Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 5/31/16
"Extremely Contagious Virus Now In All 50 States"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Sunday, May 31, 2026
"Beautiful Relaxing Music - Calming Piano & Guitar Music"
Full screen highly recommended.
"Beautiful Relaxing Music - Calming Piano & Guitar Music"
"Beautiful relaxing music by Soothing Relaxation. Enjoy calming piano and
guitar music composed by Peder B. Helland, set to stunning nature videos."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“This shock wave plows through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Moving toward to bottom of this beautifully detailed color composite, the thin, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge on. Cataloged as NGC 2736, its narrow appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula.
About 5 light-years long and a mere 800 light-years away, the Pencil Nebula is only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. The Vela remnant itself is around 100 light-years in diameter and is the expanding debris cloud of a star that was seen to explode about 11,000 years ago. Initially, the shock wave was moving at millions of kilometers per hour but has slowed considerably, sweeping up surrounding interstellar gas.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120924.html
"Could Be Worse..."
"I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."
- Jim Butcher
"Dig your way out", they said...
The Poet: John O'Donohue, "In These Times "
"In These Times "
"In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety,
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down,
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home."
~ John O'Donohue,
from "To Bless the Space Between Us "
"The Harvest of Chaos"
"The Harvest of Chaos"
by The Macro Butler
"Confucius never studied climate models, yet he would have understood ENSO immediately: when the Pacific Ocean loses balance, the whole village argues with the weather. El Niño warms the waters and sends droughts, floods, and disappointed farmers across the globe; La Niña cools them and simply redistributes the misery with equal generosity. In normal times, trade winds keep the Pacific in harmony - warm in the west, cool in the east - but like an overconfident central banker, nature eventually pushes too far in one direction. Scientists now track ENSO with satellites, equations, and supercomputers, yet the system still behaves like an ancient dragon: predictable enough to respect, unpredictable enough to humble mankind every few years.
Click image for larger size.
ENSO behaves like a dysfunctional family running the planet’s weather. El Niño, the “warm child,” arrives around Christmas, weakens the Pacific trade winds, and proceeds to flood Peru, dry out Australia, confuse monsoons, and make grain traders age prematurely.
Click image for larger size.
La Niña, the “cool sister,” pushes the warm water back west, bringing heavy rains to Asia and Australia while upgrading Atlantic hurricanes from “seasonal inconvenience” to “annual subscription service.” Between them sits the neutral phase — the climatic equivalent of a politician promising stability before chaos resumes. Scientists can track these mood swings better than ever, but ENSO still refuses to follow a proper calendar, reminding humanity that nature enjoys keeping both farmers and economists slightly uncomfortable.
Agriculture is essentially humanity’s oldest weather derivative: every spring, farmers place a giant leveraged bet that rain will fall, the sun will behave, and temperatures will avoid having an existential crisis. ENSO enjoys sabotaging this arrangement. El Niño and La Niña can drown fields, delay planting, block harvests, wreck transport networks, or simply turn fertile land into an expensive dust collection. Too little rain shrivels crops, too much rain rots them, and a heatwave during pollination can erase an entire harvest faster than a hedge fund blowing up on margin. In farming, the difference between abundance and disaster is often just a few badly timed weeks of weather - and ENSO has a remarkable talent for arriving precisely at the wrong moment.
ENSO treats global agriculture like a rotating game of climatic musical chairs: every crop eventually loses a seat. Wheat may survive in one hemisphere while Australian fields bake like forgotten pizza dough; corn, famously dramatic during pollination, can see yields collapse after a few badly timed hot weeks in the US or Brazilian growing belts. Soybeans follow a similar script, with Argentina and Brazil regularly discovering that Mother Nature dislikes concentration risk as much as portfolio managers do. Rice, however, remains the true geopolitical powder keg. Since billions depend on Asian monsoons to flood their paddies at precisely the right moment, El Niño can turn rice markets into a global stress test, while La Niña often replaces drought with biblical flooding. On average, a strong El Niño trims global cereal production by only 2–4%, but averages are the economist’s favourite way of hiding the fact that some farmers enjoy bumper crops while others begin researching bankruptcy lawyers.
