Jeremiah Babe, 3/4/25
"Social Security Is Going To Collapse, Start Saving Now;
Bank Cartel Will Pull Plug On U.S. Economy"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Dan, I Allegedly, "Over 100 Companies Announce Layoffs in March"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly PM 3/4/25
"Over 100 Companies Announce Layoffs in March"
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"War In Pieces"
An unlikely message for hopeful minds.
"War In Pieces"
by Joel Bowman
“In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments,
the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people,
to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.”
~ Leo Tolstoy, from his essay "On Patriotism" (1894)
"Your editor spent most of the weekend offline; reading, writing and otherwise safely ensconced in what used to be known as the “real world.” We trust we didn’t miss anything... Just jesting. Human beings almost always miss something... and not only when their attention is diverted elsewhere. Often, they are most blinded by an object when they are staring right at it.
When we left off last week – right before “going dark” over the weekend – it appeared as though the world was bracing for the imminent outbreak of peace. The tables had been set... the canapés plated... the Champagne chilled. Volodymyr Zelensky was en route to the White House to meet POTUS, having ironed his favorite t-shirt for the big occasion. The offer on hand – a lucrative minerals agreement binding US economic interest to that of Zelensky’s cratered nation – was supposed to be a stepping stone towards a lasting peace deal.
“The idea,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “is that, with joint U.S.-Ukraine investment in the nation’s resources, the United States will continue to have a stake in Ukraine’s security, stability, and lasting peace and therefore be incentivized to uphold and defend Ukrainian security.” All Hollywood’s favorite actor-president had to do was smile for the cameras, sign on the dotted line and not find Hunter Biden’s stash of Bolivian marching powder hidden under the sink in the guest bathroom. Alas...
Peace, Averted? After forty minutes of live discussion, which provided just enough context for the mainstream media to dutifully ignore it when crafting their prime time cuts, talks descended into a full scale Oval Office communication breakdown. No doubt you’ve seen the clips... and the memes. Following the diplomatic spat, Zelensky was sent back to his country without any supper while, presumably, the White House staff made do with an impromptu luncheon of Berry caviar and Krug Grande Cuvée.
By the time we returned to our desk Monday morning, it appeared as though defeat had been snatched from the jaws of victory. Peace had been averted. But by whom? Cue the predictable “he said-she said” cacophony ringing out across the Interwebs, in which all the usual actors began lining up on their respective sides, explaining their own unique version of exactly the same event.
To some, the faultless Zelensky was “ambushed” by Trump and his attack dog, Vice President JD Vance. This was the claim advanced by the chattering class, many of whom have cheered the war from the beginning and would sooner see the world turned to ash than suffer the ignominy of peace in Trump’s time. This camp includes all the usual chickenhawks in DC and the EU, who are only too happy to watch other people’s sons and brothers marched off to the frontlines while they bravely hoist digital Ukrainian flags in their BlueSky bios (having fled the perilous free speech zone that is X).
Others held that Zelensky came across as entitled and disrespectful and even suggested that he should be grateful for any aid – military or otherwise – from a country which, along with having no shortage of its own problems to contend with, also enjoys something of a geographical convenience when it comes to conflicts on the other side of the world. (Indeed, it was Zelensky’s veiled “you have nice ocean, and don’t feel it now... but you will feel it in the future” comment that appeared to rouse Trump’s ire in the first place.)
No, No, NATO: The upshot of all this is that, within the space of a long weekend, the world went from taking one step closer to peace... to key players in and around the United States government calling openly for the immediate withdrawal from not only the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but also the United Nations (UN).
Here’s The Independent: "Elon Musk shared his support for the US leaving NATO and the UN on Saturday night and was joined in the cause by Utah Sen. Mike Lee. The head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) took to X to write “I agree” to a post stating “It’s time to leave NATO and the UN” Musk is joined by several Republican lawmakers, such as Lee, who have questioned U.S. membership of NATO.
Hmm... what might a post-NATO world look like, you wonder? For those of us who were not around on April 4, 1949, when NATO was formed – between the member states of Europe’s Western Union (France, the UK and the three Benelux states) plus the United States, Canada, and a handful of other European nations – it is difficult to imagine a world without such a supranational entity.
Of course, the alliance has undergone many transformations during its 75-plus year history and, arguably, even served a purpose during the Cold War years as a necessary counterbalance to Soviet geopolitical interests. (Though there are those who hold that it only served to escalate tensions and further fuel the nuclear arms race.)
Either way, today, more than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall (and NATOs repeatedly broken promise not to move “one inch to the east”), it is the United States that is left footing the overwhelming brunt of the alliance’s “defense” budget... even though, as Messrs. Trump and Zelensky point out, in their own ways, there is that “beautiful ocean” separating the continents, one from the other. Here’s a graphic representation of the budget breakdown...
This is what it looks like when, as Polish PM Donald Tusk stated this week, “500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians.”
Defund and Defang: News that European NATO states might soon have to “go it alone” must have sent chills through the cold, dark hearts of warmongers from Brussels to Bethesda, Munich to McClean, who were suddenly faced with the threat of a defunded and defanged alliance. We can only imagine their silent prayers, their desperate pleas under drone-free skies, as they envisioned the order books of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman drying up faster than a mother’s tears under the looming prospect of a ceasefire.
Which begs the hypothetical question, without an aggressive military alliance conscripting member states around the world (and orchestrating coups d'état when citizens of those states don’t vote accordingly), who’s going to buy all those shiny Javelin missiles and F-16 fighter jets? Without a US-led NATO to do the heavy lifting, what will become of the poor ol’ Military Industrial Complex?
