reasonable. Humans had logic and reason and were created in God’s image. That would make God logical and reasonable, although not in ways that people would always understand. He had heard someone say—someone smart, but he couldn’t remember who—that man created God in his own image. A quick and easy dismissal for those who wanted it. Man had undoubtedly created a conception of God, as Nick was doing that morning. It didn’t logically follow that God didn’t exist, or that he hadn’t created man.
If God was logic, he was also justice. That the two went together seemed beyond argument; the books would balance. Even if there was no God, there was at least some justice because actions have consequences. Drink yourself stupid, and you throw up in the middle of the night. Your head aches the next morning. You could have been beaten, robbed, or worse after you passed out on the street. You were saved by a guardian angel, who would kill you if you didn’t play the devil’s game with Hendricks.
A collision with consequences was coming for the cohort running the United States government. They were drunk with power and corruption. Like all drunks, they kept drinking. You don’t murder the natives, destroy their country, prop up your gang of thieves, spew endless hypocrisy, then walk out of the bar to your cozy bed scot-free. You weaved down uncertain streets and dark alleys and were a sitting duck for all the enemies you had made. Sooner or later, they would get you.
There would come a time when Franklin and his ilk couldn’t just move on to a new set of lies. When retribution came, it would be Old Testament merciless. Nothing created hate like arrogance asserting its control but exempting itself from its own rules. Throw in pious crap about moral superiority, and you’ve got hate that’s passed down generation to generation, that neither forgets nor forgives. God knows crap when he sees it, and he doesn’t forget or forgive. He wouldn’t bless his children subjugating his children. This love of power was the root of evil. He’d bless the Golden Rule: his children treating his children as they themselves wanted to be treated.
Yes, indeed, Old Testament merciless. There were different conceptions of God, but they all had one thing in common: God the creator. Humanity destroyed but it had also created every step of its own progress - life depended on it. To see something where there was nothing, to discover that which had been hidden, to plan and to build, to make your conception a reality; that was the spark of the divine, communion with God.
He finished his coffee, got up from the couch, went into the kitchen, and rinsed his cup. There was a bottle of Jack, almost full, by the sink. He poured it down the drain. He threw a bag of marijuana in the garbage. His headache was gone. It was time to write - to create - his story of My Tho, Minh, and Quang. He’d write for a few hours and then go to the hospital to see Quang. He wasn’t sure how, but his path with Quang led to creation - to God - as well." - "The Gray Radiance" Robert Gore, 2023
The battle against insanity is moral and spiritual. A snippet here and a snippet there of what you know to be true are lifelines; the mountains of lies are death. Two plus two will always equal four. The unremitting search for truth leads to its distilled essence: wisdom.
A collision with consequences is no longer coming for the cohort running the United States government; it’s arrived. Their frantic efforts to censor and suppress, their vicious cancellations, and their high-tech totalitarianism are to keep that reality - not so much from the populace they claim to rule - but from themselves. They cannot escape the misery and death they are imposing on everyone else.
The ultimate insanity is pretending that ignoring reality will change it. The ultimate wisdom is dealing with it. If you plod along the straight line path of facts and logic, holding to your sanity and what you know to be true, you won’t win the race, but that’s a race over the cliff. You will preserve your mind...and your soul. And you may be around to help start things fresh after the insanity extinguishes itself."
"There's a definite end of days feeling the world. It's as if everyone knows there is no returning to the good old days of a well-oiled Imperial machine chewing through any and all obstacles, and this realization is so frightening that the need to pretend everything is fine, just fine, overwhelms the last remaining ties to reality.
Let's play the historical analogy game: which collapse will America track most closely? Rome circa 475 AD, the USSR circa 1989, or Revolutionary France circa 1789? I'm tempted to include China's Song Dynasty circa 1276 AD, but the analog of the Mongol invasion isn't a likely fit. The Khmer Empire circa 1350-1430 AD and the Mayan Civilization in the 9th century might be excellent analogies but not enough is known about these complex declines to make an analogy more than guesswork.
