Gnomusy (David Caballero), "Footprints On The Sea"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, September 20, 2024
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Why is the sky near Antares and Rho Ophiuchi so colorful? The colors result from a mixture of objects and processes. Fine dust illuminated from the front by starlight produces blue reflection nebulae. Gaseous clouds whose atoms are excited by ultraviolet starlight produce reddish emission nebulae. Backlit dust clouds block starlight and so appear dark.
Antares, a red supergiant and one of the brighter stars in the night sky, lights up the yellow-red clouds on the lower center. Rho Ophiuchi lies at the center of the blue nebula near the top. The distant globular cluster M4 is visible just to the right of Antares, and to the lower left of the red cloud engulfing Sigma Scorpii. These star clouds are even more colorful than humans can see, emitting light across the electromagnetic spectrum.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120828.html
"Do Not Let Your Fire Go Out..."
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the
hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.”
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
The Poet: Shel Silverstein, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”
“Where the Sidewalk Ends”
“There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.”
- Shel Silverstein
“Al Swearengen's Take On Life"
Strong language alert!
"In life you have to do a lot of things you don't ****ing want to do.
Many times, that's what the **** life is... one vile ****ing task after another. "
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Strong language alert!
"Pain or damage don't end the world, or despair or f***ing beatings.
The world ends when you’re dead. Until then you got more punishment
in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back.”
- “Al Swearengen”, Ian McShane’s character on “Deadwood”
"Too Often..."
"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word,
a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring,
all of which have the potential to turn a life around."
- Leo Buscaglia
Jeremiah Babe, "The U.S. Economy Is On The Bridge Of Collapse - Society On The Brink Of Chaos"
Jeremiah Babe, 9/20/24
"The U.S. Economy Is On The Bridge Of Collapse -
Society On The Brink Of Chaos"
Comments here:
Travelling with Russell, "I Went on the Yekaterinburg Metro (Full Tour)"
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell, 9/20/24
"I Went on the Yekaterinburg Metro (Full Tour)"
"I recently travelled 2000km from Moscow to Yekaterinburg to ride their famous metro line. The Metro opened on 26 April 1991 and is 12.7 kilometers (7.9 miles) long and serves 9 stations. Discover the beauty and grandeur of the Yekaterinburg Metro with me."
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Squatters Evict Homeowner - Homeowners Are Losing Control"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 9/20/24
"Squatters Evict Homeowner -
Homeowners Are Losing Control"
"This one is crazy. "Squatters Evict Homeowner: The Ugly Truth Revealed," we dive into the shocking story of Daniel Toma in Kentucky. Imagine inviting friends over only to find yourself kicked out of your own home! That's right - Daniel's generosity backfired when his guests, Amy and Tyler, claimed squatter's rights, leaving him homeless. As the economy spirals, this could happen to anyone!"
Comments here:
"Alert! Europe Votes Yes To Nuclear Armageddon! Israel Starts Major War Before Election"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 9/20/24
"Alert! Europe Votes Yes To Nuclear Armageddon!
Israel Starts Major War Before Election"
Comments here:
"How It Really Is"
"We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us; and if it be delightful to us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching. Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so."
- Blaise Pascal
"Every Normal Man..."
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands,
hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
- H. L. Mencken
Bill Bonner, "The Fed's Himalayas"
"The Fed's Himalayas"
The Fed began manipulating stock prices about thirty years ago.
Since then, each of the households in the top 1% has gained about
$32 million in wealth. Down below, the wealth gain has been negligible.
by Bill Bonner
Dublin, Ireland - "The Fed acted. Investors re-acted. MarketWatch: "U.S. stocks roared higher Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average topping the 42,000 milestone for the first time and the S&P 500 also surging to a record close, a day after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell repeatedly used variations on the word “recalibrate” to describe the decision to deliver an extra-large, 50-basis-point interest-rate cut to kick off a new easing cycle."
What does this mean? Were we faked-out by the stock market’s January 2022 sell-off? Are we still in the Great Bull Market, 1982 to Kingdom Come? You’ll recall, in January 2022, inflation was running hot and stocks turned down. It looked not just like another correction, but like a fundamental change of direction... a new Primary Trend. “The boom is over,” we wrote (or words to that effect). “From now on the Primary Trend is down. Because the Fed can no longer juice the market the way it used to. Any stock market gains from here forward are likely to be offset by inflation.”
In round numbers, yesterday’s new high put the stock market about 20% above its 2022 peak. And in round numbers, consumer prices are about 20% higher too. So, investors haven’t really made any real gains. In gold terms, they’re still losing money. While stocks went up yesterday, gold went up too... and is now 25% higher since the beginning of this year. In January 2022, the Dow/Gold ratio - showing how many ounces of gold it took to buy the thirty Dow stocks - stood at 20. Today, it’s just 16. As expected, inflation has undermined the stock market gains.
