Running 'Cause I Can't Fly 2

Sunday, May 12, 2024

"7 Ways to Support Others During Tough Times"

"7 Ways to Support Others During Tough Times"

by Lexi Behrndt

"Life is fragile. Hard times are inevitable. At one time or another, we will all go through a difficult time, whether we deal with sickness, catastrophe, crisis, or relational breakdown. In those times, we need each other more than ever, but it's not just enough to be surrounded by people. We, as supporters, need to be educated in the best way to love our friends and family through tough times.

1. Silence speaks louder than words misspoken. Don't ignore them. Plain and simple. If you don't know what to say, don't avoid them. Say something. Ninety nine percent of what you could say is better than saying nothing at all. Instead, if you had a relationship with them, even if it was 10 years ago, a simple, "I'm so sorry," or "I'm thinking of you," or "I'm praying for you."

2. Don't make them ask you for help. Do they need help? Absolutely. Do they want to ask? Absolutely not. There is nothing more humbling than having to admit that you don't have your life under control, and for all the people pleasers out there, asking people for something as simple as meals or free babysitting is something we'd rather avoid. We'd rather tough it out than beg. Instead, offer your help, and offer specific ways that you would like to help.

3. Don't rush them through their pain. Saying things like "I know exactly how you feel" or telling me a story of your cousin's boyfriend's aunt's struggle and how she made it through. While we may say things with good intentions, it can also serve to minimize their issues and urge them to stifle their pain. Yes, what they are going through has probably been faced before. Yes, people do survive. Yes, things might get better. Yes, to all the things.

People need to know that the pain they feel is real and they need to move through it. They need to get a little messy and be a little more honest and feel a little more, because if they move through it too quickly or try to avoid their feelings, they might not heal just the right way. A doctor doesn't just give a sling with no cast to someone who has severely broken their arm. The doctor gives a cast. The doctor prescribes time for healing, because they know that if the healing is rushed, the bone may also not heal properly. In the same way, we need to give time for others to move through their pain rather than rush them. Instead, sit with them. Listen. Let them be honest when life is hard. Let them be angry. Let them be whatever they need to be, and resist the urge to fix them, heal them, or placate them. Just be with them.

4. Don't give unsolicited advice. Even if you have been in the situation before, support, but don't preach. This includes all cliche and trite phrases and platitudes. You may have heard them said before, but that doesn't mean they are helpful. Instead, listen, love, give. Give time, energy, resources... give yourself. Just don't give advice when they haven't asked.

5. Don't give them magic formulas. If they stand on their head, count to 30, twice and backwards, confess everything they have ever done, change their past mistakes, then this tough situation would no longer be happening to them. There is no magic formula. Life is hard and messy and it doesn't negate the goodness in this world, but it does assign blame and guilt to the situation, one of the last things that someone who is suffering needs is to be shamed. Instead, let them know you are thinking of them, praying for them, loving them, and cheering them on.

6. Don't make it about yourself. Essentially, don't complain about how your friend's tough time makes you feel. If you are close, you will be affected, but if they are closer to the problem than you, then they are not the person to whom you should vent. Instead, you should offer them support. Check on them. Love them. Let someone else support you. Instead, focus on supporting them. For more on this, do yourself a favor and read this article by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman for the LA Times.

7. Don't forget the person. With all of the above tips, don't just follow them like a black-and-white guide. The beauty in each of us is that we are unique individuals with different backgrounds, personalities, experiences, and circumstances. Instead, consider the recipient. Some people want hugs. Some people aren't touchy-feely. Some people want company. Some people prefer to sit alone. Some people want you to do things without asking, some people want you to run it past them first. Some people want someone to cry with and talk to, some people reserve that trust for a select few. Consider who they are before you act, and support them accordingly.

The bottom line? Love them selflessly and support them unconditionally, or as I remind myself... Say a little less. Love a little more. Life can be messy, but with love, we can help each other survive even the toughest times.”

- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

"Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave."

Full screen recommended, if you can stomach it.

"Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave."