Rome, the USSR and Revolutionary France are all compelling analogies due to the hubristic cluelessness of their fractured elites as the pretensions of stability collapsed around them. Even though Nero didn't actually fiddle while Rome burned and Marie Antoinette didn't gush "Let them eat brioche" when notified that the peasants had no bread (or more accurately, could no longer afford it), these myths are handy encapsulations of the disconnect from reality that infested the elites in the last years before the deluge of non-linear chaos overwhelmed the regimes.
While historians gather evidence of tipping points such as pandemics, ecological damage, invasions, droughts, inflation, etc., the core dynamic is ultimately the loss of social cohesion within the ruling elites and in the social order at large. As a generality, the permanence of the status quo is taken for granted by elites, who then feel free to squabble amongst themselves over the spoils of wealth and power. Distracted by their own infighting, the elites are blind to the erosion of the foundations of their power. As coherence in the elites unravels, the ties uniting the elites with the masses unravel as well. One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms, but the reforms are too little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability fight the reform movement to a standstill.
As social cohesion unravels, systems that once seemed immutable (i.e. linear) suddenly display non-linear dynamics in which modest changes that would have made little difference in the past now unleash regime-shattering disorder.
So take your pick, America: what's the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford bread? They all lead to the same destination:
"At my age: I have been in many places, but I've never been in Cahoots. Apparently, you can't go alone. You have to be in Cahoots with someone.
I've also never been in Cognito. I hear no one recognizes you there.
I have, however, been in Sane. They don't have an airport; you have to be driven there. I have made several trips there, thanks to my friends, family and work.
I would like to go to Conclusions, but you have to jump, and I'm not too much on physical activity anymore.
I have also been in Doubt. That is a sad place to go, and I try not to visit there too often.
I've been in Flexible, but only when it was very important to stand firm.
Sometimes I'm in Capable, and I go there more often as I'm getting older.
One of my favorite places to be is in Suspense! It really gets the adrenalin flowing and pumps up the old heart! At my age I need all the stimuli I can get!
And, sometimes I think I am in Vincible but life shows me I am not."
“I remember several years back I heard something that changed my life forever. Up until that point I had been struggling through life – doing everything the hard way. I couldn’t figure out why my life wasn’t going the way I felt it should be. I saw some people going through life effortlessly and seemingly with less tension and frustration while I was wondering if I could ever straighten out the mess my life had turned out to be. I was behind on my dreams, my promises, and my bills. Then one day I was listening to a tape and the lady was talking about the power of having dreams and goals and all of the other stuff that those motivational speakers talk about. By that point I had listened to hundreds of such tapes, but it seemed as if nothing worked for me.
Probably the only reason I was listening to that one was because I had developed a habit of listening to cassette tapes while driving my car. The statement the lady said was simple and I think I had even heard it somewhere before but this time a light bulb went on in my head. I remember stopping the tape and rewinding it over and over again to hear the 17 words she said. I couldn’t believe it was so basic and simple. I was looking for something sophisticated and complicated. I thought I had to attend a $10,000 seminar. I didn’t know I could find it on a $10 tape program.
I’m taking the time to tell you all of this preliminary information because when I tell you the 17 words, I really want you to get it and get it NOW! Because if you get it NOW, your life will never be the same. You will be using the same principle that all who have became wealthy before you have used. Even those who became wealthy and can’t tell you how they did use this same principle without even being aware of what they are doing. Well, are you ready for the 17 words that made a powerful and positive impact on my life and on the life of tens of thousands of individuals who have achieved unimaginable success? Of course you are… Well, here they are…
For things to change, you must get a
picture of what you want them to change to.
Yes, it’s as simple as it sounds and as easy as it seems… Don’t try to make it any complicated than this because it will only frustrate you.