Most likely, the Fed will continue to cut rates. Stock prices may rise further, as inflation pressures build up in the economy. That is what the bond market seemed to be saying yesterday. Even though the Fed is now actively cutting rates, long Treasury bond yields went up. The 30-year bond now yields more than 4%.
As for what will happen next...We could see glittering new highs in the Dow. And it could turn out that the January 2022 peak was not actually the Everest of the Primary Trend... but just another peak in the Fed’s Himalayas. But for now, we’ll stick with our guess: Jan. 2022 marked a turning point. And the primary trend is down.
In any case, it makes little difference to us. This is not the time to go ‘all in’ into the stock market. The Dow/Gold ratio has been more than cut in half since the beginning of the century. In terms of gold, the Dow is now only worth about 40% of its 1999 peak. And as far as we know, stocks are still going down. Meanwhile, commentators explained that the Fed cut will ‘stimulate’ the economy. It will help guarantee a ‘soft landing,’ they said. It will ‘boost employment,’ they added. But so far this century we’ve seen more stimulus added to the US economy than in the entire 19th and 20th centuries combined. US debt - which only partially measures the stimulus efforts, rose from just $5 trillion to $35 trillion - a 7x increase.
Did the economy grow faster? No. Were people richer? Well... some of them were. The only reliable effect of artificially low interest rates and money-printing has been to increase prices of financial assets... and make the people who own them richer.
The Fed began manipulating stock prices about thirty years ago. Since then, each of the households in the top 1% has gained about $32 million in wealth. Down below, in the 90% of households that do not own financial assets, the wealth gain has been, relatively, negligible. This unfairness - not to mention the Fed’s drag on the economy - could be easily corrected. Let buyers and sellers of credit set their own rates. And, for good measure, don’t allow the Fed to ‘print’ money to lend to the federal government.
Problem solved. If the feds insist on spending beyond their means, they’ll have to borrow the money, honestly, from savers. Will either candidate suggest such a thing? Of course not. But let’s look at what they are proposing. Next week."
o
"There Comes A Time..."
"I make no bones about being partisan for my country. I also feel no shame whatever because of it. I absolutely disagree that "great thinkers don't let that affect the thoughts". I would say exactly the opposite: someone who refuses to let love-of-country affect their thoughts is a moral cripple irrespective of their intellectual prowess. I can look dispassionately at the situation, and I have done so repeatedly. But I will never forget which nation I love and support.
We Americans have a saying: “It’s more important what you stand for than who you stand with.” I do not rely upon peer opinion to decide what is right and what is wrong. I make those decisions for myself, and even if I discover that every other human alive chose differently, that doesn’t mean I was wrong.
There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to choose sides. I have chosen my side. I am comfortable with my decision. I do not think everyone on my side is a saint, but I know that those on the other side are much, much worse.
Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows. That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and “great thinking”. It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice.”
- Steven Den Beste
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“Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and unexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country – hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
- Mark Twain
"Hunger Games Is Fiction No More"
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"Hunger Games Is Fiction No More"
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
"When “The Hunger Games” first came out more than a decade ago, the dystopia it presented was compelling and sophisticated but also implausible. Lately I wondered how it held up and rewatched the first three films (I don’t know about the others).
My goodness, it was more prescient than it seemed at the time, including the stratification of wealth, the decadence of privilege, the abuse of power, and the complications of resistance. This series exists on many levels, but strikes me as one of the more revealing fictional stories that forecast the overlapping of material decadence, desperate poverty, and the use of fear as a propaganda device.
As a political allegory, it covers the same intellectual terrain as Aristotle’s “Politics,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” and de Jouvenel’s “On Power,” but in a way that is more penetrating for readers and viewers, and particularly relevant for our times.
The entire series deals with the greatest conflict in history, that between liberty and power. Those fortunate enough to live in District One, the center of the empire, and socialize with the best, eat well, dress in increasingly preposterous ways (hair dyed in unnatural colors), follow all the trends, go to the right parties, and try to keep with the social scene.
Each of the districts below perform their assigned economic function of keeping the center living in luxury. Borders between them are strictly enforced. Your place in the socio-political order is determined by accidents of birth with no broad economic mobility.
In order to maintain the order and keep rebellion at bay, the leaders in District One hold an annual extravaganza that combines fashion, violent games, and intense political messaging of the dangers of rebellion. Each district is required to send two randomly assigned tributes to the games where they face off in an arena in a battle for their lives with only one winner, as the people at the top watch with intense fascination.
