Jim Kunstler, "The Party of Algae and 'Our Democracy'"

"The Party of Algae and 'Our Democracy'"

by Jim Kunstler

"Okay, convince me that gay-Islamic-race-communism is a “progressive” political program America is going to buy like corn flakes. The Lefty-left wants to think so, as it lurches from one peak of mental illness to an even greater one in the 130 days to the midterms. Look how successful they’ve been with open borders, defunding the police, men in the girl’s swim lane, no cash bail, sex-change surgery for kids, free-for-all elections, hatin’ on white people, and open Medicare fraud. The new re-branding strategy as “Democratic Socialism” only tells you that reality has ceased to interest them.

No, winning electoral districts stuffed with illegal aliens in bright blue cities with tiny overall voter turnouts won’t sweep the nation like love. More likely it’s a harbinger of the party’s approaching death, like the Whigs going down the drain in 1852, gurgle-gurgle. Advocating to destroy American society is a poor sales pitch. The party’s old-line leadership frantically seeks some way to neutralize the rising influence of Zohran Mamdani and his disciples, but so far nothing works. An odor of desperation fills the air.

One thing you can say about the gay-Islamic-race-communists is that they are well-organized, which is understandable since their political program resembles an ant farm, a dis-individuated collective with insectile characteristics, workers and soldiers toiling in mindless solidarity to occupy more electoral territory so as to vanquish their “oppressors,” Trump and the big feet of his capitalist minions.

Meanwhile, though, the money flows dry up as the old Big Donor Dawgs freak-out at the prospect of having their fortunes confiscated, eaten by this advancing ant-swarm, while Scott Bessent and Todd Blanche work to disassemble the giant, hive-like matrix of NGOs that, for years, laundered US taxpayer dollars through the Democratic Party’s patronage system. In New York City, Philly, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Portland, the NGOs furnished comfortable salaries for young activists churned out remorselessly by Higher Ed, but all that’s starting to look like a bygone Shangri-la, a lost world.

“Many Democratic primary voters, however, are in no mood for defensiveness. As they see it, they’ve been failed by a cautious, compromising establishment, and they’re going to overthrow it.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

Of course, the loss of those cushy jobs and perqs has pitched that young demographic into a yet greater rage, prompting them to wreak vengeance and havoc on the system that took their “entitlements” away. Activists want to do activism, which is not necessarily the same as working for a living. It’s working for an ideal, a cause - to abolish the very society based on working for a living and replace it with a parent-like, hovering, all-powerful government that provides your every need by “seizing the means of production.”

The trouble is, this has been tried before, many times in the previous century, and the track-record is discouraging, exhibit-A being the old Soviet Union, the experiment that failed. Why? Because after seizing the means of production, the state bureaucracy lacks the skills, the spirit, and the creative juice to produce much of anything, and especially to do it well. All it can actually contribute to the process is its intrinsic bureaucratic entropy and, to put it ultra-simply, entropy is just not a force for good in this world.

The Republican Party is laboring through its own parallel, but rather different sort of crack-up, a breach based more on pure enmity to President Trump’s personality than necessarily to ideas or policy. The Right still uniformly subscribes to personal liberty and economic enterprise, but factions on the right have a long-running investment in the Deep State apparatus and its protection against Mr. Trump’s impending prosecution of the so-called “grand conspiracy” (the ongoing seditious coup), as well as his dismantling of the money-flow architecture that keeps Beltway types rolling in dough. Former AG Bill Barr is exhibit-A for that faction, as when he concealed the FBI’s possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop through Trump Impeachment No. 1, when he refused to investigate ballot fraud after the 2020 election, and when he managed to let Jeffrey Epstein off himself in the Manhattan federal lockup.

Then there is Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the emptiest suit to ever occupy that job, who refuses to explain his aversion to common-sense election reform or his failure to allow confirmation of the president’s nominees to important federal posts. He is so committed to doing nothing that he makes “Joe Biden” look like a prodigy of action. They say Sen. Thune represents the old-school “country club” Republicans, but he looks too dim to even tote up an 18-hole golf card.

There are also Tucker, and Candace, and Nick Fuentes, and MTG, and other pouting and shouting former MAGA superstars throwing down against the president and his program. Tucker has exposed facets of his personality that seem every bit as cuckoo as the beliefs of the Democratic Party - his Bible literalism, his romance with space aliens, and especially his vehement antipathy for the Jews. It has all become rather unappetizing, though rumors swirl of Tucker seeking to build a whole new party to replace the GOP and MAGA. As Homey de Clown might put it: I don’t think so. . . .

