Lewis Garr says:
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Median homebuyer age today: 62, versus 31 in 1981
I knew it was bad - but that is a FREAKING SHOCK!
Median homebuyer age: 62, versus 31 in 1981:
Updated thoughts: 62 is the age of the tail end of DaBoomer generation - who got lucky by having their 'ASSets' like houses and stock portfolios appreciated with DaFed's $$$$ policies - ending up in a national disaster!
Median homebuyer age: 62, versus 31 in 1981:
Do Something with Your Talents - by bionic mosquito
The parable of the talents. The master gave five to one servant, and from this he made a gain of five; he gave two to a second servant, and from this he made a gain of two. The third servant was given one talent to steward, and he brought back the same one talent. This displeased the master: he took the one talent and gave it to the one who now had ten.
Matthew 25: 29 ‘For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away. 30 And cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
On the surface, the parable is about money and investing, but this conclusion to the parable doesn’t sound right. Everywhere else in Scripture, we read that the ones with money are to give to the poor. Is Jesus telling us otherwise here? Further, is Jesus saying that poor investors will be punished in the outer darkness? This seems unlikely – or, at least, unlikely given what we understand elsewhere of the reasons for such punishment.
It seems clear He is not teaching such things, as He continues – immediately after concluding the parable:
Jesus is explaining how His disciples – and how we – are to understand this parable. “Talent” was a measure of money; it also can just mean “talent,” as in the gifts we have received from the Holy Spirit. The parable teaches us to use whatever gifts (talents) we have received to increase the wealth of the master. In other words, we are to use our talents in the service of God’s Kingdom.
If we use our talents to serve God’s Kingdom, He will reward us by increasing our talents (think “spiritual gifts,” not “prosperity gospel”) such that we can be of even more use. As Jesus said, “For to everyone who has, more will be given…”
As A Follow-Up To Sugar.... Denninger
Unsaturated fats are called that because they have open bonds available; "monounsaturated" fats have one and "polyunsaturated" fats have more than one. Saturated fats -- animal fats -- have zero. Without machine processing unsaturated fats will all oxidize -- spoil -- and thus they are all processed to prevent that and make them shelf-stable.
When I went low-carbohydrate and then years later wrote this article documenting the results of my N=1 experiment (which incidentally, done correctly, is high saturated fat, moderate protein, low-carb) I accidentally, without knowing how dangerous these seed oils were (as I hadn't yet dug into that aspect of modern food being in many cases literal poison) also removed basically all seed oils from my food intake. Why? Because a steak, rack of ribs or chicken breast (skin on thank you!) has no seed oil in it. Yes, those animals eat plants (duh) and thus some of it is in their flesh but there is a balance to it. What I added to my green vegetables and eggs, either cooked in or on, was butter which is of course animal-fat based as are cheeses. Basically all of the inflammation-related things, along with the body mass, disappeared including some (severe allergies) that I had suffered from all the way back to childhood.
The bad part of seed oils is that they get incorporated into your cellular structure and the turn over has a half-life of about two years. This happens to almost-exactly align with what we've seen in chronic disease; we now have young adults in their 20s and 30s showing up with colon cancer, pancreatic cancer and similar, along with serious other maladies like Crone's. Chronic inflammation is known to be an actual cause of all manner of serious trouble including heart disease, cancer and more. Indeed lung cancer caused by asbestos isn't from chemical damage to cellular DNA because it can't be; asbestos was used because its chemically inert which is what makes it fireproof (it will not oxidize or otherwise react with other chemicals), including in the body. Because of that it causes inflammation the body cannot clear and that is why the cancer occurs. The medical industry knows this is the case yet they and the government refuse to at minimum label all alleged "foods" that are inflammatory when used on a regular basis as carcinogenic and ban those that are unreasonably-so and have non-inflammatory alternatives.
The facts are that if you remove them all from your diet now in a year or two a material amount of them will be gone from your body and that will continue to improve over the next 20 years (at which point there will be statistically none remaining; 10 half-lives is the mathematical formula for that.)
How does this proverb relate to the theme of fate in LOTR by Tolkien? - Ask Brave
So the proverb is the in-world expression of Tolkien's theological claim: no act of evil is so great that it cannot be turned to serve a greater good — not because fate forces it, but because evil is structurally incapable of sustaining itself against the order of creation.
