"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,
but pretty soon... everything's different."
- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, October 9, 2020
"A Wise Man Once Said..."
“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”
- “Dr. Meredith Grey”, “Grey’s Anatomy"
The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, "A Walk"
"A Walk"
"My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"How the Brain Stops Time"
"How the Brain Stops Time"
by Jeff Wise
"One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from "The Matrix" in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.
Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli. An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat?
Researcher David Eagleman has tackled his very issue in a very clever way. He reasoned that when time seems to slow down in real life, our senses and cognition must somehow speed up-either that, or time dilation is merely an illusion. This is the riddle he set out to solve. "Does the experience of slow motion really happen," Eagleman says, "or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect?" To find out, he first needed a way to generate fear of sufficient intensity in his experimental subjects. Instead of skydiving, he found a thrill ride near the university campus called Suspended Catch Air Device, an open-air tower from which participants are dropped, upside down, into a net 150 feet below. There are no harnesses, no safety lines. Subject plummet in free fall for three seconds, then hit the net at 70 miles per hour.
Researcher David Eagleman has tackled his very issue in a very clever way. He reasoned that when time seems to slow down in real life, our senses and cognition must somehow speed up-either that, or time dilation is merely an illusion. This is the riddle he set out to solve. "Does the experience of slow motion really happen," Eagleman says, "or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect?" To find out, he first needed a way to generate fear of sufficient intensity in his experimental subjects. Instead of skydiving, he found a thrill ride near the university campus called Suspended Catch Air Device, an open-air tower from which participants are dropped, upside down, into a net 150 feet below. There are no harnesses, no safety lines. Subject plummet in free fall for three seconds, then hit the net at 70 miles per hour.
Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation? To see, Eagleman asked subjects who'd already taken the plunge to estimate how long it took them to fall, using a stopwatch to tick off what they felt to be an equivalent amount of time. Then he asked them to watch someone else fall and then estimate the elapsed time for their plunge in the same way. On average, participants felt that their own experience had taken 36 percent longer. Time dilation was in effect.
Next, Eagleman outfitted his test subjects with a special device that he and his students had constructed. They called it the perceptual chronometer. It's a simple numeric display that straps to a user's wrist, with a knob on the side let the researchers adjust the rate at which the numbers flash. The idea was to dial up the speed of the flashing until it was just a bit too quick for the subject to read while looking at it in a non-stressed mental state. Eagleman reasoned that, if fear really does speed up our rate of perception, then once his subjects were in the terror of freefall, they should be able to make out the numbers on the display. As it turned out, they couldn't. That means that fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.
Next, Eagleman outfitted his test subjects with a special device that he and his students had constructed. They called it the perceptual chronometer. It's a simple numeric display that straps to a user's wrist, with a knob on the side let the researchers adjust the rate at which the numbers flash. The idea was to dial up the speed of the flashing until it was just a bit too quick for the subject to read while looking at it in a non-stressed mental state. Eagleman reasoned that, if fear really does speed up our rate of perception, then once his subjects were in the terror of freefall, they should be able to make out the numbers on the display. As it turned out, they couldn't. That means that fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.
Eagleman's findings are important not just for understanding the experience of fear, but for the very nature of consciousness. After all, the test subjects who fell from the SCAD tower certainly believed, as they accelerated through freefall, that they knew what the experience was like at that very moment. They thought that it seemed to be moving slowly. Yet Eaglemen's findings suggest that that sensation could only have been superimposed after the fact. The implication is that we don't really have a direct experience of what we're feeling ‘right now,' but only a memory - an unreliable memory - of what we thought it felt like some seconds or milliseconds ago. The vivid present tense we all think we inhabit might itself be a retroactive illusion."
- http://www.psychologytoday.com/
"It May Be Then..."
"Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum."
- W. Somerset Maugham
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
- Sydney J. Harris
"A Very Fit Consideration..."
“How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.”
