George Galloway MP, 4/24/24
Scott Ritter, "Evil Incarnate"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 4/24/24
"Huge Escalation Is About To Happen
In Ukraine and Middle East"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Musical Interlude: Yanni, “Standing in Motion"
Full screen recommended.
Yanni, “Standing in Motion"
Live At The Acropolis 1993
"A Look to the Heavens"
“What makes this spiral galaxy so long? Measuring over 700,000 light years across from top to bottom, NGC 6872, also known as the Condor galaxy, is one of the most elongated barred spiral galaxies known.
The galaxy's protracted shape likely results from its continuing collision with the smaller galaxy IC 4970, visible just above center. Of particular interest is NGC 6872's spiral arm on the upper left, as pictured here, which exhibits an unusually high amount of blue star forming regions. The light we see today left these colliding giants before the days of the dinosaurs, about 300 million years ago. NGC 6872 is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Peacock (Pavo).”
"When That Day Comes..."
"If you had one last breath - what would you say? If you had one hour to use your limbs before you would lose the use of them forever - would you sit there on the couch? If you knew that you wouldn't see tomorrow who would you make amends with? If you knew you had only an hour left on this earth - what would be so pressing that you just had to do it, say it, or see it? Well there is something that I can guarantee - that one day you will have one day, one hour and one breath left. Just make sure that before that day that you have said, done and experienced everything that you dream of doing now. Do it now - that is what today is for. So pick up the phone and call an old friend that you have fallen out of touch with. Get out and run a mile and use your body and sweat. Seek out someone in your life to say you're sorry to. Seek someone In your life that you need to thank. Seek someone in your life that you need to express your feelings of love to. Then when that day comes you will be ok with it all."
- John A. Passaro
"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make,
who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?"
~ Stephen Levine
“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
- Stephen King, "Shawshank Redemption"
Paulo Coelho, "Killing Our Dreams"
"Killing Our Dreams"
by Paulo Coelho
"The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams is the lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the Good Fight.
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
"The Immortal Hymn of Mankind"
"The Immortal Hymn of Mankind"
by Paul Rosenberg
"If you could go back in time a thousand years, you’d find people who were eerily similar to your present companions. The same is true for people who will live a thousand years from now. Some of them will be nearly identical to the people you now love, and you would care deeply about those people, the same as you do their present-day counterparts.
Please understand this: The men, women and children we would love in the future can advance only in the same way we have, by the benefaction of their predecessors.
Can you imagine how long it took for ignorant men and women to learn metallurgy? Or crop rotation? Or a hundred other things we can barely imagine being without? Our lives are advanced only because they created new ways of living and passed them down to us. Hundreds of generations of people just like us lived through dark times, fighting toward whatever bits of light they could find, opposed by others nearly the entire way, to bring us where we are now.
Someday our generation will also be gone, and we will have played – whether we’ve understood it or not – the crucial role of transmitting civilization to following generations. What do we want them to be like? How do we want them to live?
Numberless men and women have struggled toward the future and spent all they had to bring us here. We owe them something. It may be that they no longer care, but their gifts to us will cease to exist unless we pass them along. We make them matter, and they deserve to matter.
We stand now at the threshold of the stars, but we’ve been immobilized by self-serving structures designed to control every human and reap from their every action. We must get past them if we are to continue forward. Foolishness and fear bid us to forget the future, to chase status instead of goodness, consumption rather than production, and stasis rather than expansion. A thousand self-serving voices call us aside, grasping at our minds and emotions. We must turn away from them all.
We owe this to the people of the past.
We owe it to the people of the future.
We owe it to ourselves.
What happens next is up to you. It’s not up to leaders or bosses. It’s up to you. The consequences of your failures are inescapable, and the consequences of your good deeds are inescapable. Whether or not you acknowledge them, our descendants will live or die by them. What you are and what you do matter a very great deal. Engage your will. Act. Awake."
