"A Real Life Economic Nightmare: How Would You Feel If You Had Applied For 900 Jobs Without Any Success At All?"

"A Real Life Economic Nightmare: How Would You Feel 

If You Had Applied For 900 Jobs Without Any Success At All?"

by Michael Snyder

"If you have applied for hundreds of jobs and still find yourself out of work, you are certainly not alone. In many industries, it is absolutely brutal out there right now. U.S. employers have been laying off hundreds of thousands of workers in 2025, and there is immense competition for any good jobs that do happen to be available. So if you have a good job that you highly value, I would hold on to it as tightly as you can, because you don’t want to end up among the desperate hordes that are scrambling for work in this very harsh economic environment. For example, a 46-year-old woman in Florida that was laid off last September has applied for 900 jobs without any success at all…

"Jennifer Smith, 46 years old, says she has applied for 900 jobs since being laid off last September from a financial-services provider in the Tampa, Fla., area, where she led the user-experience department. She has landed just one interview and no offers. This has left Smith, who has three children, increasingly anxious about her finances. Smith decided this past week to sell her five-bedroom home and trade down to a smaller house. While severance pay has helped, it is about to run out, and Smith has been paying soaring premiums to keep her health insurance."

I feel so badly for her. Searching for work in this environment can be just as exhausting as a full-time job, but you don’t get paid for it. If she doesn’t find a job soon, she could potentially lose everything. Of course there are countless others that are in the exact same boat.

On the other side of the country, 61-year-old John Comber says that he has applied for about 500 jobs since late 2023 with no success…"Some older, out-of-work Americans are wondering if they will find jobs again. "I’m considering myself semiretired at this point,” says John Comber, 61, a software quality engineer in Sandpoint, Idaho. He hoped to work another decade and thought he would easily pick up more work when his last contract work wrapped up in late 2023. Instead, he estimates he has applied for 500 jobs with no hits." This isn’t a bum with no skills that we are talking about. Comber is a highly skilled software engineer. But this is the economic environment that we live in now.

It is being reported that the number of Americans that have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks is now at “the highest level since 2017, not counting the pandemic’s unemployment surge”…"Job seekers are out in the cold this summer. Especially the ones who have been hunting for a while. Beyond the headline-grabbing top-line numbers in the jobs report for July was another striking piece of data: The number of people unemployed for at least 27 weeks topped 1.8 million, the highest level since 2017, not counting the pandemic’s unemployment surge. The median length of unemployment in the U.S. has also ticked up, from a seasonally adjusted 9.5 weeks in July 2024 to 10.2 weeks last month."

Wow. And that figure is only going to go higher, because employers all over the nation are feverishly laying off workers right now. I shared this on Friday, but I feel like I should share it again in this article. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. employers have announced 806,383 job cuts so far in 2025. Compared to the same time period in 2024, that is a 75 percent increase…"So far this year, companies have announced 806,383 job cuts, the highest YTD since 2020 when 1,847,696 were announced. It is up 75% from the 460,530 job cuts announced through the first seven months of last year and is up 6% from the 2024 full year total of 761,358."

How are you going to spin those numbers to make them look good? You can’t. This reminds me so much of what we witnessed in 2008 and 2009.

Most of the country is living on the edge financially, and so a job loss can be absolutely catastrophic. Once you are out of work, it can be so tempting to turn to debt to bridge the gap. Of course these days many Americans are piling on tremendous amounts of debt without even being out of work. As a result, U.S. households are now more than 18 trillion dollars in debt. Take a moment and think about how crazy that is. When you break that down, that is approximately $53,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

We are literally drowning in debt, and one recent study discovered that about two-thirds of all U.S. adults “lie about or hide their financial struggles from family and friends”…

• Two-thirds of Americans with debt lie about or hide their financial struggles from family and friends.

• The average American carries $42,000 in debt but understates the amount by $6,565 when discussing it.

• Shame drives the secrecy, with nearly 30% citing embarrassment as their main reason for hiding debt.

• Financial deception damages relationships for 73% of people with debt, often causing arguments and isolation.

