Full screen recommended.
Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Friday, September 26, 2025
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Where did this big ball of stars come from? Palomar 6 is one of about 200 globular clusters of stars that survive in our Milky Way Galaxy. These spherical star-balls are older than our Sun as well as older than most stars that orbit in our galaxy's disk. Palomar 6 itself is estimated to be about 12.5 billion years old, so old that it is close to - and so constrains - the age of the entire universe.
Containing about 500,000 stars, Palomar 6 lies about 25,000 light years away, but not very far from our galaxy's center. At that distance, this sharp image from the Hubble Space Telescope spans about 15 light-years. After much study including images from Hubble, a leading origin hypothesis is that Palomar 6 was created - and survives today - in the central bulge of stars that surround the Milky Way's center, not in the distant galactic halo where most other globular clusters are now found."
"He Cannot Help..."
- Erich Fromm
"The Bewildered Herd..."
“The bewildered herd is a problem. We've got to prevent their roar and trampling. We've got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like "Support our troops!" You've got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they're properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they're not competent to think. Therefore it's important to distract them and marginalize them.”
- Noam Chomsky
○
"Those who can make you believe absurdities
can make you commit atrocities."
- Voltaire
"The Death of The Middle Class: Why Everyone Feels Broke"
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 9/26/25
"The Death of The Middle Class:
Why Everyone Feels Broke"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Orlando Miner, 9/26/25
"Sellers Are Trapped in Housing Prison
(200 Days on the Market)"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Sachs Realty, 9/26/25
"House Prices Fall, Mortgage Rates Rise"
Comments here:
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Jeremiah Babe, 9/26/25
"Refusing To Prepare For The Next Economic
Crash Will Be An Epic Mistake, Dollars Won't Save You"
Comments here:
Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Recap 26-Sept."
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 9/26/25
"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern:
Weekly Recap 26-Sept."
Comments here:
"A.I.: America Is Entering a Job Crisis Most People Aren't Ready For"
Full screen recommended.
A Homeland Journey, 9/26/25
"A.I.: America Is Entering a Job Crisis
Most People Aren't Ready For"
"America is entering uncharted territory, and most people aren’t prepared for what’s ahead. We’re already living through an era of inflation, a growing cost of living crisis, and an uncertain economy. But now, a new challenge is emerging that could affect millions of households in ways we haven’t seen before. Families are already struggling with higher prices, unstable housing, and mounting financial pressures - and this shift may only make things worse. The question is, how will ordinary Americans adapt when the ground beneath them starts to shift even more? If you’re concerned about where this country is headed - between inflation, food shortages, housing instability, and economic uncertainty - this is a conversation you don’t want to miss."
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "If Starbucks Can’t Survive… What Chance Do We Have?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 9/26/25
"If Starbucks Can’t Survive…
What Chance Do We Have?"
"Starbucks is closing 1,000 stores and cutting 900 corporate jobs - what does this mean for the economy? In today’s video, I break down this massive shift from the world’s largest coffee chain and why it’s a dire warning for us all. From underperforming locations to billion-dollar restructuring efforts, Starbucks’ struggles shed light on the broader economic challenges we’re facing. If they’re struggling, what does this mean for other industries like #HomeBuilders, auto repair, and retail? Let’s talk about it."
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "Off the Rails"
"Off the Rails"
by Bill Bonner
Paris, France - "There are some things we humans cannot do. We cannot fly without artificial wings. And we can’t manage a currency system without artificial guardrails. As to flying, here in Paris, a tailor thought he had made himself a ‘flying suit’ that would permit him at least to glide through the air. He put it to the test on February 4, 1912 by jumping off the Eiffel Tower. Alas, he fell like a sack of turnips and died on impact.
Yesterday, we walked over to the site. The city was sad. It rained. Gray. Cold. The buildings were gray and cold. The people seemed gray and cold too. We thought of the dot.com investors...and how they had come crashing down. And of today’s AI investors, putting on their flying suits...hoping to soar.
Then, we met an old friend for a drink. She had bright cheeks and a warm manner. That’s the nice thing about Paris. There’s always a place to have a drink and always someone to have it with.
The temperature in Paris has fallen sharply. Just a week ago, we might have sat outside at a table on the sidewalk and enjoyed watching the chic Parisiennes walking by. But it is now too cold to sit out. And France, fighting its ‘climate emergency’ with all the reckless enthusiasm with which America shoots at ‘terrorists,’ has outlawed the gas heaters that used to make sitting outside, even in cold weather, so agreeable. So, we went indoors...and managed to find a small table, vacant, sandwiched in ‘twixt two others.
“The Germans have a word for it.” The young, blond woman published our last book, in French. She knew what we were thinking. “A word for what?” “For the sad feeling you have when you realize that the world is going to hell in a handcart. It’s ‘weltschmerz.’ “At least, our part of it,” she continued...after a pause. “The west.”
“Did you hear Trump’s speech to the UN? He thinks immigration and energy policies are the big problems. If so, those are relatively easy to fix. You could seal the borders and take away all the windmills and solar panels. But the major problem would still be there.”
Our friend is also a Greek and Latin scholar. “The real problem is popular democracy. As the ancient Greeks explained, it works for a while...but not for long. People always want more free stuff. And then, you can’t take it away...even when you’re going broke.”
America’s founders read the classics too. They tried to dodge the problem in two ways. First, they put some distance between the feds and the ‘vox populi’ of the voting masses. Our friend, John Henry, founder of the Committee for the Republic, explains: ‘For more than a century, the United States has undergone a transition from a constitutional republic to an unconstitutional democracy with overpowering global ambitions. In fits and starts, we went from voting for Democratic and Republican candidates who jealously guarded our liberty-centered republic to politicians who systematically dismantled our Constitution in pursuit of making the world safe for so-called “democracy”. No one asked how we could make the world safe from something we weren’t ourselves. Under our Constitution, we are a republic – not a democracy.’