Anthony Hopkins, "Fastest, Most Powerful Prayer In The World"
Anthony Hopkins,
"Fastest, Most Powerful Prayer In The World"
Great scene from the movie "360".
Comments here:
Anthony Hopkins,
"What's The Meaning Of Life?"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "Walmarts Self Checkouts Backfire, Stop Being A Walmart Slave"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/24/24
"Walmarts Self Checkouts Backfire, Stop Being A Walmart Slave;
Mortgage Demand Crushed, Now What?"
Comments here:
"A Well-packaged Web Of Lies..."
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”
– Dresden James
Scott Ritter, "Russia has Demilitarized NATO and Putin is Exposing the Truth"
Scott Ritter, 4/24/24
"Russia has Demilitarized NATO
and Putin is Exposing the Truth"
"Former US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer and UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter explains how Russia has become a major player in the emerging multipolar world through its victorious stand in Ukraine, and what this all means for NATO's fledging global hegemony with Washington at its head. Hint: the truth will shock you!"
Comments here:
Gerald Celente, "Judge Andrew Napolitano: Killing The Constitution and Marching Off to War"
Gerald Celente, Trends Journal 4/24/24
"Judge Andrew Napolitano:
Killing The Constitution and Marching Off to War"
"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."
Comments here:
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, "Phil Giraldi: Israel Has Biden Trapped"
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 4/24/24
"Phil Giraldi: Israel Has Biden Trapped"
Comments here:
"How It Really Is"
Read a book? That'll be the day!
"Nationwide, on average, 79% of U.S. adults are literate in 2023.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2023.
54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level."
"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't
even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny
doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
- Thomas Sowell
"Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: ''What were you doing for the last 12 years before you got here?''
- Thomas Sowell
"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
- Thomas Edison
"Are People Really Stupid?"
“All of the available data show that the typical American citizen has about
as much interest in the life of the mind as does your average armadillo.”
- Morris Berman
“Think of how stupid the average person is,
and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
- George Carlin
"Are People Really Stupid?"
by Fred Russell
"On the face of things, judging from the general level of knowledge and understanding, not to mention the intellectual pursuits, of most of the human race one is tempted to say that the overwhelming majority of mankind lacks the intellectual capacity, the intelligence, to contribute to human progress. And it is in fact a very small elite that has carried us beyond Neanderthal Man, without whom, if the truth be told, we might still be living in caves. It is, in a word, appalling to contemplate the level at which ordinary people use their minds, what they read, if at all, what they watch on TV, the movies they go out and see, and the ease with which they are seduced and manipulated by the technicians of the psyche, namely, politicians and advertisers.
The impression one gets when contemplating these tens and hundreds of millions of people glued to their TV screens for the reality shows and sitcoms or fiddling with their smartphones from morning till night is of complete empty-headedness. This is not to say that such people cannot be shrewd, resourceful, or, for that matter, simply decent. It is to say that at the average level of intelligence displayed by the human race, the great intellectual achievements of mankind seem to be beyond the scope of the vast majority of men and women. But are people really stupid? And if they aren't, who or what has held them back?
Now one may be inclined to place all the blame for our ignorance on the television producers and gadget makers, but the truth is that by the time they get to us the damage has already been done. All they really succeed in doing is dragging us down a little further. The problem starts in childhood. It starts in the schools with all those empty cells waiting to be filled and no one, not entire educational systems, really knowing how to fill them. In fact, the opposite result is achieved. By the time the child finishes elementary school, unless he is destined to join the intellectual or scientific or economic or political elite and is self-motivated, as the saying goes, he will have developed an aversion to the learning process that will persist for the rest of his life.
