Full screen recommended.
Yanni, "The Storm"
Full screen recommended.
Yanni, "Prelude and Nostalgia"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, April 26, 2024
"A Look to the Heavens"
"A gorgeous spiral galaxy, M104 is famous for its nearly edge-on profile featuring a broad ring of obscuring dust lanes. Seen in silhouette against an extensive central bulge of stars, the swath of cosmic dust lends a broad brimmed hat-like appearance to the galaxy suggesting a more popular moniker, the Sombrero Galaxy. This sharp optical view of the well-known galaxy made from ground-based image data was processed to preserve details often lost in overwhelming glare of M104's bright central bulge.
Also known as NGC 4594, the Sombrero galaxy can be seen across the spectrum, and is host to a central supermassive black hole. About 50,000 light-years across and 28 million light-years away, M104 is one of the largest galaxies at the southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. Still the colorful spiky foreground stars in this field of view lie well within our own Milky Way galaxy. "
The Poet: Carl Sandburg, "Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind "
"Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind "
The past is a bucket of ashes.
1
"The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it,
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.
2
The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold,
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
3
It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
and the only listeners left now
are the rats and the lizards.
And there are black crows
crying, Caw, caw,
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The only singers now are crows crying, Caw, caw,
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are the rats and the lizards.
4
The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats,
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.
And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts,
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was. "
- Carl Sandburg, 1878 -1967
"Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind"
"Dave Ramsey Giving Dangerous Advice Again; New Economic Crash Will Make 2008 Look Like A Picnic"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/26/24
"Dave Ramsey Giving Dangerous Advice Again;
New Economic Crash Will Make 2008 Look Like A Picnic"
Comments here:
"The Dunning-Kruger Effect - Cognitive Bias - Why Incompetent People Think They Are Competent"
Full screen recommended.
"The Dunning-Kruger Effect - Cognitive Bias -
Why Incompetent People Think They Are Competent"
"I Seek The Truth..."
“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
- Marcus Aurelius
"The Curse of Interesting Times"
"The Curse of Interesting Times"
Things are the most interesting they've been
in 80 years, 250 years, and, well, ever.
by Contemplations on the Tree of Woe
"The Chinese curse their enemies with the phrase “may you live in interesting times.” Or, rather, Americans think that Chinese curse their enemies like that; according to Infogalactic, “despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no equivalent expression in Chinese.”
Fortunately, there’s an actual Chinese phrase that’s much more interesting. It’s found in a 1627 short story collection by Feng Menglong called "Stories to Awaken the World," and it states "better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic times.” And to be a dog in 17th China didn’t mean being a beloved fur baby with your own YouTube channel. It meant being a workbeast that got eaten when times were lean. The Chinese still have an annual dog meat festival.
Whichever adage you prefer, our times are both chaotic and interesting. In fact, they are monumentally interesting - they are so interesting as to beggar coherent description, to put to shame historical comparison, so remarkable that every single one of us would be justified in screaming from the rooftops in shock and awe. And yet we don’t. We keep calm and carry on, sturdily gripped by our bias for normalcy, by our human ability to adapt to even the most bizarre circumstances. It’ll be fine, we tell ourselves. This is fine.
But what if we put aside our normalcy bias for a moment and look at how just how “interesting” our times really are? What do we see then?
Once Every 80 Years…Once every 80 years, a country enters a crisis. That is, at least, the assertion of Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. According to Strauss and Howe, human history is organized into repeating patterns marked by four “turnings”: the High, the Awakening, the Unraveling, and the Crisis. Each turning is approximately 20 years long, and an entire cycle of four turnings is therefore about 80 years long. According to Strauss and Howe, American history looks something like this:
○ American Revolutionary Crisis, 1765 - 1785
○ American Civil War Crisis, 1855 - 1875
○ Great Depression and World War II Crisis, 1930 - 1950
○ You Are Here, 2010 - 2030
If we believe Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, we are in the midst of what they call a Fourth Turning - a moment of Crisis.