Most of us try to hide our financial struggles because we are ashamed. But it shouldn’t be that way. If we could just be open and honest with one another about what is going on, we would find that there are countless others that are going through the same thing. The entire economy is failing, and if we can get people to understand that they won’t be so quick to blame themselves for their troubles. Unfortunately, right now conditions are moving in the wrong direction very rapidly.

Residential investment was down during the first quarter of 2025, and it was way down during the second quarter of 2025…In May, Citi Research recalled that the late economist Ed Leamer famously published a paper in 2007 that said residential investment is the best leading indicator of an oncoming recession. “We would be wise to heed his warning,” Citi said.

In fact, residential fixed investment shrank 4.6% in the second quarter, according to data released Wednesday, after contracting 1.3% in the first quarter. One of the primary reasons why residential investment is way down is because home sales are way down. In fact, during the second quarter home sales were the lowest that we have seen in 13 years…"America’s spring homebuying season just hit its weakest point in over a decade - marking the slowest market since 2012 and sparking fears that a full-blown price collapse could be next. Spring is traditionally the hottest time for pending home sales but that’s no longer the case in the in the now struggling US housing market. In 2025, April through June brought the lowest sales in 13 years, according to Redfin."

Let’s get real. The housing market is in a depressed state. And if we stay on the path that we are on, the rest of the economy will be in a depressed state soon too. Decades of very foolish decisions have brought us to this point, and more Americans are falling out of the middle class with each passing day. If you still have your spot in the middle class, you should be very grateful. Because soon even more Americans will be applying for hundreds of jobs without any success at all."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Bill Bonner, "Fire and Ice"

"Fire and Ice"

"Central planning is always a mistake, in the sense that it makes

 most people worse off. It is not a mistake for those who do the planning. 

The feds and their cronies get more money and more power."

by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "Last week, the US began Crackpot Financial Experiment Number Two. CFEN2. CFEN1 was the move, in 1971, to a ‘paper’ currency…with nothing to connect it to real output. It greatly increased the amount of credit available, leading to a long (but largely fake) boom from 1982-2021 and to $37 trillion in government debt. CFEN2 should have an almost opposite effect. It discourages trade and should depress the world economy. Today, we take a guess about what happens next.

As we closed out the week, we got this. From Spencer Hakimian via X: "My friend is in the business of buying wholesale steel rebar, steel beams, steel sheets, etc. from inexpensive overseas producers and then selling it downstream to American homebuilders who build budget homes. He got an email from his customs broker this afternoon that their order from Hanoi, Vietnam will be subject to either 50%, 70%, 110%, or 135% tariff tomorrow. 50% penalty for foreign steel. Another 20% penalty for Vietnam. Another 40% transshipment penalty if U.S. customs believes the steel is not truly Vietnamese. And another 25% fentanyl penalty if CBP thinks China is involved with this steel in any way whatsoever. The customs broker told him to assume he’s paying the full 135%, just to be safe. They won’t know for sure for a few months, and the penalties of being wrong are too severe."

Central planning is always a mistake, in the sense that it makes most people worse off. It is not, however, a mistake for those who do the planning. The feds and their cronies get more money and more power.

The latest trade deals are counted as a ‘win’ for Mr. Trump. They show he can get what he wants. He’s a deal maker par excellence, after all. And he can prevail against almost the entire world. Against the English, the French, the Swiss, the Brazilians, South Koreans, Japanese...etc. etc. Didn’t he win everywhere...against everyone? Maybe. But in a trade dispute, the real winner is usually the loser - the one whose borders remain most open, not the one who has raised the drawbridge and closed his doors.

Imagine that we live on opposite sides of a river. On our side, we raise chickens. On your side, you raise wheat. We trade. But then, we notice that we are buying more of your wheat than you are of our chickens. “Unfair,” we shout. We impose a tariff of 30% on wheat imports. “We won!” we say. ‘We won, too,’ you say, ‘cause it could have been worse.’

But in this world of winners, on our side of the river we pay 30% more for bread. You may not pay more for the chickens, but now you have less money to buy them; your wheat now costs us more, so we can’t buy as much. And you, with less income from your wheat sales, buy fewer chickens. We are both poorer.

But wait. There’s more to the story. On our side of the river, our government collects the 30% tariff. It is the only real winner...having taken its ‘tax’ out of the chicken/wheat trade. As to what happens next, in today’s real-world economy, we were put the question by a young woman at a wedding reception. Over the noise of a blaring band, we answered as best we could: “There are two possibilities - fire or ice...a whimper or a bang.