The sheer spectator power of the event is what psychologically ties the elites to the social and political structure, while the fear of being called up as tribute for the games is what impresses upon the population the need for compliance. The scenario is consistent with Carl Schmitt’s principle of the friend/enemy distinction in his “Concept of the Political,” which, he argues, must finally be made real by the shedding of blood.
Those who have followed the story until the final installment might have supposed that the problem was rather stark. One man, President Snow, held all the power. He was a cruel man and he used every means to keep his power. He sat at the center of a capital city that pillaged the districts of resources and held power through fear.
If that is all there is to the problem, the solution would be clear: President Snow has to go. With the source of the problem out of the way, all will be well. This was the thinking of District 12 heroine Katniss Everdeen for most of the series. And one can see why she would believe this. Snow is a ghastly figure, and he was personally responsible for vast cruelty and crimes. He deserves to be overthrown and for justice to prevail.
Plus, she supposes that everyone she knows shares her vision of the final goal: a normal life without oppression, without violence, without pillaging, without rigid geographic and caste classifications, and without televised death matches orchestrated to instill fear in the population.
There was more going on beneath the surface. The capital city of Panem was an autocracy but also the center of a nation-state, which is to say that the bureaucracy, the administrative apparatus, a standing military, a media enterprise, and its methods of rule could survive the death of the leader. This is the difference between a personal state and a nation state. The power apparatus of the nation state seeks immortality, a continuing life regardless who happens to head it.
President Snow is the paranoid autocrat who, Katniss comes to discover, is himself entrapped in a system that he must maintain while seeking a successor. There are masses in the capital to keep entertained, potential betrayers within his own ranks, and rebellions constantly brewing. He knows for certain that his rule is fragile and that an iron hand is the only way to maintain this unstable system.
Another problem is that the system itself is attractive to competitors who long not for freedom as such but rather to inhabit the commanding heights. The problem of creating a world without power, then, becomes more complicated than the overthrow of the existing autocrat.
In every revolutionary situation, those who are most motivated to achieve the aim are those who seek to hold power themselves. So long as the machinery of legal violence exists, there will be those who seek to control it - and, as Hayek said, it is usually the worst who make it to the top and spend their lives seeking to get there. Therefore, it is not just those who rule but also those who seek to rule who constitute a threat to liberty. This is how the existence of powerful nation-states ends up creating multiple layers of dangers.
This is the story of how Rousseau became Robespierre, how Russian liberalism became Bolshevism, and how so many meritorious movements against colonialism and corporatism have ended in dictatorship, tyranny, and famine.
Anyone who seeks to end oppression has to keep his or her eye out for those who would use the chaos and confusion of political upheavals to seize and exercise power in the future. This is what Katniss learns, as she gradually discovers that her one-time allies had become skilled in the conduct of war, appreciative of the status that comes with leadership, and lust for exercising state power themselves.
She comes to discover this dark truth about the rebel armies when the leader herself admits that she has every intention of retaining the Hunger Games as a mechanism of control following a successful coup.
Through this shocking revelation, Katniss learns that great lesson of history: It is not just despots who need to be kept at bay, but also those who most passionately seek to overthrow despots too. In order to realize liberty, you need more than just loathing of those in charge; you need the ascendance of the love of true liberty itself and a system in place that guards that liberty against every attempt to overthrow it.
Once Katniss catches on to what is happening around her, she has to make a decision. Does she comply with the dictates of the increasingly centralized revolutionary forces or take a different turn and go her own way? The urgency of this decision is what turns “The Hunger Games” from being a simple Manichean struggle between one good and one evil into a real-life version of a Massive Multiplayer Online game.
There are many applications to this principle in history but one might pertain to U.S. foreign policy. In the 1980s, the United States sought to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan by supporting Islamic fundamentalists, who were then called “freedom fighters,” and they were given weapons and massive logistical support. After the Soviets left, the rebellion gradually metastasized into the Taliban, who ruled with an iron hand, and were then overthrown after 9/11, leading to 20 years of U.S. occupation, which stirred resentment among the population, and a final deal that put the Taliban back in charge, who enforce their rule with the weaponry that the United States left behind in a chaotic withdrawal.
That’s a one-paragraph summary of three decades of incredible folly.
This saga coincided with a similar situation in Iraq after 2003, following a decade of embargoes, intermittent bombing, and harsh sanctions. The overthrow of the once-allied dictator Saddam Hussein brought to power not liberty-loving constitutionalists, but rather a Shiite majority that oppressed in turn the Sunni minority that Hussein had represented. The Sunni insurgency against the Iraqi state caused a bloody civil war in Iraq that eventually spilled over into the rebellion against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and mutated into the Islamic State. Over the course of 25 years, Iraq went from a defeated and relatively quiescent state to a seething hotbed of poverty, violence, and hatred.