You must know exactly what you want and the more specific and clear you can get, the better. This is important because Human Beings are Teleological in nature… In other words, we move towards the pictures we constantly hold in our minds. Let me give you an example… Suppose you went to the store and bought a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle but it didn’t have a picture on the box of what the end result should look like.
Would you have a much harder time putting the picture together? Of course. You may eventually figure it out; however, the person who has a clear picture of what the end result should look like will be more than 100 times ahead of you. The question is are they 100 times ahead of you because their IQ is 100 times greater? Is it because they are 100 times better looking than you? Maybe it’s because they live 100 times closer to the person who created the puzzle? Ohh, I know – they were one of the first students to take the Evelyn Woods mind-expanding speed-reading and comprehension course right? If none of this is true then what is?
Yes, the person who had the clear and specific picture of what the outcome was supposed to be was simply operating in accordance to how our brain works. It moves towards the pictures we hold in our mind. It’s interesting because once you know exactly what it is you are moving towards, you seem to automatically know the steps to take or the necessary steps will soon become noticeable.
Your brain's subconscious mind, operating similar to a magnet, will start to attract in your direction the conditions, people, and circumstances that will help you move closer to the mental picture you maintain in your mind and it will repel all of those things that do not correlate to the picture you have in your mind. Therefore, the people who are clear and specific about what they want are using the powers of the Universe to assist them. This is, indeed, an awesome power. A person who knows how and uses this awesome power of the Universe to his or her advantage is a person who is working smart. A person who struggles every day trying to move closer to the success that they have no idea how it’s supposed to look is a person who is working hard.
Based on your observations over the years, do you think that most people are working hard or working smart? People who just work hard day in and day out without a clear picture of what they are moving towards are about as exciting as a tulip. Even though they may seem to be willing to work hard and put in the hours, they don’t seem to have much life in them. And people want to follow people who seem to have some life in them. If they want to find people who don’t seem to have much life in them, all they have to do is go to their job. People will follow people who look like they know where they are going and look like they are excited about the journey.
You must understand that your strength comes from knowing what you want. This will ignite the fire inside of you and enable you to borrow from the promise of the future so you can engage in the activities today that will move you closer and closer to what you want. It will enable you to go through the trials and tribulations that may be necessary so you can arrive at your destination. But remember the journey will be more important than the destination because in the journey you will become the person you require to become to finally arrive at your destination. So when you reach your destination, look at the person you have become and set a new destination so you can continue to grow and develop.
Whatever you do, just always remember that for things to change, you must get a picture of what you want them to change to. These are the "17 Words that Changed My Life Forever"… why not allow them to change yours too?”
“A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose.”
IDF Choppers Deployed, Foreign Nationals Hit In Missile Attack"
"Hezbollah's latest missile barrage on Israel killed one foreigner and injured nine others. Medics said the dead and wounded were all foreign laborers working in a local orchard. The wounded were evacuated by chopper to hospitals in North and Central Israel. Israeli officials said Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles near the border community of Margaliot."
“The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off."
“Who Are The Animals? The IDF Behaving As Animals!”
"Political commentator and presenter Ana Kasparian spoke on the incident of the Israeli 'massacre' that killed over 100 Palestinians seeking food in Gaza City. She said “Everything that we have looked into does not show Palestinians behaving as animals, it shows the IDF behaving as animals.” Kasparian repeated her question of “Who are the animals?” saying she was sick and tired of people referring to Palestinian civilians as animals."
When the past overtakes the present, the future is doomed...
by Bill Bonner
"There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation."
~ Adam Smith
"How about this from Fortune: "Hotshot Wharton professor sees $34 trillion debt triggering 2025 meltdown as mortgage rates spike above 7%: ‘It could derail the next administration’ Among the illustrious nameplates adorning the offices of Ivy League business schools is one Joao Gomes. A Wharton Business School finance professor, Gomes is issuing a warning cry many of his peers so far have chosen to ignore: America’s burgeoning public debt mountain.The gist of Gomes’ warning is that the ruin of America is bound to come from its $34 trillion of debt. The more current income you have to devote to past spending, the less you have left over for current spending. Not to put too fine a point on it, but people with less money to spend are poorer.