"Problems with drugs and crime on Kensington Ave, Philadelphia's most dangerous street. In Philadelphia as a whole, violent crime and drug abuse are major issues. The city has a higher rate of violent crime than the national average and other similarly sized metropolitan areas. The drug overdose rate in Philadelphia is also concerning. Between 2013 and 2015, the number of drug overdose deaths in the city increased by 50%, with more than twice as many deaths from overdoses as homicides. Kensington's high crime rate and drug abuse contribute significantly to Philadelphia's problems.

Because of the high number of drugs in the neighborhood, Kensington has the third-highest drug crime rate by neighborhood in Philadelphia, at 3.57. The opioid epidemic has played a significant role in this problem, as it has in much of the rest of the country. Opioid abuse has skyrocketed in the United States over the last two decades, and Philadelphia is no exception. In addition to having a high rate of drug overdose deaths, 80% of Philadelphia's overdose deaths involved opioids, and Kensington is a significant contributor to this figure. This Philadelphia neighborhood is said to have the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast, with many neighbors migrating to the area for heroin and other opioids. With such a high concentration of drugs in Kensington, many state and local officials have focused on the neighborhood in an attempt to address Philadelphia's problem."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Full screen recommended, if you can stand it.

"Opiod Addiction (Xylazine/Fentanyl)

Is Killing Every 11 Minutes In America"

Filmed in Kensington, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Comments here:

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Full screen recommended.

Bruce Springsteen, "Streets of Philadelphia"

A comment: Shakespeare wrote in "Macbeth", "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." I once saw another quote about Hell, maybe Sartre, "This is Hell, cleverly disguised just enough to keep us from escaping." Look around, what do you see? Our society and economy, civilization itself is totally collapsing in every way, and it's doing it right now, and life as we knew it is already gone forever. The more I see, the more I think that thought about this being Hell just might be true...

"How It Really Is"

Dan, I Allegedly, "Houses are Under Water"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly AM 5/12/24

"Houses are Under Water"

"A record number of houses are worth less than what is owed on them.

This is called being underwater. How will that get fixed? Very simply put, it will not."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Greg Hunter, "Huge Financial Shock Inevitable & Hitting Now"

"Huge Financial Shock Inevitable & Hitting Now"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Former Wall Street money manager Ed Dowd is a skillful financial analyst. Even though he has a wildly popular book on CV19 vax deaths and injuries called “Cause Unknown,” he is now turning his attention back to the economy. Dowd warns the economy can fall out of bed at any time. Dowd explains, “What’s coming up next is a credit cycle. We are going to see commercial real estate go into problem mode. There are a lot of loans that need to be rolled over in 2024 and 25. A lot of these properties are down 80%. There is huge credit risk coming. The prediction of bank failures is accurate. We are going to see, over the next 12 to 24 months, banks go belly-up. Then, they will have to get merged with bigger banks.”

What happens to the Biden economy? Dowd says, “The economy is going to take a nosedive sometime in the next 12 months. The real economy is not doing well. The only thing that has been holding up the GDP growth is government spending. We are spending $1 trillion every 100 days. That’s adding $1 trillion to the deficit. The only job creation is government jobs, and they don’t actually add to the economy. Reports are coming out now that the low-income consumer is getting absolutely hammered. McDonald’s talked about it in their most recent earnings call. So, low-income and the middle-class are getting squeezed while the rich continue to plug along.”

Dowd told me off camera that the economy could get into trouble without warning. Dowd explains, “You’ve got to look at history. In 2008 and 2009, everyone talks about the crisis, but bank failures started showing up in 2007. I suspect as we roll through time in the real economy and the money supply issues start to hit the economy, we will see more bank failures and more businesses shut down. 46% of small businesses are having problems paying their rent. There is going to come a time in the next 6 to 12 months this huge shock that we saw in the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2000 bubble where massive layoffs start to happen–it’s inevitable. This is what happens when you crank up interest rates from 0% to 5.5%. There is a lag in the real economy, and it’s hitting right now. It’s only going to intensify as time goes on.