10 Foods That Will Keep You Alive When the Stores Shut Down Because of the Food Crisis
Civilization has never fallen from a height this great. Make no mistake: collapse doesn’t arrive with fanfare and televised announcements. It comes silently, in gas station lines, in empty shelves, in the darkness of your refrigerator at midnight when the power dies and doesn’t come back. Those who survive aren’t the strongest—they’re the prepared. And preparation starts with what you put between your teeth when supermarkets become cathedrals of famine.
This list isn’t for weekend warriors. This isn’t for people who think a bag of rice and a few cans of tuna are enough. These are nutritional weapons—foods chosen for caloric density, extreme durability, versatility, and the ability to keep your body functional when everything around you disintegrates. Every entry has been tested by time, by catastrophe, by those who survived when others couldn’t.
Before we dive in, understand something fundamental: the food you buy now, in abundance, is different from the food that will keep you alive. Most people die in the first 90 days of a crisis not because they have no food, but because they have the wrong food. They have chips, they have expiring cereal, they have frozen meat that rots when the power dies. They have foods requiring complex preparation, abundant water, or storage conditions that vanish when infrastructure crumbles.
What follows are the ten pillars of survival nutrition. Stock them deep, stock them now, and pray you never need them.
DMSO Heals Blood Vessels and Could Save Millions From Strokes
The overlooked evidence on DMSO’s effects on circulation, blood clots, stroke, brain injury, heart disease, and common peripheral vascular disorders—and its potential to transform medicine.
Story at a Glance
•DMSO is an “umbrella remedy” whose combination of therapeutic properties makes it uniquely suited to treat “incurable” conditions. This article will focus on the extensive evidence DMSO safely eliminates clots, protects the blood vessels, and restores circulation, as impaired blood flow is one of the most common causes of disease but challenging to manage with conventional options.
•DMSO revolutionizes the treatment of strokes, as it not only eliminates the stroke, but also can be started hours earlier than normal treatments and is able to heal the injured tissue that would otherwise be lost. Extensive evidence, and now reader reports show that were it to be widely adopted, millions could be spared from the disability or death they cause each year.
•DMSO is also uniquely suited to treating brain bleeds, traumatic brain injuries, and concussions, as it relieves pressure on the brain while restoring vital circulation and reviving dying brain cells. Extensive evidence and reader reports again show its utility here.
•Because the heart, like the brain, is exquisitely sensitive to its blood supply being cut off, many of DMSO’s properties have also been repeatedly shown to have immense value in heart attacks alongside many other severe heart conditions.
•DMSO has been extensively used for peripheral circulatory disorders, with hundreds of readers, mirroring the existing evidence, reporting it eliminating varicose veins present for decades, dissolving clots and DVTs, restoring color and sensation to blue, purple, or black ischemic limbs, healing venous, diabetic, and pressure ulcers, and resolving Raynaud’s, frostbite, and hemorrhoids, frequently within days.
•This article summarizes the extensive data demonstrating DMSO’s efficacy for circulatory and vascular conditions (approximately 1500 studies and 160 pertinent reader testimonials) and provides practical guidance on DMSO protocols and complementary approaches for the neurological and vascular conditions discussed throughout this series.
Decades ago, I learned that DMSO was an excellent therapy for strokes and then subsequently had numerous experiences where someone I told to take DMSO had their full stroke resolve on the way to the hospital (sparing them from a life of expected disability), after which I started also using DMSO for successful post-stroke recoveries. When you consider both how debilitating strokes typically are and that, for decades, there has been only piecemeal progress on reducing the suffering they cause, it’s hard to put into words how upsetting this has been for me.....
Nodes, Not Poles: Why the New Geoeconomic Order Is Multinodal, Not Multipolar
Every commentator now reaches for the same word. The American century is ending, the dollar’s grip is loosening, new blocs are forming, and the world, we are told, is becoming “multipolar.” The word feels precise. It is not. “Multipolar” imports a set of twentieth-century assumptions that actively misdescribe what is emerging in the global economy, and because the word we choose determines what we look for and what we measure, the wrong word produces the wrong analysis. There is a better one, and it is not merely a matter of style. The order taking shape is multinodal.
The distinction matters most precisely in the domain where change is fastest — the geoeconomic one, the world of payment rails, trade corridors, currencies, energy routes, and supply chains. That is a networked world, and networks are made of nodes, not poles.....