The real danger of a Super El Niño is not that one farmer has a bad season — it is that the entire planet seems to misplace its harvest at the same time. Australia’s wheat dries out, India’s monsoon weakens, Brazil’s soybeans suffer, and the US Corn Belt starts resembling a convection oven. In normal times, markets can substitute one crop for another, like diners reluctantly switching from steak to chicken when prices rise. But when wheat, corn, soybeans, and rice all surge together, substitution becomes an economist’s fairy tale. Scarcity stops being an inconvenience and starts becoming a geopolitical event, with the poorest consumers discovering that inflation is far less amusing when it appears on a dinner plate rather than a Bloomberg terminal.
The Super El Niño of 1877–1878 was nature’s reminder that civilization is only a few failed harvests away from panic, and that politicians armed with ideology can sometimes be more dangerous than drought itself. Monsoons collapsed across India and China, Brazil’s northeast turned to dust, and famine spread through much of the developing world, ultimately contributing to tens of millions of deaths. Yet El Niño was merely the spark; the true accelerant was a Victorian system that continued exporting food while people starved, proving that free markets can occasionally display the bedside manners of a tax collector at a funeral. Today’s world has better logistics, satellites, and humanitarian agencies, but large parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East still remain one severe climate shock away from..."
Visit The Macro Butler Website here: https://themacrobutler.com/
"Permadrought: 75 Percent Of The Global Population Lives In A Country That Is Being Affected By “The Great Drying”
"Permadrought: 75 Percent Of The Global Population Lives
In A Country That Is Being Affected By “The Great Drying”
by Michael Snyder
"Our planet is drying out at a pace that is unlike anything we have ever seen before. Once massive lakes are rapidly shrinking, once mighty rivers are steadily dwindling, and colossal underground aquifers are being pumped dry all over the world. This is an absolutely enormous problem, because very soon we simply will not have enough fresh water to support 8 billion people. In fact, drought conditions are severely affecting global crop production in 2026. If current trends continue, it will become increasingly difficult to grow food. In other words, if the land on our planet doesn’t stop drying out there is no way that we will be able to avoid an era of widespread global famines.
This isn’t something that just started happening recently. Over the last several decades, the world has been losing fresh water “at an unprecedented rate”… The world is losing fresh water at an unprecedented rate, two decades’ worth of satellite data has revealed. Measurements from NASA’s twin GRACE satellites and GRACE follow-on missions have shown that since 2002, the amount of land suffering from water loss has been increasing year on year by twice the area of the state of California. That includes the loss of water from surface reservoirs such as lakes and rivers and underground aquifers, which are an important source of drinking water around the globe.
Mega-drying regions have emerged across the Northern Hemisphere with the worst-hit areas extending across the western coast of North America, Southwestern North America and Central America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Just look at what has been happening to the Great Salt Lake. Once upon a time it was absolutely gigantic. But now it has lost approximately 73 percent of its water and approximately 60 percent of its surface area.
Of course this isn’t just happening in the United States. One study found that 75 percent of the population of the world currently lives in a country that is being affected by “continental drying”… Much of the Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying,” affecting the countries containing 75% of the world’s population, the new research shows. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, examined changes to Earth’s total supply of fresh water and found that nearly 6 billion people live in the 101 countries facing a net decline in water supply, posing a “critical, emerging threat to humanity.”
I was stunned when I first read that. If 6 billion people live in nations that are steadily drying out, what does that mean for the future of humanity?
We aren’t just talking about a few isolated deserts. The United Nations is telling us that excluding Antarctica, drylands now account for more than 40 percent of all the land on this planet. And more than three-quarters of all the land on this planet has been getting drier over the past 30 years… As Earth continues to warm, more and more of the planet is becoming dry. A 2024 UN report found that in the last three decades, over three-fourths of all the world’s land became drier than it had been in the previous 30 years.
Drylands now comprise 40.6% of all global land (excluding Antarctica). In addition, the number of people living in drylands doubled over the last 30 years to 2.3 billion, which represents over 25% of the global population. In a worst-case climate change scenario, this number could climb to 5 billion by 2100.
Many of us have just come to accept that drought is a normal part of life. If you look at the latest U.S. Drought Monitor map, it is a nightmare. Right now, more than 60 percent of the continental United States is experiencing at least some level of drought… As of May 26, 2026, 50.77% of the United States and Puerto Rico and 60.77% of the Lower 48 states are in drought.