- Christiaan Huygens, (1629-1695)
"The Stage Has Been Set For A Historic National Meltdown"
"The Stage Has Been Set For A Historic National Meltdown"
by Michael Snyder
"Everything that has happened in 2020 so far has set us up for a grand finale that none of us will ever forget. This year we have already witnessed the worst public health crisis in about a hundred years, widespread lockdowns all over the nation, a crippling economic collapse and civil unrest in major cities across America. To say that the American people are in a bad mood would be a major understatement. Now we are less than a month away from a bitterly contested presidential election, and as you will see below, one survey recently found that a majority of Americans are expecting violence. That is extremely unfortunate, but these are the times in which we live. Our country is literally falling apart all around us, and nobody seems to have a way to stop it from happening.
And the worse economic conditions become, the worse the mood of the nation is going to get. On Thursday, we learned that another 840,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week: "The latest jobless claims figures from the Labor Department, which cover the week ending Oct. 2, show that 840,000 workers sought aid last week, about four-times the pre-crisis level. More than 63 million Americans have sought jobless aid since the coronavirus lockdowns began in mid-March."
If someone had told me late last year that 63 million Americans would file new claims for unemployment benefits this year, I would have thought that person was crazy. Prior to 2020, the worst number for a single week in all of U.S. history was 695,000, and now we have been way above that figure every single week of this pandemic.
Of course the layoffs just keep rolling along. Right now, it is being reported that WarnerMedia expects to lay off thousands of workers in the coming weeks: "AT&T’s WarnerMedia is preparing a restructuring that seeks to reduce costs by as much as 20% as the COVID-19 panic drains income from movie tickets, cable subscriptions and TV ads, reports The Wall Street Journal. The layoffs are expected to begin in the coming weeks and would result in thousands of layoffs across Warner Bros. studios and TV channels like HBO, TBS and TNT, the paper said."
Personally, I wouldn’t be saddened if WarnerMedia completely shut down on a permanent basis. They produce an endless barrage of garbage programming that is corrupting the minds of millions of Americans, and our society would definitely be better off without them. But at the same time that millions upon millions of Americans have been losing their jobs, those at the very top of the economic food chain have been getting even wealthier thanks to the Federal Reserve’s reckless intervention in the financial markets.
At this point, the top one percent of all Americans have more than 15 times more money than the bottom 50 percent combined: "According to the latest Fed data, the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4% of all household wealth in the U.S.), while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9% of all wealth)."
If you think that there isn’t a lot of resentment out there, then you haven’t been paying attention. We are seeing the rise of a “Robin Hood mentality” among many that live in deeply impoverished areas, and when things get really crazy out there they are going to be hitting wealthy neighborhoods really hard.
Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that this upcoming election could potentially be the spark that sets off a lot more civil unrest. Personally, I have such a bad feeling about what is going to happen, and I believe that having so many people voting by mail could cause all sorts of problems. In fact, even the mainstream media is admitting that we could see a million ballots that are sent through the mail rejected for one reason or another: "Absentee ballot rejections this November are projected to reach historic levels, risking widespread disenfranchisement of minority voters and the credibility of election results, a USA TODAY, Columbia Journalism Investigations and PBS series FRONTLINE investigation found.
At least 1.03 million absentee ballots could be tossed if half of the nation votes by mail. Discarded votes jump to 1.55 million if 75% of the country votes absentee. In the latter scenario, more than 185,000 votes could be lost in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – states considered key to capturing the White House."
Any system of voting that could potentially disenfranchise a million voters is deeply broken and should not be used. But at this point it is too late to do anything about it. More than 6 million people have already voted, and more votes are being sent in with each passing day.
Of course millions of other Americans are also deeply concerned about the integrity of this election. Just check out the results of a recent YouGov survey: "The YouGov poll of 1,999 registered voters found that nearly half – 47% – disagree with the idea that the election “is likely to be fair and honest.” And that slightly more than half – 51% – won’t “generally agree on who is the legitimately elected president of the United States.” The online poll was conducted Oct.1-2 and has a margin of error of +/- 2.56 percentage points." In essence, about half the country believes that this election may not be legitimate. That is a major national crisis right there.
In addition, YouGov has also found that 56 percent of Americans believe that there will be “an increase in violence as a result of the election”: "In addition, a YouGov poll of 1,505 voters found that 56% said they expect to see “an increase in violence as a result of the election.” That question had a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points."
This definitely is not the America that I grew up in. In the old days, nobody would have ever imagined widespread violence after a presidential election. Another recent survey discovered that a whopping 61 percent of Americans believe that “the U.S. could be on the verge of another Civil War”.