Jilted former Trump adviser and reliable permahawk, John Bolton, took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal over the weekend to address just that question... only, he did so with a straight face. Note that the article was not titled or “How to Promote and Protect Peace” but rather..."How to Protect NATO and Other Alliances From Trump." In other words, “How to protect supranational military alliances from democratically-elected leaders that don’t toe the line.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is due to address the nation in a joint session of Congress this evening. After his customary fashion, the 47th president has promised to “tell it like it is.” Fathers and daughters... mothers and sons... war pigs and deep state politicians alike...the world will be listening."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“What makes this spiral galaxy so long? Measuring over 700,000 light years across from top to bottom, NGC 6872, also known as the Condor galaxy, is one of the most elongated barred spiral galaxies known.
The galaxy's protracted shape likely results from its continuing collision with the smaller galaxy IC 4970, visible just above center. Of particular interest is NGC 6872's spiral arm on the upper left, as pictured here, which exhibits an unusually high amount of blue star forming regions. The light we see today left these colliding giants before the days of the dinosaurs, about 300 million years ago. NGC 6872 is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Peacock (Pavo).”
"How Humanity Discovered We’re All Made Of “Star Stuff'”
"How Humanity Discovered
We’re All Made Of “Star Stuff'”
by Big Think
"If you zoom out on the question, “Where do you come from?”, you might point to your ancestors who lived centuries ago. Zooming out further, you could look back on the evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa some 300,000 years ago, or the first vertebrates to crawl out of the ocean 370 million years ago, or life first forming on Earth several billion years before that.
But if you really take the long view, you’ll see that humanity’s story was already taking shape before our planet existed. “All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star,” the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in 1973. “We are made of star-stuff.” Sagan was far from the first person to note our cosmic lineage, however. This week, we dive into centuries of history to trace how scientists discovered that we are, in a very real sense, the children of ancient stars.
Each one of us - in a very physical and physiological way - is 13.8 billion years old. This is the age of the Universe. It took our cosmos this long to forge the elements and build up the cumulative complexity that makes us what we are. It took the Universe 13.8 billion years to create creatures capable of realizing they are the result of an agglomeration this lengthy.
This is another way of understanding one of Carl Sagan’s most famous sayings. In 1973, Sagan memorably declared we “are made of star stuff.” By this, he meant that the matter within our bodies is the byproduct of deceased stars. We, quite literally, are ancient stardust.
But people haven’t always appreciated this. Far from it. What’s more, Sagan was far from the first to claim we are forged of “star stuff.” The debate - about whether our bodies are comprised of the same ingredients as suns - has raged for centuries. This is the story of how we figured out we are descended from the chemical cauldrons that are suns, and how this transformed our sense of who and what we are.
A seismic shift in worldview: As far back as the early 1500s, the pioneering Swiss alchemist Paracelsus was confidently stating our bodies “are not derived from the heavenly bodies.” The stars “have nothing to do” with us, he stressed: their material bequeaths no “property” nor “essence” to us. Going even further, Paracelsus declared that, even if there “had never been” any stars, humans would have been born - and would continue being born - without noticing any significant difference. He acknowledged we, of course, need our Sun, for warmth and light. But “beyond that,” the distant stars “are neither part of us nor we of them.”
Paracelsus was not alone in this. The dominant view, tracing back to Aristotle, had long assumed that the Earth and other celestial bodies weren’t just separated by a chasm in space, but by distinctions in all other qualities too. The terrestrial and heavenly realms were thought of as separate spheres of existence - governed by entirely different laws and constituted from different materials.
But in the decades after Paracelsus passed away in 1541, a revolution began, merging these two domains by proving the heavenly and Earthly were governed by the same rules. This was thanks to Galileo, his telescope, and the founding of the modern scientific method. As Francis Bacon summed up in 1612, the “separation supposed betwixt” the celestial and the terrestrial had been proved “a fiction.” The forces shaping things down here, Bacon stressed, are the same as those driving orbits up there.
This was a seismic shift in worldview, the proportions of which are hard for us to appreciate today. Throughout the 1600s, ponderers like René Descartes began announcing it means we can conclude the “matter of the heavens and of the earth is one and the same.” But even though the following century saw the building of ever-bigger telescopes - to better spy on distant stars - there still remained no way of conclusively confirming this fact. For all anyone knew, the heavens could be made of elements completely alien to those found on Earth.
As the 1800s opened, the stars still seemed distant and unfamiliar enough that the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel could dispassionately compare them to a “rash” besmirching the night sky. Similarly dismissive, the influential French polymath Auguste Comte asserted in 1835 that our species would never ascertain the elemental ingredients of suns. He boasted that not even the “remotest” posterity will unlock knowledge about the bodily properties of objects beyond our Solar System.
“We must keep carefully apart the idea of the Solar System and that of the Universe,” Comte continued curmudgeonly, “and be always assured that our only true interest is in the former.” For Comte, this proved no tragedy or privation. “If knowledge of the starry heavens is forbidden,” he explained, “it is no real consequence to us.”
Inventor of words like “sociology” and “altruism,” otherwise impressively prescient, Comte was being overconfident. It’s no understatement to say this was - and remains - one of the worst-ever predictions about the future of human inquiry.
In 1859, just two years after Comte died, the field of spectroscopy was founded by Gustav Robert Kirchoff and Robert Bunsen. Using analysis of light emitted and absorbed by objects to ascertain their chemical constitution, their method eventually proved the stars are made of the same elements we find laced throughout mundane matter on Earth. This was thanks to work conducted by Margaret and William Huggins from their private observatory in South London. They proved Paracelsus wrong, and Comte along with him.
In ensuing decades, scientists began announcing that “the whole visible Universe” - from our “central star” to the outermost “nebulae” - had been “reached by our chemistry, seized by our analysis, and made to furnish the proof that all matter is one.” Ninety-one years before Sagan said the same thing, in August 1882, the French spectroscopist Jules Janssen made the claim: “these stars are made of the same stuff as we.”
People found comfort in this. During a 1918 speech, the Canadian poet and physician Albert D. Watson declared that, thanks to the spectroscope, “loftier qualities of our being” were being revealed - hitherto invisible to us. “We are made of universal and divine ingredients,” Watson explained.