Some of the areas that are being hit the hardest are where we grow our food. In particular, wheat farmers in the U.S. are having a very challenging time this year… It’s a perfect storm of terrible conditions for wheat farmers this year. Drought, dramatic swings in temperature, the skyrocketing price of fertilizer and diesel, plus multiple viruses affecting wheat have all led to one of the most challenging years for farmers in decades. There are different classes of winter wheat, but they’re all down when compared to last year’s crop, explained Todd Hubbs, a crop marketing specialist at Oklahoma State University Extension.
What are they supposed to do? If it doesn’t rain, it doesn’t rain. Unfortunately, it is being projected that the winter wheat harvest in the U.S. will be down by 21 percent compared to last year… The most widely produced class of wheat in the U.S., Hard Red Winter wheat, has a current production forecast of 515 million bushels. That may sound like a lot, but it would end up being the lowest since 1957, Hubbs said. Soft red winter and white wheat varieties are also having tough years, with the lowest production volume in 6 to 10 years. In all, growers will see their smallest wheat crop in terms of production since 1972, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture; 1.56 billion bushels this year, down 21% from 2025.
Are you going to eat 21 percent less wheat this year? I don’t think that anyone is planning to make that kind of sacrifice. But there simply won’t be as much wheat as normal in 2026. Kansas is a key wheat producing state, and a lack of rain has created nightmare conditions in much of the state…The latest U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) data, published May 28, shows 57% of Kansas suffering from drought, Sittel said. “For the 26-year history of the USDM, the median coverage of drought in Kansas is 22%, which is another way to look at our current conditions against a historical time series,” Sittel said.
Typically, the winter wheat crop receives a few inches of rainfall in the spring, but that didn’t happen this year. “The majority of the crop didn’t get that extra rainfall, and where we didn’t get any of that rainfall, a lot of times the crop already got terminated and insurance was called upon,” Lollato said. “Or we’re looking at very, very limited yield potentials, like 15–20 bushels per acre.”
We just experienced the driest first three months of a year ever recorded in the United States. That is really saying something. In addition to a seemingly endless drought, U.S. farmers are also facing much higher prices for diesel fuel and fertilizer. On top of everything else, now a “Super El Niño” is coming, and that means that drought conditions will greatly intensify in many parts of the world. This may be a good time to remind my readers that the “Super El Niño” of 1877-1878 caused horrifying droughts that killed more than 50 million people all over the globe.
Unfortunately, scientists are warning that the “Super El Niño” that will start later this year could be even more powerful. Yes, we really are facing a catastrophic scenario. But for now most of the population is still pretending that everything is going to be just fine, and so they continue to party as things rapidly get worse all around them."
"Yes, There Is A Meaning..."
"Yes, there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters -
to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."
- Logan Pearsall Smith
"One Can Make People Believe..."
“One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."
- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Of course we know very well what to expect...
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when
everything the American public believes is false."
- William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)
o
Freely download Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism", here:
"The Chief Obstacle..."
"The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race."
- Don Marquis
"In the mass of mankind, I fear, there is too great a majority of fools and knaves,
who, singly from their number, must to a certain degree be respected,
though they are by no means respectable."
- Philip Stanhope
"Russian Train Station of the Future: Leningradsky Vokzal"
Full screen recommended.
Travelling With Russell, 5/31/26
"Russian Train Station of the Future:
Leningradsky Vokzal"
"What does the Leningradsky Railway Station look like inside? Join me on a detailed, fully narrated tour of this amazing, futuristic transport hub. The station is one of the oldest railway stations in the country, with more than 175 years of history."
Comments here:
"How It Really Is"
Hey! They've got something big for you, too, Good Citizen!
Same as it always was, same as it always will be...
"In The Time Of Your Life..."
- William Saroyan
Freely download "The Human Comedy", by William Saroyan, here:
“10 Things You Should Know About Life’s Most Important Questions”
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“10 Things You Should Know
About Life’s Most Important Questions”
by Marc Chernoff
"It’s a harsh fact that every one of us is ignorant in some way. Although we tend to pretend otherwise, it’s impossible to know it all. Ignorance is our biggest collective secret. And it’s one of the scariest and most damaging realities of life, because those of us who are most ignorant – and thus most likely to spread ignorance – are also the ones who often don’t know it.
Here’s a quick test: If you have never changed your mind about one of your learned beliefs, if you have never questioned the fundamentals of your opinions, and if you have no inclination to do so, then you are likely ignorant about something you think you know.