We have never seen anything like this before, and at this point it is undeniable that our society is breaking down all around us. But instead of bringing us together, the results of this upcoming election are only going to deepen our divisions no matter who wins. Everything that our forefathers worked so hard to build is at risk, and we are getting very, very close to crossing the point of no return."
"Tomorrow, Come Here Tomorrow…"
"Tomorrow, Come Here Tomorrow…"
by Jim Kunstler
"The Coen Brothers must be writing Nancy Pelosi’s script now, a kind of Macbeth update set in a swampy Potomac lowland at Halloween time: Madam Speaker rides her fabled scepter up in the night sky, around the capitol dome, across the moon’s laughing face, to the White House, trailing vapors of hatred and malice as she curses the Golden Golem within. Her mask matches her designer frock, woven of cobwebs with dark strands of enmity. Her hair is perfect. Her flight-path not so much, as the Golem below easily shoots her down through the oval office window with a rubber band and a paper clip and she augers, smoldering, into the rose garden… Fade out….
Well, tomorrow is here, and exactly the hour this blog regularly gets posted is when Mrs. Pelosi aims to announce her latest scheme for ousting Mr. Trump: perhaps a bill for some kind of new 25th Amendment commission to work around the inconvenience of the law as currently configured, that is, an executive branch prerogative. The stunt has two purposes: 1) to paint Mr. Trump as unfit - a song as old and boring now as I am Woman, Hear me Roar - and 2) to put up a smoke-screen diverting voters attention from her obdurate refusal to compromise on the latest Coronavirus relief bill.
The paranoid hysteria on display among the Party of Chaos suggests that those polls showing Ol’ White Joe Biden up twelve points may just be more media dis-info. The purpose: to claim, when the time comes, that the President won reelection by some kind of subterfuge, and justify an all-out post November 3rd Lawfare offensive to challenge the ballots in every swing-state, and do exactly what they are blaming Mr. Trump for in advance: confounding an orderly resolution of the peoples’ will.
Is it possible that some Democratic Party voters begin to suspect that the party officials running this game have lost their minds? A good signifier, of course, is the ghostly figure carrying their battle-flag, Mr. Biden, the Flying Dutchman candidate whose mind slips in and out of fog-banks as he navigates the shoals of defeat. Why did the Party ship out with him on the poop-deck? My guess would be: to deflect indictments of himself and many other former officials as the steady flow of documentary evidence gets released by new DNI John Ratcliffe, including a batch this past week showing pretty incontrovertibly that everybody and his uncle in the Obama executive branch was keenly aware that RussiaGate was a Hillary campaign ploy and allowed themselves to be weaponized into the scheme - under the assumption that she couldn’t lose and they’d never be found out.
She lost. They’re found out. Grand juries have been convened by Mr. Durham. Something wicked is coming their way. Their ship is going down and the rats are all squeaking desperately in the scuppers at the rising water. Won’t this all be a shock to that crew of media fabulists who stupidly maintain that the Mueller Report actually proved something - the David Frenches, Max Boots, and Rachel Maddows of this world and their True Believer followers? History is rhyming again. It’s like 1794 in Paris. The Jacobins Reign of Terror comes to its sudden and ignominious end with Robespierre bawling under the national razor. So does today’s Reign of Perfidious Sedition close, with Jim Comey bawling, “I can’t recall,” into his laptop.
Incidental to this is the breaking news - sure to not be reported in The New York Times or by CNN - that one Devon Archer, business partner of Hunter Biden (and John Kerry stepson, Christopher Heinz) has just had his previously overturned conviction for security fraud reinstated by a federal appeals court. Sound abstruse? Yeah, kind of, but, believe me this boy is in some serious hot water, the rap being a federal one, and Mr. Archer now poised to sing like a canary to John Durham’s posse about his various financial exploits in Ukraine and other foreign lands with Joe Biden’s son (and Mr. Kerry’s stepson) in exchange for lighter jail time. You just watch.