It is not hard to understand why. School bores him, and oppresses him. Its premise, fostered in the West by the Church the virtually exclusive supplier of teachers until fairly recent times, historically speaking is that as a consequence of Original Sin all men are born evil and must therefore be coerced into doing what is good. The result has been rigidly structured frameworks where teachers hammer away at the captive child until his head is ready to explode. Within just a few years, the public school system thus destroys the natural curiosity of the child and dooms him to a life of total ignorance, dependent, for whatever sense of the world he does have, on second rate journalists, who themselves lack the knowledge, understanding, discipline and integrity to be historians or even novelists and therefore shape his perception like the ignorant clerics of the Middle Ages, raining down on his head a disjointed and superficial body of information presented largely to produce effects, and even this is beyond his capacity to retain.
The man in the street may thus be said to have a great many opinions but very little knowledge, mindlessly repeating the half-truths of experts and analysts who reflect his own biases and constructing out of them a credo of dogmatic views that remain embedded in his mind for an entire lifetime like bricks in a brick wall.
Does it matter? After all, we have all the scholars and scientists we need, and besides, a world where everyone became one would be a dull place indeed. It can even be argued that it is better for the race if progress is opposed, since, judging from its products, it mostly expresses itself materially and economically in an unholy alliance of greed and technology. However, progress of this kind cannot be fought if all that people have on their minds is to wire themselves into this technology, and that is what they will be doing until their minds are engaged in less frivolous pursuits. They are thus doubly victimized, first by the schools, whose methods are not attuned to the temperament and capacity of the average child, and then by the economic elites who control the technologies and consequently the flow of information and whose only interest in the man in the street is as a consumer of their products.
Unfortunately, there is very little hope that any of this will change. The wrong people control human society and will continue to do so, because they created the model and are the only ones who know how to operate it. The sad truth is that today's man in the street is neither wiser nor more knowledgeable than a medieval peasant. Calling ourselves Homo sapiens, or even Homo sapiens sapiens, seemed like a good idea once but very few of us have lived up to the billing."
Apologies to armadillos for the comparison! lol
"Ignorance, Its Uses and Nurture"
"Ignorance, Its Uses and Nurture"
by Fred Reed
"Democracy may not be the silliest idea concocted by man but, for anything larger than a small town, it is crackpot. It consists in the idea that a public, on average knowing almost nothing, can choose leaders in popularity contests among provincial lawyers who know little more and are required to know nothing, except how to get elected.
In a democracy, this ignorance is both a protected quality, like motherhood and a valued resource. By common consent, the ruled do not look too closely at the mentality of elected rulers, and the rulers speak solemnly of the wisdom of the people, who have none. Reporters will ask, “Senator, what are your views on Afghanistan?” but never, “Senator, where is Afghanistan?” or “Can you spell Afghanistan?”
To plumb the depths of democratic puzzlement, we might, by means of polls, ask how many voters can name three cities in China apart from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hongkong. Or how many can name even those cities. Or how many know even one date in Chinese history, or can name a single province. Yet they know that China is perfectly dreadful and dangerous.
Ask what countries border on the Caspian or Black Sea. Or, seriously, how many have ever heard of the Caspian. In today’s politics, these are not quiz-show trivia but influence Washington’s choice of our next war.
See how many have heard of the Minsk Accords. If they have not, they lack a hamster’s grasp of the Ukraine war. What they think they know probably comes through CNN and MSNBC, assiduous hawkers of the not so.
Gallup: Twenty-one percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.
Fifty-four percent of Americans read below the sixth-grade level.
A good bet is that the lower third in intelligence of the population know nothing at all of international affairs and exceedingly little of national. Given the appallingly poor schools in the cities, another good bet is that the proportion of blacks cognizant of international geography or politics is vanishingly low. Since Latin American cardiac surgeons and system programmers do not swim the Rio Bravo to pick oranges in Florida, the Hispanic percentage is unlikely to be greatly better. Taken as wholes, none of these three groups is remotely qualified to vote.
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) stunned attendees at a high school solar eclipse event Monday by claiming the rock-solid moon is a “planet” that is “made up mostly of gases” — before adding she still wants to be “first in line” to learn how to live there. I suggest sending her. She is the former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee.