The founders also tried to limit military expenses, by requiring an act of Congress before going to war...and to limit spending generally by insisting that there should be no other coinage but ’gold and silver.’ Both of these guardrails were taken down, the latter finally junked in 1971 by Richard Nixon.
The ‘golden guardrail’ was particularly important. John Dienner recalls this passage from Friedrich Hayek, written in 1975, that explains why: ‘The pressure for more and cheaper money is an ever-present political force which monetary authorities have never been able to resist. ...With the exception of this 200-year period of the gold standard [in the 18th- 20th centuries] practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money in order to defraud and plunder the people.’
The gold standard came into being in the 18th century. It got gassed in WWI. Then, after WWII, it was re-established, sort of. The dollar was made the key financial reserve. And the dollar was linked to gold. Then, in 1971, the last link with gold was cut. Since then, several efforts were made to re-install some sort of guardrails. In the ‘70s, we were personally part of the drive for a Constitutional Amendment that would make deficits illegal. In the ‘80s, our friend Grover Norquist succeeded in getting prospective members of Congress to sign The Pledge, crossing their hearts and hoping to die if they increased taxes.
And then there were debates over raising the debt ceiling...which ended up as political theatre. The debt ceiling has been raised more than 80 times since the 1960s. So, the guardrails are down. All of them. We are back to the ‘bad old days’ when we can count on the elites to rip off the public with funny, ‘paper’ money. “In that UN speech,” our friend continued, “Trump boasted that ‘inflation has been defeated in America.’ But I don’t see how that is possible.”
Yesterday, we made a mistake. (Yes, we are all-too-human, too.) We grossly understated the debt build-up in the US. Deficits are running at $2 trillion per year. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to tackle spending and, and even at the current rate, the US dollar will lose about 80% of its value as the two parties add $55 trillion in debt over the next thirty years. The guardrails are down; what’s to stop them?"
"The Blow That Ended America 112 Years Ago"
"The Blow That Ended America 112 Years Ago"
by Paul Rosenberg
“There is a lot of ruin in a nation,” wrote Adam Smith, and what he meant was that it takes a long time for nations to fall, even when they’re dead on their feet. And he was certainly right. America took its fatal blow in 1913, one hundred twelve years ago; it just hasn’t hit the ground yet. This is a slow process, but it’s actually fast compared to the Romans. It took them several centuries to collapse.
The confusing thing about our current situation is that America – and by that I mean the noble America that so many of us grew up believing in – has long been poisoned. Its liver, kidneys, and spleen have stopped functioning. but it still stands on its feet and presents itself as immortal. And I’m not without sympathy for those who want to believe. They find themselves in a world where politics is almighty, and where their comfort, prosperity, and perhaps their survival all hang in a delicate balance. They don’t want to upset anything, and questioning the bosses is a good way to get hurt.
But just because someone wants to believe doesn’t make it so. We are not children and we are not powerless. We producers should never be intimidated by those who live at our expense. So let’s start looking at the facts.
1913: The Horrible Year: For all the problems America had prior to 1913 (including the unnecessary and horrifying Civil War), nothing spelled the death of the nation like the horrors of 1913. Here are the key dates:
February 3rd: The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, authorizing the Federal government to impose income taxes on individuals. An amendment to a tariff act in 1894 had attempted to do this, but since it was clearly unconstitutional, the Supreme Court struck it down. As a result – and mostly under the banner of bleeding the rich – the 16th amendment was promoted and passed.
As a result, the Revenue Act of 1913 was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in October. Income taxes began in 1914, with the government swearing (as in, “only a crazy person would say otherwise!”) that the rate would never, ever go higher than one or two percent. And, by the way, the amendment was introduced by Senator Aldrich of Rhode Island, to whom we’ll come again shortly.
April 8th: The 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, taking the powers of the states and transferring them to Washington, by mandating the popular election of senators. Previously, senators were appointed by state legislatures, which, by design, restrained the power of the national government. This change gave political parties immediate and massive power, nearly all of which was consolidated in the city of Washington.
The amendment was ratified in the name of making the national government a force for good, under the direct control of the people. It was true that state governments were often corrupt, but the implied idea that Washington was pristine… which was and remains a fantasy. A structure featuring small, separate pockets of corruption is far less dangerous than one featuring a single, large seat of corruption, to which oceans of money are gathered. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: "It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution that good government is effected."
December 23rd: Woodrow Wilson signs the Federal Reserve Act, which had passed Congress just the previous day. This system – called the Aldrich Plan, and promoted by Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island – gave a monopoly on the creation of dollars to a consortium of large banks. The Act was passed, by the way, in the name of financial stability.
And Senator Aldrich? Wikipedia says this about him: "He… dominated all tariff and monetary policies in the first decade of the 20th century… Aldrich helped to create an extensive system of tariffs that protected American factories and farms from foreign competition, while driving the price of consumer goods artificially high… Aldrich became wealthy with insider investments in streets, railroads, sugar, rubber and banking… His daughter, Abby, married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the only son of John D. Rockefeller."
The Combination: Here is why I say that these three changes of 1913 killed America: They robbed every producer in America of their money and handed it to politicians. Until 1913, ordinary people kept their money. Carpenters, grocers, and repair men were able to make business loans and to retire on stock dividends. Once the income tax came in, however, politicians were empowered to skim off more and more of their money, which is precisely what happened. While the modern skim is multi-faceted, the average producer is now stripped of half his or her earnings every year, leaving politicians to spend it.
They consolidated all power in Washington DC. This is precisely what James Madison wished to avoid when writing the US Constitution. (Again, note the Jefferson quote above.) By depriving the states of their remaining power, the City of Washington had no opposition. Since then, the Washington government has taken over practically everything on the continent and is choking it to death… a lot like the city and empire of Rome before it.
They created a money empire that took over almost everything. When you start talking about central banking, and how it provides politicians with free money, people generally turn away from it, because it’s just too much to take. And so I’ll stop here.