Keep your ears pricked also for developments involving Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA) and his role in 2016-17 as an active disseminator of Steele Dossier RussiaGate dis-info in coordination with the George Soros funded Democracy Integrity Project, run by former Dianne Feinstein chief-of-staff Dan Jones and assisted by swamp lawyer Adam Waldman, a Steele / Warner go-between who happened to be a $40,000-a-month lobbyist for one Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and Clinton Foundation doner (at least $1-million) who also employed Christopher Steele as a dis-info errand boy. Unpacking that one will be like unpacking the surgical batting in a sucking chest wound. Scrub for it.
In this now bi-polar nation, the mood swings get wilder by the week. The President had a bit of a rough seven days, what with his Covid-19 treatment at Walter Reed and stunningly rapid recovery, which sent his adversaries into a transport of hebephrenic distemper. Vice-president Mike Pence calmed the waters a little bit in his Wednesday meet-up with the Harris Administration candidate - no doubt the rogue housefly poised above his right ear fed him juicy debating points. Kamala Harris demonstrated a talent for mugging, face-pulling, eye-rolling, and leering. If the veep thang doesn’t work out, she might consider a career as a mime. Her home turf, San Francisco, used to be full of them until the local pols let homeless junkies take over the streets."
"Alas..."
“Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come, nor care beyond today.”
- Thomas Gray,
“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than
sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 10/09/2020"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 10/09/2020"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"It’s official, there will be no more debates unless Joe Biden decides to take on the President in person. The so-called “Presidential Debate Commission” now says the next debate should be virtual, and President Trump said no way. The Trump campaign says, “Swamp creatures to now rush to Joe Biden’s defense by universally cancelling an in-person debate is pathetic.” President Trump says he will “do a rally instead” now that he has been cured of Covid and released by his doctors. Something else that is “pathetic” is Speaker Pelosi taking another run at President Trump using the 25th Amendment. It ain’t going to work.
The Vice Presidential Debate is now history. Who won? It’s hard to tell. Harris went on the attack early and often and looks like she tied up Pence with the phrase “I am speaking,” even though she didn’t really say much. She pushed identity politics and systemic racism issues of the Left. Harris did not answer direct questions about packing the Supreme Court with far Left Marxist liberals if the Biden Harris team won. Pence, on the other hand, scored some points about economic policy, destroying ISIS and continued tax cuts. Pence missed some opportunities to hit up Harris over $ 1.5 million in China payoffs to Hunter Biden and did not tag her for the violence encouraged by her party that never spoke out about burning down cities around the country. Pence won, and the only thing the Dems can talk about is “I am speaking,” which ain’t going to win an election.
Another 840,000 people filed for unemployment claims in the latest numbers to come out of the Department of Labor. The stimulus deal looks dead as the President has broken off talks because he says Speaker Pelosi is “not negotiating in good faith.” Trump does have some options to continue unemployment payments, but a stimulus deal would be much better to get the economy back to work."
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he talks
about these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up.
"Market Fantasy Updates 10/9/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates 10/9/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
○
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
○
Gregory Mannarino,
AM Oct 9, 2020:
"The State Wants To Live At The Expense Of EVERYONE!"
○
Updated live.
○
Daily Update (October 9th to 13th)
○
"Covid-19 Pandemic Update 10/9/20"
by David Leonhardt
Oct 9, 2020, 7:47 AM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 36,567,300
people, according to official counts, including 7,639,636 Americans.
Oct 9, 2020 7:47 AM ET:
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count◆
OCT 9, 2020 2:10 PM: "France Daily COVID-19 Cases Rise To Record 20,000: Live Updates"
◆
Updated 10/9/20, 5:23 AM ET
Click image for larger size.
"In A Pandemic We Learn Again What Sartre Meant By Being Free"
"In A Pandemic We Learn Again What Sartre Meant By Being Free"
by Julian Baggini
"One of the most powerful effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, after its terrible toll on human life, has been on our liberty. Around the world, people’s movements have been severely curtailed, tracked and monitored. This has had an impact on our abilities to earn a living, study and even be with loved ones at the end of their lives. Freedom, it seems, is one of this virus’s biggest casualties.
But an article by Jean-Paul Sartre for The Atlantic in 1944 makes me question whether this is a straightforward tale of loss. The French philosopher summed up his thesis in the line: ‘Never were we freer than under the German occupation.’ Sartre’s core insight was that it is only when we are physically stopped from acting that we fully realize the true extent and nature of our freedom. If he is right, then the pandemic is an opportunity to relearn what it means to be free.