“While little more than a third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, just as many (35 percent) could not name a single one.
n reading, 628 Patterson High School students took the test. Out of those students, 484 of them, or 77%, tested at an elementary school reading level. That includes 71 high school students who were reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first-grade level. Another 45 were reading at a second-grade level. Just 12 students tested at Patterson High School, were reading at grade level, which comes out to just 1.9%.
While people who read political columns online are likely of intelligence above the average, i wonder how many who rail against capitalism, socialism, fascism, racism, and terrorism can define the words.
I recently checked the bios of the members of the House committee on China to see how many read, write, or speak Chinese. None. Thus do we make policy regarding the most important foreign country on the planet.
A friend, a former US Senator, once estimated, dead seriously, that ninety percent of the Senate doesn’t know where Myan Mar is. If you and I, dear reader, do not know this, it probably doesn’t matter. The Senate engages in foreign policy.
It is important to note that intelligence does not by itself confer the capacity to vote. I know people way into the upper percentiles who do not have the time or the interest to worry about foreign policy, for example. There are engineers, neurosurgeons, mathematicians, journalists, musicians and artists, whose minds just don’t run in political directions, especially involving obscure countries on the other side of the world. Neurosurgeons have families who merit attention, journals to read to keep up with their fields, perhaps a hobby or two, and don’t have much left over to worry about a new Russian pipeline across Mongolia, wherever that is.
People I have met of IQ 190 or better, maybe four (of whom I assuredly am not one), have had the memory and analytical capacity to, I think, approximate an understanding of politics, history, and so on. These people are so rare as to be almost nonexistent. The rest of us at best can know bits and pieces.
For example, my knowledge of Caucasian politics consists entirely in the fact that Washington wants to put military bases in Georgia to help surround Russia. I am blankly ignorant of Congressional and state politics, agricultural policy, or much about what Blackrock is doing around the world. There is too much to know, and too little wit to know it with.
If we ignore exceptions and degrees, the public can be regarded as a vast semi-comatose polyp that knows only whether it is comfortable or cold and wet and has enough to eat. If the economy is good, people will vote for incumbents, whether these have any responsibility for the prosperity or not. If wars can be fought without inconveniencing them, in places not actually within their visual horizon, they will pay scant attention. They will not concern themselves with education as long as their children get good grades, however unrelated to anything learned. Their interests are local, though they can be stirred up over this football team or that, this Trump or that Biden, or morality plays about police brutality or the righteous heroism of Ukrainians.
Taking into account the aforementioned poor education, controlled media, and American anti-intellectualism – Americans seem to dislike the obviously intelligent – and you have a polity utterly incapable of anything approaching functional democracy. Rev the people up over the Superbowl or morality tales about the Ukraine or Russia and they will do anything desired. Roll over. Bark. Beg. Nothing to it."
Adventures With Danno, "Stocking Up At Costco!"
Full Screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 4/24/24
"Stocking Up At Costco!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Costco and are stocking up on a lot of different grocery items! We show how we get the most out of our membership, making it totally worth it!"
Comments here:
o
Meanwhile, elsewhere...
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 4/24/24
Travelling with Russell, 4/24/24
"I Went to Russia's Largest Food Expo:
PRODEXPO 2024"
"Prodexpo 2024 is the largest international show of food and drinks in Russia and Eastern Europe. Bringing togther more than 2000 companies to showcase food and drinks. ProdExpo is Russia’s largest showcase of alcoholic beverages and wines from more than 30 countries."
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "You Will Never Own a Home"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 4/24/24
"You Will Never Own a Home"
"Redfin just conducted a wild survey that showed that most people
have basically given up on the fact that they will ever own a home.
Will you ever own a home? "
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "Crisis Zone: On The Edge Of A Total Debt Market Meltdown"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/24/24
"Crisis Zone:
On The Edge Of A Total Debt Market Meltdown"
Comments here:
o
Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/24/24
"Live! Never Let Your Guard Down!
Hold The High Ground And Be Ready For Anything!"
