"Imagine what life would be like if lived, in May Sarton’s lovely phrase, with “joy instead of will.” That is what Beethoven imagined, and invited humanity to imagine, two centuries ago in the choral finale of his ninth and final symphony, known as “Ode to Joy” - an epochal hymn of the possible, half a lifetime in the making.
In the spring of 2012, the Spanish city of Sabadell set out to celebrate the 130th anniversary of its founding with a most unusual, electrifying, and touchingly human rendition of Beethoven’s masterpiece, performed by a flashmob of 100 musicians from the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l’Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs. Watching the townspeople - children with kites, elders with walkers, couples holding hands - gather to savor the unbidden music in a succession of confusion, delight, and ecstasy is the stuff of goosebumps: living proof that “music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.”
"Jamie Dimon is complaining that the bank debacle will cause more bank regulation. The large banks have to start paying the FDIC back for loses and this is going to affect each banks individual bottom line."
"In today's vlog we are at Aldi and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
“This pretty, open cluster of stars, M34, is about the size of the Full Moon on the sky. Easy to appreciate in small telescopes, it lies some 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. At that distance, M34 physically spans about 15 light-years. Formed at the same time from the same cloud of dust and gas, all the stars of M34 are about 200 million years young.
But like any open star cluster orbiting in the plane of our galaxy, M34 will eventually disperse as it experiences gravitational tides and encounters with the Milky Way's interstellar clouds and other stars. Over four billion years ago, our own Sun was likely formed in a similar open star cluster.”
"Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart."
"I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."
"The small group of devoted followers gathered around Chicago housewife Dorothy Martin sat in stunned silence as the clock on her suburban living room wall struck midnight on the twentieth of December, 1954…and nothing happened. Many had left jobs and spouses and given away all their money and possessions in order to await the arrival of alien beings from the planet Clarion, who Martin had assured them would descend at that appointed hour, carrying the faithful few off in their flying saucers just before huge floods engulfed the planet Earth. Finally, four hours after their scheduled departure time, Martin broke her silence.
As the group readjusted their bras, belts, and zippers - having been instructed to discard any metal objects which might interfere with the aliens’ telepathic radio transmissions - their tearful host revealed the reason why their intergalactic rescuers had failed to appear: Apparently it had all been only an elaborate test of faith, and the group’s advanced state of enlightenment had saved the entire planet from a watery destruction!
Surprisingly, only one or two of Martin’s followers were unconvinced by this perfectly rational explanation. Among them, however, was social psychologist Leon Festinger, who had secretly infiltrated the group. Festinger would later write about Martin - using the pseudonym of Marian Keech - in his groundbreaking 1958 book, "When Prophecy Fails." (Not surprisingly, Festinger is credited with coining the psychological term ‘cognitive dissonance.’)
Following publication of Festinger’s book, the group predictably collapsed under the weight of public ridicule. Martin fled to Peru to warn the clueless natives about the imminent re-emergence of Atlantis, before later resurfacing in Arizona, where she joined crackpot L. Ron Hubbard’s nascent pseudoscientific movement, Scientology.
It seems that for as long as people have inhabited the world, they have anticipated its imminent demise. (In fact, the oldest known apocalyptic prediction is depicted on Assyrian tablets from 2800 BC.) In what may be the earliest example in European folklore, a Frankish villager wandered off into the forest in 591, only to be accosted by a swarm of ravenous flies. Overwhelmed, the poor fellow completely lost his mind and returned to his village clothed in animal pelts, claiming he was Jesus Christ, sent to gather his flock before the coming Rapture. (Perhaps resenting the competition, a local bishop hired a gang of thugs to capture the Lord of the Flies, who they rapturously hacked into little bits.)
The failure of one apocalyptic prophecy not only failed to deter its devoted followers but in fact spawned several entirely new religions. When the world failed to end as predicted in the ‘Great Disappointment’ of 1843-44, Massachusetts preacher William Miller’s tens of thousands of followers splintered off to found the Seventh Day Adventists, as well as the obnoxious doorknockers known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. When the next fateful year of 1874 passed without the desired fireworks, the latter’s charismatic founder, Charles Taze Russell, explained that Jesus had indeed returned, but was invisible to all except the truly devout. (Predictably, few dared admit to being lacking in the requisite level of faith.)
The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, had declared way back in 1832 that 1890 would be the year of Jesus’s long awaited return engagement. (Later jailed for fraud, Smith somehow failed to predict his own deliverance by an angry mob at age 39.) Russell revised the fateful year to 1881…then 1914…and finally, 1918. (The latter dates spanned World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic, events that while apocalyptic for many, fell short of being world ending.)
Our own time has seen the horrors of the Peoples Temple - in which 914 adults and children committed suicide in the jungles of Guyana in 1978; the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists - 75 of whom died in the FBI standoff at Waco in 1993; Aum Shinri Kyo -whose poison gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1994-95 left 19 innocent people dead; and -neither least nor unfortunately, last - Heaven’s Gate, 39 of whose members committed suicide in 1996, fully expecting (like Dorothy Martin) their spirits to be carried away by aliens hiding in the wake of an approaching comet.
