Are the proxy wars in Ukraine and the Mideast about propping up the failing US dollar and world hegemony?

Yes, probably, but with a caveat.

In a world that is experiencing resource depletion and most probable peak oil, what will be the most valuable resource in the near future?

World War III will be about oil and gas. It's all about energy, the lifeblood of world economies, and who will be king of the world.

Attribution: Pixabay

As you read this my wife and I will be on our way to the gorgeous white sand and blue waters of Gulf Shores, Alabama.

We really lucked out on this one. Gulf Shores is just a hop, skip and a jump from Hurricane Helene's landfall in the panhandle of Florida. I hope those folks over there in the Big Bend area will be OK. Helene was a Cat. 4 when it hit the shore, it's a big one.

The area east of the hurricane is getting hammered as well. There's massive rain and wind over Florida, and it will move up into Georgia and the Appalachians. To the west of the hurricane, where Gulf Shores is, will be pretty calm and quiet. Like I said, we really got lucky on this one, a little wobble to the west and our vacation will have been much different, as in nonexistent.

It was a nail biter all week tracking the hurricane and it's a relief that we get to go, but at the same time we feel guilty in our pleasure knowing what those folks are going through just a short distance away. A hurricane, Beryl, went right over the top of us in Southeast Texas a few months ago. It made landfall south of Houston as a Cat. 1 hurricane and by the time it went over us it was just a tropical storm, but that was bad enough. There was flooding, trees down everywhere and we were without electricity for 6 days. That, I'm sure, is nothing compared to what folks are going through beneath Helene.

Hopefully everyone got to high ground.

This is the strangest life, I've ever known. -Jim Morrison

Daedalus told his son Icarus: Don't fly too close to the sun or it will melt your wings and into the sea you will plummet. Don't fly too low or your wings will collect water and into the sea you will plunge.

Yet, Icarus in his exuberance flew too high and paid the toll of greed, ambition and hope with his life.

There is but one thing on this earth that comes close to matching the power of the sun. We as a species, as a country, as a polity are forgoing Daedalus's warning of balance between the extremes. Madmen are in the throes of greed and ambition in lieu of hope, as we potentially soar ever closer to our metaphorical watery cortege.

Where are we headed in this country, post Constitution? Have you given it any thought?

The US Constitution is one of the most, if not the most, enlightened documents in the history of mankind. It was meant to curtail the power of the federal government, to keep it in check. Notice I used the word "was" since it seems like there no longer are any checks on our government.

What result would you expect from the nexus of big money and the mainstream media in our electoral process? Big money invests in protecting big money and the media invests in making big money for the media. Big money seems to be the common denominator on this grease slickened mobius strip of an election process, wouldn't you say?

Would this current circus of an election not be the natural evolutionary point of that amalgamation of greed, deceit and avarice?

Have you asked yourself where this is all headed?

I spent most of my life as a staunch Democrat. Raised in a blue family in a blue city in a blue state. I voted straight line Democrat starting in 1972.

The years of Republican rule, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush solidified my Democratic Party convictions.

Than along came Bill Clinton and after 12 years of Republican control I was ready for change. But, it didn't take long into his administration that I started to question it all. Clinton was a master of gaslighting the public. To me, that was the start of the Democratic Party's illiberal policies that have metastasized into the upside down party that we're dealing with today. They have lost their way.

How can a political party call themselves democratic, with a small d, when they do things like putting up a presidential candidate that no one has voted for? They do everything within their means to keep third party candidates off of state ballots. They've unleashed weaponized tech giants on their ideological opponents and non-conforming adherents. I thought democracy was about choice. Of course, all here know better, Bernie Sanders comes to mind. We are presented, election after election, with no real choices other than corporate lackeys that are only concerned about their own best interests.

Don't get me wrong, the Republicans are no better. In fact, they have helped in this climb to bastardized governance by playing a game of leapfrog with the opposition party that has contributed greatly to our current state of affairs. Every subsequent administration for decades has brought us closer to the constitutional crisis we are now facing. The constitutional crisis I speak of is the lack of adherence to said constitution. It is all but ignored by our supposedly duly elected leaders, and I say leaders with tongue in cheek.

Is there any doubt now?

The media controls the masses, especially television. I've written many times in the past about the war on our minds. The events from the past few weeks have brought the media's techniques front and center. It's on full display.

It's amazing how Joe Biden went from the greatest president ever to persona non grata overnight and Kamala Harris went from a ditzy air head to a media darling as they hang on every word she says much like Ernest T. Bass' crush on Miss Crump, the school teacher, on The Andy Griffith Show.

The average working stiff doesn't have the time to be well informed like we political junkies. They go to work in the morning, come home in the early evening and maybe have enough time to watch the evening news before dinner. That's not to mention the subtle political and social nudging proliferated on regular television programming. Ditto that for the written media and internet as well. The Bernays of the world recognize that situation and use it to its fullest extent and it obviously works. It seems rather easy to corral a mind when it's fenced in by short spurts of a short attention span. They are easy targets.

The human mind is malleable like a clump of clay longing to be formed into a useful piece of pottery. The media is the potter's wheel and the propagandist is the potter.

I started high school in 1968, a tumultuous year of change, both for the country and myself. For the first time I was exposed to long hair freaky people, mostly from the upper grades. I was also exposed to different alternative political viewpoints and alternative life styles than those from grade school and junior high. It didn't take long, by my sophomore year I had tuned in and turned on.

I can freely admit that my friends and I experimented with drugs, mostly pot and LSD (acid). Acid was hit or miss where I lived, you never really knew what you were getting until you tried it. We very rarely got the good stuff like owsley, what we got was usually in pill form which meant it was cut with substances like speed. That made the trip very unpredictable. It could be very enjoyable or a really bad trip with everything in between. I never had a bad trip but I witnessed them. I saw friends have breaks with reality and one that never came back. I did, though, have a couple of trips where all I could do was sit in a chair and hold onto the arms as firm as I could until I came down. It was that intense.

I see the current political situation much like that. Hold on tight.

Sometimes when you're watching history happen it goes by really fast. Like the last couple of weeks or so. If political years are like dog years, we all just aged rapidly.

I wont try to add anything new to the Trump Assassination^© story lines, just about all has already been said, but I do want to point out how the incident has proven to be a masterclass in marketing, symbolism and narrative creation and control, both before and after the event.

In a timeline of an event there is a past, a present, and a future. The past and the future are predicated on the present. The present being that fleeting fragment of a millisecond in time that we recognize as the here and now, that swiftly renders the future into the past. It's that fleeting moment of the present that the story tellers use to define the past and the future to fit within a narrative. Never mind that you witnessed the event in real time, that's not what you saw, here's what you saw, laid out in a neat package of cognitive bias.

Package it in patriotism, repeat the media message ad nauseam, add in some slick AI imaging and babbling talking heads, and you've got a story line worthy of a TMZ gossip column.

That's how modern histories are written, and truth is dispatched right before our eyes.

Sometimes it feels like I'm witnessing a Greek Tragedy. One that even Sophocles may not have dreamed of.

Surely, the same human dynamics were at play in Sophocles' time as they are today, but if one wanted to pen a modern Greek Tragedy a seminal factor that would be beyond an ancient Greek's understanding would be, digital technology. That technology amplifies the modern stage exponentially, in which the ancient Greeks would have to invent a new vocabulary to explain the plight of the contemporary hoi polloi.