Are we in a Fourth Turning? I certainly believe so. As I documented in "Running on Empty," the United States now stands at a financial precipice. US inflation is at its worst in 40 years because the monetary system we established under Truman and rejuvenated under Nixon is now about to collapse. With that crisis have come challenges from a resurgent Russia and burgeoning China that could lead to a Third World War or, at best, a post-American world order. The Thucydides Trap has never been so close to springing. It’s no wonder then that US fears of nuclear war have surged to levels not seen since the Cold War. But unlike the Cold War, no one wants to ‘ask what they can do for their country’ anymore. US Army recruitment is at its worst in 50 years. And why would they want to serve? Our nation is divided into warring camps. US partisan distrust of the opposing party is at its worst in 30 years.
All right. That all sounds bad. But if Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is true, the Fourth Turning will be over in about 5-10 years and we’ll move into the next Turning, the High. And those are awesome! But what if we won’t be heading into another high?"
Full, fascinating, most highly recommended article is here:
○
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, "Weekly Intel Wrap-Up RoundTable"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 4/26/24
"Weekly Intel Wrap-Up RoundTable"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "This is More Than a Warning Sign"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 4/26/24
"This is More Than a Warning Sign"
"We just got our gross domestic product numbers for the first quarter of 2024. They were an absolute disaster. Plus, we got the personal consumption expenditure numbers. Inflation is going nowhere but up."
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "A Different Kind of Dumb," Part Two
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"A Different Kind of Dumb," Part Two
The patterns of Megapolitics suggest that this sort of excess spending and meddling
in the affairs of others will grease the skids for the decline of of the US empire.
by Bill Bonner
Dublin, Ireland - "First up: the GDP came in at half what was supposed to be... and inflation was hotter than expected. Bloomberg reports: "US Economy Slows and Inflation Jumps, Damping Soft-Landing Hopes." "First-quarter core inflation measure accelerates to 3.7% rate. Gross domestic product increased at a 1.6% annualized rate, below all economists’ forecasts, the government’s initial estimate showed. The economy’s main growth engine - personal spending - rose at a slower-than-forecast 2.5% pace. A wider trade deficit subtracted the most from growth since 2022."
And here we see the inflate or die trap clearly. The Fed wants to cut rates. Banks want lower rates. Wall Street wants lower rates. The US government desperately needs lower rates. But inflation is looking over the Fed’s shoulder. At 3.7%, it’s nearly twice the Fed’s target. So, a cut would likely cost the Fed its remaining credibility... signal higher levels of inflation in the future... and might send the bond market into a tizzy, making it even harder for the feds to roll over their $34 trillion in debt and fund trillions more in new deficits.
The US growth rate is barely a third of Russia’s GDP growth. But if the Fed cuts rates to try to boost GDP, it risks bringing on higher levels of inflation and a collapse of the bond market... forcing it to ‘print’ more money to cover the feds’ deficits.
Death of the Bubble: If it doesn’t cut rates, it risks a recession/depression of unknowable severity... and the death of the bubble economy that its ultra-low interest rates, 2009-2021, created. Inflate or die. Our high confidence guess is that it will die a little... doing nothing until the pain of a dying bubble becomes unbearable. In earlier editions of this commentary, we’ve seen that climbing down the debt mountain, more or less safely, is possible. Jamaica did it. Greece seems to be doing it. Argentina has begun to do it. But you only do it by cutting spending... sharply. Emphatically. Enough to run a surplus that you use to reduce your debt. As Javier Milei puts it: a balanced budget is “non-negotiable.”
Which makes the $95 billion in ‘foreign aid’ - to people who don’t need it (Israel)... can’t achieve anything with it (the Ukraine)... or have no real use for it (Taiwan) - even more out-of-line. George Will claims that opposing the ‘foreign aid’ package is “ignoble.” Others say that it ‘promotes US security.’ Still others believe it will help ‘protect democracy,’ somehow. Whether those things are true or not... we have no idea. They are not the sort of claims that can be fact checked.
Wages of Debt: The contrary point of view is that the wages of this spending will be starkly negative. Americans will be blamed for the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza. In the Ukraine, Americans will be blamed by some for not giving the Ukrainians enough firepower to win... and by others for promoting a losing war with hundreds of thousands of casualties. And in Asia, America will cut itself off from friendly trade with the most innovative and productive economy on the planet. Instead of gaining the benefits of win-win trade with China, the US will reap the bitter costs of win-lose rivalry.