Fast forward to the Libyan case where the overthrow of another dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, sparked what seemed like a populist blowback, but was really part of a series of “color revolutions” that manipulated social media and the mainstream press into following U.S. foreign policy priorities. Combined with all the other interventions, and alongside a surreptitious attempt to boot the Syrian overlord, the next stage saw the spread of ISIS into a region-wide insurgency that intended regional rule through bloodshed, which was finally put down by the Trump administration.
The point is that attempts to purge the world of an existing evil raise the very risky prospect of creating even more. And it’s not just about foreign regimes. A famous trait of democracy is that the urge to kick out one group of leaders is necessarily tied to bringing another group into power. The latter are often no better and sometimes worse than the former. This is one of the reasons for so much political nostalgia in U.S. politics: a look back almost always provides a better picture than a look at the present.
The simple lesson of “The Hunger Games” is that powerful people can do terrible things. We must resist in order to stop them. The more complicated lesson is that powerful institutions themselves are corrupt, and that there will always be those lacking in moral scruples who are willing to assume the mantle of power. That is precisely why the Founding Fathers struggled so hard to put in place a framework for rule that guaranteed, as a first priority, the rights and liberties of the people: a Republic if the people can keep it.
There is general agreement today that the United States does stand at the precipice of something huge because the existing disequilibrium is simply not sustainable on multiple levels. The key question is always: what kind of society do we want to live in? Everyone needs a clear and compelling answer to that question today. There is no more standing on the sidelines to watch the action from the outside, like spectators in the Hunger Games.
At the end of the movie, we see Katniss out of battle gear, sitting in the grass, at her home, being bathed by sunlight, tending to her own life, cultivating her own personal vision of freedom, out of the limelight. Ruling herself, not others, and having regained a normal life. Perhaps that scene offers the best lesson of all."
Jim Kunstler, "Mad to the Max"
"Mad to the Max"
by Jim Kunstler
“I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for the press to
have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is.”
- Hillary Clinton
"If anything like civil war ignites in this country, the sides will not be the political Red and the Blue but the sane and the insane. Now it happens, unfortunately, that the insane are driving the engine of government. They have been at war with the people of this land for years, depriving them of livelihoods, stuffing them into prison, breaking the social contract, wrecking the country’s relations with the rest of the world, and belaboring the peoples’ minds with one insulting absurdity after another.
They comprise a bizarre coalition of the permanent bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, and the news media. The permanent bureaucracy includes its own machine for making war on citizens: the intel blob, whose tentacles reach into other agencies: Homeland Security, the State Department, the so-called Justice Department, the Pentagon, the myriad Public Health offices, and the shadowy clique that stands-in for a disabled president in the White House.
You can tell they are insane because they are driven by a single motivation: to remain in power for no other purpose than to escape responsibility for their many crimes against the people. This is insane behavior because it depends on the proposition that reality does not matter, that reality is optional, that there is no such thing as truth, and if it happened to exist, to be a thing, it would have no greater value to the human project than its opposite, untruth.
The greatest absurdity of the moment, is the idea that Americans might desire to continue under the rule of this evil coalition devoted to unreality and untruth, that is, to vote for candidates of the Democratic Party. Its greatest crimes, of course, are the lawless measures taken to pervert the very elections that might allow them to retain power in office.
Some of it is well-hidden and abstruse, such as the machinations of election lawfare manager-in-chief, Marc Elias, who for many years has used the courts and the state legislatures to fiddle election rules that make it impossible to account for who is actually casting the votes. This, you understand, is insane. What sovereign people would seek to institutionalize election fraud?
Some election crime is just in your face. The open border policy may have many nefarious angles, but an obvious one is stuffing the voter rolls with live bodies that have names attached, which can be bundled and harvested in ballot form like so many sheaves of oats. No one is fooled by this. Yet the Democratic Party has its heavy hand on the lever of power that controls entry to the country. Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security allows this to happen and bullshits Congress in open committee hearings. Congress has impeached him for this affront and the Democratic majority Senate has declined to hold the attendant trial - because stuffing the voter rolls with illegal immigrants allows them to remain in power.
The remedies for this dastardly mess are pretty simple and straightforward: return to paper ballots cast on one election day, requiring voter ID that amounts to proof of citizenship. Everything else - computerized (hackable) ballot-counting machines, mail-in ballots, early voting, automatic voter registration by means of other government transactions that have nothing to do with elections (motor-voter acts) - only insures election fraud. Sane people do not seek to defraud themselves.