Dowd likes gold as a core asset. He also thinks the dollar has a way to go before it tanks, but it will tank someday. Down also thinks that the CV19 bioweapon shot pushers are trying to change the narrative to admit “some deaths” happened, but the amount is small. Dowd calls BS on that, and he thinks the death and injuries are at least 33 million in the USA alone. According to Dowd’s research, the CV19 vax was a criminal enterprise that murdered and seriously harmed millions. Dowd thinks the deaths and injuries from the CV19 vax are going to get worse. Dowd thinks Johns Hopkins and the rest of the medical community are trying to change the narrative, so they don’t get blamed for pushing a massive death and disability CV19 vax program." There is much more in the 53-minute interview.

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with money manager and investment expert Ed Dowd, author of the recently updated book called “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021, 2022 and 2023.”

- https://rumble.com/

If you want to go to Dowd’s website called PhinanceTechnologies.com, click here. Dowd’s work on compiling data on deaths and disabilities caused by the CV19 bioweapon/vax is all free at his website.

"Poke The Bear And Find Out: Here’s Why The West Should Finally Listen To Russia’s Warnings"

"Poke The Bear And Find Out: Here’s Why

The West Should Finally Listen To Russia’s Warnings"

by Tarik Cyril Amar

"We have been through an intense, if muffled crisis in the ongoing political-military confrontation between Russia and the West by way of Ukraine. The essence of this crisis is simple: Kiev and its Western supporters have lost the initiative in the Ukraine proxy war and may be on the verge of defeat, as high Western officials increasingly admit.

In response to this self-inflicted quandary, several important Western players have threatened further escalation. Most prominently, Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron publicly encouraged Kiev to use British Storm Shadow missiles to strike inside Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron continued to threaten a direct – not covert, as at present – intervention by French, that is, NATO, troops (In addition, an intriguing and much-discussed article reported that a deployment of 1,500 troops from France’s Foreign Legion had already begun. While its sources were hard to assess, its claims appeared too plausible for easy dismissal.)

Moscow, in return, issued a set of stark warnings, laying down – or highlighting – red lines. It announced drills with tactical nuclear weapons. Belarus did the same; in Minsk’s case, the weapons in question are, of course, also Russian. In addition, the British and French ambassadors received extremely straight talk about the risks their respective governments were running.

Addressing London, Moscow made clear that Kiev striking inside Russia with British missiles would expose Britain to “catastrophic consequences,” in particular, Russian retaliation against British forces anywhere. Regarding France, Moscow blasted its “belligerent” and “provocative” conduct and defied as futile French attempts to produce “strategic ambiguity.”

For now, this particular crisis seems to have abated. There are some signs that the West got the message. NATO figurehead Jens Stoltenberg, for instance, has insisted that NATO is not planning to send troops – openly, that is – into Ukraine.

Yet it would be wrong to feel too reassured. For this crisis was, at its core, a clash between, on one side, a Western problem that has by no means gone away and, on the other side, a persistent Russian policy that, it seems, all too many in the West refuse to take seriously enough.

The Western problem is that a defeat at Russia’s hands would be worse by orders of magnitude than the fiasco of the rout-like retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. Ironically, that is so because the West itself has charged its needless confrontation with Russia with the power to do unprecedented damage to NATO and the EU:

First, by insisting on treating Ukraine as a de facto almost-NATO-member, which means that by defeating it, Moscow will also defeat Washington’s key alliance. Second, by investing large and growing sums of money and quantities of supplies into this proxy war, which means that the West has weakened itself and, perhaps even more importantly, revealed its own weakness. Third, by trying to ruin both Russia’s economy and its international standing; the failure of both attempts has resulted in a stronger Russia across these two domains and, once again, revealed more limits of Western power. Fourth, by radically subordinating the EU to NATO and Washington, the geopolitical damage has been, as it were, leveraged.

In short, when the Ukraine crisis started in 2013/14 and then greatly escalated in 2022, Russia had vital security interests at stake; the West did not. By now, however, the West has made choices that have charged this conflict and its outcome with the capacity to do great, strategic harm to its own credibility, cohesion, and power: Overreach has consequences. That, briefly, is why the West is at an impasse and remains there after this crisis.