In more immediate terms, the feds have to borrow more and more money in order to pay the interest on their $34 trillion debt pile and continue their excess spending. They inevitably compete with private borrowers and drive up interest rates.
That ‘70s Show: Yesterday, we remembered the 1970s. In 1979, the going rate for a mortgage was 12.9%. Today, there’s $12 trillion of mortgage debt. Much of it is fixed, at very low rates. Sales have dried up, because, for the sellers, it would mean taking on a new mortgage at much higher rates.
The adjustment to higher rates takes time. Already, the housing industry is not building as many houses as it used to, because it can’t sell them. And buyers aren’t buying like they used to either, because they can’t afford them. With a median house price of $435,000 (up from $25,000 in 1970!), a mortgage at 12.9% would mean monthly payments – interest only – of $4,676. The median household income is only about $6,000; doesn’t leave much to live on.
Even at 7%, the mortgage payment – around $3,000/mo. – is more than most people can afford.
Most likely, house prices will go down as demand for expensive houses shrinks. But mortgage rates are likely to continue going up as the demand for credit increases. At some point – Professor Gomes says it will come next year – a debt crisis will begin. The economy will fizzle and spark…then, die like a wet flame.
We’ve been warning about public debt – off and on – for the last 50 years. This gives us some street cred in the doom and gloom industry. But most people think our clock has stopped. A half century is ‘long term;’ they assume that if nothing bad has happened in 50 years it’s not going to happen at all. A few gray-beards remember the post-WII experience. The debt/GDP ratio then was as high as it is now. But…lo…no catastrophe followed. Instead, the debt went down and the economy boomed.
No End in Sight: Mightn’t that happen again? Very unlikely. The WWII debt was different. It was entirely driven by the war. Households and businesses – unable to buy anything – saved their money. By the end of the war, they were flush with real money and ready to spend, invest, and build. Come the Japanese surrender, military spending plummeted and civilian spending soared.
Today, the situation is almost the opposite. Consumers and businesses are deep in debt too. And whatever ‘war’ we are engaged in, there is no end in sight. But it all takes time to play itself out. You can boil an egg in 3 minutes. You can watch a movie in an hour and a half. But neither wine nor whiskey matures overnight. And Rome wasn’t destroyed in a fortnight. You might see Halley’s comet in the night sky and then keep watching for it. After a few years, you would give up. The comet had gone off into the black universe, you might conclude, never to be seen again. But you gave up too soon. It comes back every 75 years or so.
Even jumping out of an airplane leaves you seemingly suspended in air…as if time had stopped. And yet, no matter how long it takes, you’re going to end up on the ground.
It took the US 190 years to accumulate its first $1 trillion of debt. But now the ‘ground rush’ begins; time speeds up. The US adds $1 trillion in debt every few months. The latest projections show national debt at $60 trillion by 2034. That would put the interest expense around $3 trillion. You reach for the rip cord. But it’s not there. The insiders benefit from federal spending…and they control Congress. No parachute is available.
One way or another, the past will get what’s coming to it. Patience."
"Where did this big ball of stars come from? Palomar 6 is one of about 200 globular clusters of stars that survive in our Milky Way Galaxy. These spherical star-balls are older than our Sun as well as older than most stars that orbit in our galaxy's disk. Palomar 6 itself is estimated to be about 12.5 billion years old, so old that it is close to - and so constrains - the age of the entire universe.
Containing about 500,000 stars, Palomar 6 lies about 25,000 light years away, but not very far from our galaxy's center. At that distance, this sharp image from the Hubble Space Telescope spans about 15 light-years. After much study including images from Hubble, a leading origin hypothesis is that Palomar 6 was created - and survives today - in the central bulge of stars that surround the Milky Way's center, not in the distant galactic halo where most other globular clusters are now found."