Whichever point of view you choose, what is indisputable is that in the US as in Argentina ‘no hay dinero’ (there is no money). So, the $95 billion will have to be borrowed. US debt will increase... and the Primary Trend towards lower real asset prices, higher interest rates, higher levels of inflation, and spreading poverty will be enhanced.
The patterns of Megapolitics also suggest - but leave much room for interpretation and argument - that this sort of excess spending and meddling in the affairs of others will grease the skids for the decline of the US empire. Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. And empires gotta decline. As if guided by an invisible hand, the feds do what they have to do... when they have to do it…wrecking America’s financial position, undermining its moral position, and ultimately destroying its position as the world's leading hegemon.
But Monday we’ll look back at Francis Fukuyama... the reprise of history... and what might replace the Post-WWII order. The humans in it will be every bit as dumb as those who run things today. But maybe... a different kind of dumb. Stay tuned."
Jim Kunstler, "Emergency-O-Rama"
"Emergency-O-Rama"
by Jim Kunstler
“We’ll certainly never forget the dark days
of June 6 - January 6th, excuse me.”
- President “Joe Biden”
"The plum blossoms are ready to pop here. You can feel your blood rising. The evening sun lingers a little longer every day. Normally you’d celebrate, but not this year of roaring portents and evil juju. History doesn’t stop to catch its breath for a moment. The tiny glowing diode deep in “Joe Biden’s” brain dims a bit more each day (pause) while low men and women in high places trifle with the fate of the nation. Everyone dreads what’s coming.
Which, judging by events of the week just past, looks like a worse summer of civil chaos than 2020 was. Some entity - say, the checkbook of George and Alex Soros, maybe? - has funded the spring mustering of student mobs in support of Hamas seeking to drive wicked Israel into the choppy Mediterranean. What you’re seeing, though, is probably not what you think you are seeing in all that. The kids are mere digits in a cultural algorithm playing out as New Age dumbshow.
I doubt that three-quarters of them actually give a flying fugazy about the Palestinians, and even fewer could find Gaza on a map if you water-boarded them. They affect to be intersectional victims of the universal oppressor, but in so far as many of the rioters are girls of the Ivy League, or comparable redoubts of privilege - little blue-eyed, blonde-haired muffins raised on pony club, Hermes, and artisan granola - there must be something else going on. That something else is probably sex, which is so problematical now in any traditional frame of a man getting it on with a woman that the American birth-rate is going to zero.
How does a young woman get it on with so many collegiate men vying for gay brownie points these days, or going for the grand prize in transitioning? Why, it’s a non-starter. So, instead, you go slumming among the savages, those hairy, dumb brutes on twerk-alert, dripping testosterone - illegal aliens, student third-worlders, BLM alumni, hardcore hoodlums. They don’t know nuthin ‘bout no pony club, but they will rut like Bilberry rams until the ladies fall away crosseyed. Affecting to be a lesbian only makes the game more piquant. And if you forgot your birth control, for some reason, there’s always the abortionist.
Any time there are brownie points at stake, you know the game is actually for status, and where status is the game, fashion is the currency. Thus, the dress-up in Arab keffiyehs, the charming head-scarf denoting allyship with Hamas. Beats the heck out of those flitty N-95 masks from the 2020 Covid nights of roistering in the Seattle CHOP and trying to burn down the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland.
Rioting gives young men of the toxic persuasion opportunities to flaunt their moxie in acts of derring-do, brawling with the cops, dancing on top of cars, ripping down chain-link fences, flinging gasoline bombs. So much the better for getting the ladies’ attention. Look what I can do! And the keffiyeh accessorizes well with black bloc riot garb. For the muffins, wearing it is great practice for the utopia-to-come when they must don burkas under submission to Sharia. Will Hermes put out a burka?
So far, the spring rioting has mostly been fun for the rioters. Unlike the J-6-21 “paraders,” locked up in the putrid DC jail for years pending trial, the Hamas frolickers are at near-zilch risk of any serious consequences. Few will even be suspended from school. They are doing exactly what the schools trained them up for: destroying Western Civ, one acanthus leaf at a time. According to the shadowy stage-managers behind “Joe Biden,” this will save our democracy.