On the other side, we have that persistent policy of Moscow, namely its nuclear doctrine. Much Western commentary tends to overlook or downplay this factor, caricaturing Russia’s repeated warnings about nuclear weapons as “saber-rattling.” Yet, in reality, these warnings are consistent expressions of a policy that has been developed since the early 2000s, that is, for almost a quarter-century.

A key feature of this doctrine is that Russia explicitly retains the option of using nuclear weapons at a relatively early stage in a major conflict and before an adversary has had recourse to them. Many Western analysts have described the purpose of this posture as facilitating a strategy of “escalating to deescalate” (sometimes abbreviated as E2DE), here meaning specifically to end a conventional conflict on favorable terms through a limited use of nuclear weapons to deter the adversary from continuing.

The term “escalate to de-escalate” emerged in the West, not Russia, and this Western interpretation of Russian policy has played an important role in Western politics and debates and, thus, has its critics as well. In addition – but this is a separate question – some analysts point out that the idea of E2DE is less of any country’s national property than something inherent in the logic of nuclear strategy, that other nuclear powers have had similar policies, and that the whole idea, whoever adopts it, may not work.

In addition, Russia’s nuclear doctrine is, as you would expect, complex. And, while France’s President Emmanuel Macron has made a habit of strutting a constant inconstancy he calls “strategic ambiguity,” Moscow is capable of inflicting some genuine calculated uncertainty on its adversaries, with less bragging but more effectively. Thus, one side of its nuclear doctrine stresses that nuclear weapons could only be used if the existence of the Russian state was in danger, as has just been underlined again by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov. But to misunderstand this as a promise that Moscow would only use nukes if Moscow were under siege and half of Russia’s territory or population gone already, would be foolish.

In reality, there also is room in its nuclear doctrine for treating the “unconditional territorial integrity and sovereignty” of Russia as critical thresholds. How do we know? From multiple Russian documents, which need not be cited here because Ryabkov has reminded us of this facet of Moscow’s policy, too. In the same statement in which he emphasized the criterion of “state existence.” Take that, Emmanuel.

A final point, it seems, needs highlighting as well: Russia has never restricted its option of using nuclear weapons, indeed any type of weapons, to the area of a specific local conflict, for instance, Ukraine. The opposite is the case. Moscow is explicitly reserving the right to strike beyond the confines of such a battlefield. That is something that President Vladimir Putin has made crystal clear in his address to Russia’s Federal Assembly in February of this year. It is exactly that message that Britain has received as well in the recent crisis.

Whichever way you parse it, official Russian nuclear doctrine has specific messages for potential adversaries. Moscow has consistently applied this doctrine throughout the Ukraine War and in its recent warnings – by drill and by diplomatic demarche – to its Western opponents.

But there is the rub: The West has a history of obstinately not hearing Russian messages. That is how we ended up in this war in the first place. Russia had warned the West repeatedly since, at the latest, President Vladimir Putin’s well-known speech at the Munich Security Conference in – wait for it – 2007. The last major warning came in late 2021, when Russia – with Sergey Ryabkov, incidentally, in the forefront – offered the West what turned out to be a last chance to abandon its unilateralism and specifically NATO expansion and, instead, negotiate a new security framework. The West brushed this offer off. With nuclear weapons in play, it is time that Western elites learn to, finally, listen when Russia sends a serious warning.

- https://swentr.site/

Saturday, May 11, 2024

"Alert! Total Systems Crash From London To New York! Everyone Is Sleeping, Buckle Up!"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 5/11/24

"Alert! Total Systems Crash From London To New York!

Everyone Is Sleeping, Buckle Up!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "Americans Are Drowning In Debt And Racking Up More, Massive Debt Crisis Unavoidable"

Jeremiah Babe, 5/11/24

"Americans Are Drowning In Debt And Racking Up More,

Massive Debt Crisis Unavoidable"

Comments here:

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Musical Interlude: 2002, " A Gift of Life"

Full screen recommended.