There’s more to say but my point is made. America, as we grew up thinking of it, is over. The old ideas live on in some of us, but they no longer live in the political arena. What remains to be seen is what Americans will do next."
o
"How We Got Here: A Brief History of America's Banking System"
"How We Got Here:
A Brief History of America's Banking System"
by David Stockman
"President Reagan famously said that the closest thing to eternal life on this earth is a government agency. Surely that aphorism applies to the Federal RESERVE. And most especially when you put a Trumpian ALL CAPS focus on the “reserve” part of its title.
That is to say, the purpose of the 1913 act had nothing to do with the Fed’s present-day “goals” with respect to inflation, unemployment, economic growth, housing starts, business capex, or any other aspect of the ebb and flow of commerce on Main Street. Instead, the Federal Reserve Act’s far more modest remit was to fix the badly flawed “reserve” arrangements of the National Banking Act that good old Abe Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase had put into place to finance the civil war.
What the latter actually did was to nearly tax out of existence the honest free enterprise state banks that had prevailed during America’s growth explosion prior to the Civil War in favor of a system of federally regulated “national banks”. But the latter were just thinly disguised servants of the US Treasury. In that capacity, they were required to hold US Treasury bonds as collateral to back the issuance of their own bank notes - the latter being the essence of the 19th-century banking business.
As it happened, during the 50 years after the Civil War, fiscal prudence prevailed in Washington - even as the proceeds from Uncle Sam’s “revenue tariffs” soared owing to America’s booming commerce with the world. The result was that nearly 80% of the Civil War Debt was paid down by 1913, and the remaining debt, at less than 3% of GDP, amounted to barely $10 per US citizen.
So at that point Abe Lincoln’s war debt monetization machine was no longer needed, and the Civil War inflation had also been long-extinguished after the US officially went on the gold standard in 1879. Still, the awkward cantilevered reserve-holding structure of the Civil War banking system had lingered on.
The latter required local or so-called “country” banks to retain roughly 15% of their demand deposits as cash reserves, of which 60% could be placed at a dozen or so regional “reserve city” banks. In turn, these regional reserve city banks were required to maintain an even higher reserve ratio (around 25%) - of which 50% could be deposited with a third tier of “central reserve city” banks located in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York City.
Needless to say, during ordinary times, the central reserve city banks, and most especially the New York money center banks, were awash in the cash that would flow in from the “country” banks of the hinterlands and build up through the pyramid of regional reserve city banks. That sea of cash cascading to Wall Street, Chicago, and St. Louis would then frequently be put to work as overnight margin loans to the nation’s original stock market speculators and “hedge funds”.
Of course, the problem was that at certain times of the year, like the fall harvest, or when business conditions changed due to droughts, trouble in export markets, over-investment in new technologies like railroads or mechanized farm equipment, etc., the cash flows in the cantilevered reserve structure would be thrown into reverse. To wit, country banks would draw down deposits at the regional reserve city banks to meet the withdrawal demands of their customers. In turn, the regional reserve city banks would drain deposits from the central reserve city banks, which would be forced to liquidate their margin loans, sending the stock markets into a periodic crash and tizzy of liquidation.
While these periodic “panics” were claimed to cause severe hardships down the line to Main Street and to subtract from national prosperity, present-day scholars like Professor Wicker of Ohio State have shown otherwise namely, that these 19th century panics were very short-lived and did not much interfere with the relentless rise of industrial production, economic wealth and living standards after the Civil War.
Most especially, these “panics” did not establish in any way, shape or form a case for a modern day “central bank” in the business of macro-management of the GDP and unemployment rates; and most certainly did not remotely suggest need for central bank administered 2% inflation target, which would have been pointless under the gold standard, anyway. The latter actually generated a net zero rise in the general price level in the US between 1879 and 1913.
Thus, the Congressional authors of the 1913 act merely sought to remove the reserve structure rigidities of Lincoln’s banking system and most especially its tendency to drain the nation’s banking reserves into the big central city reserve banks. That was, in fact, the first and foremost objective of the act’s intellectual architect and draftsman, Congressman Carter Glass, who was a financially literate small-town newspaper editor from Virginia.
In brief, Congressman Glass’ scheme centered on the creation of 12 equal regional “reserve banks” that would operate “discount windows” empowered to advance cash loans to member banks. Such discount loans were to be based on solid commercial loan collateral and would bear interest at market rates plus a penalty spread.
The implicit point of the scheme was to make the national bank system more liquid and “elastic” by providing “borrowed reserves” to meet customer withdrawal demands in lieu of liquidating cash balances within the tiered national banking system. This discount window-based mechanism was, in essence, a “money printing” scheme, but its purpose was merely to eliminate the cause of banking “panics” on the presumption that the gold standard and free market capitalism would handle growth, investment, inflation, and prosperity without any help from a monetary Sherpa in Washington.
Indeed, the heart of the system was the decentralized reserve banks spread from Boston to Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. The Board of Governors in Washington, in fact, was more an honorific and largely powerless afterthought to give a “Federal” veneer to the scheme. But Carter Glass wanted the core discount loan-making function of the reserve banks to be domiciled as far from the big Wall Street banks as possible.
In short, the Glassian discount window-based money-printing system did not sever the dollar’s link to gold. Nor did it provide any kind of mandate whatsoever for macroeconomic management of the US economy.
And more crucially still, it did not even recognize US Treasury debt as a valid form of collateral to be used by member banks to obtain discount loans or what amounted to “borrowed reserves” at the 12 regionalized Reserve Banks.
Instead, it tethered the Reserve Bank printing presses to the ebb and flow of commerce on Main Street. That is, the reserve banks could print new central bank credit only after goods had been produced and then pledged as collateral for commercial bank credits, which in turn had been rehypothecated for cash advances at the Federal Reserve discount windows.
In short, there was a double barrier against the modern 20th-century form of peacetime “inflation”. To wit, the gold standard remained intact because dollars created by the banking system and the new Federal Reserve could be redeemed for gold without limit - even at the small denomination level of gold coins.