It is widely suspected by the not-insane that even the attempt at massive voter fraud may not avail to put over the paramount candidate of the insane: Veep Kamala Harris. Nobody believes that she is capable of being president. But the insane don’t seek a capable president - in fact, the opposite. They want a president who can only function with direction and management of the blob, by the blob, and for the blob. The blob’s motives, besides seeking to avoid responsibility for its prior crimes, are a license to commit new crimes, especially crimes that expand the many perquisites and privileges of being in power. These include the fortunes to be made in control of the nation’s wealth, and the sadistic pleasure derived from punishing and humiliating their not-insane opponents. For instance, running the insane Ukraine war, with its fabulous kickbacks for the military contractors and office-holders...and making you witness more drag queen story hours.
Due to the possibility that sane citizens, despite calculated election fraud, might elect Mr. Trump, who opposes all that psychotic, criminal nonsense, the coalition of the permanent bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, and the news media appears to have few options left besides murdering Mr. Trump. The first two would-be assassins show a train of association with the intel blob. Thomas Crooks (or, at least one of his many cell phones) traveled repeatedly to a downtown DC building adjacent to the FBI HQ; Ryan Wesley Routh has alleged links to the Arlington, Va., Maximus Company, a CIA cut-out - perhaps explaining how the otherwise indigent Routh funded his global travels. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) disclosed yesterday that the DHS knows of five assassination teams targeting President Trump, three connected with foreign governments, two domestic.
The most mystifying element in the coalition of the insane is the news media - that is, the cable news networks plus The New York Times/WashPost axis - who have tirelessly broadcast the mantras that Mr. Trump seeks to quash our democracy and that he is a new Hitler who must be stopped at all costs. The inflammatory barrage has had an obvious effect. But the mystery is: what’s in it for these news companies to go along with their insane and desperate partners: the blob and the Dems?
What’s in it for Joe Khan, Executive Editor of The Times? His paper lies and spins unreality incessantly. He surely makes a comfortable salary, but he can’t be getting rich...that is, really rich...millions. Apparently, he publishes unreal stories because he’s insane. He believes things that are not true. Nor are his reporters getting really rich. They just appear to be blinded by sheer hatred - rising to insanity - and perhaps also by the lurking fear that their many published lies, dating back to RussiaGate, will eventually disgrace them professionally if allowed to be pursued and revealed by the sane.
The temperature is rising in this political crucible. Something is going to melt down. It’s looking pretty clear now who can take the heat, and who can’t."
Thursday, September 19, 2024
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "The Royal Albert Hall Concert"
Full screen recommended.
Ludovico Einaudi,
"The Royal Albert Hall Concert:
Lady Labyrinth and Nightbook" ( 2010 )
"A Look to the Heavens:
“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.
The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
Chet Raymo, “What Not to Believe”
“What Not to Believe”
by Chet Raymo
“In Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra, I came across this epigraph from Euripides: "Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe." I have no idea which of Euripides' plays the quote is from, but it strikes me as a suitable source for reflection. Credulity is the default state of a human life. Children are born to believe, to accept as true what they are told by adults. An innate credulity has survival value in a dangerous world. If a grown-up says "There are crocodiles in the river," it is probably best to stay out of the water.
Skepticism, on the other hand, must be learned. I was late in realizing that I didn't have to believe the received "truth." My best teacher was a somewhat older Panamanian secular Jew I went to graduate school with at UCLA. We took our brown-bag lunches together in the university's botanical garden, and spent the hour talking about physics, religion, and the "meaning of life."
Moises was the first person I had encountered after sixteen years of Catholic education who mentioned the word "skepticism." "Why do you believe that?" he would ask, and often I had no answer except that it was what my family and teachers told me was true. The idea that I might actually examine the basis for my beliefs was a rather new concept. In matters of religion, like almost everyone else in the world, I had embraced uncritically the faith story into which I was born.
And thus began my search for "a judicious sense of what not to believe." When later, as a teacher, I wrote a little column for each issue of the college newspaper, I called it "Under a Skeptical Star," from a line of the Scots poet/scholar William MacNeile Dixon: "If there be a skeptical star I was born under it, yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment." A liberating sense of what not to believe opened the door to a vastly more interesting world whose diverse and astonishing riches I continue to explore to this day."
"At The Approach Of Danger..."
“At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other, even more reasonable, says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man’s power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.”
- Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”
“All our mortal lives are set in danger and perplexity: one day to prosper,
and the next – who knows? When all is well, then look for rocks ahead.”
- Sophoclese, “Philoctetes”
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Free Downloads:
A little light reading from Tolstoy…
Freely download “War and Peace”, by Leo Tolstoy, here:
Freely download “Seven Tragedies of Sophocles- Philoctetes” here:
The Poet: William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
"The Second Coming"
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
- William Butler Yeats, January 1919
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," indeed...
"Never, Ever Forget..."