That and stuffing Donald Trump in jail for the rest of his natural life. Alas, the lawfare cases cooked up toward that end appear defective to a spectacular degree. It really says something about the true authors of these beauties brought by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith. I speak of the behind-the-scene blob lawfare ninjas Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Matt Colangelo, and Mary McCord, who wrote the scripts for all four of this year’s big elephant trap cases against the former president. You have to wonder how that bunch made it through their law boards. The current extravaganza in Manhattan that centers on alleged book-keeping errors in furtherance of an unstated federal offense is due to go on a few more weeks. The howling errors of both the prosecution and Judge Juan Merchan are so extravagant that the proceeding looks like it was cribbed from the pages of Lewis Carroll.
Yet, there is near unanimous sentiment that the Trump-deranged New Yawk jury will convict, no matter how much more idiotic the case turns out to be. By then, we will be verging on summer. The college campuses will be shuttered and the youth-in-revolt action will necessarily move to the regular streets. Whichever way the verdict goes in the Alvin Bragg case, epic looting and rioting will commence.
Sometime this summer, I predict, the Mar-a-Lago documents case will get tossed on something like malicious prosecution. Jack Smith’s DC case, kneecapped by SCOTUS, won’t start before the November election (or maybe ever) and ditto the Fani Willis fiasco in Atlanta. George and Alex Soros will pour millions into box lunches for the kids burning down what’s left of the cities and the demure gals of the Ivy League Left will find plenty of love in the ruins.
The two major party conventions in July (Republican) and August (Democrat) are sure to out-do the 1968 lollapalooza in Chicago (I was there) in mayhem and property damage. “Joe Biden” - really the blob behind him - will ache to declare a national emergency, perhaps even a second emergency after the recently unveiled “climate emergency” supposedly pending any day. The USA will be in an historic horror movie you could call Emergency-O-Rama. If you think the financial system, and the US economy that has become the tail on the finance dog, can survive all this, you will be disappointed. The army may have to step in and put an end to these shenanigans. Don’t think it can’t happen."
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 4/26/24"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 4/26/24"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"President Trump’s so-called immunity case is in front of the Suprem Court. Who knows how it will turn out, but the first day of argument did not go well for the Biden Administration lawyers. The High Court is not going to dismiss the case, and likely some sort of immunity will be decided upon. At the very least, this case will delay other Trump cases in New York, Florida and Georgia until after the 2024 November Election, and that would be a big win in and of itself.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs just vetoed a bill that would “require proof of residency for voting.” All I can say is Hobbs and other Democrats in power are clearly protecting the voter fraud. With an 8% actual approval rating for President Biden, the swamp knows they will be forced to cheat and cheat big. My questions are: Can they cheat enough to pull it off again? Can they find enough people to help them cheat when the very people that helped them in 2020 are now struggling to survive? It’s not going to get better before election day.
You know the economy is in trouble when the CEO of one of the biggest banks in the world starts sounding the alarm about “higher interest rates and higher inflation.” A few months ago, Jamie Dimon praised Donald Trump’s economic policies at the World Economic Forum. People were shocked!! Today, Dimon is preparing his bank for higher interest rates caused by massive government spending, a skidding GDP and spiking inflation. It appears many would like Trump back in office to fix and run the economy. Maybe we can defeat the Deep State cheaters and get our wish. I pray Jehovah please help us in the name of Christ Jesus. There is much more in the 52-minute newscast."
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these
stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 4/26/24.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Canadian Prepper, "Emergency Update! Massive Attack On USA Imminent?"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/25/24
"Emergency Update! Massive Attack On USA Imminent?
Texas Warns Citizens, Snipers On Rooftops"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "The Stagflation Nightmare Rocks Markets, GDP Crushed; Rate Cuts Are Just A Dream"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/25/26
"The Stagflation Nightmare Rocks Markets, GDP Crushed;
Rate Cuts Are Just A Dream"
Comments here:
"Amazon Grocery Stores Are Falling Apart All Around Us As Business Face Massive Challenges"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 4/25/24
"Amazon Grocery Stores Are Falling Apart All
Around Us As Business Face Massive Challenges"
"People from all over the U.S. are getting outraged by the price increases they're seeing at grocery store chains operated by Amazon. The behemoth retailer is also raising service fees, and shutting down more unprofitable locations this month, even after laying off almost 30,000 employees over the last year, and reporting record profits for the fiscal year ended in March 2024.