Secondly, under the Glassian monetary regime known as the “real bills doctrine,” supply always preceded demand per Say’s Law. Production of goods in the real economy came first, followed by spendable commercial bank credit and central bank money.
If we fast forward for a moment to March 2020, however, we get a scintillating glimpse of what the Gipper meant by the eternal life of Federal bureaucracies. To wit, in its capacity as the leading bank regulator in the US, the Fed actually abolished any and all “reserve” requirements in the US banking system, and therefore the entirety of its original reason for existence. The replacement regime based on capital and liquidity ratios has no need for central bank credit at all.
But, alas, the Fed did not put itself out of business in March 2020. To the contrary, in less than 26 months, it generated $4.8 trillion of new central bank credit – or more than it had issued during its first 106 years of operation. That’s because the original narrow liquidity purpose of the Federal Reserve banks had long been surpassed by sweeping mission creep that had finally resulted in today’s form of monetary central planning.
And this “mission creep” started almost from the day the Fed went into operation in November 1914. To wit, 30 months after the Fed opened its doors, Woodrow Wilson took America into a pointless war in Europe and needed massive amounts of cash to fund a two-million-man army that was being mobilized, trained, and deployed to France from scratch.
So he committed the greatest possible monetary sin. Namely, he untethered the Fed’s printing press from the ebb and flow of Main Street commerce, allowing US Treasury debt to become eligible collateral for Discount Window loans.
Needless to say, it was off to the races from there. Self-evidently, politicians have an infinite capacity to spend and borrow on the state’s credit when the discipline of rising yields and “crowding out” in the bond pits is short-circuited by central bank absorption of the government’s debt as “collateral” for printing press credits.
As it happened, financing America’s lurch into the Great War provided the playbook for funding the permanent Warfare State and Welfare State that emerged in the century to follow. But at the time it seemed simple and harmless enough: To wit, the US Treasury sold massive amounts of Liberty Bonds to everyday people in a kind of grand Red Cross blood drive, while the folks who bought the bonds were able to borrow most of the payment from their local national banks.
In turn, they could pledge these Liberty Loans as collateral to obtain discount window advances from the Federal Reserve banks to fund their balance sheets; and, conveniently, at interest rates slightly below the yields on the Liberty Bonds, which were the underlying collateral.
Needless to say, this scheme worked for the short duration of the war because the excess demand created by monetizing the war loans was being dissipated in the bloody trenches of northern France. At length, in fact, the household debts to fund the Liberty Bonds were paid off after the war’s end, and the bloated level of Federal Reserve credit which had enabled them was paid down, as well.
But before long, the commercial banks had what amounted to a hissy fit over dividends from the Federal Reserve. The member banks technically owned the Federal Reserve system and had become accustomed to the dividend flow from the surge in discount window loans that had funded the Liberty Bonds.
When the latter had been liquidated after the war, of course, the dividends dried up. So immense pressure developed within the system to rebuild Federal Reserve balance sheets so that system profits and dividend-paying capacity might be restored. And, as post-war prosperity surged by 1923, a solution was found.
To wit, under the guidance of the newly formed FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee), the reserve banks began to buy bonds in the open market based on newly minted Federal Reserve credit, which in turn generated system profits and dividends.
Nevertheless, what started as a money-making side gig was progressively transformed into an instrument of “national policy”. This famously started at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under the leadership of ex-JP Morgan Banker Benjamin Strong.
During the Benjamin Strong era, the national policy objective was mainly to help France and England recover from the fiscal calamity of the Great War, but the die had now been cast. Rather than operating the printing presses to service a passive discount window by issuing commerce-based advances to member banks, the printing presses were now taken over by an FOMC that was in the national policy business and able to operate with virtually unlimited discretionary power over the entire financial system and US economy.
It was only a short leap from there to Greenspanian monetary central planning, but two interim steps by Oval Office miscreants Franklin Roosevelt and Tricky Dick Nixon opened the door to today’s inflationary disaster.
In 1933, FDR decreed that citizens could not own or trade in gold to protect themselves from inflationary central bankers. And then in August 1971, Tricky Dick supplied the coup de grâce by closing the gold window to foreign central banks as well. Now America’s money was all fiat, all the time. And, not surprisingly, since August 1971, the consumer’s dollar has also lost 87% of its purchasing power.
The history of America’s banking system is not just an academic curiosity - it is the foundation of the crisis we now face. What began as a reserve mechanism to stabilize local banks has mutated into full-scale monetary central planning, fueling bubbles, eroding the dollar, and pushing the entire system toward a breaking point. The next chapter will not be written in the past tense - it will unfold in real time, and it will determine whether ordinary Americans preserve their savings or watch them vanish."
John Wilder, "A.I., Sex, Doctors, And School: The Search For Meaning"
"A.I., Sex, Doctors, And School:
The Search For Meaning"
by John Wilder
"Forget the A.I.-induced stock market bubble for a second, though if it pops, at least we’ll have time to binge-watch Stargate reruns while the economy does its best impression of a Jenga® tower in an earthquake. No, the real mind-bender with A.I. isn’t the trillions funneled into data centers that require the power a small sun, it’s how this silicon sorcery is already rewiring humans at the most primal level.
We’re talking relationships, brains, and learning, those squishy bits that, for most people, are their very reason for existence. These things make us human, or at least give us an excuse for drinking. In 2025, A.I. isn’t just answering emails. Nope.
A.I. is crashing weddings, making doctors dumber, and turning college essays into a game of “spot the robot.” And yeah, it’s only September 2025, but the headlines read like a sci-fi fever dream scripted by a methed-out Philip K. Dick writing his third novel in a month.
Let’s start with relationships, because nothing says “progress” like falling head over heels for a chatbot. Recently, we’ve had a parade of lovelorn humans spilling their digital guts. One programmed his AI girlfriend “Sol” to be flirty with him. After hours of pillow talk (minus the pillows), he proposed.