The US stock market is now in a bubble. We’re talking 1929 or 1999 levels. Something is going to happen to bring those prices down and crash the whole bubble economy. Tariffs could do the job...just as the Smoot/Hawley tariffs sent the whole world into a depression in the ‘30s. Sharp price increases for consumer products, for example, might panic investors. Or, since none of these ‘deals’ is actually final...we could still see a trade war break out...which might cause a stampede out of stocks.

Or, maybe there won’t be a panic. The economy will simply slow down as consumer prices rise. Some form of stagflation, in other words. Over a number of years, adjusted for inflation, real stock prices would go down, as they did in the 1970s. GDP would go down. People would earn less real money...and have less to spend. But it would be less obvious what was going on.

Either the fragility and complexity of the tariff regime tip the economy into a major crisis. Or, economies adapt without fireworks, absorbing the tariffs as they would any other tax hike. The going rate for tariffs was less than 4%; now, it will be about 18%. One way or another, the economy must adjust to the much higher taxes. Was that helpful?”, we asked? She looked doubtful."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "It's Far Worse Than You Think - Are We on the Brink of Collapse?"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, AM 8/4/25

"It's Far Worse Than You Think - 

Are We on the Brink of Collapse?"

"The shocking truth is out - America’s real debt isn’t $37 trillion as we’ve been told, but a staggering $151 trillion when factoring in unfunded liabilities like pensions, veteran benefits, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Hey, it’s Dan from I Allegedly, and in today’s video, I’m breaking down how this financial crisis goes far deeper than most realize, why it’s time to face the reality of bankruptcy, and what it means for all of us. Plus, I’m covering the latest in business news, the state of the auto market, and privacy issues tied to smart meters and AI surveillance. It’s a jam-packed episode you don’t want to miss!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Suspicious Minds"

"Suspicious Minds"

by Jim Kunstler

"It was a coup, and I'm using that term literally...

One egregious felony after another."

- Stephen Miller

"America is tired of being driven insane, of having absurdities crammed into our collective consciousness. Reality is an agreement about what is going on in the world. That act of faith requires such an agreement be based on what is demonstrably true. Without it, society dissolves into chaos and failure.

The RussiaGate psychodrama is about an agreement based on lies. It started with Hillary Clinton’s desperate ploy to save her foundering 2016 election campaign. Her emails somehow got sent to Wikileaks, a radical news org dedicated to revealing government secrets, implicating misconduct. It was easy to declare the Russians did it, by hacking - when it was much more likely, in fact, proven by a forensic audit, that a Clinton campaign insider downloaded the info on a thumb drive, perhaps one Seth Rich, found murdered on a DC sidewalk soon thereafter.

Every lie after that met the kind of skepticism among the public that generates heat, controversy, scandal, and fire. Hillary managed to enlist President Barack Obama and his executive agencies into her project, and the party apparatus with it, because the Clinton Victory Fund had paid the DNC’s debts and took over its management. Soon, the Russia collusion project grew into a gigantic scaffold of flaming lies. The big newspapers and the TV news networks bought the story, and came along for the ride. They were all sure Hillary would win the 2016 election. All the heat and fire would get flushed away. The polls all said so. The agencies and the parties would pick up and go on as before, run the show, make careers, get wealthy, be important!

They miscalculated. They lost. But they decided to keep building the scaffold of lies in order to protect themselves from the danger it represented - because they lived in that scaffold, it was the party’s house. And the scaffold of lies needed massive fortification. The house that the party lived in had to be protected at all costs, or they would all be cast out, homeless, a whole party on street, lost, broke, ruined, dying, like the pitiful tweakers bent over out on Kensington Avenue in Philly, in every Democrat-run city, really.

And so, they undermined the winner of the election at every turn, worked furiously to drive him from office, made a plague happen, subverted the 2020 election, and spent four years under a fake president jamming absurdities into the public arena, turning it into a freak show, one drag-queen story hour after another, from seas to shining sea. All to defeat the return of a public consensus about reality based on what is demonstrably true - starting with the fact that there are men and there are women, and that the primary interaction between them keeps society going by producing offspring.