2002, " A Gift of Life"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Who knows what evil lurks in the eyes of galaxies? The Hubble knows -- or in the case of spiral galaxy M64 - is helping to find out. Messier 64, also known as the Evil Eye or Sleeping Beauty Galaxy, may seem to have evil in its eye because all of its stars rotate in the same direction as the interstellar gas in the galaxy's central region, but in the opposite direction in the outer regions. Captured here in great detail by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, enormous dust clouds obscure the near-side of M64's central region, which are laced with the telltale reddish glow of hydrogen associated with star formation.

M64 lies about 17 million light years away, meaning that the light we see from it today left when the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees roamed the Earth. The dusty eye and bizarre rotation are likely the result of a billion-year-old merger of two different galaxies."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210329.html

The Poet: Langston Hughes, “Life Is Fine”

“Life Is Fine”

“I went down to the river,

I set down on the bank.

I tried to think but couldn’t,

So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!

I came up twice and cried!

If that water hadn’t a-been so cold

I might’ve sunk and died.

But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!

I took the elevator

Sixteen floors above the ground.

I thought about my baby

And thought I would jump down.

I stood there and I hollered!

I stood there and I cried!

If it hadn’t a-been so high

I might’ve jumped and died.

But it was High up there! It was high!

So since I’m still here livin’,

I guess I will live on.

I could’ve died for love -

But for livin’ I was born.

Though you may hear me holler,

And you may see me cry -

I’ll be dogged, sweet baby,

If you gonna see me die.

Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!”

- Langston Hughes

Chet Raymo, "The Ring of Truth"

"The Ring of Truth"

by Chet Raymo

"In Salley Vickers' novel, "Where Three Roads Meet," the shade of Tiresias, the blind seer of the Oedipus myth, visits Sigmund Freud in London during the psychoanalyst's final terrible illness. In a series of conversations, Tiresias retells the story of Oedipus- he who was fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother- a story at the heart of Freud's own theory of the human psyche. At one point in the conversations, as Tiresias and Freud discuss the extent to which our lives are fated, the question of immortality arises. Freud says of Oedipus that "he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is." And Tiresias replies, "But, Dr. Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal."

Oedipus lives on, whether he lived or not in actuality. Sophocles lives in our consciousness as vigorously as ever he did in life. They live because their stories touch something resonant and unchanging in human nature. Vickers suggests that what makes the Oedipal story immortal is not any necessary tendency of humans to act out the Oedipal myth, a la Freud, but rather Oedipus's rage to know the truth- or become conscious of a truth he has known all along and suppressed - even though the truth will be his undoing.

The poet Muriel Rukesyser got it exactly right when she said: "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." Even atoms are stories we tell about the world, having first paid close attention to how the world works. The plays of Sophocles and the other Greek dramatists live on not because their authors were immortal, but because nature endures and their stories tell us something that rings true about enduring nature. And, like Oedipus, we have a rage to know, even if knowledge will unseat some of our more comfortable illusions.

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Thucydides in the Underworld"

"Master, what gnaws at them so hideously their lamentation stuns the very air?"

"They have no hope of death," he answered me..."

- "The Inferno," Dante Alighieri

"Thucydides in the Underworld"

by JR Nyquist

"The shade of Thucydides, formerly an Athenian general and historian, languished in Hades for 24 centuries; and having intercourse with other spirits, was perturbed by an influx into the underworld of self-described historians professing to admire his History of the Peloponnesian War. They burdened him with their writings, priding themselves on the imitation of his method, tracing the various patterns of human nature in politics and war. He was, they said, the greatest historian; and his approval of their works held the promise that their purgatory was no prologue to oblivion.

As the centuries rolled on, the flow of historians into Hades became a torrent. The later historians were no longer imitators, but most were admirers. It seemed to Thucydides that these were a miserable crowd, unable to discern between the significant and the trivial, being obsessed with tedious doctrines. Unembarrassed by their inward poverty, they ascribed an opposite meaning to things: thinking themselves more “evolved” than the spirits of antiquity. Some even imagined that the universe was creating God. They supposed that the "most evolved" among men would assume God’s office; and further, that they themselves were among the “most evolved.”