Candace Owens, of course, seems clinically insane, with her year-long program of intense defamation and vilification of Charlie Kirk’s widow, as well as heer fleering Jew hatred. MTG just looks like a sore loser, and Nick Fuentes...? He’s like something that crawled out of the kitchen baseboards after the lights went out. I doubt that any of them will succeed in destroying MAGA, but they’re making the movement uncomfortable. Let’s face it: they’re embarrassing.

On the other hand, the Party of Algae and “Our Democracy” is incapable of being embarrassed, and that has been obvious for a long time based on the absurdities they attempt to foist upon our country. The Iran War seems to be fading in the rear-view mirror now, despite all their yelling about how we lost it. Oil is hovering just below $70-a-barrel as I write. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are reduced to a pitiful vaudeville act in the face of Mamdani-ism. Bernie Sanders is lost in a rain-dance for Utopia. And James Carville is on-track for a three-week vacation in the Rubber Room. Don’t bother praying for them. Just wait for gurgle."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

Joel Bowman, "A Sum Without Limit"

"A Sum Without Limit"

by Joel Bowman

“The sum of things is bounded by no limit.”

~ Lucretius, "De Rerum Natura," Book I (c. 60–55 BCE)

Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Once upon a time, in another world, a magical world, the future still felt like it was a long way away. Now, it seems like it can’t come quickly enough! One has only to pick up the paper to read stories of breathtaking ambition and profound stupidity.

Why, just in today’s New York Times...One headline asks whether “Canada is about to enter the Eurovision song contest?” Another wonders if it’s “time for a new sexual revolution?” One inquires “what’s behind those tarps at the Kennedy Center?” Another fearless mind probes “where has all the cottage cheese gone?” Behold, dear reader, the pressing concerns of our day! And lo! What’s this?

Rockets and Riches: No sooner had the world minted its very first trillionaire, in Mr. Elon Musk, when his “13-figure club card” was unceremoniously revoked. Naturally, the green-eyed papers are delighted by the demotion: "Elon Musk’s Net Worth Drops $350 Billion In Massive SpaceX Selloff" ~ gloats Forbes. "Elon Musk loses trillionaire status as global tech rout hits SpaceX" ~ crows the BBC. "Musk loses trillionaire status as SpaceX shares ‘come down to earth with a bump’" ~ gushes The Guardian.

And just for good measure, via a report from the kind of people who study such things, we learn that xAI is “leaning into explicit content.” Here’s Forbes, “psst, passing is on”:

Grok’s Traffic Is Mostly Driven By Adult Content, Report Says: The report claims xAI is actively doubling down on its explicit video and image-generation tools and that adult-content dominance extends into Grok’s coding model, which The Information reports frequently receives requests for pornographic material. So the man is into big rockets, cyber trucks and nudie pics? A man’s gotta have a hobby, doesn’t he? (Your editor enjoys slow train rides, comfy old sweaters and dusty books. Ahem...)

Leaving the Freudian psychoanalysts to their own diagnoses, we pause only to marvel at the kind of civilization that would make such a fellow the richest person – by a wide margin – in its long and sordid history? Oh, the times we live in! Speaking of...

Political Animals: In Wednesday’s Note, we left you with a humble suggestion for a new measurement of time: Human Years. Instead of measuring time by days, months, years and so forth, we mused, perhaps we might think of it in terms of “aggregate human experience.” Or calendar time multiplied by the number of human beings living it. And why not? Geologists have deep time. Astronomers have cosmic time. Physicists have space time.

What about us? We wide-eyed observers of the passing parade? A 12-hour clock is useful for making sure you arrive at the train station on time. A monthly planner is helpful when booking a vacation. A calendar year is practical for organizing your Christmas cards and counting the candles on your daughter’s birthday cake. But what about the collective, human experience? What about considering the broad sweep of civilization itself?

How does a day planner... or a news cycle... or a sun dial... help us understand the rise and fall of empires, the decay of their currencies, the great cycles of history itself? They can help us pinpoint a moment in relative time... but what if, as the population grows, history literally speeds up?

When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, back in 49 BC, the world population stood at about 170 million, hardly more people than voted in the last US presidential election. That we have 8.2 billion men, women and children roaming the planet today... about 48x the population alive during Caesar’s day... is only part of the story.

Human beings, as Aristotle so keenly observed, are by nature “political animals.” By that he did not mean that we are all Republicans or Democrats, Tories or Whigs, RINOs or libtards, but rather that we are essentially creatures of the polis... the broader civic community that helps shape our lives. That includes our institutions, our laws and customs, our liberties and obligations, our cultures and habits, as well as our public deliberations, general elections and other such popular, mass delusions.

