Insights and Advice to Help Us Through the Fog That Surrounds Us

Now for some insights and advice to help us through the fog that surrounds us. 

Fog? Sure, the fog of war. We all know what than means, right? It starts on battlefields, where it's not crystal clear what the heck is going on. 

Think of the image of 19th century armies lined up and engaging. The cannons fire as the troops approach each other in lines. Smoke from canon fire and the rifles used at the time filled the air. Many such battles were engaged over wide swatches of land. There were engagements left, right, center. The strategy each general had quickly went out the window and there was need to respond to the enemies activities. All amounted to fog that had to be dealt with in some way.

The fog extends to reporting on war. Do we really know whether what we read and hear is accurate, much less true? Think of the war with Iran and lots of statements from the current administration, from the Israeli government, the Iranian government. What's true? What has been exaggerated or meant to distract or confuse the other side? What are simply outright lies?

You get the picture - we simply don't have a clear picture.

That's why our last two posts urged us to step back from engagement with the reporting from media on all sides - and that includes left/right, liberal/conservative - in order for us to remain somewhat sane.

So today, some insights and advice to advance further what we've been harping on.

First the always thoughtful Charles Hughes Smith give us a general picture of the world as it appears to must of us these days.  

In the present era, all the world is a stage and everything is a performance on that stage: welcome to the Theater of the Absurd, a Hollywood set fabricated of cardboard and plaster made to look like gold leaf and marble columns, where the contraptions and ropes that do the magic are hidden behind purple velvet drapery.

Every detail has been designed to create the illusion of permanence and power to rivet our attention and distract us from noticing that behind this faux fabrication, the world is on fire.

You can find the whole article HERE.

(https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2026/04/welcome-to-theater-of-absurd.html)

Next a Big Picture comment from Ray Dalio. He's published much on his research into the long-term cycles that emerge from a study of centuries of our history. It's worth checking in on him when he opines from time to time. If you think it worth your time, you can read books he's written or watch videos he's produced.

He recently posted in Linked In:  

As a global macro investor for over 50 years who has needed to study all things that affected markets over the last 500 years to know how to deal with what’s coming at me, it appears to me that most people tend to focus on and react to the attention-grabbing things that are going on at the time—like what is going on with Iran now—and miss the much bigger, more important, and longer-term-evolving things that are driving what is going on and what is likely to happen. For today, that is most importantly that the US-Israel-Iran war is just part of a world war that we are in and that isn’t going to end anytime soon...

Certainly, what will happen with the Strait of Hormuz (most significantly, whether control of passage through it will be taken away from Iran and which countries are willing to spend how much blood and treasure to make that happen) will have many enormous repercussions all around the world. There are also the issues of whether Iran will still have a capacity to inflict harm on its neighbors with missiles and the threat of nuclear weapons, of how many troops the US is sending and what they will do, of the cost of gasoline, and of the upcoming US midterm elections.

All these near-term issues are important, but they lead people to miss the really big, even more important things. More specifically, because most people tend to have this short-term perspective, they now expect, and the markets are pricing in, that this war won’t last long and that when it ends we will get back to “normal.” Virtually nobody is talking about the fact that we are in the early stages of a world war that isn’t going to end anytime soon. Because I have this different perspective, I will now explain it...

You can find the whole article HERE. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-thing-we-world-war-isnt-going-end-anytime-soon-ray-dalio-sbrqe/

In the midst of all the fog, there are some things worth reading/watching. Don't take our word for it. We've got sources like the above that we've found helpful in sorting through all that's swirling around us. You should have your own. Just be careful and choose what won't cause even more fog to billow up.