He saw this as salutary: It means we should start acting accordingly, to live up to the station implied by our “ingredients.” If we are made of “universal” elements, so too should our “conduct, ambitions, and aspirations” assume an identical scope. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust may still apply, but at least each passing life is a corpuscle made from the same ash as stars.
Others felt similarly. In 1923, the Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley mused that “man, beast, rock, and star” are all part of the same corporeal family. Astronomy’s “recent” breakthroughs, he explained, have confirmed “the uniformity of all chemical composition.” “We would ask for no higher immortality,” Shapley concluded, than to be “made of the same undying stuff as the rest of creation.”
Shapley reiterated the same message, six years later, in an interview making the cover of The New York Times. It was accompanied by a striking illustration, depicting a human figure against a backdrop of spiral galaxies and streaking comets. The title read: “The Star Stuff That Is Man.” In terms of bodily makeup, we seemed siblings to the stars.
It’s telling Shapley used words like “undying” and “immortality.” It was, at this time, still an open question as to whether the Universe itself was eternal. The evidence had not yet been gathered to decide conclusively either way. Assuming the cosmos was eternal, as most scientists back then did, it was also possible to hold that life itself had also never begun: that living things simply have always existed and forever will, circulating like dust motes in an undying cosmic swirl.
But then, as the century wore on, evidence began accumulating indicating the Universe itself - and therefore, also, matter as a whole - had a hot beginning. Scientists also began remarking that, if this is true, there must have been a time when life also - cosmically speaking - could not have existed, anywhere.
Through the 1940s, the Russian polymath George Gamow developed theories explaining how the most abundant and lightest elements - hydrogen and helium - had been forged in the Universe’s fiery, explosive beginning. But our bodies are comprised of heavier, more complicated elements than these: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulphur.
It fell to the intransigent English astronomer Fred Hoyle to expose - through the 1940s and 1950s - how the heavier elements of our living world had all been cooked within dying stars: by fusing simpler nuclei into more complicated arrangements, before puffing them out into space via the solar death rattle that is a supernova explosion.
In this way, the evolutionary ancestry of all matter had been revealed. Hoyle unveiled the processes through which heavier elements are built up from the lightest, by the systole and diastole of dying stars. He also, through this, revealed our umbilical link to some of the most powerful energetic events in the cosmos.
The children of stars: We aren’t siblings of stars, it turned out. Given we are made from elements originally forged within senile suns, it is truer to say we are their children. This is our genetic link to the Universe: our shared cosmic heritage, the ancient atomic alchemy of the cosmos.
Adding a Shakespearean spin to the motif, the journalist George W. Gray - whilst reflecting on Hoyle’s revelations - mused that “we are such stuff as stars are made of.” “The sense of kinship of life stuff with star stuff is inescapable,” Gray continued, and it touches “physicists” as much as “sentimental laymen.”
From here, the motif became common parlance for popular science. Just a few years prior to Sagan, the German writer Hoimar von Ditfurth repeated the phrase in his 1970 book "Children of the Universe." The cosmos, Ditfurth reflected, “used an entire Milky Way, with its hundreds of billions of suns in order to create the commonplace objects that surround us.” Continuing, Ditfurth marveled: “if certain vast cosmic events had not taken place, nothing in our everyday world would now exist.” This is why, in a very literal sense, each one of us is roughly 13.8 billion years old.
Each of us isn’t just a product of events in our early childhoods, which continue shaping the way we are today. The same link - of the present to the past - applies just as much to events, interlinked, leading all the way back to the Big Bang. Had they not happened, or happened differently, we wouldn’t be here to ponder today.
Across the ages, one of the eldest assumptions has been that the basic building blocks of our world are sealed away from time. That is, that while the things built from matter, from mountains to monkeys, have ancestries and biographies - in the sense they are born, develop, and decay - atoms themselves don’t suffer such inconveniences. The elements were assumed eternal: not subject to change.
One of the deepest, most surprising, revelations of modern science - uncovered thanks to our probing into things at the largest and smallest scales - has been that matter itself has its biography. That is, the elements have a family history, where what’s simpler sometimes becomes the parent of things more complex. The truth of common descent stretches far beyond biology. When Sagan pronounced that “we are made of star stuff,” he was contributing his bit to this centuries-long effort: representing our cumulative, collective fight to figure out our place in this cosmos and our relationship to it. It turns out this relationship is parental, in the most profound sense. Our very atoms betray the birthmarks of our amniotic link to this aging, explosive Universe."
Ever wonder why there's always "A Look to the Heavens" post?
Home... ;-)
“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of Infinity. Life is Eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in Eternity.”
- Paulo Coelho
"When An Old Friend Takes Her Own Life"
"When An Old Friend Takes Her Own Life"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"When an old friend takes her own life, your own life is irrevocably diminished. What seemed to matter before no longer matters, and what seemed to make sense no longer makes sense. My friend had recently moved 1,000 miles away, to a town which had long extended a magnetic draw on her. But she knew no one there, and since her work was all done on computer, she toiled alone. Like any other human being in those conditions, she was lonely. Yes, she had a loyal companion in her dog, and two very close friends here in California, and a constellation of lesser friends like me; but it was not enough at a critical moment.
She'd had those moments before, and been saved: just as she'd gathered the pills to swallow, a friend had called, and she'd gotten past that moment of dark obsession. Of all the past days' memories and thoughts, one returns: what if I had sensed her despair and called her at that moment? And why didn't I sense her need for reassurance and human contact at that critical hour? I have often dreamed of her, and had done so just the week before; it was a vivid dream, not at all alarming, and I'd recounted it to her in an email. She'd made no response, and I'd given it no further thought. Was the dream a premonition? No; but perhaps it was a signal, if not of distress, then of some tendril of distress.