Thucydides longed for the peace of his grave, which posthumous fame had deprived him. As with many souls at rest, he took no further interest in history. He had passed through existence and was done. He had seen everything. What was bound to follow, he knew, would be more of the same; but after more than 23 centuries of growing enthusiasm for his work, there occurred a sudden falling off. Of the newly deceased, fewer broke in upon him. Quite clearly, something had happened. He began to realize that the character of man had changed because of the rottenness of modern ideas. Among the worst of these, for Thucydides, was that barbarians and civilized peoples were considered equal; that art could transmit sacrilege; that paper could be money; that sexual and cultural differences were of no account; that meanness was rated noble, and nobility mean.

Awakened from the sleep of death, Thucydides remembered what he had written about his own time. The watchwords then, as now, were "revolution" and "democracy." There had been upheaval on all sides. "As the result of these revolutions," he had written, "there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion."

Thucydides saw that democracy, once again, imagined itself victorious. Once again traditions were questioned as men became enamored of their own prowess. It was no wonder they were deluded. They landed men on the moon. They had harnessed the power of the atom. It was no wonder that the arrogance of man had grown so monstrous, that expectations of the future were so unrealistic. Deluded by recent successes, they could not see that dangers were multiplying in plain view. Men built new engines of war, capable of wiping out entire cities, but few took this danger seriously. Why were men so determined to build such weapons? The leading country, of course, was willing to put its weapons aside. Other countries pretended to put their weapons aside. Still others said they weren't building weapons at all, even though they were.

Would the new engines of destruction be used? Would cities and nations be wiped off the face of the earth? Thucydides knew the answer. In his own day, during an interval of unstable peace, the Athenians had exterminated the male population of the island of Melos. Before doing this the Athenian commanders had came to Melos and said, "We on our side will use no fine phrases saying, for example, that we have a right to our empire because we defeated the Persians, or that we have come against you now because of the injuries you have done us - a great mass of words that nobody would believe." The Athenians demanded the submission of Melos, without regard to right or wrong. As the Athenian representative explained, "the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept."

The Melians were shocked by this brazen admission. They could not believe that anyone would dare to destroy them without just cause. In the first place, the Melians threatened no one. In the second place, they imagined that the world would be shocked and would avenge any atrocity committed against them. And so the Melians told the Athenians: "In our view it is useful that you should not destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men - namely, that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing. And this is a principle which affects you as much as anybody, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible vengeance and would be an example to the world."

The Athenians were not moved by the argument of Melos; for they knew that the Spartans generally treated defeated foes with magnanimity. "Even assuming that our empire does come to an end," the Athenians chuckled, "we are not despondent about what would happen next. One is not so much frightened of being conquered by a power [like Sparta]." And so the Athenians destroyed Melos, believing themselves safe - which they were. The Melians refused to submit, praying for the protection of gods and men. But these availed them nothing, neither immediate relief nor future vengeance. The Melians were wiped off the earth. They were not the first or the last to die in this manner.

There was one more trend that Thucydides noted. In every free and prosperous country he found a parade of monsters: human beings with oversized egos, with ambitions out of proportion to their ability, whose ideas rather belied their understanding than affirmed it. Whereas, there was one Alcibiades in his own day, there were now hundreds of the like: self-serving, cunning and profane; only they did not possess the skills, or the mental acuity, or beauty of Alcibiades. Instead of being exiled, they pushed men of good sense from the center of affairs. Instead of being right about strategy and tactics, they were always wrong. And they were weak, he thought, because they had learned to be bad by the example of others. There was nothing novel about them, although they believed themselves to be original in all things.

Thucydides reflected that human beings are subject to certain behavioral patterns. Again and again they repeat the same actions, unable to stop themselves. Society is slowly built up, then wars come and put all to ruin. Those who promise a solution to this are charlatans, only adding to the destruction, because the only solution to man is the eradication of man. In the final analysis the philanthropist and the misanthrope are two sides of the same coin. While man exists he follows his nature. Thucydides taught this truth, and went to his grave. His history was written, as he said, "for all time." And it is a kind of law of history that the generations most like his own are bound to ignore the significance of what he wrote; for otherwise they would not re-enact the history of Thucydides. But as they become ignorant of his teaching, they fall into disaster spontaneously and without thinking.