Of course, our situation is not nearly as extreme as it was for the French under occupation, who, as Sartre said, ‘had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk’. Still, like most of us, I have at times found myself unable to do almost everything I had taken for granted. During the strictest lockdown period, nights out at theaters, concert halls and cinemas were cancelled. I couldn’t go for a walk in the countryside, relax in a bar or restaurant, sit on a park bench, visit anyone, even leave my home more than once a day.
Yet I haven’t been the only one to experience this as, at least in part, a liberation. It drove home to me how so many of the things I habitually ‘chose’ to do I did simply because they were there or because I had got into the habit of doing them. Others have noticed how much they were just going along with what other people were doing. In a fast-paced consumer society with endless options, we are easily bounced around by our whims, manipulated by advertisers and marketers. Very little of what we do every day is the result of a considered decision. Being able to do what we want without constraint, but also without thought, is the lowest and least valuable form of freedom.
In lockdown, I learned that I missed much less about this old life than I would have thought. I was reminded how shallow many of our preferences really were. When my options shrunk and any activity required more planning, the choices I made became more authentic because they had to be more thought-through. This capacity for reflective decision-making is the highest and most valuable form of freedom a human being can have.
A new urgency screams at us: unless we make a change, this will be our lot until we die, which could be sooner than we think. In short, the pandemic enables us to see more clearly the difference between the hollow freedom to act without impediment and the true freedom to act in accordance with our all-things-considered judgments. The American philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 1971 illuminated the difference with his distinction between the things that we simply want and the ones that, after consideration, we want to want. For instance, if I want a doughnut and eat it, I’m simply following my desires, the wants I find myself having at any given moment. But if, on reflection, I don’t want to eat junk food (or, at least, not often) then I have the capacity to veto these wants in the light of what I know I want to want. This kind of freedom requires self-restraint. A person without this capacity is not truly free but is what Frankfurt calls a ‘wanton’: a slave to his desires.
The consumer society encourages us to act like wantons. So when it is disrupted, by war or pandemic, so too is the lazy habit of acting on desire without proper reflection. Any time when our ability to act on impulse is severely restricted, we have the opportunity to break the habitual link between desire and actions, and question whether the desires we act on are the ones we endorse, all things considered.
The vital importance of our capacity for freedom is also made starker by the gravity of our circumstances. During the occupation, Sartre wrote: "At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: ‘Man is mortal!’ And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death…"
In 1944, this was truer than today because many choices were literally life-and-death ones. Resistance fighters found themselves thinking ‘Rather death than …’ Today, few of our choices have such stark and immediate consequences. But the daily reminders of death force us to take seriously the choices we make, about our work, our relationships, our lifestyles. Many have discovered that they are living a life they never really chose, but merely drifted into. A new urgency screams at us that, unless we make a change, this will be our lot until we die, which could be sooner than we think.
So instead of following the path of least resistance, I’ve been trying to make more considered choices, which means saying ‘No’ more often and picking my projects more carefully. Many of us are now making hard choices, the most authentic ones we have made in years, to try to live a life more aligned with what we truly value, with what we want to want. Although the military metaphor of a war on the coronavirus is overused and often inapt, it works perfectly when applied to another of Sartre’s striking sentences: ‘The very cruelty of the enemy drove us to the extremities of this condition by forcing us to ask ourselves questions that one never considers in time of peace.’ Without state ‘interference’, many more lives would have been lost, jobs destroyed and businesses ruined
Another line that resonates is ‘Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty?’ For Sartre in 1944, the solitude was that of the underground resistance fighter, working alone for the common good. ‘In the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they were protecting, all the others …’ Our solitude in this pandemic is less extreme, as are the risks and sacrifices we’re called on to make. Still, the same essential moral insight applies. How we behave in ordinary life is a poor measure of our moral backbone, since we’re rarely called on to go above and beyond the call of duty or given the opportunity to break the social contract without penalty. Now, however, our socially isolated choices reveal our true colors.