It is convenient is think our friends resilient, just as it is convenient for adults to believe children are resilient when turmoil or tragedy strikes the family. Yes, children are resilent--they are human beings. But they are not endlessly resilient, and their quiet after death or upheaval is not resilience or resolve, it is the numbing of terrible pain.
And so this false reliance on resilience nags at me; I was too self-absorbed to think through the underlying conditions in my dear friend's life, and how lonely she might feel. Her childhood was not positive, nor was her family more than grudgingly supportive; there were always squabbles over money and demands for fealty she could not meet. She was resilient, but only just so; and I should have been alert to the proximity of her limits.
But I am also keenly aware of the limits of my influence in her life; though we each wish with all our hearts that we could have saved her in that moment of supreme temptation and pain, there are limits to our influence.
If you think of your oldest, closest friends - I have known and loved her for 37 years now - then we cannot recall all the thousands of words exchanged or spoken, or the thousands of hours spent together. We recall some few words and scenes, and it is those few we have to cherish and ponder. But what caused us to recall those moments and not others?
We are ripe to influence and connection only rarely; even our closest friends only influence our thinking and emotions at certain unpredictable junctures. After the fact, often when things have gone awry, we remember what they told us, or the comment they made off-handedly, or perhaps most rarely, their earnestly offered advice which we'd promptly ignored.
And so I hold two uncomfortably conflicting truths: that I could have been, and should have been, a better friend to her these past few months, when she needed all her friends' presence and understanding. But feeling this, and knowing it to be painfully true does not alter the limits of my influence in her life. Perhaps I could have contacted her in just the right moment, when my call or words could have tipped her away from that terrible decision; but more likely, that is a vain hope of a heartbroken friend, looking back from the periphery of her life.
For there are limits to us, this poor amalgam of brain and emotion; yes, faith can help, pets can help, friends and family can help, medication can help, insight can help, resolve can help -but none of these, or all of them put together, is guaranteed to overcome the darkness within us at its bleakest. The sufferer must be attuned to that particular wavelength at that moment in time; and if they have spun beyond our reach, then our ability to save them is lost as well.
Those of you who were born with minds which don't follow the happier pathways, the easier pathways, know that the "normal" person cannot understand the despair felt by those prone to one or more of the many madnesses which plague the human mind and spirit. Yes, we all know despression and anxiety, but those blessed with standard-issue minds will never experience the bottomlessness the others experience.
In a peculiarity of natural selection, or God's will (perhaps, despite the false labeling imposed by language, they amount to the same thing), the human spirits with the most enthusiasm for life, the ones with the poet's spark, the ones with the keenest sensibilities and sensitivities to life, are the ones most often drawn to that terrible cliff of self-destruction.
Some may mock Thanatos, the urge to self-destruction, the yin to the will to live's yang, as illusion. But it is real, and if you have not felt it, then count your blessings.
It is ironic, and tragic, that the selfish among us, the bitter types who have soured on life and who tap an endless well of bile to blame others for their own difficulties, or those who always find the energy to trumpet their own self-glory, never end their own lives. They cling on, as if the will to sow discord and ego are indestructable. No, it is the fragile ones, the thoughtful ones, who are drawn to that dark edge, and who jump; for life is too painful to bear at times, and they think not of faith or the love of their friends and family, but of escape.
It is an illusion, a cherished one, and one I wish was true, that love alone can save a lovely soul in extremis. She was loved, dearly, and yet we who loved her could not save her. We cannot but wish with all our own lifeforce that we could have done so, but there are limits, even to love. How I wish I had felt an urge to pick up the phone and call her that day, that hour, in the hope that perhaps that simple act would have distracted her, or comforted her just enough to stay her hand. But I had felt no such urge, and so the moment was lost.
To wish for that is to wish for powers and strengths I do not possess; I am just another muddled, muddling-through human, struggling daily with my own weaknesses and demons, trying not to fail those I love in this life. But I cannot help but feel I failed her, and that haunts me, and will haunt me, even as I know that to want that power in her life is not the same as actually wielding it. Though it is natural to wish for a limitless ability to save such a dear soul, perhaps it is overstating our reach.
When an old friend takes her own life, then you come to know how little you knew of her and of her life in that distant town. There are limits on what a friend can know, at least a friend who is not in the inner circle; and perhaps even they cannot know.
We were close at times, something like cousins or perhaps at the very best, as she once told me, siblings; she had no brothers. There is no good analog or word for friendships with no romantic frisson between men and women. We did not look anything alike; I am tall and fair, and she was very petite, with skin and eyes far different from my own.
She was the much better writer, the one who deservedly won the notice of mentors and prize committees. In comparison, I am a plodder, the aspirant who rows along without attracting much notice because, well, I'm just not that good. I thought her beautiful, and liked looking at her; she had an enthusiasm for things, and life, which I admired and even envied at times.
Now she is gone, and my life is so much poorer. My only consolation, and it too is a poor one, is that I had just written her that I loved her very much, and had always loved her. She'd made no answering comment, for it was known, and understood; but I hope, in my secret heart, that it gave her some small solace to read it, and to know it was true."
"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether
it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Kahlil Gibran, "You Are My Brother..."
"You Are My Brother"
“You are my brother, but why are you quarreling with me? Why do you invade my country and try to subjugate me for the sake of pleasing those who are seeking glory and authority?
Why do you leave your wife and children and follow Death to the distant land for the sake of those who buy glory with your blood, and high honor with your mother's tears?
Is it an honor for a man to kill his brother man? If you deem it an honor, let it be an act of worship, and erect a temple to Cain who slew his brother Abel.
Is self-preservation the first law of Nature? Why, then, does Greed urge you to self-sacrifice in order only to achieve his aim in hurting your brothers? Beware, my brother, of the leader who says, "Love of existence obliges us to deprive the people of their rights!" I say unto you but this: protecting others' rights is the noblest and most beautiful human act; if my existence requires that I kill others, then death is more honorable to me, and if I cannot find someone to kill me for the protection of my honor, I will not hesitate to take my life by my own hands for the sake of Eternity before Eternity comes.