Though official agencies and corporate CEOs cite improving economic conditions in their latest reports, most U.S. consumers have yet to report experiencing some financial relief this year. In fact, a LendingClub survey found that 66% of Americans are still feeling the pinch of higher food prices on their monthly budgets, and that may be especially true for Whole Foods' and Amazon Fresh customers.
A few weeks ago, one Amazon customer went viral on TikTok for exposing some of the insane prices for everyday staples she had seen at her local Whole Foods store in Boston. The woman, who goes by the username @via..li on the social media platform, posted a video about her expensive purchases, which has been shared by hundreds of thousands of users, and re-shared on various websites."
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Josh Groban, “Gira Con Me Questa Notte”
Josh Groban, “Gira Con Me Questa Notte”
○
English lyrics:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“How far do magnetic fields extend up and out of spiral galaxies? For decades astronomers knew only that some spiral galaxies had magnetic fields. However, after NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope (popularized in the movie Contact) was upgraded in 2011, it was unexpectedly discovered that these fields could extend vertically away from the disk by several thousand light-years. The featured image of edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 5775, observed in the CHANG-ES (Continuum Halos in Nearby Galaxies) survey, also reveals spurs of magnetic field lines that may be common in spirals.
Analogous to iron filings around a bar magnet, radiation from electrons trace galactic magnetic field lines by spiraling around these lines at almost the speed of light. The filaments in this image are constructed from those tracks in VLA data. The visible light image, constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data, shows pink gaseous regions where stars are born. It seems that winds from these regions help form the magnificently extended galactic magnetic fields.”
'Two Possibilities Exist..."
"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the
Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life.
It's just been too intelligent to come here."
- Arthur C. Clarke
"I Am Done"
"I Am Done"
by OHMama
"I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.
My 1940s born Dad raised me to be patriotic and proud, to love the war bird airplanes of his era as much as he does, and to respect our flag and our country as a sacred thing. I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift a person could have. I grew up thinking that our country was as strong, and honest and true as my Dad. I grew up thinking I was free.
As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from under us.
I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.
We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year without going into debt.
At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.
I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the medicine cabinet.
I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.
I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility.
Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence.
And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.
And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They’re probably relieved that upstart Trump is gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.
I will not vote again; they’ve made it abundantly clear that my voice doesn’t matter. Whatever irrational, suicidal lunacy the nanny states thinks is best is what I’ll get. What it decided I need is a geriatric pedophile who shouldn’t be charged with anything more rigorous than choosing between tapioca and rice pudding at the old folks home, and a casting couch skank who rails against racism while being a descendant of slave owners.
I’m free to dismember a baby in my womb and kill it because “my body my choice”, but God help me if I won’t cover my face with a germ laden Linus-worthy security blanket or refuse let them inject genetically altering chemicals into my body or my child’s. I can be doxed, fired, shunned and destroyed for daring to venture that there are only 2 genders as proven by DNA, but a disease with a 99+% survival rate for most humans is a deadly pandemic worth murdering an economy over. Because science. Idiocracy is real, and we are living it. Dr. Hannibal Lecter would be an improvement over Fauci.
I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heartbreaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.
I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to or from the society they live in.
I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but f**k these motherf**kers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all, mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all."
Soon, OHMama, soon...
“How Buster Douglas Beat Mike Tyson”
"The image that comes to mind is a boxing ring. There are times when... you just want that bell to ring, but you're the one who's losing. The one who's winning doesn't have that feeling. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you are willing to give. And then you say, 'Life is not something that should have been. I'm not going to play the game. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to call "out". There are three positions possible. One is the up-to-it, and facing the game and playing through. The second is saying, Absolutely not. I don't want to stay in this dogfight. That's the absolute out. The third position is the one that says, This is mixed of good and evil. I'm on the side of the good. I accept the world with corrections. And may [the world] be the way I like it. And it's good for me and my friends. There are the only three positions."