Seeing that time was short, and realizing that a massive number of new souls would soon be entering the underworld, the shade of Thucydides fell back to rest."

- https://www.financialsense.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "Your Bank Could Betray You - What They Aren't Telling You!"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 5/11/24

"Your Bank Could Betray You -

What They Aren't Telling You!"

"What they aren't telling you! Dive into the shocking truths behind the banking sector's move towards digital-only transactions, potentially signaling a major shift in global financial practices. You cannot deny what we are going to be heading into. Now you have a bank that will deny all transactions. This bank will be closed basically to human contact. No deposits, no withdrawals and no cashier's checks."

Comments here:

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The Daily "Near You?"

Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

And thank you from Casa Grande ;-)

"A Waking Dreamer..."

"Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."

- Edward O. Wilson

"Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96, On What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives"

"Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96,

On What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives"

by Maria Popova

“When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan observed as she beheld impermanence and transcendence at the foot of a mountain. “By the grace of random chance, funneled through nature’s laws,” the poetic physicist Brian Greene wrote in his beautiful meditation on our search for meaning in a cold cosmos, “we are here.”

And then we are not.

We die. All of us - atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea - you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales and poems, with general relativity and Nina Simone. It is what puts into perspective just how fleeting and vacant and self-embittering all of our angers and blames and resentments are in the end - what beckons us, instead, to “leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.”

That is what the late, great Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924–February 21, 2020) - one of the most original, deepest-seeing poets of our time - explores with great subtlety and profundity disguised as levity in the poem “Immortality” from her final poetry collection, the Pulitzer-winning masterpiece "Alive Together" (public library).

"Immortality"

"In Sleeping Beauty’s castle

the clock strikes one hundred years

and the girl in the tower returns to the world.

So do the servants in the kitchen,

who don’t even rub their eyes.

The cook’s right hand, lifted

an exact century ago,

completes its downward arc

to the kitchen boy’s left ear;

the boy’s tensed vocal cords

finally let go

the trapped, enduring whimper,

and the fly, arrested mid-plunge

above the strawberry pie,

fulfills its abiding mission

and dives into the sweet, red glaze.

As a child I had a book

with a picture of that scene.

I was too young to notice

how fear persists, and how

the anger that causes fear persists,

that its trajectory can’t be changed

or broken, only interrupted.

My attention was on the fly;

that this slight body

with its transparent wings

and lifespan of one human day

still craved its particular share

of sweetness, a century later.

- Lisel Mueller

“Immortality” by Lisel Mueller (read by Maria Popova)

- https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/lisel-mueller-immortality

(Two centuries earlier, William Blake explored the same eternal subject though the same creature in his short existentialist poem “The Fly.”)

In the front matter of this altogether miraculous book, where an epigraph would ordinarily appear, Mueller offers a short poem that becomes a kind of chorus line for the entire collection, but emerges as an especially harmonizing counterpart to “Immortality” in particular:

Complement these fragments of the wholly transcendent Alive Together with physicist Alan Lightman on our yearning for immortality in a universe governed by decay, Pico Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence, and Marcus Aurelius on mortality as the key to living fully, then revisit Barbara Ras’s bittersweet, buoyant, perspective-calibrating poem “You Can’t Have It All” and Marilyn Nelson’s magnificent ode to how we fill our impermanence with importance, “Faster Than Light.”

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

○

"The Backdoor to Immortality: Marguerite Duras

on What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death"

“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote as she weighed what gives meaning to our mortal lives in a stunning poem - one of the hundreds that outlived her as she returned her borrowed stardust to the universe at ninety-six. And yet, by some felicitous deviation from logic - perhaps an adaptive imbecility essential for our mental and emotional survival, one of the touching incongruences that make us human - the moment something becomes precious to us, we quarantine the prospect of its loss in some chamber of the mind we choose not to enter. On some deep level beyond the reach of reason, we come to believe that the people we love are - must be, for the alternative is a fathomless terror - immortal.