In this way, civilization is less like a stack of building blocks and more like a vast network of interconnected individuals, exchanging information across time and space, through billions of interactions, from one End of the World to another.

Laws and Large Numbers: Which brings us to another piece of the puzzle: Metcalf’s Law, or what armchair economists sometimes refer to as the “network effect.” Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, distilled his proposition as following:

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. The basic idea here rests on the concept of non-linearity. You throw a Fourth of July cocktail party. One sympathetic friend arrives. Early. They’ve created one possible two-way line of conversation. Then the second guest arrives. Now you have three possible pairings. After the fourth, you have six. The fifth, ten. And so on... By the time fifty of your closest mates are gathered on your back lawn, you’ve got over a thousand (1,225) possible duos.

Thus, under Metcalf’s Law, value is said to grow quadratically, so that:

Guest #10 adds 9 new potential connections.

Guest #100 adds 99 new potential connections.

Guest #1,000 adds 999 new possible connections>

And if we keep counting to include all possible connections – pairs, trios, small groups, large groups, whole teams, etcetera... right up to all 50 guests shouting at one another simultaneously – the possible combinations increase to...

several trillion (1.126 quadrillion, or 1,125,899,906,842,572).

The same mind-boggling math is true across various other kinds of networks, too... whether it be communications, operating systems, social media, dynamic marketplaces, payment systems and even the vast network called civilization itself. Not only does each additional participant bring their own individual value, but they increase the potential value of every preceding person in the entire community.

Across the Rubicon: In Caesar’s day, that community fanned across the “known world.” Today, with nearly fifty times as many people and a density of connections unimaginable to the ancients, civilization has grown into the largest and most intricate information network ever assembled.

During the five minutes it takes you to scan today’s pithy Note, for example, the world’s population will grow by approximately 650 people. Using Metcalf’s Law, and factoring in our existing population, that’s 5.33 trillion new potential human pairs created just while you finish your cup of coffee/glass of wine.

Every minute... of every hour... of every day... unfathomable waves of budding partnerships, lurking rivalries, nascent collaborations, and looming conflicts are building on humanity’s horizon. And if we expand our counting as we did for your hypothetical garden party, to include every new possible grouping of three, four, five, etc. ... all the way up to an 8.2 billion person (plus 650 newbies) collaboration? The number of new possible human connections created by these new earthly arrivals grows to hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe. No kidding. Surely one of ‘em can figure out where all the cottage cheese went, no?"

:Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."

https://joelbowman.substack.com/

"3-18 Days: The Practical Diesel Buffer… Does It Preclude Bombing Iran?"

Click image for larger size.

"3-18 Days: The Practical Diesel Buffer…

Does It Preclude Bombing Iran?"

by Larry C. Johnson

"I am indebted to my new friend who is an energy expert ,and currently working in the Persian Gulf, for explaining why the US is facing a very serious risk of a domestic energy crisis. If ignorance is bliss then I’ve spent my last 71 years happily believing that the conversion of oil to fuel for cars, trucks and planes was a simple process. Boy, was I wrong. The United States is facing a potential crisis surrounding the production of diesel and aviation fuel. According to this person, who has 35 years experience in the oil industry:

The U.S. does not have a month of freely deliverable diesel in a stress event. The headline EIA number shows 106.1 million barrels of total distillate fuel oil stocks and 3.631 million b/d of four-week average distillate product supplied, implying 29.2 days on paper. But that national inventory includes barrels in pipelines, refineries, terminals, regional storage, and operational positions that cannot all be allocated immediately to critical distribution hubs.

Operational estimate: applying a 45%-60% practical deliverability factor to total distillate stocks leaves roughly 48-64 million barrels of usable, allocable diesel-equivalent supply. At 3.631 million b/d, that is approximately 13.1-17.5 days, rounded to 13-18 days.

So let me explain how he reached this conclusion. Think of the diesel buffer as the gap between when supply stops flowing and when the economy starts breaking. Thirteen days is not a comfortable cushion - it’s essentially no cushion at all, because the economy runs on diesel in ways that cannot be deferred.

Diesel is not a lifestyle fuel. It moves every truck on every highway, powers every locomotive, runs every tractor during planting and harvest, and drives every piece of heavy construction equipment. When a family decides gas prices are too high, they drive less. When a freight company decides diesel is too expensive or too scarce, it cannot defer the shipment - the grocery store shelves just go empty. Diesel demand is largely inelastic. The economy cannot negotiate with it the way it can with gasoline.