Selfishness, my brother, is the cause of blind superiority, and superiority creates clanship, and clanship creates authority which leads to discord and subjugation.
The soul believes in the power of knowledge and justice over dark ignorance; it denies the authority that supplies the swords to defend and strengthen ignorance and oppression - that authority which destroyed Babylon and shook the foundation of Jerusalem and left Rome in ruins. It is that which made people call criminals great men; made writers respect their names; made historians relate the stories of their inhumanity in manner of praise.
The only authority I obey is the knowledge of guarding and acquiescing in the Natural Law of Justice.
What justice does authority display when it kills the killer? When it imprisons the robber? When it descends on a neighborhood country and slays its people? What does justice think of the authority under which a killer punishes the one who kills, and a thief sentences the one who steals?
You are my brother, and I love you; and Love is justice with its full intensity and dignity. If justice did not support my love for you, regardless of your tribe and community, I would be a deceiver concealing the ugliness of selfishness behind the outer garment of pure love.”
Is it an honor for a man to kill his brother man? If you deem it an honor, let it be an act of worship, and erect a temple to Cain who slew his brother Abel.
Is self-preservation the first law of Nature? Why, then, does Greed urge you to self-sacrifice in order only to achieve his aim in hurting your brothers? Beware, my brother, of the leader who says, "Love of existence obliges us to deprive the people of their rights!" I say unto you but this: protecting others' rights is the noblest and most beautiful human act; if my existence requires that I kill others, then death is more honorable to me, and if I cannot find someone to kill me for the protection of my honor, I will not hesitate to take my life by my own hands for the sake of Eternity before Eternity comes.
Selfishness, my brother, is the cause of blind superiority, and superiority creates clanship, and clanship creates authority which leads to discord and subjugation.
The soul believes in the power of knowledge and justice over dark ignorance; it denies the authority that supplies the swords to defend and strengthen ignorance and oppression - that authority which destroyed Babylon and shook the foundation of Jerusalem and left Rome in ruins. It is that which made people call criminals great men; made writers respect their names; made historians relate the stories of their inhumanity in manner of praise.
The only authority I obey is the knowledge of guarding and acquiescing in the Natural Law of Justice.
What justice does authority display when it kills the killer? When it imprisons the robber? When it descends on a neighborhood country and slays its people? What does justice think of the authority under which a killer punishes the one who kills, and a thief sentences the one who steals?
You are my brother, and I love you; and Love is justice with its full intensity and dignity. If justice did not support my love for you, regardless of your tribe and community, I would be a deceiver concealing the ugliness of selfishness behind the outer garment of pure love.”
- Kahlil Gibran
"War..."
"War does not determine who's right... only who's left."
- Bertrand Russell
o
"The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting
each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals."
- Edward Abbey
o
Full screen recommended.
Sarah Paine, "The Greatest Tragedy in Human History"
"1930s - Street Scenes New York"
Full screen recommended.
NASS, "1930s - Street Scenes New York"
"I colorized, restored and created a sound design for this video of New York in the 1930s. We start on Manhattan's West Side, at 12th Avenue and 42nd Street, at the ferry terminal of the West Shore Railroad, the New York, Ontario and Western Railway, and the Weehawken Ferry. After we have a Crowd Scene street where we can see the beautiful fashion in the 30s."
Comments here:
Fascinating...
"Causes Do Matter..."
"Causes do matter. And the world is changed by people who care deeply about causes,about things that matter. We don't have to be particularly smart or talented. We don't need a lot of money or education. All we really need is to be passionate about something important; something bigger than ourselves. And it's that commitment to a worthwhile cause that changes the world." - Steve Goodier
"Find the things that matter, and hold on to them,
and fight for them, and refuse to let them go."
- Lauren Oliver
John Wilder, "Trump’s Axe"
"Trump’s Axe"
by John Wilder
“By this axe, I rule!”
– Kull the Conqueror
"Last week I talked about the relative economic effects of the Great Government Purge of 2025-2026. Unlike Stalin’s Purge, the winners don’t get a bullet, instead they get a severance check and unemployment. Regardless, that’s not fun for the people involved, especially good people who are doing useful work for the Republic. But it might be necessary.
There are two ways to combat waste and ideological rot. Trump tried using a scalpel during in his first term, cutting carefully, and here and there. The impact of his efforts was minimal. Slightly fewer regulations that would later be made by the same bureaucrats that voted for Her® and the dotard Biden was the sum of all of his efforts. He was stopped at every turn by internal bureaucratic resistance, asking for clarifications and just ignoring Trump as if he were the terms and conditions on a piece of software.
Once Biden showed up, however, the bureaucracy reacted like a Ferrari™, purring along as whoever was actually running the government instead of Biden made requests that were instantly carried out. Also, like a Ferrari©, it spilled fluids everywhere, but enough of “Rachel” Levine.
Then they shot at Trump after trying six different ways to put him in prison or impoverish him. That changes a guy. Coming in to this administration, he threw the scalpel away and picked up an axe. During the first 40 days, he’s put out 68 executive orders. The axe has been aimed squarely at GloboLeftist and sex-fetishist activist enclaves, secret slush funds for GloboLeftist causes, and regulatory fortresses.
The rot is deep: it’s been growing for more than a century and excision’s the only shot left. The rot started where most bad things in the United States start, around the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve™ and the income tax. The income tax was promised to only impact the very wealthy, but that was, to put it charitably, a big fat lie.
The income tax was used first to fund a war, then a growing bureaucracy, then another war. Along the way, sometime in the 1930s, the obsession with secrecy began. Our war against Germany and Japan really did require a strong secrecy culture – having the Germans know when we were going to invade Normandy, or even that Normandy was a target would have led to failure. And, yeah, we didn’t really want everyone to know how to make nukes, though the Rosenbergs felt differently. Before they fried differently.