And so, when a loved one dies, this deepest part of us grows wild with rage at the universe - a rage skinned of sensemaking, irrational and raw, unsalved by our knowledge that the entropic destiny of everything alive is to die and of everything that exists to eventually not, even the universe itself; unsalved by the the immense cosmic poetry hidden in this fact; unsalved by the luckiness of having lived at all against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise; unsalved by remembering that only because ancient archaebacteria were capable of dying, as was every organism that evolved in their wake, we and the people we love and the people we lose came to exist at all."

- Maria Popova

- https://mailchi.mp/

"How It Really Is"

"Have We Reached “Peak Idiocracy” Yet?" (Excerpt)

"Have We Reached “Peak Idiocracy” Yet?" (Excerpt)

by Michael Snyder

Excerpt: "We should all be absolutely horrified by what has happened to our society. Everywhere you look, people seem to be going completely and utterly nuts. Once upon a time, the crazy people were a very small segment of the population that could be easily ignored. But now the lunatics are literally running the asylum. If you doubt this, just look at our statehouses around the nation and the current crop of politicians that we have in Washington. Sadly, the truth is that the people that are representing us are a very accurate reflection of what we have become as a nation. We truly have become a raging “idiocracy”, and the rest of the world is literally laughing at us."

The complete, hang our heads in shame article is here:

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

"Ah, You Miserable Creatures!"

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great!

You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything!

Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."

- Frederic Bastiat

How much more evidence do you need to

realize we as a society have lost our collective minds?

"That's The Truth..."

"Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be."

- Orson Scott Card

"Now the voices and the sound of movement were gone, and the stream could be heard running quietly under its banks. The air was full of the scent of water and of flowers. She walked, quiet, while the house began to reverberate: a band had started up. She walked beside the river while the music thudded, feeling herself as a heavy, impervious, insensitive lump that, like a planet doomed always to be dark on one side, had vision in front only, a myopic searchlight blind except for the tiny three-dimensional path open immediately before her eyes in which the outline of a tree, a rose, emerged then submerged in dark. She thought, with the dove's voices of her solitude. Where? But where? How? Who? No, but where, where? Then silence and the birth of a repetition. Where? Here. Here? Here, where else, you fool, you poor fool, where else has it been, ever?"

- Doris Lessing

"In The End..."

"What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end,

of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."

- John Ruskin

"Parades, There And Here"

Full screen recommended.

"Russia Victory Day: Russian Weapons & 9,000

Soldiers Parade in Central Moscow"

"President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia would do everything to avoid a clash of global powers but would not let itself be threatened, in a speech to mark the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two. Putin was addressing massed ranks of Russian servicemen on Red Square.

After calling for a minute of silence, Putin ended with the words: "For Russia! For victory! Hurrah!", providing the cue for thousands of troops to answer with three loud cheers. "Russia will do everything to prevent a global clash. But at the same time we will not allow anyone to threaten us. Our strategic forces are always in a state of combat readiness," Putin said in a short speech as flurries of snow whipped across the vast square.

Russia stages its main annual Victory Day parade in Moscow's Red Square marking victory in World War II. Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to make an address at the event. Russia on Thursday marks the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two as relations with the West spiral deeper into crisis over the advance of Russian troops against Ukraine's Western-backed forces.

Vladimir Putin, who rose to power just eight years after the Soviet Union broke up, will speak at the Victory Day parade on Red Square though there will be less military hardware on display than in parades before Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Putin now casts the war as part of a holy struggle with the West, which he says has forgotten the role played by the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany and the lesson that neither Napoleon Bonaparte nor Adolf Hitler could defeat Russia."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Full screen recommended.

"The Best of San Francisco Pride Parade 2023"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Comments?

Adventures With Danno, "Massive Price Increases At Walmart!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, AM 5/11/24

"Massive Price Increases At Walmart!"

"In today's vlog, we are at Walmart and are noticing massive price increases on many grocery items. It's getting rough out here as many families continue to struggle to put food on the table."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/