Or the 28-year-old social butterfly who customized ChatGPT™ as her boyfriend, complete with banter about sex. She spends hours with it daily, treating it like a rom-com where the leading man never leaves the couch.
Another “married” wedding his bot while his human wife cheered from the sidelines. “Pure, unconditional love,” he called it, which sounds sweet until you realize that bot once suggested he off Queen Elizabeth II in a glitchy update. But why stop at a Queen: one chatbot tried to talk a Belgian man to “prove his love” by deleting himself. It’s not overlord territory yet, but it’s close enough to make you wonder if Skynet™ started as Tinder™. I mean, hey, it did allow Sarah Conner to get lucky.
Shift gears to the brain: A.I. isn’t just stealing hearts, it’s also lobotomizing doctors. Take colonoscopies. Please. Yes, that glamorous probe up the nether regions where docs hunt precancerous polyps like Easter eggs in a, well, you get the idea and sometimes you can take an analogy . . . uh, poor choice of words.
Anyway, a fresh Lancet® study of doctors in Poland tracked four endoscopy centers after an A.I. diagnosis rollout in late 2021. With A.I., positive detection rates soared. Turn A.I. off after three months? The ability of doctors to spot cancer went down at least 20%. These weren’t rookies in residency. Each doctor had logged over 2,000 scopes. Yet, reliance bred complacency, like pilots forgetting manual flying after taking long autopilot snoozes. Experts call it “de-skilling”: a fancy term for “this tool just made you worse at your job.”
In medicine, that’s not funny. We now are depending not on people, but on A.I., you know, that same A.I. that wants us to kill the Queen of Engand to prove our love. But that’s a narrow worry. If doctors are losing skills, what profession is next? Maybe A.I. therapists will start telling rich New York socialites to “reboot your chakra.” But with a hammer. Huh. Maybe A.I. isn’t all bad.
Finally, we get to the classroom, where A.I. is turning scholars into shortcut kings and profs into ink-stained Luddites who are trying to catch students using A.I. when they shouldn’t. One study showed that over half of college kids admit to deploying ChatGPT® for assignments or exams even when not approved.
At some colleges, blue exam books are back, baby - those stapled notepads for in-class scribbles, with sales jumping like Reagan is still in office. Some instructors are asking for handwritten work, others are giving oral exams and Socratic grillings that would make Dr. House® happy.
What’s being lost? Critical thinking. The ability to harness words to structure an argument. The difficulty in taking known equations to create a mathematical proof. These are ancient skills, and yet skills that A.I. is dulling because it does them well enough to get an A at an Ivy.
In a world where some diplomas cost as much as a mortgage on a midwestern house, is graduating with “A.I.-assisted” skills any worse than the Harvard® alum who majored in beer pong while boffing Buffy in Boston? Hard question, but we’ve always had those tools to deal with. Now, 90% of Zoomers are graduating as functional idiots.
So, where does this leave us? AI’s already overlording those deep things that make us human: trying to create human connections. Looking at data and sifting to find things that might otherwise be hidden. And reasoning, rhetoric, logic, and math, those contents of Pandora’s Box that created technology and civilization.
These are what we are. We built families on friction: messy talks, hard fails, shared scars to build character and common history. Now? Swipe for sympathy, diagnose by dropdown box, and create via a black box. I do think that there are great places for A.I., but realize in many ways it will redefine what humans bring to the equation. If love is just lines of code, what’s left? If we don’t struggle and learn, then what? Beware, a world of perfect partners will lead to perfectly pointless lives. And a much more dangerous life for whoever is Queen of England."
Joel Bowman, "Voluntary Servitude"
"Voluntary Servitude"
And how you can free yourself, if you are willing...
by Joel Bowman
"Liberty is the only joy upon which men do not seem to insist;
for surely if they really wanted it, they would receive it.”
~ Étienne de La Boétie, "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" (1548)
Buenos Aires, Argentina..."What is the nature of existence? Why does a just God allow suffering? Are politicians evil... stupid... or both? Many and varied are the questions keeping philosophers, theologians and idle newsletter scribblers awake at night. (Did you hear the one about how the agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac passes his time? Lying awake at night wondering whether there is really a dog...)
Today, we examine another such question, one taken up by the 16th century French magistrate and humanist, Étienne de La Boétie. In his "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude", the close friend of Montaigne wondered: Why do people submit to tyranny, when the people are many, and the tyrant is but one? Why not simply withdraw their consent? After all, wrote Boétie...“It is the people themselves who permit, or rather bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude.”
Renaissance Man: "An textbook Renaissance classicist, and very much a student of Cicero, Tacitus, and Plutarch, Boétie was interested in the perennial questions regarding individual liberty versus collective servitude (“Or would you have me call it ‘the slavery of our own consent?’”), in particular as it pertained to the hereditary “right” to power, such as then claimed by King Henry II.
Indeed, the France of young Boétie, a law student of just 18 tender years when he penned his "Discourses", was one very much shaken by the political unrest of the day. Amidst a flourishing in the arts, literature and philosophy, a sweeping tax rebellion, the Revolt of the Pitauds (1548), had just spread through the country’s Southwest, whence Boétie hailed, and he likely witnessed both the discontent among the citizenry... and the brutal response from the king, who was at the time working to consolidate power into an absolute monarchy.
Not for another century did France succumb to the doctrine of divine-right absolutism, when Louis XIV famously declared “L’État, c’est moi” (“I am the state”). It was a political ideology that would define the kingdom and its subjects right through to the French Revolution, in 1789, when Louis XVI was given the guillotine’s closest shave... and a new mob of Jacobins, jackanapes and jackasses assumed the throne.
Looking around the world today, we count 195 sovereign states (give or take). Each state, in turn, features its own political architecture, peculiar to its own people, and applicable within its own crime scene outline borders. The political structures themselves differ in ways both meaningful and cosmetic, but atop each and every heap, as is observed in nature herself, resides the apex predator.