Let’s use the worst case: 13 days. Thirteen days means that if anything disrupts the supply chain - a refinery outage, a pipeline failure, a crude supply disruption - the effects reach the real economy within two weeks. There is no meaningful time to arrange alternatives. A tanker from a replacement crude source takes longer than 13 days to arrive. A refinery turnaround takes longer than 13 days to complete. The buffer is shorter than the lead time for almost every possible remedy.

The geography makes it worse. The 13-day figure is a national average, which means some regions have more and some have less. The Southeast is particularly exposed, being heavily dependent on the Colonial Pipeline, which is itself a single point of failure that demonstrated its criticality when it was shut down for six days in 2021. Six days is nearly half the total national buffer.

What about aviation fuel? Here is where the two problems collide mechanically, and why it creates a genuine bind rather than just a theoretical tradeoff. Diesel and jet fuel are not different products from different parts of the refinery. They are competing claims on the same physical fraction of crude oil - the middle distillate cut that comes off the atmospheric distillation column in the same boiling range. Every refinery scheduling decision is, at its core, a daily argument about how to divide that fraction between the two products.

With a 13-day diesel buffer, the refinery cannot let diesel output fall. The economic and political consequences of a diesel shortage materialize too quickly and too severely. Diesel production becomes, in practical terms, the floor that cannot be breached.

Now layer in a wartime demand for military jet fuel. JP-8 is pulled from the same middle distillate fraction. The military’s operational requirements are also non-negotiable - aircraft do not fly on goodwill. So you now have two inelastic demands competing for one fixed supply of middle distillate from each barrel of crude processed.

The refinery’s response to this bind is constrained in every direction: It cannot simply run more crude. Crude supply itself may be disrupted - this is precisely the scenario the Persian Gulf blockade creates. And even if crude is available, refinery throughput is limited by physical capacity. You cannot run 110% of nameplate capacity.

It cannot shift to lighter crude to get more barrels. Light crude produces proportionally more gasoline and less middle distillate. Running lighter crude when you need diesel and jet fuel makes the allocation problem worse, not better, because you are shrinking the pool of middle distillate that both are fighting over.

It cannot get more middle distillate out of sour crude than the chemistry allows. A barrel of sour crude from the Persian Gulf typically yields around 20–25% middle distillates by volume. That fraction is fixed by the molecular composition of the oil. You can optimize within a range, but you cannot double the yield through operational choices.

Hydrogen becomes a choke point. Making JP-8 from sour crude to military specification requires substantial hydrogen - for sulfur removal, for aromatic ring saturation to meet smoke point requirements, and for freeze point management. Making ULSD from the same sour crude also requires substantial hydrogen - even more, to reach the ≤15 ppm sulfur specification. A refinery’s hydrogen generation capacity is finite. Every cubic foot of hydrogen diverted to jet fuel processing is a cubic foot unavailable for diesel desulfurization. At the margin, maximizing JP-8 production makes the diesel quality problem worse, not just the diesel volume problem.

The certification delay adds time pressure. Switching refinery configuration between maximizing diesel and maximizing jet fuel is not instant. It takes days to a week to restabilize the unit operations and certify the product meets specification. In a 13-day buffer environment, a week of transition time is not a casual cost - it represents a material fraction of the entire safety margin consumed by the act of reconfiguring production.

Under normal peacetime conditions, refineries optimize their middle distillate split based on market prices - jet fuel commands a premium, so they lean toward jet. The diesel buffer stays comfortable and the system works.

The Iran war changes all of that simultaneously in three directions at once: First, the diesel buffer starts shrinking. Persian Gulf sour crude - even though only 8% of US imports - supplied roughly 17% of the medium-sour grades that US complex refiners prefer for middle distillate production. That quality gap is not easily filled by Canadian heavy or domestic light sweet crude without refinery adjustment. Diesel output drops or becomes more expensive per barrel just as the buffer needs defending.

Second, military JP-8 demand spikes. A naval campaign in the Persian Gulf, sustained air operations, and a mobilized logistics tail consume enormous quantities of aviation fuel. The military doesn’t queue behind civilian demand - it has priority. So the refinery is simultaneously being squeezed from both ends of the middle distillate barrel: the military is claiming more jet fuel from the top, and the diesel buffer is bleeding out from the bottom.

Third, the refinery cannot easily solve this by running harder. As explained earlier, maximising JP-8 from sour crude requires pulling a lighter, narrower distillate cut. This is precisely the action that reduces diesel yield - the heavier tail of the middle distillate that would have become diesel is either lost to the vacuum unit or downcycled to fuel oil. The more aggressively refineries respond to military jet fuel demand, the faster the diesel buffer erodes.