"Never, ever forget that nothing in this life is free. Life demands payment in some form for your "right" to express yourself, to condemn and abuse the evil surrounding us. Expect to pay... it will come for you, they will come for you, regardless. Knowing that, give them Hell itself every chance you can. Expect no mercy, and give none. That's how life works. Be ready to pay for what you do, or be a coward, pretend you don't see, don't know, and cry bitter tears over how terrible things are, over how you let them become."
- Ernest Hemingway, "For Whom the Bell Tolls "
"I Pity You, Too..."
“Said a philosopher to a street sweeper, “I pity you. Yours is a hard and dirty task.” And the street sweeper said, “Thank you, sir. But tell me, what is your task?” And the philosopher answered saying, “I study man’s mind, his deeds and his desires.” Then the street sweeper went on with his sweeping and said with a smile, “I pity you, too.”
- Kahlil Gibran
Bill Bonner, "Excrement Employment"
"Excrement Employment"
Over time elites ‘solve’ more and more problems. Their problem
solving inevitably brings directives, statutes, agencies and commissions,
along with fees, jobs, power, and more wealth - for themselves.
by Bill Bonner
Dublin, Ireland - “I’d like to do the job sooner,” said a roofer in France. “But I can’t find workers. They all want to go to college and get jobs in the city. Air conditioned offices. Coffee machines. That kind of thing.” Today we wonder what kind of thing that is.
Business Insider: "A 2021 survey by Pew Research... asked people from around the world what made their lives meaningful... in the US, only 17% mentioned work as a source of meaning. That was a sharp decline from when Pew asked the same question four years prior — a full one-third of Americans mentioned their jobs as a source of meaning in 2017, double the 2021 rate. Increasingly, it seems that more people feel like their jobs don't matter.
The academic David Graeber coined the term "bullshit jobs" in 2013 to describe jobs where, he wrote, "the person doing it believes it pointless, and if the job didn't exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place."
Elites get the good jobs. They get the money. They get the beautiful women and the handsome men. And the big houses. And the fast cars. They live in the good neighborhoods, shop at the high-end stores, live longer and eat in the fancy restaurants. Is it any wonder that every mother wants her babies to grow up and join them? Roofing? Forget it. Plumbing? Dirty. Farming? What, you want to live in Nebraska? Mining? You’re going to destroy the earth. Manufacturing? Let the Chinese do it; they sweat... we think... remember?
Over time, elites ‘solve’ more and more problems. Their problem solving inevitably brings directives, statutes, agencies and commissions... along with fees... jobs... power... and more wealth - for themselves, of course. Then, the gap between them, and the rest of the population, widens.
But the elites are elite for a reason. They have more training, more education and more expertise; they are better connected, better informed and richer. They don’t stock the shelves at Walmart; they manage its advertising, its recruiting, its legal team, its product development and marketing. They analyze the numbers and make decisions. The elite have the prestige jobs - judges, architects, doctors, foreign policy specialists, scientists, priests, and engineers. Naturally, they earn more. But a society only needs so many judges. And only so many people can make it through the rigors of medical school.
So, as the number of young people who want to enter the elite classes grows... something must be found for them to do. This creates a whole ‘second tier’ of faux elites... who fill government, universities and health care industries. They are not professors of physics... nor are they qualified teachers, anaesthesiologists or trained emergency room nurses. Nor are they elected politicians (for which, too, the need is very limited).
Instead, they are DEI officers... inspectors... clerks and paper pushers in a society swamped by decrees, rules, and red tape. They are ‘educators,’ rather than real teachers. They are ‘health administrators,’ rather than real doctors or nurses. They are ‘security professionals,’ rather than real cops. They are ‘artists,’ who depend on grants rather than paying customers. There is even a whole group of people who call themselves ‘scholars,’ even though they actually do no research or scholarly thinking. They are just hangers-on in the education industry.
Taken together, they are the college-educated foot soldiers of the empire... fetchers, water carriers and porters for the real elites. They add to the complexity and the costs, doing meretricious busywork... often with ‘bullshit jobs’ that slow us all down... and make us all poorer."
Gerald Celente, "Interest Rates Down, Market And Gold Up, Nuclear War On Horizon"
Strong language alert.
Gerald Celente, 9/19/24
"Interest Rates Down, Market And Gold Up,
Nuclear War On Horizon"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
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"How It Really Is"
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Yeah, Joe and Kamala, the right track straight to Hell...
Too bad the joke's on US!
"That's why they call it the American Dream.
Because you have to be asleep to believe it."
- George Carlin
Gregory Mannarino, "'We The People' Are Done, Corporate Profits And Executive Bonuses Will Skyrocket"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/19/24
"'We The People' Are Done, Corporate Profits
And Executive Bonuses Will Skyrocket"
Comments here:
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand
our banking and monetary system, for if they did,
I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
- Henry Ford
Judge Napolitano, "Prof. John Mearsheimer: Is Israel on the Brink?"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 9/19/24
"Prof. John Mearsheimer: Is Israel on the Brink?"