- Joseph Campbell
○
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact,
it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are,
what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
- Maya Angelou
○
“How Buster Douglas Beat Mike Tyson”
by johnnysmack7
“Going into the fight, Mike Tyson was the undefeated and undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. He held the WBC, WBA, and IBF titles. Despite the several controversies that marked Tyson’s profile at the time, such as his notorious, abusive relationship with Robin Givens; the contractual battles between longtime manager Bill Cayton and promoter Don King; and Tyson’s departure from longtime trainer Kevin Rooney, Mike Tyson was still lethal in the ring, scoring a 93-second knockout against Carl “The Truth” Williams in his previous fight. Most considered this fight to be a warm-up bout for Tyson before meeting up with then-undefeated number 1 heavyweight contender Evander Holyfield (who was ringside for the fight). Tyson was viewed as such a dominant heavyweight that he was not only viewed as the world’s top heavyweight, but often as the number one fighter in the world pound-for-pound (including by “Ring Magazine”), a rarity for heavyweights.
Buster Douglas was ranked as just the #7 heavyweight by Ring Magazine, and had met with mixed success in his professional boxing career up to that point. His previous title fight was against Tony Tucker in 1987, in which he was TKO’d in the 10th round. However, a string of six consecutive wins gave him the opportunity to fight Tyson. In the time leading up to the fight, Douglas faced a number of setbacks, including the death of his mother, Lula Pearl, 23 days before the fight. Additionally, the mother of his son was facing a severe kidney ailment, and he had contracted the flu on the day before the fight.”
- http://www.knockouts2sleep.com
“The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back.
That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.”
- Vince Lombardi
At 2:40 of this video Douglas takes a tremendous uppercut and goes down, kneeling to clear his head; you can see him wondering to himself if he should get up. No one at all expected him to, but he reached for something deep inside himself, found an inner strength perhaps even he was unaware of, and got back up to continue the fight. The rest, as they say, is history… and real glory.
– CP
Full screen recommended.
“Get Up Off Your Knees!”
“Get Up Off Your Knees!”
On your knees you may live to see another day,
but you’ll never live to see better days.
by Robert Gore
“Zoos are among the saddest places on earth: magnificent but confined creatures on display for gawking crowds, prevented from living out their biological destinies, fed their daily rations, and domesticated beyond where they could ever return to the wild. You have to feel pity and sorrow for these innocent prisoners; they’d flee in a heartbeat if they could.
Humans have made themselves inmates – whether of a zoo, prison, or asylum is hard to say, likely a combination of all three. Animals earn our admiration because they resist losing their freedom. Humans occasionally do too, but usually surrender theirs for promises and trifles. The promises are broken and the trifles grow more trifling as humanity for the most part gives up. Keep people amused and make sure the rations don’t stop and no outrage rousts them to try to reclaim their birthright. When they visit the zoo, the animals stare back at them with contempt.
In this country, we sing, “Sweet land of liberty,” and, “The land of the free, and the home of the brave.” We incant “freedom” and “liberty” during election seasons, but anything beyond that is considered embarrassing, bad form. A legislator denouncing a proposed law as an infringement of freedom would be regarded as a lunatic. Millions of pages of federal, state, and local laws and regulations already infringe freedom. The denouncer might be irrefutably right, but his denunciation would be irrelevant.
While wildlife should be free in the wild, coping with the risks to the best of their capabilities, humans are supposedly unsuited for freedom. Free humans might develop their own talents and capabilities, produce, exchange, exercise their rights, and engage in voluntary association and social intercourse, all unsupervised. You can argue that such activities are generally beneficial. However, there is a special class who are permitted to supervise and coerce the rest of us, to curtail our freedom. This special class ensures fairness or equality or some such thing. Who knows what might happen without them. Think of the dangers!
Just consider the concept of people deciding what’s in their own best interest. A hyphenated word lurks: self-interest. The special people are motivated by everything but self-interest, or so they say. Indeed, nobility of motive justifies their power and the destruction of your liberty. The desire to better your life is selfish, unlike the impulses supposedly animating those holding the guns to your head. After widespread surrender, few champion their right to their own lives, which is selfish after all, or challenge the special people’s moral superiority, which confers their right to hold the guns.