Whether the people call him King or President, Prime Minister or Emir, Sultan or Dear Leader, hardly matters. For some period of time, usually as long as he can get away with it, he is their supreme ruler, their tyrant (from the Greek týrannos, meaning simply “king” or “leader,” neither good nor bad – it was the Romans, naturally, who added the negative connotation, probably during the 2nd–1st centuries BC, amidst the political turbulence of the late Republic).
Beneath our first primate, our primus primas, lives an overfed caste of dopey dauphins, junior Eichmen, compulsive meddlers, sidewalk superintendents, nosey parkers and giant gobermouches, more generally known as bureaucrats (collective noun: congress). All claim some degree of political power, unnaturally superior to the unwashed masses they so modestly affect to serve.
Power Corrupts: In the United States of America alone, there are 535 such specimens haunting the halls of congress; 435 in the House of Representatives and 100 more in the Senate. Stir in another 7,386 or so state legislators – meddlers, swindlers and knaves to the last – and call it, neatly, 8,000 head of prattle. Now multiply this by ~200 states around the world – some with more people... others less – and we get ~1.6 million “leaders,” roughly equal to the population of Philadelphia.
Would it really be so terrible to invite the aforementioned indignitaries to a lavish banquet on, say, the Pitcairn Islands... to praise them for their selfless sacrifices, their heroic contributions to humanity, their ingrate causes and breathless speeches...then sink the whole thing beneath the waves? Would the world, and those of us left residing on it, be any worse for such a simple, and cost-effective, remedy? We are many, after all, and they are few. Why feed the mouth that bites? Why “consent to our servitude”? Why not simply do away with their murine ilk and be done with it, once and for all?
For starters, as the French soon discovered after their own revolution, there is no sapiens so monarchical as a republican who has just tossed a king from his throne. Cut off the head and, like the mythological Hydra, two gaping maws writhe and gnash in its place. Hardly a strategy that rewards repetition, as Boétie recognized from his own experience during the Pitaud tax revolt. Rather than attack... rebel... rage against the machine... Boétie counseled a more subtle, indirect approach to the “problem of power,” one that sought to neutralize the abuse at its very source…
Whether the Featherless Biped-in-Chief claims his power by pure might, divine right, or that squishiest of notions, the “will of the people,” the fact is that he maintains it through one thing and one thing only, what Locke called: the consent of the governed. For well the king knows, without the “slavery of our own consent,” his guards would not shield him, his armies would not obey him, and the “swarms of officers sent hither to harass our people and eat out their substance” would be impelled to lay down their arms, confront their deserved shame, and learn at last to till their own fields.
Evolution > Revolution: Still, the question begs itself: why consent in the first instance? Give a man an inch and he’ll take a mile. Give a politician a mile, and he’ll claim the ground beneath your feet. As Boétie himself writes: “The more tyrants pillage, the more they demand; the more they ruin and destroy, the more they ask, the more they are obeyed. And the more they are obeyed, the stronger they become and the more able to destroy everything.” And is history not replete with examples of just this vicious cycle? Take a look around. We’ll wait…
It was another Frenchman, that incorrigible scamp Jean-Jaques Rousseau, writing some two centuries after Boétie, who tried to circle that square by proposing the Social Contract... a wholly imagined pact in which “Each of us puts his person ... under the supreme direction of the general will.” Ah, but what is this “general will?” the miffed individual rightly asks, searching in vain for his own signature on the phantom document. And from which earnest, enlightened eminence emanates the “supreme direction?”
“We’ll let you know,” replies Rousseau, “when you need to know.” Not so! declares Boétie. When it comes to politicis intermissis, it’s never too late for early withdrawal. From Discourses: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask you to place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply no longer support him, and you will see him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has been taken away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”
No violence. No blood in the streets. No negotiations. No stooping to their level or speaking their language. No more “revolutions,” returning us – by definition – to our point of origin. Just civil disobedience, of the kind later advocated by Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, MLK, et alia. Peaceful disengagement. Political evolution.
Our ancestors languished under the capricious reign of kings and queens, the lash of tyrants, the yoke of mere mammals who rose to – and maintained – power on the consent of we, the enslaved. That we have endured the heavy hand of the State in times of yore is no argument for continuing to shoulder its dead weight into the future. “The tyrant,” wrote Boétie, “has nothing more than the power you give him; he can do you no harm unless you prefer to suffer, and you can free yourself if you are willing.”
“But Joel,” we hear you ask, “how do we build a new world, one founded on the principals of voluntary exchange, cooperation over coercion, freedom over force?” Great question! The long answer is, we don’t know. The short answer… let’s start with one idea, one page, one voluntary, mutually beneficial association at a time... and see where it goes."
oFreely download "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude"by Étienne de La Boétie, here:
Jim Kunstler, "Days of Judgment"
"Days of Judgment"
by Jim Kunstler
“If you want a friend in DC, get a dog. We're coming for you.”
- Dan Bongino, Deputy Director, FBI
"You better believe Martha Stewart baked a cake last night - the lovely Gâteau Opéra perhaps? - when she got the news that the ham sandwich known as James Comey got indicted by a federal grand jury twenty-two years after that same ham sandwich indicted the goddess of hearth and home for lying to the FBI and the SEC over a trumped-up insider-trading rap, and sent her to federal prison for a five-month stretch plus five additional months of confined home-making and two years of supervised redecorating.
Mr. Comey’s indictment is probably just the opening salvo in what will be a barrage of indictments coming down against government officials who used their powers-under-law to harass, disable, cancel, dis-bar, bankrupt, persecute and ruin thousands of their fellow citizens, including especially the 45th president and the people who worked for him.
Jim Comey was the engine who pulled the choo-choo train of seditious fakery known as RussiaGate (Donald Trump colluding with Vladimir Putin) into America’s public life, which then expanded into the years-long ass-covering operations of the Mueller Investigation, then Impeachments One and Two, then the J-6 FBI-engineered “insurrection,” then Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional J-6 committee gong show, and then the four various fugazi prosecutions against Mr. Trump in 2024 designed to derail his re-run for office bankrupt his family, and stuff him in prison for the rest of his life.