People who have voluntarily worked at the frontline, risking their own lives, have shown their courage. Others who have rallied around to feed and shelter the most vulnerable instead of simply holing up at home have shown thier compassion and care. On the other hand, those who have broken the rules merely for their own convenience have exposed their selfishness, and often a sense of privilege. Like most of us, I fall in between, showing that I am no hero but no villain either, just one of the many ordinarily decent people who are neither especially praiseworthy nor blameworthy.
The pandemic also teaches us about freedom in ways that go beyond Sartre’s discussion of the individual. Politically, using Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, we talk of the ‘negative liberty’ to go about our business without restraint, and the ‘positive liberty’ to do the things that give us the possibility to flourish and maximize our potential. For example, a society where there is no compulsory schooling gives parents the negative liberty to educate their children as they wish. But, generally speaking, this doesn’t give the child the positive liberty to have a decent education.
Over recent decades in the West, negative liberty has been in the ascendancy and positive liberty has been tarred with the brush of the nanny state. What we should have learned in 2020 is that without health services, effective regulation and sometimes strict rules, our negative freedom is useless and even sometimes destructive. Without state ‘interference’, many more lives would have been lost, jobs destroyed and businesses ruined.
We now have an opportunity to reset the balance between negative and positive liberty. There isn’t a trade-off between big government and personal freedom: many freedoms depend on the state for their very possibility. What the social scientists Neil and Barbara Gilbert in 1989 dubbed the ‘enabling state’ and the economist Mariana Mazzucato in 2013 called the ‘entrepreneurial state’ are essential for giving us the opportunity to realize the full potential of our freedom.
One final way in which we are waking up to our freedom is that our conception of what’s possible has been expanded. Hospitals can be built in weeks, not years; air quality can be improved almost overnight; governments can subsidize employment rather than just pay unemployment; private companies, such as food retailers, can be held accountable as public services and not just private enterprises. The Overton window has been flung wide open. More is possible than we imagined.
Freedom to act without a belief in the possibility to act is empty. Our eyes have been opened to more potential futures than we believed were available to us. The challenge is to respond to this opportunity without falling into naive utopianism or wishful thinking. Our realization is not the simplistic belief that we have fewer constraints than we thought we had, but that the actual constraints we have are not the ones we believed them to be.
I am not equating the trials of living under Nazi occupation with living with the scourge of COVID-19. But despite the many and important differences, Sartre’s message of freedom in 1944 rings just as true today. Our primary experience is one of restriction, of loss of liberty. But, with thought and reflection, we can follow this with a renewed sense of what freedom really means, why it matters, and how we can use it to forge a better future. Perhaps we will soon look back and say, as Sartre did: ‘The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man.’"
"We Don't Have A Clue..."
“We don’t have a clue what’s really going down, we just kid ourselves that we’re in control of our lives while a paper’s thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they’re tired, or bored.”
- Neil Gaiman
Thursday, October 8, 2020
"Alert! Eruption Of Business Closures And Layoffs Make 20 Percent Of Americans Out Of Money In 2020"
"Alert! Eruption Of Business Closures And Layoffs Make
20 Percent Of Americans Out Of Money In 2020"
Epic Economist
"A new stimulus bill is now out of sight, boosting a widespread businesses collapse and compromising many American households whose lives are hanging by a thread. In this video, we investigate the repercussions of this measure, how the economic collapse will be influenced by another coup, and analyze a very concerning survey that found one out of every five Americans will be completely out of money by the end of the year.
Delaying the urgently needed unemployment aid and a second round of payments will have a huge impact on tens of millions of out-of-work Americans who are coping with mountain-scale debt, the prospects of eviction and not being able to afford food. The huge wave of job losses put those who worked in especially hard-hit industries such as travel and hospitality in a vulnerable position, making them reliant on another stimulus check to be able to make ends meet.
A recent report informed that almost one-quarter of U.S. consumers have less than three weeks of financial runway before they run out of cash, meaning 1 in 5 Americans could be entirely out of money by the first week of November. And things are about to get way more complicated - experts say “many will have to sacrifice and prepare because it could get worse before it gets better”.
And even though we want to believe there is an outlook where things could get better, considering the level of economic deterioration we have witnessed so far and the extra suffering we are being submitted to right now, it doesn’t seem realistic. In fact, it is an evidence that the economic depression is accelerating.
