Open thread 7/9/2026
The person who compiles this series of video interviews is excellent at what he does. The note he wrote for this video states that it went viral and that as a result the woman got gifts and cards from all over the world:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Trump Tells the Truth About Iran
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-tells-the-truth-about-iran-4620ed02?st=zvVbZj
And then there’s this in the WSJ – not the editorial page. I’ll file this under “news too good to be true so I don’t believe it”.
Iraq Agrees to U.S. Demands to Halt Dollar Flows to Iran-Backed Militias
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iraq-us-dollar-shipments-iran-eccef82f?st=9pafM3
I certainly understand loneliness now. During the mornings, I can work outside, afternoons go to the Gym. There are gaps though, but manageable. It really starts about the time I start making dinner, for one. The house is very quiet. I watch TV until late, often having our cat, Sasha, on my lap. Her and Bella actually keep me going. Going to the Gym means that I am around other people. My neighbor, Tom, and I are members of the same unwanted Club. Talking helps us both. I also talk often with my best friend in IN. I could go on, but I think I have said enough.
Shirehome, thank you for sharing with us what you’re going through. Loneliness is truly painful. Glad you’re here.
SHIREHOME:
I’m sorry.
I’m glad that you have the animals and the friends, even though it doesn’t make up for your loss.
I’m retired, in my sixties, happily married, husband will retire soon.
We have a great relationship with both our daughter and our son.
I worry about being alone —neither one of us has a network of friends and my extended family lives in another state. Our kids live in different states, too.
I just can’t imagine husband or myself doing well being completely alone, even if we do end up having the capability of getting out of the house and around others, such as at a gym.
SHIREHOME:
I am sorry for the loneliness you express.
I’m 67 and have been married 42 years. My wife has cancer. So I can extrapolate how I would feel in your situation.
“Does USAID [funding cuts] explain Collapsein Left-wing Causes?”
CLAIM: the Wild Panoply of Far-Left causes, here and abroad, have been effectively sundered by Elon Musk’s DOGE, which resulted in the defunding the tens of billion in dollars USAID doled out for many years.
The list of consequent changes goes from the recent Latin America turning Right, or a very low-key “Pride” month this past June, to Hip-Hop music decline and trans plays in Columbia?
YouTuber Nick Freitas does the basic research on this important— and possible election outcome issue — here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKcmHlNTow0
He uses sources such as the WashPost, FoxNews, Congressional investigations, Pew Research, and recent policy research to find answers.
His assessment says, this is more likely than not. US tax dollars have been distributed in key parts of the world, typically, through far-Left captured NGOs.
Thus, part of these answers are quite strong. Other parts maybe more than just suggestive. So, probable. Or very probable.
For example, Cuba weakening in Communist hold? US aid to Cuba has monies spent there, but no discernible change in the government there. But after Trump used Hard Power in the softest way and removed strongman Maduro, months later sees Cuba releasing 2000-some political prisoners. Therefore, recent US Aid or USAID cuts in National Endowment for Democracy funding are unlikely to have been effective.
Another question is has USAID funding cutoff hit the Democratic Party’s largesse? Today, the comparative two party funding is 7 to 1, GOP leading DNC. Freitas says, correctly, that he’s never seen such a huge funding gap facing Democrats.
And Congressional investigations tell us how USAID monies got passed from NGOs and back to the Democrat Party war-chest.
Wow. I’m only two-thirds through this video talk. But I expect more opinion and news along these lines to come for months. The only likely improbability is the GOP exploiting these findings to sweep the ‘26 fall election!
President Trump, Veto the Housing Bill!
https://anncoulter.com/2026/07/08/president-trump-veto-the-housing-bill1/
A new, original, and very different take on where NHIs might come from, from former fighter pilot turned UFO investigator Chris Lehto, and based on the ideas of scale and alignment.*
• See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6EyrmlgcUs
@Snow on Pine:
Yep, that guy’s take is quite original.
My own (speculative, loosely-held) view is a tad different:
I’ve thought for a decade or more that…
IF that the various alien-biologic-entity sightings are real sightings of rational-animals that aren’t from this world,
THEN it is probably from an alternate version of THIS world, not a world from some vastly different location. And the alternate version would be accessible by moving from one spatial dimension or alternate history, to another (ours).
Now, I don’t grant that the “tic-tac” sightings and rumors of U.S. reverse-engineering of alien tech aren’t just part of a psyop conducted to make China/Russia/whomever have second thoughts.
And, I honestly don’t think it matters much. Whatever the truth is, it’s a reality we’ve been living with for decades or centuries, and it interrupts normal life rarely enough that most folk are never impacted by it. (If E.T. has landed, so what? Does it mean I have to stop loving my wife and kids? We all still have to pay taxes.) So who cares, really?
But, just for the sake of exploring the topic, let’s make some observations:
1. Filmmakers (e.g. the Men in Black films) have depicted alien species with radically different morphology from humans. Yet the actual reported alien sightings almost uniformly involve bipeds with arms that have digits at their ends, which are no shorter than two feet tall, and no taller than ten feet tall, and which have discernible heads, eyes, mouths. And on occasion, the “visitors” have seemed nearly identical to normal humans.
Why so similar?
2. Also, when they have technology — flying machines, guns, robots, surgical machines — the tech is usually recognizable to us. A bronze age human wouldn’t have a clue what an automobile was, and would probably compare it to a giant crystal being used as a house. So how come we can look at an alien flying machine and say, “Oh, look, it’s an alien flying machine” …?
Again, why so similar?
It makes a lot of sense if…
(a.) the “aliens” are from Earth, but from some alternate-timeline version of Earth, in which they evolved differently;
(b.) the natural world permits individuals to accidentally (or, with the right tech, intentionally) “slide sideways in time” to alternate versions of your own planet, in which history happened differently, and even evolution happened differently; and,
(c.) it’s difficult to “slide sideways in time” to alternate histories that are radically different from your own, but it’s easier to “slide sideways in time” to alternate histories that are pretty similar to your own.
If these three things are true,
then we would see what we are seeing:
The “aliens” would be an alternate version of us with a history of evolution and technological development that’s pretty close to ours. The ones we see most often would be “only” a thousand years ahead of us, not ten million years; and biologically, they’d have evolved in a way that makes sense on Earth and thus in a way similar to our own.
They might have invented the automobile in a year which, for us, would have been the early Medieval period.
Or, they might have evolved for lower intelligence and more hair, and no visible tech whatsoever. (Sorry to raise the possibility, but…”Bigfoot?”)
If there were locations naturally occurring in the universe where the walls between “timelines” were unusually “thin,” one could imagine low-tech individuals accidentally “sliding” into other worlds, and then “sliding back” (or to another location).
Anyway, I’m not convinced this is true, because I’m not convinced all the various reports of alien craft and individuals are true and correctly perceived. I suspect most of them aren’t.
BUT, if those phenomena aren’t hoaxes or misunderstandings, THEN the phenomena require explanation. And in that case, I think my proposal is adequately explanatory to cover the full variety of reported phenomena, and does so without proposing too many extraneous entities. (It requires a certain already-reputable interpretation of quantum-level weirdness — the many-universes hypothesis — and some way of “sliding” between them apart from normal causation, which is the biggest missing piece. After that, it’s just us, over and over and over….)