This creates a three-way constraint with no clean solution:

1. Protect the diesel buffer → limit JP-8 output → constrain military operations.

2. Maximize JP-8 for military → draw down diesel buffer → trigger civilian supply cascade before the war ends.

3. Try to do both → run refineries at maximum utilization → lose the ability to flex for any further shock, with no margin for equipment failures, maintenance, or a second disruption

The 13-day buffer is what makes this bind acute rather than manageable. With sixty days of diesel inventory, a refinery operator can tolerate shifting the middle distillate split toward jet fuel for several weeks without civilian consequences. With thirteen days, the same shift starts a visible countdown almost immediately. Now do you understand why Donald Trump signed the MoU with Iran?

If the United States decides to renew its bombing campaign of Iran, that would likely trigger the stress event outlined above. Based on that fact I believe that Donald Trump, notwithstanding his threats, will not run the risk of crashing the US economy by bombing Iran again."

- https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/

As the great Mogambo Guru said, "We're so freakin' doomed!"

And we are...

Gerald Celente, "Nasdaq Down, Inflation Up, Main Street Suffers"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 6/25/26

"Nasdaq Down, Inflation Up, Main Street Suffers"

"In this episode of Trends in the News, Gerald Celente breaks down the economic warning signals the mainstream won’t tell you. As the Nasdaq slides and inflation continues to climb, the real story isn’t on Wall Street - it’s unfolding on Main Street, where businesses and consumers are feeling the squeeze. From rising costs and shrinking purchasing power to market volatility and deepening economic uncertainty, Celente connects the dots between financial market turbulence and the everyday struggles facing working Americans. Who’s really winning in this economy - and who’s paying the price? Tune in as Celente exposes the forces driving today’s economic chaos and what it means for your future."

 -  https://trendsjournal.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"You'll Never Own a Home in America, Here’s Why"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 6/25/26

"You'll Never Own a Home in America, Here’s Why"

"The math stopped adding up sometime around 2021. A house that cost four years of income now costs eight and the gap is the whole story. I went looking for the moment American homeownership broke, and I kept hitting the same wall: the inventory. There are roughly 700,000 homes for sale in a country that needs millions more. Builders never recovered from 2008, and the ones they do put up are bigger, pricier, aimed at the buyer who already owns. So the shortage isn't an accident of the market. It's the foundation everything else is built on. Then I traced where your money actually goes. 

On a 30-year loan at today's rates, you don't pay for the house first, you pay the bank first. For the opening decade, the overwhelming share of every check is interest, not equity. I ran the numbers on a median home and watched the borrower hand a lender more in interest than the original price of the house. You're not buying a home. You're renting money, and the rent is brutal. Now layer in wages. Adjusted for what things actually cost, the typical paycheck has barely moved in 40 years while home prices ran off the chart. I overlaid the two lines and the divergence is almost violent , productivity climbing, pay flat, prices vertical. When I stacked rent against a mortgage payment in most major metros, renting came out cheaper month-to-month. Which means the people calling renters irresponsible have the math exactly backwards. That's the part that reframes everything: the system isn't failing to put young people into homes, it's working precisely as designed to keep them out. 

The median first-time buyer is now pushing 40. A generation that did everything right is being filtered out one credit decision at a time, and the lever that decides it is a three-digit number most people never learn to control. So I dug into that number, the credit score, because it's the one variable in this whole machine you can still move. And below that score sits a bigger question I'm still chasing: who decided a country could price its own children out of the ground they were born on?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Earth Blue"

Full screen recommended.

Deuter, "Earth Blue"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"As far as ghosts go, Mirach's Ghost isn't really that scary. Mirach's Ghost is just a faint, fuzzy galaxy, well known to astronomers, that happens to be seen nearly along the line-of-sight to Mirach, a bright star. Centered in this star field, Mirach is also called Beta Andromedae. 

About 200 light-years distant, Mirach is a red giant star, cooler than the Sun but much larger and so intrinsically much brighter than our parent star. In most telescopic views, glare and diffraction spikes tend to hide things that lie near Mirach and make the faint, fuzzy galaxy look like a ghostly internal reflection of the almost overwhelming starlight. Still, appearing in this sharp image just above and to the right of Mirach, Mirach's Ghost is cataloged as galaxy NGC 404 and is estimated to be some 10 million light-years away."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

"What the Rain Found Them Doing"

Full screen recommended.

Three-Quarter Town,

"What the Rain Found Them Doing"

"In Three-Quarter Town, rain never arrives in a hurry. It finds an old woman by the window, a black cat curled on a blanket, sheep waiting patiently beneath the eaves, and quiet hands still busy with tea, music, letters, and small familiar work. Some stay inside by the fire. Some step out to check the barn. Some simply watch the rain move across the rooftops until evening comes. A gentle rainy-day story about solitude, companionship, and the little things people keep doing when the world turns soft and gray."