It was probably no coincidence that all of these cults were acting in anticipation of an impending Bible-inspired Day of Judgement. One is tempted to blame these kinds of incidents on the delusions of a small minority of misguided religious fanatics, except that millions of people alive today are expecting an imminent Biblical apocalypse. In a 2012 global poll, fully one out of 7 people said they thought the world would end during their lifetime - and rather ominously, Americans topped the list of doomsayers at 22%. Since their government has the means to fulfil their death wish many times over, one can only hope their gloomy prediction won’t one day become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just call it a bedtime story for humanity."
"Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people. This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the Antonine Plague of 165 AD.
The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests which reduced the caloric intake of most people, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague which swept Europe in 1347.
I’ve mentioned the book "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire" a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization. It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.
In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor. The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Kondratieff and others, and Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations. All three are playing out globally in the present.
In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues: the rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.
Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma. Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 30 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.
Now the plan–for lack of any real plan–is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.
Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.
Which brings us to luck. As a general rule, historians seek explanations which leave luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and action and cycles. Yes, cycles and human action influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.
If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors, then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history. It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power in the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse. That was good judgement by Pius but also good luck.
As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs. (A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud but without the water vapor/steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of sea water, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.) That was bad luck for the dinosaurs, and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.
The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)
In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us. We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control – technology, wise investments and policies, etc. The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.
We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.
I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, "Born Under a Bad Sign" (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” The next five years might have us singing this line with feeling."
Dropped Jaws With This Statement On The Woke Military"
By Patriot Political
"To say that the United States military has gone woke in recent years would be putting it mildly. But one man who has certainly earned the right to offer his criticism has had enough. And the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden dropped jaws with this statement on the woke military.
May 2, 2011 was a famous date in history. It’s the day Navy SEAL Rob O’Neill killed Osama bin Laden, bringing a small payback for thousands of Americans who perished nearly a decade earlier on 9/11.
O’Neill is not happy with the direction the Navy has taken in recent years and he just blasted the Armed Forces for enlisting a drag queen influencer as a “digital ambassador” to help with recruitment.
“Alright,” O’Neill began in a post on social media. “The U.S. Navy is now using an enlisted sailor Drag Queen as a recruiter. I’m done. China is going to destroy us. YOU GOT THIS NAVY. I can’t believe I fought for this bulls*it.”
After a TikTok video from drag queen influencer and U.S. Navy Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley went viral among conservative commentators this week, O’Neill evidently felt compelled to offer his thoughts. But O’Neill was not done expressing his frustration with the woke military. “You’re doing it wrong, @USNavy,” he wrote in a followup tweet. “Talk to someone whose [sic] actually done something! Not yeomen with t*ts and a Di*k!”
The Navy brought in drag queen Harpy Daniels, who is also an active-duty sailor, to participate in a pilot program targeting a wider array of potential recruits through digital platforms.
Don't you feel safer, Good Citizen? The Dept. Of Defense budget for 2023 was $870 BILLION, and this is what we get. Excuse me, but OMFGod, we have truly gone insane...
"Russia Vs Ukraine - The Ultimate Battle of the Tanks
Along the Frontline in Donetsk"
"The Russian defense ministry has released a new footage of its army of tanks crushing Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk. T-80, T-90, T-72B3 and BMP-2 tanks can be seen in combat action launching back-to-back attacks on targets with the help of drones."
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, and are noticing some major price increases on groceries! This is not good as stores are already charging extremely high prices on most items!"
"The shortage of everything is making its way back into U.S. stores. Retailers left and right are facing empty shelves of key products, and consumers are being forced to pay more for the items they need as demand continues to exceed supply. Conditions are getting so extreme that you may not find some summer favorites like ice cream, tequila, burgers and beer at you local supermarket in the coming months.
On top of that, farm-grown fruits and vegetables were some of the biggest victims of the fertilizer shortage that erupted during the pandemic and exponentially worsened after the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out, and the world lost two major producers of NPK – which stands for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three primary ingredients plants need to grow. At the peak of the shortage, farmers were seeing fertilizer prices shooting up 700%, and that was right when planting season began. Consequently, many small producers that could not afford such exorbitant costs started abandoning their less profitable crops. Drought also played a major role during the summer of 2022. And now we’re seeing the effects of this at the grocery store, with produce aisles barer than normal.
Similarly, batteries have been in short supply for quite some time now. The global production of steel, zinc, manganese, potassium, and graphite – all components that make the alkaline batteries we find at our local stores is still going down in 2023. The situation doesn’t look any better for lithium or even solar-powered batteries given that demand is significantly outstripping supply worldwide. On top of that, the cost of producing batteries went up by 156% since 2020, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. This means that not only they are getting harder to find but prices are already climbing. Batteries are usually one of the first products to disappear during an emergency, so if your battery stash is running low, you should probably restock it now before inventories drop even further.