But post-WWII, the state swelled to win a war, then never shrank because it had to fight a Cold War. The New Deal also bled seamlessly into the Great Society, birthing a permanent caste of deskbound overlords who could define the future of a business through a stroke of a pen or the press of a typewriter key.
By the ’70s, agencies like NSA and CIA ballooned under “national security”. Secrecy became a shield, while accountability a ghost. MKUltra? It’s a real thing that happened, and our tax dollars were spent on this top secret program. Why are the JFK files still redacted sixty years later? Why does the CIA maintain that the formula for invisible ink (lemon juice) is still a national secret?
Yes, I can see the reason to have secrets. But we should have about 12 of them. Which 12? I don’t know, but the never-ending, overlapping security state needs something to function: an enemy. The rest of the secrets? We put them where no one would look: in the middle of a Disney® movie.
I can’t see that we have one. Russia? Putin asked to join NATO in 2000. Are the Russians a bit skeevy? Sure they are. Are they a threat to us? Only in a nuclear fashion. After the end of the Cold War, there was no reason not to welcome Russia warmly into the host of nations. We didn’t. Why?
The national security state needed an enemy, and it couldn’t be China because Clinton was too busy giving them all of our missile tech and hiring Chinese nationals into the security state so they could take hard drives of all of our secrets back to China.
The GloboLeft has also hijacked the security state. Ideologues wormed in—trans-activists at NSA, DEI czars at DoD —while “secret” programs metastasized, cloaking rot in classified ink. Secrecy’s a double-edged blade: it really is vital for real threats (SIGINT), but a dark wet rotting swamp where sunlight never shines for that is more wedded to itself than the people it swore to serve.
“Let me tell you: you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at (sic) getting back at you,” said Chuck Schumer. Why is it that politicians should fear the intelligence community?
The purge redraws the map: the bureaucratic blob shrinks. Keep in mind it’s not just the wages paid, it’s also all of those regulators writing regulations that lower competition and increase costs. When the initial pollution regulations hit, they got rid of 90% plus of the pollution very quickly and cost effectively. Getting the last 0.1% of the pollution? Often this is crazy expensive and provides no real benefit. Remember how many jobs were lost because of the . . . snail darter, the spotted owl, and that time Oprah went on a diet.
Redefine carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and now regulators get even more power, and everything you consume increases in price. The people who have all of the climate “solutions”? They are the GloboLeftElite.
The axe is required. Most of the curtains on our “secret” nation should lift. What survives has to earn the right to stay in the shadows. GloboLeft ideologues in federal service that don’t serve the people should be rooted out and given the opportunity to find a way to add value to the world.
Yet there’s a goal in here: a leaner state, loyal to the people, not its own girth or Dear Leader. A century of rot, non-American ideologues and secrets are being sliced away. There will be chaos, as we find that, “Oh, no, we really needed to have air traffic controllers” and as this necessarily blunt instrument hacks through some good things to save the whole. It’s ugly. It’s necessary. And it might just be enough. All without building a single GULAG. Besides, that wouldn’t work on GloboLeftists. They need REEEEEEEEE-education."
Dan, I Allegedly, "40% Drive Without Insurance - A Dangerous Trend"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 3/4/25
"40% Drive Without Insurance -
A Dangerous Trend"
"40% of drivers are hitting the road without insurance - an alarming and dangerous trend that could affect all of us. In today’s video, I break down how financial struggles are leading people to make risky decisions like skipping auto insurance, why this is a terrible idea, and how bare minimum coverage just isn't enough to protect you. From shocking stories about accidents to insights on low insurance requirements in states like Florida, there's a lot to unpack about this growing issue."
Comments here:
"15,000 Workers Are Fired From Microsoft as Tech Sector Collapses"
Full screen recommended.
Market Gains, 3/4/25
"15,000 Workers Are Fired From
Microsoft as Tech Sector Collapses"
Comments here:
o
Bill Bonner, "Crackpot Economics"
Scandinavian Grunge Lines with Nordic Runes
"Crackpot Economics"
by Bill Bonner
‘Det som göms i snö, kommer fram vid tö.’
(What is hidden in snow, is revealed at thaw.)
- Old Norse Saying
Baltimore, Maryland - "There are many issues that get people riled up. And many are the dimwit policies pushed by politicians and elite groups. Personal pronouns, passing out condoms, men competing as women in sports, ‘annexing’ Greenland, forced vaccinations…and here’s a new one. The White House:
"By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: English is declared as the official language of the United States. A nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society, and the United States is strengthened by a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language."
Really? Switzerland has five languages. India has 122 major languages and 1,599 minor ones. Why can’t people speak whatever language they want? And in the US today, almost everyone speaks English. Would you say it was a ‘unified and cohesive society?’ Language is a sensitive topic. Canada wisely decided to allow both French and English as official languages. But Ukraine did not. After the US-sponsored coup in 2014, it eliminated Russian as an official language...which proved to be one of the opening shots of the war.
Typical of the world improvers, they want to force everyone into a single formula. But it’s clearly unfair to give native born English speakers an advantage. Why not level the playing field by designating some language no one speaks as the official tongue? We recommend Old Norse. Learning Old Norse would connect us to our first European immigrants…and it would stimulate both the economy and the tired, complacent minds of its citizens. Besides, it would be useful to know what those crafty Greenlanders are saying after we take it over.
But while these fringe issues grab headline attention, in themselves they don’t represent existential threats. Whether Americans speak English or Estonian…the US would still be on its way to $50 trillion of debt before the end of Trump’s second term. Deficits add up. Debt needs to be refinanced. And the larger the cost of servicing past spending, the less is available for the present. This is inherently and obviously a crackpot way to run a nation. It guarantees chaos, inflation, defaults and poverty. But it is the direction taken by every administration since the days of Jimmy Carter.