Native Elder, "Why Real Freedom Disappeared and Nobody Noticed"

Full screen recommended.

Native Elder,

"Why Real Freedom Disappeared and Nobody Noticed"

Delta King's Blues, "Too Old for This Nonsense"

Full screen recommended.

Delta King's Blues,

"Too Old for This Nonsense"

"I’ve seen enough, heard enough, and lived long enough to know what ain’t worth my time. “Too Old for This Nonsense” is a witty, straight-shootin’ Delta King’s Blues tune about patience running thin, wisdom kicking in, and finally learning when to walk away from foolishness. A laid-back, no-nonsense acoustic guitar sets the groove like a man shaking his head and moving on. The harmonica answers with sly, knowing bends, full of hard-earned perspective and just a touch of attitude. The rhythm rolls slow and confident, built for folks who stopped arguing with nonsense years ago. This is blues with wisdom and a backbone. For people who learned that peace is worth more than being right. The older I get, the less room I got for drama."

The Poet: William Stafford, ”Today”

”Today”

“The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere

a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays

come down. A tomorrow has come. Open

your hands, lift them: morning rings

all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.

Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,

you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

And it is already begun, the chord

that will shiver glass, the song full of time

bending above us. Outside, a sign:

a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,

“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant

has passed through town, widening streets, touching

the ground, shouldering away the stars.”

- William Stafford

The Daily "Near You?"

Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico. Thanks for stopping by!

Bill Bonner, "The Great Beyond"

"The Great Beyond"

by Bill Bonner

"The heart has its stories… often best left untold. Jealousy. Hate. Betrayal. Desperation. Our beat is money. But on its own, money is worthless. It is the heart, with its wants and needs, it's vanities and mysteries, that gives money meaning. So, today, we will dig a bit further into the mush and muscle, in the hopes that we might learn something.

State-Sanctioned Suicide: An old friend, in Switzerland, committed suicide. This was a death of an entirely different sort. Premeditated. Assisted. Sanctioned by the government. Here’s the report (from a family member): “Marie got in touch with an organization called ‘Exit.’ Normally, they help terminally ill people kill themselves. But they will also do it for people who are severely depressed. Marie had cut herself off from her two children. I think it was over money. She had become a recluse. And she was very unhappy.

She called me about a month ago to say that she had contacted the Exit people and was planning to commit suicide. I didn’t know what to do. Or how to take it. She could be melodramatic. And very emotional. I figured she was just telling me how depressed she was. I knew she was taking antidepressants. I thought she had it under control. Then, she called to say she had a date – about a week ahead. She seemed very determined. Calm. Her mind was made up."

Apparently, the Exit group did interviews with family and friends to make sure that she was in her right mind and was unlikely to ever recover from her depression. Then, they came to her apartment, along with a policeman as a witness; they gave her a pill. I heard from her friend, who must have been with her, that she was smoking a cigarette, calmly and even making jokes. Then, she took the pill, fell asleep and died. Rest in peace. Another family member reported that the end was “serene”… and that “it was what she wanted.”

Total Control: But the news left others deeply disturbed. One offered a comment: “Rest in peace? What kind of peace is that? She was obviously at war with her own children… and it tormented her… drove her crazy… so crazy that either she wanted to escape by killing herself… or wanted to torment them by removing all possibility of a reconciliation. Either way, it was the wrong thing to do. Not just ‘wrong’ like a mistake… but wrong – sinful… selfish and mean."

That’s what is wrong with our whole modern world,” she continued. “It has lost its soul. Imagine, people who come to your house… give you a pill… and watch you die. What’s wrong with these people? Didn’t anyone try to stop her? Didn’t anyone try to save her? Suppose you saw someone getting ready to jump off a bridge? Would you just say ‘oh well, that’s their business’? And didn’t it occur to anyone that killing people – even people who say they want to be killed – is wrong?

Look… I have no idea whether Marie should live or die. But neither do they. It’s one thing when people suddenly shoot themselves and there’s nothing you can do about it. But coming to her apartment with a pill?

This is so disappointing… and so sad. These people think they can make life or death decisions based on interviews and psychological profiles. How did they know what was really in her heart… or what Marie’s suicide would do to her children… or her friends? Why did they think she had any choice in the matter? She didn’t choose to be born; who gave her the right to choose to die? Those are things we shouldn’t decide for ourselves. How did they know whether she was meant to live or die… or whether she might some day see a burning bush… and get down on her knees to beg forgiveness… beg her children and her god… to take that iron corset off her heart and let her live?