Don't wait until everyone starts rushing to the stores to get the supplies you need because by then it may be far too late. Make sure you store your products properly. During the summer months, supply and demand problems become more acute, which means that many other items are also at risk of vanishing from sight. Pay attention to empty shelves the next time you go grocery shopping so that you know which shortage is getting worse and which products to purchase before things get even more complicated. Our struggling supply chains are still coping with one challenge after the other, and this crisis may persist for longer than we're prepared for, so the time to restock our pantries is now. While some staples are already nowhere to be found, others are still available, but not for long. That's why today, we listed a bunch of products that are in short supply right now so you can make preparations for what is coming next."
“What will become of these galaxies? Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Typically when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides.
Close inspection of the above image taken by the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile shows a bridge of material momentarily connecting the two giants. Known collectively as Arp 271, the interacting pair spans about 130,000 light years and lies about 90 million light-years away toward the constellation of Virgo. Recent predictions hold that our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years.”
Excerpt: "Two weeks ago the Biden administration had recognized that the announced Ukrainian ‘counteroffensive’ will fail to make much progress. The operation has still not started and Zelensky has moved its launch further into the future: "Speaking at his headquarters in Kyiv, President Zelensky described combat brigades, some of which were trained by Nato countries, as being “ready” but said the army still needed “some things”, including armored vehicles that were “arriving in batches”.”With [what we already have] we can go forward, and, I think, be successful,” he said in an interview for public service broadcasters who are members of Eurovision News, like the BBC. “But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable. So we need to wait. We still need a bit more time.”
Time will not prevent that any counteroffensive will lead to high casualty rates. In fact, waiting longer means more attacks on the troops in their current positions. Any detected agglomeration of forces or material is already coming under long range Russian missile fire.
As the counteroffensive is destined to fail the Biden administration is out to move the goal posts. In Foreign Affairs two of its MIC propagandists, Michael Kofman and Rob Lee, demand to prepare for a much longer war: "Policymakers, however, have placed undue emphasis on the upcoming offensive without providing sufficient consideration of what will come afterward and whether Ukraine is well positioned for the next phase. It is critical that Ukraine’s Western partners develop a long-term theory of victory for Ukraine, since even in the best-case scenario, this upcoming offensive is unlikely to end the conflict. Indeed, what follows this operation could be another period of indeterminate fighting and attrition, but with reduced ammunition deliveries to Ukraine. This is already a long war, and it is likely to become protracted. History is an imperfect guide, but it suggests wars that endure for more than a year are likely to go on for at least several more and are exceedingly difficult to end. A Western theory of success must therefore prevent a situation in which the war drags on, but where Western countries are unable to provide Ukraine with a decisive advantage."
The delusion is strong in that assessment. A ‘theory of victory’ or ‘success’ is just that – a theory. Ukraine does not have the personnel to sustain a longer war. Nor does the ‘west’ have any spare weapons that could give the Ukraine a ‘decisive advantage’. Still the cue was picked up Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmitro Kuleba (machine translation): "If Ukraine does not succeed in its counteroffensive against the aggressor country Russia, it will prepare for the next one.This was stated by Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in an interview with Bild published on May 10. He urged “not to consider this counteroffensive as the last one” – “because we do not know what will come of it.”
Kuleba noted that if Ukraine succeeds in its counteroffensive against Russia in liberating its territories, “in the end you will say: “Yes, it was the last one,” but if not, then you need to prepare for the next counteroffensive.” Kuleba is already asking for weapons for the next ‘counteroffensive’ to be launched after the currently announced one fails.
Dreizin published an alleged ‘battle plan’ for a Ukrainian ‘counteroffensive’ in the Zaporozhia front:
(1) Break through the Russian forward defense along the line Nesterianka-Novosyolovka (6km and 19km southeast of Orekhov, respectively) into the defense depth of Guards battalions in the Polozhsk-Orekhov sector, utilizing, in the first echelon, the 47th and 65th Separate Mechanized Brigades, 9th Army Corps (total of 2 tank and 7 infantry battalions—8300 men with up to 60 tanks, up to 200 other armored fighting vehicles, up to 110 field pieces and mortars, 12 MLRS, up to 100 motor rafts.) Breakthrough of the contact line will be in the order of the 65th which is already on the line, then the 47th. Neighboring units including the 128th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade will carry the task of harrying neighboring Russian units so as to prevent reinforcement of Russian forces at the main axis of advance.
(2) Subsequently, deploy the main forces. The main blow is to be from the vicinity of Orekhov, in the direction of Tokmak, ultimately towards Melitopol’. From the point of strategic value the chosen target is the right one. However, it is also the one where the Russian military has prepared its strongest defense lines."
In military books this is know as ‘echeloned defense’ with three lines of well prepared positions ten kilometer apart from each other. Each line consists of tank obstacles, mine belts, prepared anti-tank positions to monitor and counter potential breach attempts and well prepared artillery support from behind the next defense line.
To crack such a nut without air support and without significant artillery advantage is nearly impossible. It is why I think that the Zaporozhia region may not be the real target of the counteroffensive. All the talk about it may well be a diversion. The least prepared front is in the area south of Kherson."
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