"No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth. We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality."
"Watch this and have your mind blown. Its like who ever wrote this episode of X-Files knew what was about to happen and was trying to tell us all. Whoever wrote the script for this episode has to be a time traveler or a senior deep state operative who revealed the entire plan just for giggles. NO ONE could simply imagine this in 2016..."
"Costco is quietly raising prices again, and this is making customers from all over the country really furious. Executives warn that even more increases are on the horizon as the company implements a series of changes this year. Higher grocery prices have been a major topic of concern for American families since the pandemic. Despite all the talk about deflation, U.S. consumers are still spending on average $1,000 more on the same basket of basic items they used to buy four years ago.
During his final days at Costco, Galanti suggested that while the warehouse club wants to offer the most competitive prices, it is not above grabbing wider margins when the right opportunity presents itself. In other words, Costco doesn't always keep its margins thin on the items it sells, but it looks to keep prices marginally lower relative to its rivals.
So far in 2024, grocery price increases have outpaced overall inflation. Families are now paying 25% more for groceries than they were prior to the pandemic, compared with 19% overall inflation. About five categories drove nearly 30% of grocery inflation. They are beef and veal, poultry; non-frozen non-carbonated juices and drinks, fresh fruits and vegetables, and snacks, according to the report.
Such elevated costs for food are hitting American families harder higher than ever before. From February 2023 to February this year, low-income families have been hit the hardest by rising grocery prices, and they have spent on average 31% of their income on food, compared with 23% for middle-class households, and only 8% for wealthier ones, data shows.
“I think people are waiting for prices to return to what they call ‘normal’ - and with the exception of a few things, - we’re not going to see that. We’re going to see prices stabilize at this level, and that’s likely it,” said Dawn Thilmany, an agricultural economist and professor at Colorado State University. That's sad news for everyone struggling to get by month after month. But that's the new reality we're in and, at the end of the day, Costco is just a small fish in a sea of vicious creatures."
“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.”
"'Amor fati' was Nietzsche’s famous expression. It is a Latin phrase with connections to the Stoic writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Literally translated, it means “love of fate.” It is a white shoe yearning for mud. It is a turkey looking forward to Thanksgiving. Or an investor stoically preparing for a bear market.
We use the term to describe the grace and courage you need to meet a complex, unknowable, and uncontrollable future. You don’t know whether the Earth is warming or cooling… whether it is good or bad… or whether you can do anything about it. You don’t know who’s doing “equal work.” You don’t know what equality is… how to measure it… or what to do about it. You don’t know who the bad guy is. It may even be you. It recognizes that we are all God’s fools, living in a world of ignorance, headed towards we don’t know where. Using our brains, we can make progress in our physical, material world. Technical thinking yields pyramids and Eiffel Towers.
Ignorance Everywhere: But there is another part of life, which has a mind of its own. It does not bend readily to our desires or yield to our intelligence. It is the part of life whose purposes are unknown. The first and most important Commandment, according to Jesus, was not to fight it, but to love it.
But ignorance can be a charm. You just have to take it seriously. And appreciate it. Recognizing your own ignorance will inform your newfound modesty. You will be aware of it. And fiercely proud. Nobody will be humbler than you are! And since you are so chummy with ignorance, you will see it everywhere – in every headline, every public announcement, every speech on the floor of the Senate… and every crackpot comment from every dummy voter in the empire.
In private affairs, you reduce uncertainty by getting as close to the subject as possible. That is, you avoid secondhand “news” and try to find out for yourself. The more you know about a company, for example, the more confident you can be about investing in it. That’s why the insiders always have the inside track, an advantage that is increased by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s phony “level playing field” propaganda. In public affairs – policy discussions, economics, politics – as you get closer, you become less cocksure. That is, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
In an interesting university study, people were asked to pick out Ukraine on a map… and whether they approved of military intervention in that country. Curiously, the further off they were on the geography (the average guess was 1,800 miles off), the more they favored forceful intervention. In public affairs, ignorance and confidence vary inversely.