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Tuesday, April 23, 2024
"'Will Destroy Israel If...': Iran's Big Threat To Jewish State After Tit-For-Tat Attacks"
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 4/23/24
"'Will Destroy Israel If...':
Iran's Big Threat To Jewish State After Tit-For-Tat Attacks"
"Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi threatened Israel of annihilation in case the Jewish State launched an attack on the Islamic Republic. The statement from Raisi came during a visit to Pakistan, according to IRNA news agency and comes at a time when tensions are running high between the two sides following tit-for-tat military strikes."
Comments here:
Iran can do it too, even without Hezbollah's 200,000 missiles.
Tel Aviv will look like Gaza and the israeli Occupation Force will be obliterated.
Israel will cease to exist...
Inshallah. So be it.
Canadian Prepper, "A Warning From A Wise Old Man, 'The Trigger Event For WW3 Is This..."
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, Posted 4/23/24
"A Warning From A Wise Old Man,
'The Trigger Event For WW3 Is This..."
This video was filmed 48 hrs BEFORE the Israeli 'token' retaliatory strike, another
accurate prediction for JS. Watch the whole video to learn the longer time of events.
Comments here:
Kurt Vonnegut, "Requiem"
"Requiem"
“The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice and a sense of irony,
might now well say of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do."
The irony would be that we know what we are doing.
When the last living thing has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up perhaps
from the floor of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done. People did not like it here.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
o
"The civilization now in jeopardy is all humanity. As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and sky. In our tenure on this planet, we have accumulated dangerous, evolutionary baggage propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. We have also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, a desire to learn from history and experience, and a great, soaring passionate intelligence, the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.
Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet earth. But up and in the cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evidenced when we view the earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
There are not yet obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably into self-destruction. I dream about it... and sometimes they are bad dreams."
- Carl Sagan
Gerald Celente, "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum!"
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, The Trends Journal, 4/23/24
"The Inmates Are Running The Asylum!"
"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."
Comments here:
"Mass Graves in Gaza Show Israelis Are Worse Than Nazis"
"Israel is Evil personified.
Israel is Evil embodied."
- Scott Ritter
Full screen recommended.
Richard Medhurst, 4/23/24
"I Thought I'd Seen Everything in Gaza, But This..."
Comments here:
o
Richard Medhurst, 4/22/24
"Mass Graves in Gaza Show
Israelis Are Worse Than Nazis"
Comments here:
Full screen recommended.
"The One Video Israel Really
Doesn't Want You To See"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "The Average Household Is F****d, The Biggest Mistake You Can Make Is Believing The Lie"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/23/24
"The Average Household Is F****d,
The Biggest Mistake You Can Make Is Believing The Lie"
Comments here:
"The Pale Blue Dot"
Full screen recommended.
"The Pale Blue Dot"
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
- Carl Sagan
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Peculiar spiral galaxy Arp 78 is found within the boundaries of the head strong constellation Aries, some 100 million light-years beyond the stars and nebulae of our Milky Way galaxy. Also known as NGC 772, the island universe is over 100,000 light-years across and sports a single prominent outer spiral arm in this detailed cosmic portrait.
Its brightest companion galaxy, compact NGC 770, is toward the upper right of the larger spiral. NGC 770's fuzzy, elliptical appearance contrasts nicely with a spiky foreground Milky Way star in matching yellowish hues. Tracking along sweeping dust lanes and lined with young blue star clusters, Arp 78's large spiral arm is likely due to gravitational tidal interactions. Faint streams of material seem to connect Arp 78 with its nearby companion galaxies."
"Sometimes..."
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that has nothing to do with you, this storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.
You have to look! That’s another one of the rules. Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.”
- Haruki Murakami
“Closing your eyes won’t make the awfulness go away. It may be that nothing will. But dwelling on it, dreading the evil, playing out the misery in your head – doesn’t this feed the monster? You can’t close your eyes to life, but you can choose where your gaze lingers.”
- Richelle E. Goodrich
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