There is no way to certainly ascertain that economic conditions will get any better especially because an enormous part of the population won't be able to pull through without more emergency government assistance, and the pressure of all the unfoldings seen in 2020 keeps building up. Americans are seeing their finances increasingly worsening during the current economic downturn. Now that stimulus discussions have been effectively suspended, and most of that previous relief has dried up, another wave of mass layoffs is about to be witnesses as the holiday season approaches.
Airlines will be leading this trend. The airline industry was unquestionably one of the most affected, the sector is dealing with a disastrous collapse. However, the desperate need for more aid is not exclusive to it. Every day, more businesses go under and more jobs are lost, and approximately 50% of all American small businesses from all sectors are in the same situation.
Furthermore, more families are struggling to pay their bills, make rent, afford basic needs. Their overall income is being pushed to below pre-outbreak levels, as a consequence, reducing spending and deepening the economic deterioration.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy still has "a long, long way to go", and it is at risk of derailing. Likewise, chief economist at RSM, Joe Brusuelas said there’s a 50% probability of a deep recession over the next 12 months. Also, the annual growth rate will likely drop to 1%, a sharp decline from the previous forecast of 4%.
With all that said, it doesn’t make any sense to be talking about a “recovery”, because absolutely nothing points out to one. At this point, we are still seeing small and large businesses collapse. Last month, 54 large companies filed for bankruptcy, totaling 509 registered bankruptcies so far.
Additionally, a Brookings survey reminded us that small businesses account for about 99% of all businesses in the US and about 47% of jobs in businesses, and their downfall mean that we have lost at least 4 million jobs that will only return with the creation of new businesses.
The most optimistic scenario would see around 50 percent more business losses than at the peak of the Great Recession, and while some businesses largely benefited from the crisis, most of the small ones are severely injured. Considering all industries will soon need federal help, and not everyone would be able to get it, what lies ahead of us is even more financial distress."
Gregory Mannarino, "Market Bubbles And Economic Troubles... Going Down The Toilet"
Gregory Mannarino,
"Market Bubbles And Economic Troubles... Going Down The Toilet"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident.
The featured exposure covers a sky area several times the size of the full moon. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six of the sister stars visible to the unaided eye. The actual number of Pleiades stars visible, however, may be more or less than seven, depending on the darkness of the surrounding sky and the clarity of the observer's eyesight."
"At Last..."
“At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.”
- Richard Bach, “Nothing by Chance”
"What Foolish Forgetfulness..."
“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.”
- Denis Diderot
○
Hans Zimmer, "Time"
“‘Sometimes’: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte’s Stunning Meditation on Walking into the Questions of Our Becoming”
“‘Sometimes’: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte’s
Stunning Meditation on Walking into the Questions of Our Becoming”
by Maria Popova
“The role of the artist, James Baldwin believed, is “to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” This, too, is the role of the forest, it occurs to me as I walk the ferned, mossed woods daily to lose my self and find myself between the trees; to “live the questions,” in Rilke’s lovely phrase – to let the rustling of the leaves beckon forth the stirrings and murmurings on the edge of the psyche, which we so often brush away in order to go on being the smaller version of ourselves we have grown accustomed to being out of the unfaced fear that the grandeur of life, the grandeur of our own untrammeled nature, might require of us more than we are ready to give.
Those disquieting, transformative stirrings are what the poet and philosopher David Whyte explores with surefooted subtlety in his poem “Sometimes,” found in his altogether life-enlarging collection “Everything Is Waiting for You” (public library) and read here by the poet himself as part of a wonderful short course of poem-driven practices for neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” meditation toolkit (which I can’t recommend enough and which operates under an inspired, honorable model of granting free subscriptions to those who need this invaluable mental health aid but don’t have the means).
“Sometimes”
“Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.”
- David Whyte
Complement with Whyte on anger, forgiveness, and what maturity really means, hardship as the ground for self-expansion, and his lovely letter to children about reading as a portal to self-discovery, then revisit other great poets bringing their own versed wisdom to life: Marie Howe reading “Singularity,” Marissa Davis reading her own “Singularity” in response to Howe’s, Jane Hirshfield reading “Today, Another Universe,” Ross Gay reading “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” Marilyn Nelson reading “The Children’s Moon,” and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reading from “My God, It’s Full of Stars.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)