Moral Certainty: When we first moved to Baltimore in the 1980s, we noticed this phenomenon in another context. Baltimore was a disaster. Crime, drugs, poverty, venereal disease, broken homes, unwed mothers, corruption – name a social problem; Baltimore had it. And while its leaders had been noticeably unable to solve any of these problems right in their own back yard, the city’s politically correct politicians were loud and clear on one issue: apartheid had to end… in South Africa. Had they ever visited South Africa? Could they find it on a map? Probably not. But they were sure they knew how to make it a better place.
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority,” wrote Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken. “The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”
“I am not too sure,” would eliminate many of the world’s myth-driven, self-inflicted ills – pointless wars, dumb arguments, pogroms, persecutions, and lynchings. And reckless spending of other people’s money.
Imagine a wise Hitler entertaining the idea of building Auschwitz as a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” “Hmmm… I’m not too sure that would solve it… In fact, I’m not too sure there is a problem!”
Imagine Simon de Montfort readying to attack the town of Albi to exterminate the “heretics.” When told that half the people in the town were good Catholics, de Montfort replied: “Kill them all. God will recognize His own.” Suppose he had thought twice… “Hmmm… Maybe this is not such a good idea… Maybe killing people is not what Christianity is all about… Maybe the heretics aren’t so bad… Maybe I’ll take the afternoon off.”
Unwarranted Confidence: The barroom blowhard… so sure he is right about everything… is generally the dumbest guy in the place. And the most dangerous. He’s the one who will stir up a mob… and get himself elected president. The whole system of modern public policy is built on false knowledge and unwarranted confidence. The elite claims to know what is best for you. That is how every politician can claim his proposals would “benefit the American people.” But the only program that would benefit the American people would be to let them decide for themselves what would benefit them. Give them back their money. Stop bossing them around. End the wars. Stop the empire. But who would suggest such a thing?
Rather than seeing itself as one of many nations that must get along with each other, its elites begin to see that they have a special role to play. They become the one, “indispensable” nation, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it. They are the world’s only hope in combatting evil, which they do, as then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo elaborated, with “the righteous knowledge that our cause is just, special, and built upon America’s core principles.”
Thus endowed with a special mission and special powers, and subject to the special rules of the only nation with a trillion-dollar-per-year military/empire budget, the elite develop, in Fettweis’s judgment, a fatal combination of unrestrained hubris, unrealistic paranoia, and unrepentant ignorance. They see danger everywhere, without undertaking any serious study (they assume knowledge comes automatically with raw power). And they think they have not only the right, but the means, to do something about it, even if the danger is largely fantasy.
Damned to Hell: But people always come to think what they need to think when they need to think it. “All earthly empires die,” wrote St. Augustine in 413, a few years before the Vandals destroyed his city and finally brought down the Roman Empire in the West.
The elite contribute, by taking up the myths that help it die. Certainty and ignorance vary proportionally, both on the individual and on a national level. The surer a nation is of its myths… its exceptionalism… its manifest destiny… its policies… and its position at the right hand of God… the more it is damned to Hell."
Excerpt: "Total war between the world’s largest powers reshuffled the international order defined by the previous world wars. Total war between the largest powers today - Russia, China, and the US -means a nuclear Armageddon where there are no winners and only losers. That could still happen despite nobody wanting it, but it’s not the most likely outcome.
World War 3 is unlikely to be a direct kinetic war between the US, Russia, and China. Instead, the conflict will play out on different levels - proxy wars, economic wars, financial wars, cyber wars, biological wars, deniable sabotage, and information wars. In that sense, World War 3 is already well underway, even though most don’t recognize it. Below, I’ll look at the seven domains World War 3 is playing out on and analyze which side has an advantage."