The first four months of this fiscal year added another $830 billion in debt. At that rate, even with Elon looking for nickels under the seat cushions, the debt will be like water gushing up out of sewers and storm drains…malodorous and hard to clean up. At 5% interest (which could go up), that would be an interest burden of $2.5 trillion per year… or about half of all federal tax receipts. Insider Investor adds: "The billionaire investor Ray Dalio said "debt accumulates like plaque" in a financial system, and that poses a "problem" for governments as interest payments eat up more and more of their budgets. Dalio compared himself to a doctor telling a patient about a plaque buildup: "You're in a high risk of this heart attack, essentially, and now what are you going to do about it?" "Don't wait for this to happen and then try to make it better," Dalio said.
The federal government spent about $6.75 trillion last fiscal year but only collected $4.92 trillion in revenue, meaning it ran a $1.8 trillion deficit, according to the Treasury's website. The national debt has more than tripled since 2000 to an estimated $36.2 trillion, the website showed.
The only member of the House to show any real concern about this is the steadfast Thomas Massie of Kentucky. He was the only Republican to vote ‘no’ on the latest Republican spendfest bill. Massie explained his vote to his constituents on X by writing: “The GOP Budget Resolution that passed the House this week increases the debt limit from $36 trillion to $40 trillion, and spends enough $ to increase the debt from $36 trillion to $56 trillion over the next 10 years. But yay for tax cuts!”
Maybe Massie was being sarcastic. Because there is no real tax cut in the measure passed last week. What there is is a slick tax scam, about which, more tomorrow. For now, it is hidden under the snow…that is, under near record high spending…record high debt…and record high stock prices. It takes time for snow to melt. Inflation emerges gradually, poking up through the frost like crocuses in early spring. Later, we see the old beer cans and wind-blown pizza boxes. Verðið á varðbergi. Stay tuned."
"This Is War: Expect Surging Prices, Rapid Economic Decline, Supply Chain Disruptions"
Gregory Mannarino, 3/4/25
"This Is War: Expect Surging Prices, Rapid
Economic Decline, Supply Chain Disruptions"
Comments here:
"Alert! Global Trade War Begins Today! 12 Hours To Major Trump Address! French jets Fly In Ukraine!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 3/4/25
"Alert! Global Trade War Begins Today!
12 Hours To Major Trump Address! French jets Fly In Ukraine!"
Comments here:
Monday, March 3, 2025
"America Is The World's Cash Cow; Markets Dump As Trade Wars Begin Tomorrow"
Jeremiah Babe, 3/3/25
"America Is The World's Cash Cow;
Markets Dump As Trade Wars Begin Tomorrow"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Kevin Kern, "Above The Clouds"
Full screen recommended.
Kevin Kern, "Above The Clouds"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Fans of our fair planet might recognize the outlines of these cosmic clouds. On the left, bright emission outlined by dark, obscuring dust lanes seems to trace a continental shape, lending the popular name North America Nebula to the emission region cataloged as NGC 7000. To the right, just off the North America Nebula's east coast, is IC 5070, whose avian profile suggests the Pelican Nebula. The two bright nebulae are about 1,500 light-years away, part of the same large and complex star forming region, almost as nearby as the better-known Orion Nebula. At that distance, the 3 degree wide field of view would span 80 light-years.
This careful cosmic portrait uses narrow band images combined to highlight the bright ionization fronts and the characteristic glow from atomic hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen gas. These nebulae can be seen with binoculars from a dark location. Look northeast of bright star Deneb in the constellation Cygnus the Swan."
"Are You A Gorilla Or A God?"
"Are You A Gorilla Or A God?"
By Paul Rosenberg
"Humanity stands about halfway between gorillas and gods. The great question that looms over us, is this: “Which will we incorporate into our lives? Primate things or God things?”
Yes, choices are thrust upon us all our lives, accompanied with various levels of intimidation and threat, but at some point, all of us find ourselves able to choose freely. And it is then that we go in one direction or the other. We are able to change directions of course, but every time we choose, we move a step in one direction or the other.
What We Are: Please understand that I am not endorsing any specific theories here – religious, scientific, or otherwise. I’m merely describing the situation in which humanity finds itself. We are halfway between gorillas (or chimps, if you prefer) and gods: The worst things we do are primate things, and the best things we do are god-like things. Either direction is open to us.
Strange as it may seem, we are a lot like the lesser primates. Our bodies are built in the same ways, our body chemistry is nearly identical, and the worst aspects of human nature are essentially the same as the worst aspects of primate behavior.
We are also a lot like gods. We transcend entropy; we create. We can touch the soul in others, and the best aspects of human nature are essentially the same as the best characteristics attributed to gods.
This is not what we can be; this is what we are. What we become in the future depends on whether we choose gorilla things or god things, here and now.
What Are Gorilla and God Things? Gorilla things are those which operate on a dominant/submissive model. Hierarchy (high-level individuals controlling lower-level individuals) is the blueprint of the primate world. Dominant primates seek status and the power to control others. The submissive ones seek to pass along their pain to the animals below them (females, juveniles, etc.) and to avoid punishment. They are servile toward the dominants and cruel toward those they are able to dominate. Females trade sex for favors.
God things operate on a creative model. Blessing is the blueprint of the god world: distributing love, honesty, courage, kindness, blessing, awe, gratitude, and respect into the world and to other humans.
Gorilla things are these:
• The desire to rule.
• The desire to show superiority and status.
• Servility.
• Avoidance of responsibility.
• Reflexive criticism of anything new.
• Abuse of the weak or the outsider (women, children, Gypsies, Jews, immigrants, homosexuals, etc.).
God things are these:
• Producing things that preserve or enhance life.
• Invention and creativity.
• Expressing gratitude and appreciation.
• Experiencing awe and transcendence.
• Adaptability and openness.