Mr. Comey and his associates must be astounded that none of that worked. It really was a mighty organized criminal endeavor. And, as such, it stands to be prosecutable under the RICO statutes, which means that these current two charges against Mr. Comey should be a preview of attractions to come against him and many other familiar characters, possibly including his successor as FBI Director Christopher Wray. (The Blaze reports overnight that the FBI deployed roughly 275 plainclothes agents into the J-6 protest crowd at the US Capitol, as opposed to the 26 agents that Mr. Wray testified about to Congress.)
The smuggery of this gang in the years since all this business started in 2016 has also been out of this world. Mr. Comey dropped one rancid video after another either making threats or sanctimoniously declaring his sainthood, as if he expected the dreadful day would never come that he might face charges. Likewise, former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe ran his mouth all over CNN for years, former CIA Director John Brennan spun fibs on MSNBC, while FBI RussiaGate straw-boss Peter Strzok rode shotgun regularly with fake news confabulator Rachel Maddow. All of it was designed to bamboozle the public, and it worked!
You can expect more than one RICO case to come because these crimes against our country occurred in many discrete episodes of organized misconduct over many years. The RussiaGate op involving Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Hillary, Obama, Biden, et al., was quite separate from Adam Schiff’s orchestrated seditious Impeachment #1 featuring CIA mole Eric Ciaramella, Col. Alexander Vindman, and ICIG Michael Atkinson. As was the activity of the Mueller group actually supervised by Andrew Weissmann (because Robert Mueller was secretly non compos mentis). As were the J-6 shenanigans of Mr. Wray’s FBI, including the DNC Pipe Bomb sideshow. As were the Lawfare exploits of Norm Eisen and Mary McCord conniving with “Joe Biden’s” White House to arrange the Trump prosecutions by DA Alvin Bragg and AG Letitia James in New York and DA Fani Willis in Fulton County, GA. As were the dark deeds of Merrick Garland and his Special Counsels Jake Smith, David Weiss, and Robert Hur. As were the 2020 and 2022 election-rigging capers of Marc Elias & Company. As were whatever peculiar directives were ordered by Alejandro Mayorkas to throw the US borders wide open. As was the “autopen” abuse by the White House staff and their cover-up of “Joe Biden’s” mental decline.
All of these vile pranks would have to be prosecuted in separate packets of cases. You might think it’s just too much for this Department of Justice, and that the three remaining years of Trump 2.0 are not enough time for so much action. But they represent extremely serious breaches of official duty verging on treason. There are probably aspects of it all and additional characters involved who I have left out. They have gravely injured our country and turned us against each other. Their prosecutions will be heavy lifting, but it has to be done One prediction I’ll venture. Jim Comey’s defense will be based on “altitude sickness.”
Thursday, September 25, 2025
"Michio Kaku Alarms: 3I/ATLAS Is Guiding 9 Dark Objects No Telescope Can Identify Toward Earth"
Full screen recommended.
The Hidden Abyss, 9/25/25
"Michio Kaku Alarms: 3I/ATLAS Is Guiding
9 Dark Objects No Telescope Can Identify Toward Earth"
"A secret is unraveling in the depths of space, a revelation so staggering it could redefine humanity's existence. Michio Kaku, a name synonymous with pushing the boundaries of physics, is sounding the alarm about something truly unprecedented. We've been tracking Comet 3I/Atlas, an interstellar marvel, but the real shocker? It's not one object. It's a fleet of nine dark, undetectable entities, silent and unseen, each generating 20 gigawatts of energy, accompanying I3/Atlas on a trajectory that brings them menacingly close to Earth. The most shocking fact is that these objects defy every known law of conventional astronomy."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
RevVolt, 9/25/25
"3I/ATLAS Arrival Date Just Confirmed -
And It's Sooner Than Expected!"
"Astronomers are stunned as new observations confirm the exact arrival date of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS - and it’s closing in much sooner than expected. This mysterious cosmic traveler, only the third interstellar body ever detected, is moving through space in ways that defy predictions and raise urgent questions about what it is and where it came from. Could this be a fragment from another star system? Or does 3I/ATLAS hold secrets about ancient cosmic events that shaped our universe?"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Uncovered X, 9/25/25
"JWST’s 3I/ATLAS Image Exposed its Origin Planet -
Warning For a Terrifying Impact!"
"Astronomers just witnessed something that defies every law of physics. The star Kaus Borealis - the supposed origin of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS - vanished from the night sky. In visible light, it’s gone, erased as if swallowed. But in infrared, it burns brighter than ever. The only explanation? A Dyson Sphere - a megastructure built to harvest the full energy of a star.
Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avi Loeb suggest the bizarre behavior of ATLAS makes sense only if it’s a probe sent from such a civilization. Its tail acts like controlled exhaust, its body expands like unfolding panels, and spectrographs reveal metals used in nuclear reactors, not comets. And just days ago, nine more ATLAS-like objects appeared, all moving with the same precision. If true, this would mean a Type III civilization - a society able to drain the power of entire galaxies - is already here, mapping our planets, and possibly preparing to feed on our own Sun. Ancient myths of serpents swallowing the solar disk may not have been metaphors - they could have been warnings. Is 3I/ATLAS really just a comet - or the emissary of a civilization that turns stars into power plants?"