It might mitigate moral condemnation for liberty’s surrender if it had produced some benefit for those waving the white flag. An old bromide has it that liberty is irrelevant when people are starving. Nothing is further from the truth; it’s freedom that feeds people, creates wealth, and advances humanity. The historical record offers ample proof. It’s the absence of liberty that produces starvation, poverty, decay, destruction, genocide, and war. Here too the historical record is clear, one need go no farther back than the last century. During this ascendancy of the special people, humanity fought its two deadliest wars and over a hundred million were murdered, victims of special plans for a better world.
But somehow it’s liberty that’s dangerous. Fortunately the special people still rule, to make sure it doesn’t break out somewhere. Their reign assures that this century will challenge the last for the title: Century of Slaughter. They see their subjects are domesticated draft animals, just smart enough to keep economies running, not smart enough to challenge domestication. However, it’s been free minds and free markets, not draft animals, that have produced the wonders that make modern life modern. Welfare states are halfway houses to totalitarianism. As they grow, liberty shrinks and progress slows, stops, and reverses, the deterioration culminating in either anarchy or tyranny.
Judging from the prevalence of terms like “secular stagnation” and the “end of growth,” we are in the stop phase and reversal is nigh. People have seen their freedom shrink and have borne the consequences, although most don’t make the connection between the two. Incomes have stagnated, opportunities have diminished, life grows ever coarser, and fear of a looming apocalypse pervades the popular consciousness. Many are preparing for a future in which modernity is no longer modern, where access to necessities and conveniences cannot be taken for granted. Guns and gold are at the top of checklists, for a day when the inevitable failure of the special people leads to the inevitable tyranny or anarchy.
The discontent sweeping the planet is recognition that things are wrong on multiple fronts, although recognition of the root cause is rare. The idea that changing the hands on the levers offers solutions is magical thinking. The problems stem from granting the special people the levers in the first place. They may be replaced, but once the replacements have their hands on the levers, they’ll feel special, too. Power assuredly corrupts.
We’re closer to the real solution in the lament: “Why can’t they just leave us alone?” They – the special people – must leave us alone, it’s our moral right. Those who think the collapse will never come, or that freedom can be reclaimed without a fight, delude themselves. The craven adage: It’s better to live on one’s knees than die on one’s feet, offers a false choice. On your knees you may live to see another day, but you’ll never live to see better days. You may die on your feet, but liberty offers the only hope for better days. It’s worth fighting for. It’s worth dying for.”
"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to
TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing. "
- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"
"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything"
"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s
Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and
Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning"
by Maria Popova
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.
That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by reading. Some through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.
A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing "Man’s Search for Meaning."
As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure - especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame - these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered - as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past - they are now published in English for the first time as "Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything" (public library).
Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes: "We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this."
Generations and myriad cultural upheavals before Zadie Smith observed that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Frankl considers what “progress” even means, emphasizing the centrality of our individual choices in its constant revision: "Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age."
Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims: "Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism! How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?
[…]
Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity."
Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:
"What remained was the individual person, the human being - and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down - the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one - the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self."
In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds: "Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being."
Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless - the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:
"Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else - preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us."
He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore - the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:
"I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked - and behold,
duty was joy."
In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation - an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity - Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point: "So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down."
In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo two decades later in his superb forgotten essay on the antidote to the hour of despair and life as a moral obligation to the universe, Frankl turns the question unto itself: "At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?"
Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life - it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to - of being responsible toward - life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.
Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance - triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization: "The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.
We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?"
What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms - terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:
"One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions."
With this symphonic prelude, Frankl arrives at the essence of what he discovered about the meaning of life in his confrontation with death - a central fact of being at which a great many of humanity’s deepest seers have arrived via one path or another: from Rilke, who so passionately insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” to physicist Brian Greene, who so poetically nested our search for meaning into our mortality into the most elemental fact of the universe. Frankl writes:
"The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.
[…]
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it - or leave unfulfilled - that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness."
In the remainder of the slender and splendid "Yes to Life", Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival."
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