What’s the quickest solution? Get outside and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, behaves, and handles certain aspects of life very differently from you, and just have a simple, honest conversation with them. I promise, some of life’s most important questions will become clearer by doing so. And it will do both of you lots of good. Once you’ve done that, here are some key things to remember:
1. Many of the biggest misunderstandings in life could be avoided if we would simply take the time to ask, “What else could this mean?”
2. An expert is not a person who gives all the right answers; she’s the one who asks the right questions.
3. Very few of us actively seek new knowledge in this world on a daily basis. We get comfortable with what we know, and we stop questioning things. On the contrary, we try to squeeze from the unknown the answers we have already shaped in our own minds – judgments, justifications, validations, forms of consolation without which we might feel incomplete or off-center. To really ask something new is to open the door to the storm. And the answer just may blow us away.
4. If someone can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about how they answer you.
5. Monsters do exist in the real world, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous in the long run. More dangerous are the common people with good intentions who are instantly ready to believe and act without asking questions.
6. At the end of the day, the questions you ask of yourself determine the type of person you will become.
7. Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.
8. When it comes to your relationships: Does he/she treat you with respect at all times? That’s the first question. The second question is: If he/she remains the exact same person ten years from now, would you still want to be in a relationship with him/her? And finally, does he/she inspire to be a better human being? When you find someone that you can answer yes to all three questions, you know you’ve found yourself a relationship worth having.
9. Regardless of how much you know, or how many incredible questions you ask, you can never know it all. To believe that you do, is proof of the contrary. The wilderness around us always holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask. And that’s a beautiful thing.
10. Although life will always be filled with unanswered questions, it’s the courage to seek the answers that counts – this journey is what gives life meaning. Ultimately, you can spend your life wallowing in frustration and misery, wondering why you were the one who was chosen to deal with your problems, or you can be grateful that you are strong enough and smart enough to grow from them.
Your turn: Be present and have patience with everything that remains unexplained in your heart and mind. Try to love life’s questions. Like locked doors or like good books written in foreign languages, respect their nature. Don’t expect all the answers to come easy. They cannot be given to you right now because your present understanding isn’t ready yet. It’s a question of experiencing everything first. Right now you need to hold on to the questions – explore, learn, and live your life. Perhaps, as you do, you will gradually find yourself experiencing the answers you always wanted.
So with that said, which of the reminders above hit home the most? Why? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts and insights with us."
"Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die"
"Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die:
Immortal Wisdom from the Park Ranger Who Inspired Generations"
by Maria Popova
"The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy.
Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by reason of demobilization of men.” When he received the discharge papers, he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER” on the envelope in big bold letters to signal that he was never willing for the job he was being fired from. The FBI took note and opened a file, to which they would later add the World Peace Movement he organized on his college campus, his acts of civil disobedience to protect old-growth forests from the corporate chainsaw, and his attendance of a Conference in Defense of Children in Vienna, deemed “communist initiated.”
Even as a teenager, Abbey understood that ideologies are only ever defeated not with guns but with ideas, so he decided to subvert the system by enrolling to study philosophy and literature at the University of New Mexico under the G.I. Bill. He spent the rest of his twenties traveling (he fell especially in love with Scotland, thinking about what makes life worth living, and dreaming of becoming a writer. It was when he took a job as a park ranger at thirty that he found the material for his first book: the ravishing "Desert Solitaire," which went on to inspire generations of writers and environmental activists, among them Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Cheryl Strayed, and Rebecca Solnit.
Throughout his life, Abbey kept a journal that stands as a crowning curio in the canon of notable diaries, selections from which were posthumously published as "Confessions of a Barbarian" (public library). In an entry penned just before his twenty-fifth birthday, when most of us move through the world feeling invincible and immortal, Abbey contemplates the end of life:
"How To Die - but first, how not to: Not in a smelly old bloody-gutted bed in a rest-home room drowning in the damp wash from related souls groping around you in an ocean heavy with morbid fascination with agony, sin and guilt, expiated, with clinical faces and automatic tear glands functioning perfunctorily and a fat priest on the naked heart.
Not in snowy whiteness under arc lights and klieg lights and direct television hookup. No never under clinical smells and sterilized medical eyes cool with detail calculated needle-prolonged agonizing, stiff and starchy in the white monastic cell, no.
Not in the muddymire of battle blood commingled with charnel-flesh and others’ blood, guts, bones, mud and excrement in the damp smell of blasted and wrung-out air; nor in the mass-packed weight of the cities atomized while masonry topples and chandeliers crash clashing buried with a million others, no.