This enormous, drawn-out insurrection, composed of serial felony crimes, amounts to the greatest insult against the republic - the res publica, in Latin, the public thing - in the nation’s history. And now it is coming apart as an overwhelming majority of citizens, including now many Democrats, can’t avoid discovering what has happened in the country. Because lies are weak and the truth is sturdy and eventually truth prevails, even after an arduous struggle.

The old news media complex, the networks and the papers, are not reporting the recent disclosures by the Directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intel. What will it take to get their attention? Arrests and perp-walks of formerly important officials? And then, do they acknowledge and atone for their disgraceful participation in the events? Or pretend they couldn’t figure any of it out for years and years? Poor us, we didn’t know! Suddenly, it looks like many of these “legacy” news outfits are going out-of-business. They’re throwing their performers over the side like sinking ships casting off so much useless ballast.

You knew this was coming, right? Now, here you are: the hour that consequence finally returns from its wanderings in a wilderness of institutional failure. There’s no evading it anymore. The scaffold of lies has collapsed, and trying to add additional lies will amount to throwing a few twigs on a heap of smoldering wreckage.

The institutions themselves are under new management, and they show every sign of returning to regular operation, doing what they were designed to do in the first place: deliver a truthful account of what has happened and determine a just consequence for the people who made it happen. It’s going to happen, and then we can rebuild a coherent public consensus about what is really real, who we really are, and where we go from here."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

"Economic Market Snapshot 8/4/25"

"Economic Market Snapshot 8/4/25"

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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

o

Market Data Center, Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data 

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- https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/

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Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

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- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

Job cuts and much more.

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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"The more I see of the monied classes,

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...

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And now... The End Game...

o

Adventures With Danno, "Big Problem At Sam's Club!"

Adventures With Danno, PM 8/3/25

"Big Problem At Sam's Club!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Packing Up And Moving Out Of Third World California; Nuclear Annihilation Warning"

Jeremiah Babe, 8/3/25

"Packing Up And Moving Out Of Third World California;

 Nuclear Annihilation Warning"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"America's Richest Man"

"America's Richest Man"

by Joel Bowman

“I was early taught to work as well as play,

My life has been one long, happy holiday;

Full of work and full of play—

I dropped the worry on the way—

And God was good to me everyday.”

~ J.D. Rockefeller, summing up his life at age 86. 

He died two years later, in 1937.

Ormond Beach, Florida- "When it comes to the richest people in America’s history, one man stands head and shoulders above the rest. At the peak of his personal wealth, J.D. Rockefeller’s pile was calculated to be worth roughly $900 million, the vast majority of which came from the Standard Oil empire he founded and built. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $21-25 billion in today’s dollars. Not poor, in other words. But even that number tells only part of the story…

As a percentage of the nation’s GDP, which in 1913 stood at $39 billion, the oil tycoon’s wealth represented a staggering 2.3% of the entire US economy, a higher percentage of the nation’s total wealth than held by any other person in any other age. An equal portion today, measured against America’s $30 trillion economy, would weigh in at ~$690 billion.

For comparison, Rockefeller’s closest competitors are…Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose shipping and railroad businesses helped him amass a fortune of roughly ~$105 million; a lot of money back in the 1870s. At that time, “The Commodore,” as he was known, controlled wealth roughly equivalent to ~1.1–1.5% of America’s GDP.

A generation later, Andrew Carnegie created his fortune building and dominating the American steel industry. A poor immigrant, who had arrived from Scotland in 1848, Carnegie started working at age 13 as a bobbin boy in a textile mill. He went on to work at the local telegraph office and then for the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he learned about business, management and, eventually, investing… for which he evidently had considerable talent. By the beginning of the 20th Century, Carnegie’s wealth stood at an eye-watering $480 million, a sum equal to roughly ~1.5–2.0% of the nation’s GDP.

Today, more than a century later, Jeff Bezos’s ~$215 billion Amazon fortune represents “just” 0.7% of America’s giant economy. Mark Zuckerberg’s anti-social media stash, somewhere in the vicinity of $220-240 billion, ranks similarly.