Comments here:
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Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 9/19/24
"INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern:
Weekly Intel Wrap"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "5,000 Banks Gone - Is Yours Next?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 9/19/24
"5,000 Banks Gone - Is Yours Next?"
"Your bank is dying, and you need to know NOW! In today's video, I'm diving into the shocking wave of bank closures happening across the country. From Vermont to California, banks are disappearing, leaving many in banking deserts. What does this mean for you? More than 5,000 branches have closed since 2021, and the trend isn't slowing down. Soon there will be no more bank branches."
Comments here:
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
"A Look to the Heavens"
"The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, third largest in the Local Group of galaxies after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), and our own Milky Way. About 3 million light-years from the Milky Way, M33 is itself thought to be a satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy and astronomers in these two galaxies would likely have spectacular views of each other's grand spiral star systems.
As for the view from planet Earth, this sharp image shows off M33's blue star clusters and pinkish star forming regions along the galaxy's loosely wound spiral arms. In fact, the cavernous NGC 604 is the brightest star forming region, seen here at about the 4 o'clock position from the galaxy center. Like M31, M33's population of well-measured variable stars have helped make this nearby spiral a cosmic yardstick for establishing the distance scale of the Universe."
"You Can Never Tell..."
"You can never tell what people have inside them
until you start taking it away, one hope at a time."
- Gregory David Roberts
“9 Short Quotes That Changed My Life and Why”
“9 Short Quotes That Changed My Life and Why”
by Ryan Holiday
“Like a lot of people, I try to collect words to live by. Most of these words come from reading, but also from conversations, from teachers, and from everyday life. As Seneca, the philosopher and playwright, so eloquently put it: “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application – not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech – and learn them so well that words become works.”
In my commonplace book, I keep these little sayings under the heading “Life.” That is, things that help me live better, more meaningfully, and with happiness and honesty. Below are 9 sayings, what they mean, and how they changed my life. Perhaps they will strike you and be of service. Hopefully the words might become works for you too.
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“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”
- Nassim Taleb
This little epigram from Nassim Taleb has been a driving force in my life. It fuels my writing, but mostly it has fueled difficult personal decisions. A few years ago, I was in the middle of a difficult personal situation in which my financial incentives were not necessarily aligned with the right thing. Speaking out would cost me money. I actually emailed Nassim. I asked: “What does ‘saying’ entail? To the person? To the public? At what cost? And how do you know where/when ego might be the influencing factor in determining where you decide to go on that public/private spectrum?” His response was simple: If it harms the collective, you speak up until it no longer does. There’s another line in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar.‘ Caesar, having returned from the conquest of Gaul, is reminded to tread lightly when speaking to the senators. He replies, “Have I accomplished so much in battle, but now I’m afraid to tell some old men the truth?” That is what I think about with Nassim’s quote. What’s the point of working hard and being successful if it means biting your tongue (or declining to act) when you see something unfair or untoward? What do you care what everyone else thinks?
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“It can have meaning if it changes you for the better.”
- Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl, who was imprisoned and survived three separate Nazi concentration camps, lost his wife, his parents, job, his home and the manuscript that his entire life’s work had gone into. Yet, he emerged from this horrific nightmare convinced that life was not meaningless and that suffering was not without purpose. His work in psychology – now known as logotherapy – is reminiscent of the Stoics: We don’t control what happens to us, only how we respond. Nothing deprives us of this ability to respond, even if only in the slightest way, even if that response is only acceptance. In bad moments, I think of this line. It reminds me that I can change for the better because of it and find meaning in everything – even if my “suffering” pales in comparison to what others have gone through.
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“Thou knowest this man’s fall;
but thou knowest not his wrassling.”
- James Baldwin
As James Baldwin reflected on the death of his father, a man who he loved and hated, he realized that he only saw the man’s outsides. Yes, he had his problems but hidden behind those external manifestations was his own unique internal struggle which no other person is ever able to fully comprehend. The same is true for everyone – your parents, your boss, the person behind you in line. We can see their flaws but not their struggles. If we can focus on this, we’ll have so much more patience and so much less anger and resentment. It reminds me of another line that means a lot to me from Pascal: “To understand is to forgive.” You don’t have to fully understand or know, but it does help to try.
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“This is not your responsibility, but it is your problem.”