Not the legal murder either - too grim and ugly such a martyrdom - down long aisled with chattering Christers chins on shoulders under bright lights again a spectacle an entertainment grim sticky-quiet officialdom and heavy-booted policemen guiding the turning of a pubic hair gently grinding in a knucklebone an arm hard and obscene fatassed policemen everywhere under the judicial - not to be murdered so, no never.
But how to: Alone, elegantly, a wolf on a rock, old pale and dry, dry bones rattling in the leather bag, eyes alight, high, dry, cool, far off, dim distance alone, free as a dying wolf on a pale dry rock gurgling quietly alone between the agony-spasms of beauty and delight; when the first flash of hatred comes to crawl, ease off casually forward into space the old useless body, falling, turning, glimpsing for one more time the blue evening sky and the far distant lonesome rocks below - before the crash, before…
With none to say no, none.
Way off yonder in the evening blue, in the gloaming."
When he did die a lifetime later, alone in his desert home, Abbey left a winking note for anyone seeking his final words: “No Comment.” He requested that his useless body be used “to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.” Wishing to have no part in the funeral industry’s embalmments and coffins, he asked his friends to ignore the state laws, place him in his favorite blue sleeping bag, and bury him right into the thirsty ground. If a wake was to be held, he wanted it simple, brief, and cheerful, with bagpipe music, “lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking,” and no formal speeches - “though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge.” When the wake was held at Arches National Park, where he had found his voice as a writer, Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams were among those who felt the urge.
Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:
"It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.
Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."
Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman’s spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die.
"Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow,
though it breaks every bone in our bodies."
- Edward Abbey
"Out of Time"
"Out of Time"
by Edward Curtin
“If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.” - Walter Benjamin “The Storyteller,” 1936
"Today’s rustlers are stealing the silence needed to allow stories to percolate in our minds. They are noisy speedsters, gunning down the highway of regret, constantly pushing us to abandon any sense of living deliberately and relaxed for the bait of faster internet speed and 24/7 lives in which no one is ever “off.” Like our machines, we are barely sleeping in “sleep mode” and always ready for a fast wake-up to jump into action before our use-by-date is up. Run as fast as you can. Vamoose. You can be sure that those who send and receive the most cell phone messages and emails have not heard from themselves in a long time.
Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish writer who knew that doing nothing and reposing into boredom was the secret to creativity and wisdom. He knew that silence was an endangered species whose extinction would eradicate boredom. He knew, of course, with WW I and then Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, that the times were out of joint.
“Contrary to many interpretations of Nazism, which tend to view it as a reactionary movement,” writes Modris Eksteins in "Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age," “as, in the words of Thomas Mann, an ‘explosion of antiquarianism,’ intent on turning Germany into a pastoral folk community of thatched cottages and happy peasants, the general thrust of the movement, despite archaisms, was futuristic.”
As with its lightning fast warfare – Blitzkrieg – and emphasis on “breaking out” to the future – Aufbruch – it was technocratic and progressive, with an emphasis on speed. Its romantic visions of returning to a conservative past were pure propaganda, used to fool Germans into thinking the country was on its way back while it was hurtling forward to a nihilistic, mechanized future based on violence, nationalism, and demagoguery. Its future was futuristic.
What Benjamin didn’t and couldn’t know was that sound sleep, silence, and tranquility would, with the rise of digital technology, cell phones, and the internet, become very rare as speed and a general mood of constant emergency would dominate people’s subconscious lives; that permanent busyness would become the norm; that technique and machines, in the service of creating the machine mind, would come to dominate societies, no matter what the political rhetoric.
Wendell Berry’s 1968 poem, "The Peace of Wild Things," seems quaint these days:
"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
Berry is now an old man, a farmer-poet, a naturalist, a prodigious writer who has written all his work on a manual typewriter. He is a slow man; out of step with today’s speed time and being 91 years-old is nearing the end of his life as the world frantically races on faster and faster.
Hustler or idler, getting things done or leaving things undone? For myself, such a choice may be a bit extreme. But I know that I’m not going to read "The Tao Te Ching" for wisdom since the Tao doesn’t reside in books. Nor does sapience depend on a podcast or an encounter with God depend on reading the holy books. I don’t need any more studies or conferences on social issues whose truths have been long apparent.
How many details are necessary to grasp the obvious once you are acquainted with the principle? “It is so hard to forget what is worse than useless to remember,” said Thoreau in his essay “Life Without Principle.” Few were listening then and fewer now.