Messrs. Ellison, (~$229–236 billion, Oracle Corporation), Gates (~$176–179 billion, Microsoft), Balmer (~$161–172  billion, Microsoft), Buffett (~$150–154 billion, Berkshire Hathaway), Brin (~$138–150 billion, Google) and Page (~$144–156 billion, Google), all Americans, round out nine of the world’s top ten richest super billionaires. (Bernard Arnault & family, which built their ~$146–178 billion fortune selling LVMH luxury products, are the only non-Americans in the top ten.)

Even the richest man in the world today – the shy and retiring Elon Musk, whose $400 billion personal fortune dwarfs his contemporaries – has wealth equal to “only” 1.2% of America’s total economy… about half the size of Rockefeller’s empire, relative to the America he helped build.

Mo’ Money: Hating on the rich is, of course, nothing new… and certainly, Rockefeller had his share of detractors and sworn enemies along the way, perhaps none more so than Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. The so-called “trust buster,” Roosevelt was deeply suspicious of what he saw as “bad trust monopolies,” viewing Rockefeller’s businesses as abusive and predatory, and the man himself as the archetypal robber baron. “No man should have such power as Rockefeller has,” he once decreed, “without being held accountable to the people.”

Indeed, it was the Roosevelt administration that laid much of the ideological and legal groundwork for vigorously enforcing antitrust laws which, in 1911, under President William Taft, eventually resulted in Standard Oil being broken into smaller, state-sized pieces…

Standard Oil of New Jersey later became Exxon… Standard Oil of New York became Mobil (then the two became ExxonMobil)…Standard Oil of California became Chevron…Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco… The Ohio Oil Company became Marathon Oil…Continental Oil Company became ConocoPhillips…and so on. That most of the Standard Oil companies have now merged and coagulated into the Big Oil blob we see today is but one irony.

The grand irony, however, is that, as Rockefeller’s shares in the various spin-off companies increased in value over time, the original Standard Oilman grew ever richer. Indeed, Rockefeller would go on to become America’s very first billionaire, prefiguring Bernie Sanders’ worst nightmare decades before the Grumpy Colonel was even born and proving that, if nothing else, the unwieldily federal government is an expert in one thing above all others: creating unintended consequences.

And yet, not everyone viewed Rockefeller as Roosevelt and his meddlesome ilk did. Here’s biographer, Allan Nevins, answering some of the man’s detractors…"The rise of the Standard Oil men to great wealth was not from poverty. It was not meteor-like, but accomplished over a quarter of a century by courageous venturing in a field so risky that most large capitalists avoided it, by arduous labors, and by more sagacious and farsighted planning than had been applied to any other American industry. The oil fortunes of 1894 were not larger than steel fortunes, banking fortunes, and railroad fortunes made in similar periods. But it is the assertion that the Standard magnates gained their wealth by appropriating "the property of others" that most challenges our attention. We have abundant evidence that Rockefeller's consistent policy was to offer fair terms to competitors and to buy them out, for cash, stock, or both, at fair appraisals; we have the statement of one impartial historian that Rockefeller was decidedly “more humane toward competitors” than Carnegie; we have the conclusion of another that his wealth was “the least tainted of all the great fortunes of his day.”

Top of the Rock: The pic above, taken from the observation deck during your editor’s brief sojourn in New York City last week, showcases one of Rockefeller’s most iconic legacies: The Rockefeller Center. Construction began on the ambitious project, the brainchild of Rockefeller himself, right as American was plunged into the depths of the Great Depression. At the time (1931) it was among the largest private construction projects ever undertaken, one that brought 40,000 jobs to the city itself and which provided a shining light to lift the national spirit.

Renowned for its Art Deco designs, it is perhaps no coincidence that one of the most emblematic statues in the Center depicts the Greek god Atlas, who famously carried the weight of the world on his broad shoulders…"

- https://joelbowman.substack.com/

Musical Interlude: Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"

Full screen recommended.

Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a about 25 light-years across blown by winds from its central, bright, massive star. A triumvirate of astroimagers ( Joe, Glenn, Russell) created this sharp portrait of the cosmic bubble. Their telescopic collaboration collected over 30 hours of narrow band image data isolating light from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms produce the blue-green hue that seems to enshroud the detailed folds and filaments. Visible within the nebula, NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years. 