• Improving yourself and others.
The Two Wolves: You’ve probably heard the old story of the two wolves: A young boy becomes angry and violent, and then feels guilty about his violence. He goes to his grandfather for advice. The old man says, “You have two wolves inside you: one of them is nice, the other is dangerous, and they’re fighting inside of you.” The boy then asks his grandfather, “Which one will win?” The old man replies, wisely, “Whichever one you feed.”
In the same way, humanity becomes like gorillas or gods depending on whether we build gorilla things or god things into our lives. I’m not going to tell you this is always easy, but the difficulty hardly matters: Somehow, we’ve been given a choice between becoming like gorillas or becoming like gods. No other creatures in this world have been given such a choice.
Bring god things into your life, and reject primate things. You are defining your own nature between two wildly different options, every day."
"What can we know? What are we all?
Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite,
with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"Hope..."
“Hope is always about the future. And it isn’t always good news. Sometimes, hope can imprison us with belief or expectation that something will happen in the future to change our lives. Similarly hopelessness isn’t always about despair. Hopelessness can bring us right into this very moment and answer all of life’s most difficult questions. Who am I? Where am I? What does this mean? And what now?”
- Daniel Gottlieb
"The Gods Laugh At Your Plans: Chekhov, Jaspers, And Life-changing Moments"
"The Gods Laugh At Your Plans:
Chekhov, Jaspers, And Life-changing Moments"
The most momentous and significant events in our lives are the
ones we do not see coming. Life is defined by the unforeseen.
by Jonny Thomson
"You’re in the shower one day, and you feel a lump that wasn’t there before. You’re having lunch when your phone rings with an unknown number: there’s been a crash. You come home and your husband is holding a suitcase. “I’m leaving,” he says.
Life is inevitably punctuated by sudden changes. At one moment, we might have everything laid out before us, and then an invisible wall stops us in our tracks. It might be an illness, a bereavement, an accident or some bad news, but life has a habit of mocking those who make plans. We can have our eyes on some distant shore, some faraway horizon, only to find everything come crashing down by the most unseen of events. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley” (often go wrong).
In Anton Chekhov’s remarkable play, "The Seagull," we meet a cast of characters who are all, in some way, in love with something. The young, idealistic artist Konstantin is in love with the idea of pure art. Arkadin, his mother, is in love with her fans and her celebrity. Konstantin’s girlfriend, Nina, is in love with becoming rich and famous. Everyone in the play has some kind of ambition and plan, or they live in regret over the life they chose. They rail against how misguided or mistaken their life has been, while longing for something else.
They are each like a seagull, flying over the sea or a great lake, and aiming purposefully for the shore. The view up there is wonderful. But the longer the seagull flies, the more oblivious they are to how they tire or weaken. They’re so fixated on some distant horizon that they’re at the mercy to life’s sudden changes. They’re blinkered and distracted, and the gods love nothing more than the hopeful hubris of mankind.
At one point in the play, Chekov has the character Trigorin recount a short story about a gull flying over a lake who’s, “happy and free.” But in the next moment, “a man sees her who happens to come that way, and he destroys her out of idleness.” The seagull is killed, its flight and plans annihilated, in one instant of random thoughtlessness.
Boundary Situations: While so much of our lives are spent in planning and preparation, the most transformative and significant moments are those which come at us out of the blue. These are what the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers called “boundary situations” - the ones we cannot initiate, plan, or avoid. We can only “encounter” them. These are not the mundane, everyday parts of our life - what Jaspers calls “situation being” - but rather they are things which thunder down to shake the foundations of our being. They change who we are. Although these “boundary situations” (sometimes called “limit situations”) change a bit in Jaspers’ works, he broadly sorted them into four categories:
Death: Death is the source of all our fear. We fear our loved ones dying, and we fear the moment and fact of our own death. When we know grief and despair, or when we reflect on mortality, we are transformed. We always know about death, but when it’s a boundary situation, it comes crashing into our lives like some grim scythe; an unforeseen curtain call. The awareness and subjective encounter with death transforms us.
Struggle: Life is a struggle. We work for food, compete for resources, and vie with each other for power, prestige, and status in almost every context there is. As such, there are moments when we are inevitably overcome and defeated, but also when we are victorious and champion. The final outcomes of struggle are often sudden and great, and they make us who we are.
Guilt: Hopefully, there comes a moment for each of us when we finally accept responsibility for things. For many, it comes with adulthood, but for others it comes much later still. It’s the awareness that our actions impact all around us, and our decisions echo into the world. It’s seeing the damage or tears we’ve caused. It’s to recognize that, however small or big, we’ve hurt and upset someone. It’s a profound pull of the heart that changes how we live, and it often comes on unexpectedly.
Chance: No matter how neat and ordered we might want our world to be, there will always be a messy, chaotic, and unpredictable exception. We can hope for the best, and make the plans we want, but we can never take a steering handle on the facts that will affect our existence. According to Jaspers, we each prefer, “assembling functional and explanatory structures… whose central axis lies in sufficient reason” and yet, “despite this, it is not possible for man to control and explain everything. In fact, day by day he faces events that he cannot call anything else other than coincidences or hazards.” We want order, and regularity. What we get is the mercurial and capricious throes of chance.
The best laid plans: What Chekhov’s Seagull and Jaspers’ “boundary situations” get right is that we are each much more vulnerable than we might want to allow. A wedding, three years and a fortune to plan, is ruined by a stomach bug. An hour-long journey home for Christmas winds up getting you stuck in the traffic of a freak snowstorm. A lifetime achievement is overshadowed by a national disaster. Our lives are defined by the unforeseen. We have our dreams, hopes and are flying to some faraway shore. Yet life doesn’t care. Around every corner, at every flap of our wings, everything can change."
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If you caught a glimpse of your own death,
would that knowledge change the way you live the rest of your life?"
- Paco Ahlgren, "Discipline"
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