The modern view of time asserts it is an objective measurement; it ticks away and for everyone ends in death. So fight the clock; fight death. Hurry, hurry! Run, Rabbit, run. The clock is running out. But despite this view that clock time measures one’s journey toward death, I have experienced another dimension of time that is “timeless.” I am sure you have, also. It is timeless and exists alongside clock time. It is rooted in love and takes different forms – God, sex, art, moments playing basketball, and human solidarity against evil forces being a few.
This variation in the experience of time is also natural. Clocks “tell us” one thing, but our experience of time tells us another. Even now here in New England as winter comes on, our experience of time is slowing down as nature goes dormant until the spring. Then time speeds up for us as over one night in spring the vegetation grows exponentially. We wake up and feel our hearts beating faster and a spring in our step. Excitement pulses through our veins. All the while throughout the seasons, the clocks – now mostly digital – click their sad numbers so monotonously as if they are telling us something.
I am considering starting a movement to create “do nothing days” by announcing the movement has started and immediately bowing out to do exactly nothing. Things have gotten so bad these days that if you ask a retired person how they are doing, they will proudly tell you they keep very busy, as if that is a badge of honor. Any thought of the contemplative life is an anathematic kiss of death.
At the risk of boring you and putting you to sleep and not to hatch the egg of experience, I will tell you a weird story appropriate to our most weird times. That it occurred on the night between Halloween and All Saints Day, Nov. 1, and on the weekend when eidolons and spooky images of death perambulate the streets and byways of our imaginations, might be significant if you believe in conspiracy theories and all that way-out nonsense. I can attest to its factual nature only, not to its significance. Doing so could leave egg on my face.
On this recent Halloween night, my wife and I went to sleep at our usual early hour. In the morning when we awoke, the ugly little digital clock on the table by the window read 5 A.M. So we got up, this being our normal waking time. As we passed another room, we noticed that the clock in that room said the same. But when we got downstairs, we saw that a numbers of clocks reported it was 4 A.M. We checked all the clocks in the house and four said it was 4 A.M. and four plus the telephone said 5 A.M. Naturally we were confused. Daylight Savings Time was not scheduled to end until the following day and then the clocks were to be set back an hour, not forward, and yet four of ours jumped forward, as if to tell us to hurry up, time’s running away and we’re late, we’re late for an important date. Like Alice in Wonderland, we wondered if we had gone mad, and these lines popped to mind: “‘Have I gone mad?’ ‘I am afraid so, you are entirely bonkers. but I will tell you a secret… all the best people are.‘”
There was no technological answer for this strange occurrence. Were we “losing time” or “maintaining time” or “conquering time” or was some comedian sending us a message that despite clocks we had no control over time, that it was a mystery, as we are, that the line between then and now and tomorrow, between life and death, dreams and reality is so thin as to be ghostly? Despite this spooky reminder that we all live “out of time,” my wife synchronized all the clocks to pretend she was reasserting control and was not too bonkers. I decided to do nothing."
"300,000 Real Estate Agents Have Quit - It's Getting Worse"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 5/31/26
"300,000 Real Estate Agents Have Quit -
It's Getting Worse"
"More than 300,000 real estate agents have left the industry as the housing market slowdown continues to worsen. In this video, Dan from iAllegedly breaks down the shocking numbers behind the realtor exodus, declining home sales, falling transaction volume, and why many agents are struggling to survive. With housing affordability at historic lows and buyers staying on the sidelines, the real estate industry is facing one of its toughest periods in decades.
Dan also covers the broader economy, including inflation, rising living costs, government policies, consumer financial stress, business news, taxes, food prices, and the challenges facing everyday Americans. From housing market trends to personal finance and economic warning signs, this video examines how these developments are impacting families, workers, business owners, and investors across the country."
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"Waiting..."
"We're all sinking in the same boat here. We're all bored and desperate and waiting for something to happen. Waiting for life to get better. Waiting for things to change. Waiting for that one person to finally notice us. We're all waiting. But we also need to realize that we all have the power to make those changes for ourselves."
- Susane Colasanti
"The Remaining Time"; "Don’t Leave Me"; "Forever"
Full screen recommended.