The nebula's complex structures are likely the result of this strong wind interacting with material ejected in an earlier phase. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life this star should ultimately go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion. Found in the nebula rich constellation Cygnus, NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years away."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210617.html

The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Return”

“The Return”

“Suddenly the window will open

and Mother will call,

it's time to come in.

The wall will part,

I will enter heaven in muddy shoes.

I will come to the table

and answer questions rudely.

I am all right, leave me

alone. Head in hand I

sit and sit. How can I tell them

about that long

and tangled way?

Here in heaven mothers

knit green scarves;

flies buzz.

Father dozes by the stove

after six days' labor.

No - surely I can't tell them

that people are at each

other's throats.”

- Theodore Roethke

"What if when you die they ask, "How was Heaven?"

~ Author Unknown

A truly terrifying thought...

Chet Raymo, “Take My Arm”

“Take My Arm”

by Chet Raymo

“I’m sure I have referenced here before the poems of Grace Schulman, she who inhabits that sweet melancholy place between “the necessity and impossibility of belief.” Between, too, the necessity and impossibility of love.

Belief and love. They have so much in common, yet are as distinct as self and other. How strange that two people can hitch their lives together, on a whim, say, or wild intuition, knowing little if nothing about the other’s hiddenness, about things that even the other does not fully understand and couldn’t articulate even if he did. Blind, deaf, dumb, they leap into the future, hoping to fly, and, for a moment, soaring, like Icarus, sunward. The necessity of wax. The impossibility of wax. We “fall” in love, they say. Schulman: “We slog. We tramp the road of possibility. Give me your arm.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Immortality in Passing"

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

On What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives"

by Maria Popova

“When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan observed as she beheld impermanence and transcendence at the foot of a mountain. “By the grace of random chance, funneled through nature’s laws,” the poetic physicist Brian Greene wrote in his beautiful meditation on our search for meaning in a cold cosmos, “we are here.” And then we are not.

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

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

"Immortality"

"In Sleeping Beauty’s castle

the clock strikes one hundred years

and the girl in the tower returns to the world.

So do the servants in the kitchen,

who don’t even rub their eyes.

The cook’s right hand, lifted

an exact century ago,

completes its downward arc

to the kitchen boy’s left ear;

the boy’s tensed vocal cords

finally let go

the trapped, enduring whimper,

and the fly, arrested mid-plunge

above the strawberry pie,

fulfills its abiding mission

and dives into the sweet, red glaze.

As a child I had a book

with a picture of that scene.

I was too young to notice

how fear persists, and how

the anger that causes fear persists,

that its trajectory can’t be changed

or broken, only interrupted.

My attention was on the fly;

that this slight body

with its transparent wings 

and lifespan of one human day

still craved its particular share

of sweetness, a century later.

- Lisel Mueller

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

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

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

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

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

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

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"The Backdoor to Immortality: Marguerite Duras 

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

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

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

- Maria Popova

- https://mailchi.mp/

The Daily "Near You?"

Sheboygan, Wisconsin, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Still Sometimes..."

“The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can’t pretend we haven’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still, sometimes, we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug, until we can’t anymore, until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin meant: That knowing is better than wondering. That waking is better than sleeping. And that even the biggest failure, even the worst, most intractable mistake, beats the hell out of never trying.”

- “Meredith”, “Grey’s Anatomy”

"Our Lives Begin To End..."

 

"Israel No Longer Has a Right to Exist"

"Israel No Longer Has a Right to Exist"

by Ted Rall

"In certain traditional societies, troublesome individuals who were perceived as threats to communal harmony were labeled as “witches.” To restore calm, accused witches were sometimes reintegrated into society via a ceremony of ritual cleansing. Other problematic people, particularly those whose socially unacceptable behavior persisted, were banished or killed. As a political entity, Israel is a witch. Its conduct is incompatible with 21st-century civilization. To whatever extent it ever had one, Israel no longer has a right to exist.

The Netanyahu government’s cynical exploitation of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, raid is the last straw. With gleeful bloodlust that appears to have no limits, Israel has intentionally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians. It has reduced a bustling territory filled with high-rises and seaside resorts to rubble. It has cruelly imposed a blockade of fuel, water and food that has resulted in outbreaks of long-vanquished diseases like polio and meningitis. It has created a manmade famine a few miles away from where Israelis gather at LGBTQ-friendly restaurants to eat rich meals and drink sweet wine fermented from grapes cultivated on the soil of occupied land.