I find it just overwhelmingly sad… crushingly sad… as if there really were no God at all… no real grace or beauty… no hope of redemption… as if we were now all at the mercy of soulless technicians with their crackpot theories on their power trips… with their charts and graphs… telling us the planet can only be 1.5 degrees warmer… or that we should have 2% inflation, not more, not less… and telling us when we can go a restaurant… and giving children vaccines that they don’t need… and censoring what we say…and insisting that we put their medicines into our bodies… you’re always going on about the Fed monkeying with interest rates and printing fake money… and I guess that’s part of it too… they think they can control everything and everybody…and now, they think they have the right to tell us who can die… and when."

“Very sad.”

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

"From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You"

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. 

Infrared photograph. NASA /Hubble Space Telescope.

"From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You,

with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne"

by Maria Popova

"We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be the other word for God - the weakest of the four fundamental forces, yet the great cosmic compactor that made the first atoms cohere into a common center to form the first star: an immense ball of gas, at the core of which was a hydrogen sphere that eventually reached pressures of millions of atmospheres and heated up to millions of degrees. These extreme conditions triggered a new phenomenon in the cosmos - the first nuclear fusion reactions: When two hydrogen atoms collide with immense force, neutrons are transferred from one nucleus to the other, making some atoms larger. After a series of such collisions, a nucleus with two protons forms and the second element - helium - is born. As the star ignites, illuminating the austere darkness of pure spacetime surrounding it, it keeps burning its hydrogen to make more helium. The fusion accelerates, forging carbon, then neon, then oxygen, and so forth across the periodic table, turning the star into a kind of onion with layers of fusion reactions.

Most of the first twenty-six elements in the periodic table - the elements composing almost everything we can touch and see - were created by nuclear fusion in individual stars. If you could tag any individual atom in your body and follow it backward in time, across all the other matter it composed before it became yours - your mother’s body, the food your mother ate, the soil in which that food grew, the geologic strata ground down by the oceans to make that soil - you could trace it all the way back to the core of a particular star that lived and died billions of years ago: an actual atom that is now in you, having prevailed over the infinite probabilities by which it could have ended up in someone else.

To this Rube Goldberg machine of chance you owe all of your particularity - alter any part of that cosmic genealogy, and you would have ended up as someone else.

The victory march of our particularity against probability comes alive in a short, dazzling poem by Ruth Stone (June 8, 1915–November 19, 2011). Stone was six and enchanted by her grandmother’s dictionary when she began writing poetry. She was eight-four and the grandmother of seven when she received major recognition as a poet. By the time she died, having lived nearly a century and survived her husband’s suicide, she had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award with her singular poems bridging the domestic and the cosmic, lensing the world of love and loss, of rapture and regret, through the world of galaxies and particles - poems shimmering with the spirit of The Universe in Verse (which is now a book).

This poem, found in "What Love Comes To" (public library) - Stone’s final poetry collection, published just before her death at age 96 - was read at the seventh annual Universe in Verse by David Byrne:

"Strings"

by Ruth Stone

"We pop into life the way

particles pop in and out

of the continuum.

We are a seething mass

of probability.

And probably I love you.

The evil of larvae

and the evil of stars

are a formula for the future.

Some bodies can

thrust their arms into

a flame and be instantly

cured of this world,

while others sicken.

Why think, little brother

like the moon, spit out like

a broken tooth.

“Oh,” groans the world.

The outer planets,

the fizzing sun, here we come

with our luggage.

Look at the clever things

we have made out of

a few building blocks -

O fabulous continuum."

Follow the continuum forward into the science of what happens when we die, then revisit David Byrne’s animated reading of Pattiann Rogers’s magnificent poem “Achieving Perspective,” with art by Maira Kalman, and Nick Cave’s animated reading of “But We Had Music.”

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

"Live All You Can..."

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much

matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.

If you haven't had that, what have you had?"

- Henry James

"Life Is Hard?"

"Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow,

though it breaks every bone in our bodies."

- Edward Abbey

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," 

I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"

- Sydney Harris

Paulo Coelho, "Heaven and Hell"

"Heaven and Hell"

by Paulo Coelho

"A man, his horse and his dog were traveling down a road. When they were passing by a gigantic tree, a bolt of lightning struck and they all fell dead on the spot. But the man did not realize that he had already left this world, so he went on walking with his two animals; sometimes the dead take time to understand their new condition…

The journey was very long, uphill, the sun was strong and they were covered in sweat and very thirsty. They were desperately in need of water. At a bend in the road they spotted a magnificent gateway, all in marble, which led to a square paved with blocks of gold and with a fountain in the center that spouted forth crystalline water. The traveler went up to the man guarding the gate.