Wonder Spirits,
"The Remaining Time:
60 Years of Love in 5 Minutes"
"What happens when the hourglass of life begins to run thin, but every grain of sand is made of gold? 'The Fragile Gold' is a cinematic AI-generated song and visual journey that explores the beautiful, bittersweet reality of an elderly couple. It’s a dance between the quiet habits of the present and the radiant, reckless memories of youth. Through the lens of AI Art, we witness a love that doesn't fear the coming night, but cherishes every remaining second. Hope this song reminds you to hold your loved ones a little closer today."
o
Full screen recommended.
Wonder Spirits,
"Don’t Leave Me - Our Last Storm,
The Last Challenge of Our Love"
"Love is life’s greatest anchor, but its most profound strength is revealed in the fateful, final moments of our journey. After a lifetime of walking hand-in-hand through the light and shade, facing the ultimate threshold of life and death is the most heartbreaking, yet sacred test of devotion."
o
Full screen recommended.
Wonder Spirits,
"Forever: When You Feel Alone,
Pray and Forever Love, Finding Peace in Loss"
"This song is for anyone who has ever loved deeply and lost, yet still finds the strength to smile at the sky. It’s a reminder that we are never truly alone when we walk with faith. Whether your house feels empty or your heart feels heavy, may you find peace in the stillness."
"Knowing When to Leave Matters More Than Knowing When to Enter"
Full screen recommended.
Delta Blues Brother,
"Knowing When to Leave Matters
More Than Knowing When to Enter"
"Starting is easy. Staying… is a choice. But leaving - at the right time - is wisdom. “Knowing When to Leave Matters More Than Knowing When to Enter” is a Delta blues reflection on timing, self-respect, and the quiet strength of walking away when something no longer fits. Not everything you begin… is meant to last. And knowing that… changes everything."
Native Elder, "Why Letting Go Is the Last Great Lesson of Life"
Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"Why Letting Go Is the Last Great Lesson of Life"
Saturday, May 30, 2026
Musical Interlude: Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"
Full screen recommended.
Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as the "Mice" because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy. Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion - over hundreds of millions of years.
NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. The featured picture was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2002. These galactic mice will probably collide again and again over the next billion years so that, instead of continuing to pull each other apart, they coalesce to form a single galaxy."
"It's Extraordinary..."
“It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.”
– Joseph Conrad, “Lord Jim”
"Restaurant Prices Are Insane in America - Nobody Can Afford It Anymore"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 5/30/26
"Restaurant Prices Are Insane in America -
Nobody Can Afford It Anymore"
"Americans are filming their restaurant receipts like crime scene evidence, and the numbers tell a story Washington does not want you to hear. A Chick-fil-A combo that cost six dollars and sixty-seven cents in 2015 now costs seventeen dollars. A three hundred dollar fine dining dinner in LA ended with dollar-store Christmas cookies on the plate. A forty-five dollar burger and fries somewhere normal. A hundred and ten dollars just to cut a cake at a rooftop bar. A twenty person birthday dinner that ended with the birthday girl in handcuffs because the restaurant would not split the check.
This is not a fast food story. This is what happens when wages flatline for a decade and rent eats everything left over. The middle class is being priced out of the cheap pleasures that used to glue the week together. A drive-thru run hits the wallet like a sit-down dinner used to. Two breakfasts in LA clear sixty dollars once tax and tip land. The menu price is a teaser rate. The real number shows up at the bottom, and the real number is always worse. And the restaurants are not winning either. The owner is squeezed by suppliers and landlords. The customer is squeezed by the owner. The only people winning are the big food companies whose stock charts go straight up year after year. In this video we break down what real Americans are showing on TikTok about restaurant prices in 2026, what it says about inflation, wage stagnation, and the slow collapse of the American middle class.
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The Poet: James Baldwin, "Amen"
"Amen"
"No, I don't feel death coming.
I feel death going:
having thrown up his hands,
for the moment.
I feel like I know him
better than I did.
Those arms held me,
for a while,
and, when we meet again,
there will be that secret knowledge
between us. "
- James Baldwin
"The Cruelest Joke Of All..."
"The smallest decisions made had such profound repercussions. One ten-minute wait could save a life or end it. One wrong turn down the right street or one seemingly unimportant conversation, and everything was changed. It wasn't right that each lifetime was defined, ruined, ended, and made by such seemingly innocuous details. A major life-threatening event should come with a flashing warning sign that either said ABANDON ALL HOPE or SAFETY AHEAD. It was the cruelest joke of all that no one could see the most vicious curves until they were over the edge, falling into the abyss below."
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
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