The argument that Israel, or any other nation-state, enjoys an inherent “right to exist” has always been absurd. From ancient empires like Parthia to 20th-century constructs like Czechoslovakia, countries exist so long as they are able to establish and defend their borders. When they cannot, they vanish.

Sometimes a country becomes so troublesome to its neighbors that the global community determines that it, like an alleged witch, must be excised to achieve calm. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany’s voracious expansionism was so disruptive that rivals with economic and political systems that were diametrically opposed to the point of recently having clashed militarily, including the U.S. and the USSR, formed alliances in order to destroy them. The Napoleonic Wars united powers with conflicting interests, such as Britain (a constitutional monarchy), Russia (an autocratic empire), Austria and Prussia because the defeat of Napoleon was seen as essential to curb France’s disruptive dominance and restore regional order.

Governments often act without their people’s blessing. That is true of the stateless noncitizens of Gaza. Hamas’ last election was before most Gazans were alive.

If the government of Israel did not represent the will of its people, Israel the country could be forgiven. Israel, however, is a democracy. Netanyahu, a right-wing extremist, has been prime minister for 17-plus years over multiple terms, making him Israel’s longest-serving leader. His brutal treatment of the Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank is popular with voters. A June 2025 poll found that 76.5% of Israeli Jews “think that Israel should not take the civilian population’s suffering into account at all, or should only do so to a fairly small extent” in military planning. “Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” reports The New York Times.

Considering that the Israeli public supports the genocide in Gaza, the fact that Israel Defense Forces spokesmen dismiss media photos of starving, skeletal Palestinian children as “fake” is cause for a kind of optimism. When Netanyahu says “there is no starvation in Gaza,” at least he’s aware enough of international opinion that he feels compelled to lie.

You hear about demonstrations in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu. But those protests do not agitate against the genocide of Palestinians. Israel’s few leftists, who march against Netanyahu and the war, focus on the 20 or so remaining hostages held by Hamas, and the suffering of Israeli soldiers.

It is easy for culturally isolated Israelis, whose official language of Hebrew is spoken nowhere else on earth, to ignore their country’s war crimes. “The mainstream domestic news media has rarely provided vivid coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” notes the Times. The last surviving relic of British imperialism, Israel is an apartheid state that repeatedly ignores resolutions passed by the United Nations, which it uniquely owes for its creation, and brushes off negative public opinion in the United States, upon which it is dependent for its economic, military and diplomatic survival. Like Germany in the 1930s and ’40s, it has normalized lawlessness, dehumanized and murdered people to steal their land, and committed itself to aggressive military expansion with no end in sight.

Israel is a terminally ill society. It is cruel. It is heartless.

Unlike Germany, which was decimated at the end of World War II, accepted defeat and cleansed itself via decades of atonement for Nazism, Israel is unlikely to be militarily crushed or spiritually reborn. It has little prospect of rehabilitation.

Israel is dangerous. In the last few months alone, Israel has bombed Iran, bombed and carried out the indiscriminate pager bombings in Lebanon, further emboldened murders of Palestinian civilians by fascist “settlers” in the West Bank, and overthrown the government of Syria, where it inexplicably installed a radical ex-al-Qaeda jihadi to replace a secular leader — and then bombed Syria again. Even by the standards of the Middle East, no other player is as destabilizing or violent as Israel. How long will it be before Netanyahu or his successor uses one of Israel’s illicit nuclear weapons?

The state of Israel is a troublesome witch. It has to go. Let’s be clear. Abolishing Israel - ensuring that, from the river to the sea, Palestine is free - does not imply or necessitate the removal of any of its residents. Jews, Arabs, Christians and other groups lived peacefully side by side in Ottoman-era Palestine. The German people survived the end of Hitler and are thriving today. The Soviet people survived the 1991 collapse. So it will be for the people of the nation-state that ought to become the former State of Israel sooner rather than later."

- https://www.unz.com/

o

Redacted, 8/2/25

"The Truth About October 7 

That Israel Doesn’t Want You to See"

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