“Good morning. What is this beautiful place?” “This is heaven.” “How good to have reached heaven, we’re ever so thirsty.” “You can come in and drink all you want.” “My horse and my dog are thirsty too.” “So sorry, but animals aren’t allowed in here.”

The man was very disappointed because his thirst was great, but he could not drink alone; he thanked the man and went on his way. After traveling a lot, they arrived exhausted at a farm whose entrance was marked with an old doorway that opened onto a tree-lined dirt road.

A man was lying down in the shadow of one of the trees, his head covered with a hat, perhaps asleep. “Good morning,” said the traveler. “We are very thirsty – me, my horse and my dog.” “There is a spring over in those stones,” said the man, pointing to the spot. “Drink as much as you like.” The man, the horse and the dog went to the spring and quenched their thirst. Then the traveler went back to thank the man.

“By the way, what’s this place called?” “Heaven.” “Heaven? But the guard at the marble gate back there said that was heaven!” “That’s not heaven, that’s hell.” The traveler was puzzled. “You’ve got to stop this! All this false information must cause enormous confusion!” The man smiled: “Not at all. As a matter of fact they do us a great favor. Because over there stay all those who are even capable of abandoning their best friends…”

- http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Does Anyone Know..."

"All sins, of course, deserve to be treated with mercy: we all do what we can, and life is too hard and too cruel for us to condemn anyone for failing in this area. Does anyone know what he himself would do if faced with the worst and how much truth could he bear under such circumstances?"

- Andre Comte-Sponville

Joe South, "Walk A Mile In My Shoes"

"Here And Now..."

“That we can never know,” answered the wolf angrily. “That’s for the future. But what we can know is the importance of what we owe to the present. Here and now, and nowhere else. For nothing else exists, except in our minds. What we owe to ourselves, and to those we’re bound to. And we can at least hope to make a better future, for everything.”

- David Clement Davies

"Cognition Enhancer For Clearer and Faster Thinking"

Full screen recommended.

"Cognition Enhancer For Clearer and Faster Thinking"

by Jason Lewis - Mind Amend

"This is a high-intensity audio brainwave entrainment session, using isochronic tones. Listen to this when you need a strong burst of intense focus to concentrate and study things like advanced mathematics, scientific formulas, financial analysis or any other complex mental activity. Listen to this track with your eyes open while doing the task/activity you want to focus on. Use this session in the morning, afternoon or early evening, to train your brain for better cognition, focus and thought processing. You can either sit somewhere quiet and comfortable with your eyes closed and give your brain a nice workout, or you can also listen to this while doing an activity that requires a boost in concentration.

Headphones are NOT REQUIRED for this video. Although headphones are not required you may find they produce a more intense effect, because they help to block out distracting external sounds.

"Cognition Enhancer Extended Version"

"Isochronic tones are a fast and effective audio-based way to stimulate your brain. Among many of the benefits, they can help improve focus, relaxation, energy levels, sleep and more, without taking drugs or needing any special equipment. What isochronic tones essentially do is guide your dominant brainwave activity to a different frequency while you are listening to them, allowing you to influence and change your mental state and how you feel."

I strongly suggest you read Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Isochronic Tones –

How They Work, the Benefits and the Research"

This is a brainwave entrainment audio session using isochronic tones combined with music. The isochronic tones are the repetitive beats you can hear on top of the music throughout the track. If you are new to this type of audio brainwave entrainment, find out how isochronic tones work and how they compare to binaural beats here: 

- https://www.mindamend.com

○

Full screen highly recommended.

“Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song

Reduces Anxiety by Up to 65 Percent”

By Melanie Curtin

“Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves. So here’s a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth. Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one’s health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.

Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck. The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.

According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date. In fact, listening to that one song- “Weightless”- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants’ overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates. That is remarkable.

Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created “Weightless”, Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener’s heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza.

In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you’ve got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.

Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, “‘Weightless’ was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous.” So don’t drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:

10. “We Can Fly,” by Rue du Soleil (Café Del Mar)

9. “Canzonetta Sull’aria,” by Mozart

8. “Someone Like You,” by Adele

7. “Pure Shores,” by All Saints

6. “Please Don’t Go,” by Barcelona

5. “Strawberry Swing,” by Coldplay

4. “Watermark,” by Enya

3. “Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix),” by DJ Shah

2. “Electra,” by Airstream

1. “Weightless,” by Marconi Union

I made a public playlist of all of them on Spotify that runs about 50 minutes (it’s also downloadable).”

- http://www.stumbleupon.com/