The honest limit
None of this makes “multipolar” worthless, and precision cuts both ways. There is genuine concentration in the system: the United States and China are super-nodes whose gravitational pull is real, and great-power rivalry has not been abolished by the language of networks. For the military-strategic dimension — deterrence, alliances, the hard geometry of force — the older vocabulary of powers and spheres still has purchase, and a serious analyst keeps it on hand. Multinodality is not a claim that all nodes are equal; it is a claim about the shape of the whole, which is a mesh of radically unequal hubs rather than a lineup of matched and opposing poles. The argument is not that concentration has vanished. It is that the topology is a network, and a network is described by its nodes.
Words are lenses, and the lens determines the data. Reach for “multipolar” and you will count great powers, sort the world into camps, and wait for the blocs to harden — and you will keep being surprised when the dollar springs a leak, when a mid-sized state punches ten times its weight, when a treaty ally keeps trading with the adversary, when a sanction accelerates the very escape it was meant to prevent. Reach for “multinodal” and you will map connections and measure flows, and all of it resolves into a single, coherent phenomenon: a world rewiring itself from a hub-and-spoke system with one mandatory center into a dense mesh with many. That is not a multipolar world coming into being. It is a multinodal one — and getting the noun right is the first requirement for seeing it clearly.
The Multinodal World - Vox Popoli - (And if you're still a binary thinker - wake up - or remain clueless! - CL)
https://voxday.net/2026/08/29/the-multinodal-world/
This is an insightful and important observation. The multipolar concept creates another Cold War setup that really isn’t the situation at all. Iran’s defeat of the USA and Israel has demonstrated that even second- and third-tier players now play roles that at times will be more significant than those of the first-tier players. In order to understand the post-WWII world and the events taking place within it, it’s going to be necessary for us to abandon our binary thinking about Soviets, Chi-Coms, and Uncle Sam being the good guy by spreading democracy.
The Church in the West - by bionic mosquito
The history of Western Europe in the eighth century is overshadowed by the rise of the Carolingians; at the end of the eight century the only part of Christian Western Europe that was not part of the Carolingian Empire was the British Isles.
Greek East and Latin West; The Church AD 681-1071, Andrew Louth
The story of the Church in the West at this time cannot be told without some background regarding the story of the West more broadly (and this really brings me back to my studies on medieval Western Europe at my other blog).
Much of this expansion took place during the reign of Charles the Great, Charlemagne, reigning from 768 until his death in 814. His legacy can still be seen in the tensions of Europe today.
Charlemagne’s tribe, the Franks, embraced Christianity in its Catholic – that is, not Arian – form, unlike many of the barbarian tribes in the West. Yet, like many of these barbarian tribes, the Franks inherited something of Roman civil and governance structures.
The Merovingians ruled prior to this, but by the end of the sixth century their rule was increasingly theoretical. The power behind the throne was in the person known as the “mayor of the palace.” Charles Martel (“the Hammer”) was this mayor from 714 until his death in 741. During this time, he consolidated the Frankish realms under his rule. He is also well-known for turning back the Muslims in 732 or 733 at Poitiers, in modern day France.........
....Conclusion
Iconoclasm in the West. In the East, this was introduced by emperor Leo III in 726, but his decree was never accepted in Rome. It wasn’t the first time that Rome refused the emperor: Rome refused to pay taxes a few years earlier to fund the wars against the Muslims.
The issue of iconoclasm was not as meaningful in the West as it was in the East during the eighth century. After emperor Leo’s initial decree in 726 and the pope’s response, there is little written evidence of any such struggles until the time of pope Hadrian at the end of the century. The West understood icons in a different way than did the East.
The West, it might seem, did not invest religious images with anything like the theological significance found in them in the East…
The classic defense of icons in the West comes from St. Gregory the Great: pictures are placed in churches for the benefit of the illiterate, so they can learn by picture that which they cannot read in a book. In the East, this was seen as only a small reason for the defense of icons.
Yet the Carolingian court did not see eye-to-eye with the pope on the matter, seeing icons as idolatrous. The issue being that the distinction of “worship” and “veneration” in Greek had no corresponding difference when translated to Latin.
This put Pope Hadrian in a difficult spot. He would find a reason to reject Nicaea II on a basis other than the issue of icons, such that he could present his rejection to Charlemagne in order to demonstrate that he was not reverting in some way to Byzantine authority.
The Exile of an Economist - Vox Popoli - For the Economist, mentioning workers’ interests is heresy
All of the nonsense about Left and Right is irrelevant. Even economics, as a distinct science, is nothing more than a public relations pawn in the great battle between the predators and those who would protect the prey.
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