- Cheryl Strayed
Though I came to Cheryl Strayed late, the impact has been significant. In the letter this quote came from, she was speaking to someone who had something unfair done to them. But you see, life is unfair. Just because you should not have to deal with something doesn’t change whether you in fact need to. It reminds me of something my parents told me when I was learning to drive: It doesn’t matter that you had the right of way if you end up dying in an accident. Deal with the situation at hand, even if you don’t want to, even if someone else should have to, because you’re the one that’s being affected by it. End of story. Her quote is the best articulation I’ve found of that fact.
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“Dogs bark at what they cannot understand.”
- Heraclitus
People are going to criticize you. They are going to resist or resent what you try to do. You’re going to face obstacles and a lot of those obstacles will be other human beings. Heraclitus is explaining why. People don’t like change. They don’t like to be confused. It’s also a fact that doing new things means forcing change and confusion on other people. So, if you’re looking for an explanation for all the barking you’re hearing, there it is. Let it go, keep working, do your job. My other favorite line from Heraclitus is: “Character is fate.” Who you are and what you stand for will determine who you are and what you do. Surely character makes ignoring the barking a bit easier.
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“Life is short – the fruit of this life is a
good character and acts for the common good.”
- Marcus Aurelius
Marcus wrote this line at some point during the Antonine Plague – a global pandemic spanning the entirety of his reign. He could have fled Rome. Most people of means did. No one would have faulted him if he did too. Instead, Marcus stayed and braved the deadliest plague of Rome’s 900-year history. And we know that he didn’t even consider choosing his safety and fleeing over his responsibility and staying. He wrote repeatedly about the Stoic concept of sympatheia - the idea that all things are mutually woven together, that we were made for each other, that we are all one.
It’s one of the lesser-known Stoic concepts because it’s easier to only think and care about the people immediately around you. It’s tempting to get consumed by your own problems. It’s natural to assume you have more in common and the same interests as the people who look like you or live like you do. But that is an insidious lie – one responsible for monstrous inhumanity and needless pain. When other people suffer, we suffer. When the world suffers, we suffer. What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee, Marcus said. When we take actions, we have to always think: What would happen if everyone did this? What are the costs of my decisions for other people? What risks am I externalizing? Is this really what a person with good character and a concern for others would do? You have to care about others. It’s sometimes the hardest thing to do, but it’s the only thing that counts. As Heraclitus (one of Marcus’ favorites) said, character is fate. It’s the fruit of this life.
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“Happiness does not come from the seeking,
it is never ours by right.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt was a remarkable woman. Her father killed himself. Her mother was verbally abusive. Her husband repeatedly betrayed her – even up to the moment he died. Yet she slowly but steadily became one of the most influential and important people in the world. I think you could argue that happiness and meaning came from this journey too. Her line here is reminiscent of something explained by both Aristotle and Viktor Frankl – happiness is not pursued, it ensues. It is the result of principles and the fulfillment of our potential. It is also transitory – we get glimpses of it. We don’t have it forever and we must continually re-engage with it. Whatever quote you need to understand this truth, use it. Because it will get you through bad times and to very good ones.
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“You could leave life right now.
Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
- Marcus Aurelius
If there is better advice than this, it has yet to be written. For many civilizations, the first time that their citizens realize just how vulnerable they are is when they find out they’ve been conquered, or are at the mercy of some cruel tyrant, or some uncontainable disease. It’s when somebody famous – like Tom Hanks or Marcus Aurelius – falls ill that they get serious. The result of this delayed awakening is a critical realization: We are mortal and fragile, and fate can inflict horrible things on our tiny, powerless bodies. There is no amount of fleeing or quarantining we can do to insulate ourselves from the reality of human existence: memento mori – thou art mortal. No one, no country, no planet is as safe or as special as we like to think we are. We are all at the mercy of enormous events outside our control. You can go at any moment, Marcus was constantly reminding himself with each of the events swirling around him. He made sure this fact shaped every choice and action and thought.
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“Some lack the fickleness to live as they wish
and just live as they have begun.”
- Seneca
After beginning with Seneca, let’s end with him. Inertia is a powerful force. The status quo – even if self-created – is comforting. So people find themselves on certain paths in life and cannot conceive of changing them, even if such a change would result in more personal happiness. We think that fickleness is a negative trait, but if it pushes you to be better and find and explore new, better things, it certainly isn’t. I’ve always been a proponent of dropping out, of quitting paths that have gotten stale. Seneca’s quote has helped me with that and I actually have it framed next to my desk so that I might look at it each day. It’s a constant reminder: Why am I still doing this? Is it for the right reasons? Or is it just because it’s been that way for a while?
The power of these quotes is that they say a lot with a little. They help guide us through the complexity of life with their unswerving directness. They make us better, keep us centered, give us something to rest on – a kind of backstop to prevent backsliding. That’s what these 9 quotes have done for me in my life. Borrow them or dig into history or religion or philosophy to find some to add to your own commonplace book. And then turn those words… into works.”