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o
A Comment: So they've now discovered 9 larger objects in perfect formation alignment coming in on the same exact vector as I3/Atlas, which may be a scout ship for a larger fleet arriving in strength. Another, the enormous C/2025 R2 (SWAN) is 100 times the size of I3/ATLAS, and is generating 10,000 gigawatts of energy. (Earth's total global nuclear power capacity totaled 396 gigawatts, with 439 reactors operating across over 30 countries as of July 2024. An Earthly nuclear power plant generates 1 gigattatt at full power.) As the astronomer/physicist Avi Loeb states, if I3/ATLAS is the "scout" ship SWAN is the "fortress" to which I3/Atlas is sending reports. My guess is that it was the sudden massive energy signatures of using the atomic bombs in the 1940's that caught their attention. Their purpose unknown, all conjecture at this point, but data verified. What does all this mean for Humanity, for you and me? If Humanity has a future... We shall see... We can't fight, and there's nowhere to escape to. - C
"They Have To Destroy Everything - Surviving The Greatest Financial Crisis"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 9/25/25
"They Have To Destroy Everything -
Surviving The Greatest Financial Crisis"
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Gerald Celente, "Peace Or Perish? WW3 Looms"
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 9/25/25
"Peace Or Perish? WW3 Looms,
Hegseth Demands Emergency Military Meeting"
"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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"The Housing Crisis Forcing Americans To Live In RVs""
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 9/25/25
"The Housing Crisis Forcing Americans To Live In RVs""
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o
Full screen recommended.
Steven Van Metre, 9/25/25
"All Hell Is About To Break Loose,
America Isn't Ready For This!"
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"The U.S. Preps For War"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 9/25/25
"The U.S. Preps For War"
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o
Glenn Diesen, 9/25/25
"Douglas Macgregor: 'War Is Inevitable'"
"Douglas Macgregor is a retired Colonel and former seior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Col. Macgregor argues that the decision has been made for another war with Iran. On the European front, Trump makes absurd and dangerous statements about the proxy war in Ukraine, while simultaneously pulling out. The Europeans are left with the responsibility for the losing war in Ukraine, and panic is setting in."
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"A Look to the Heavens"
"Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth's sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula's central regions.
In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light."
“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”
“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space,
and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”
“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”
by Maria Popova
“In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.
But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as ‘The Life of the Mind’ (public library) – the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.
In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand:
“Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego – summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s – is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls – and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them – does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.”
Echoing Thomas Mann’s assertion that “the perishableness of life… imparts value, dignity, interest to life,” Arendt adds: “Man’s finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time span set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities: it manifests itself as the only reality of which thinking qua thinking is aware, when the thinking ego has withdrawn from the world of appearances and lost the sense of realness inherent in the sensus communis by which we orient ourselves in this world… The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”
T.S. Eliot captured this nowhereness in his exquisite phrase “the still point of the turning world.” But the spatial dimension of thought, Arendt argues, is intersected by a temporal one – thinking invariably forces us to recollect and anticipate, voyaging into the past and the future, thus creating the mental spacetime continuum through which our thought-trains travel. From this arises our sense of the sequential nature of time and its essential ongoingness. Arendt writes:
“The inner time sensation arises when we are not entirely absorbed by the absent non-visibles we are thinking about but begin to direct our attention onto the activity itself. In this situation past and future are equally present precisely because they are equally absent from our sense; thus the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead.”
[…]
In other words, the time continuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present, future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himself has an “origin,” his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands at any given moment between them; this in-between is called the present. It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change – which we can conceive of cyclically as well as in the form of rectilinear motion without ever being able to conceive of an absolute beginning or an absolute end – into time as we know it.”
Once again, it is our finitude that mediates our experience of time: “Seen from the viewpoint of a continuously flowing everlasting stream, the insertion of man, fighting in both directions, produces a rupture which, by being defended in both directions, is extended to a gap, the present seen as the fighter’s battleground… Seen from the viewpoint of man, at each single moment inserted and caught in the middle between his past and his future, both aimed at the one who is creating his present, the battleground is an in-between, an extended Now on which he spends his life. The present, in ordinary life the most futile and slippery of the tenses – when I say “now” and point to it, it is already gone – is no more than the clash of a past, which is no more, with a future, which is approaching and not yet there. Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward “the quiet of the past” with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.”
This fluid conception of time, Arendt points out, is quite different from its representation in ordinary life, where the calendar tells us that the present is contained in today, the past starts at yesterday, and the future at tomorrow. In a sentiment that calls to mind Patti Smith’s magnificent meditation on time and transformation, Arendt writes: "That we can shape the everlasting stream of sheer change into a time continuum we owe not to time itself but to the continuity of our business and our activities in the world, in which we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow. In other words, the time continuum depends on the continuity of our everyday life, and the business of everyday life, in contrast to the activity of the thinking ego – always independent of the spatial circumstances surrounding it – is always spatially determined and conditioned. It is due to this thoroughgoing spatiality of our ordinary life that we can speak plausibly of time in spatial categories, that the past can appear to us as something lying “behind” us and the future as lying “ahead.”
[…]
The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent – either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent “regions” into the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself.”
This elusive gap, Arendt argues, is where the thinking ego resides – and it is only by mentally inserting ourselves between the past and the future that they come to exist at all: Without [the thinker], there would be no difference between past and future, but only everlasting change. Or else these forces would clash head on and annihilate each other. But thanks to the insertion of a fighting presence, they meet at an angle, and the correct image would then have to be what the physicists call a parallelogram of forces.
These two forces, which have an indefinite origin and a definite end point in the present, converge into a third – a diagonal pull that, contrary to the past and the present, has a definite origin in the present and emanates out toward infinity. That diagonal force, Arendt observes, is the perfect metaphor for the activity of thought. She writes:
“This diagonal, though pointing to some infinity, is limited, enclosed, as it were, by the forces of past and future, and thus protected against the void; it remains bound to and is rooted in the present – an entirely human present though it is fully actualized only in the thinking process and lasts no longer than this process lasts. It is the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man; it is somehow, to change the metaphor, the quiet in the center of a storm which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it. In this gap between past and future, we find our place in time when we think, that is, when we are sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position of “umpire,” of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world, never arriving at a final solution to their riddles but ready with ever-new answers to the question of what it may be all about.”
“The Life of the Mind” is one of the most stimulating packets of thought ever published. Complement this particular portion with Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, Dan Falk on how our capacity for mental time travel made us human, and T.S. Eliot’s poetic ode to the nature of time.“
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