"The New Abbreviation For Omertà Is FBI"

"The New Abbreviation For Omertà Is FBI"

by Michael Shannon

"Omerta is the Italian word for the Mafia’s code of silence. When a button soldier was arrested he was expected, upon pain of death, to maintain complete silence regarding the crimes of his fellow Mafioso. The code broke down after the FBI got serious and started making arrests. When confronted with the choice of a long prison stretch or testifying against the family, the Mafia’s ‘made men’ sang like canaries. Surprisingly, Omerta was contagious. Close contact with Mafia members during investigations has caused Omerta to jump the lawbreaker–law enforcement barrier and spread to the FBI.

My prediction is Omerta will last much longer among the corrupt FBI’s headquarters staff. That’s because the chances of special agents who break the law being prosecuted by fellow members of the Injustice Department are slim and none.

The Federalist has examined the latest text messages coup plotters wanted to keep hidden. Three years of the Russia Collusion Delusion has given Americans a good idea of who the major players in the conspiracy were. It takes quite a few minions to keep the wheels turning on a coup. Now we are getting more insight into machinations of less famous plotters.

Text messages show the whole Russia investigation was the FBI doing opposition research on Trump for Hillary Clinton, “[D]oing all this election research – I think some of these guys [FBI senior officials] want a [C]linton presidency.”

It quickly became obvious to the minions that the scope of the unprecedented tampering with Trump’s campaign was driven by conspiracy-obsessed anti-Trump fanatics, “I’m tellying [sic] man, if this thing ever gets FOIA’d, there are going to be some tough questions asked. [A]nd a great deal of those will be related to Brian having a scope way outside the boundaries of logic[.]”

The pursuit of Michael Flynn was a witch hunt from the beginning, with no basis in reality. It was simply a way to get back at Flynn, whom Obama hated, and disrupt the Trump administration. Instead of using a subpoena to investigate Flynn’s finances, which require a judge to approve, rogue FBI agents used a “national security letter” that bypassed judicial review and didn’t require probable cause.

The actions of the leaders of the FBI and the Obama administration – who should have been defending the Constitution - remind me of the KGB – under Lavrentiy Beria who famously told Stalin that guilt or innocence were unimportant, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Michael Flynn was the man.

The minions understood the ruse. “What do we expect to get from an NSL[?]” an agent texted. “We put out traces, tripwires to community and nothing.” “[B]ingo,” was the response. “[S]o what’s an NSL going to do – no content. If we’re working to close down the cases, I’m not sure what NSL results would do to help.” “[E]xactly that makes no sense,” was the reply.

It got so bad, some agents even took Trump’s side and said the president was correct when he tweeted “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”

The texts again, “So [the Trump investigation] is going to stay open? ” “[Y]ep. [C]rimes report being drafted.” “[Obscenity],” the first agent replied. “[J]esus,” a third agent wrote. “[T]rump was right. [S]till not put together… .why do we do this to ourselves. [W]hat is wrong with these people[?]?"

What indeed? The minions saw the Constitution being undermined. They saw the FBI being perverted by power-mad bureaucrats. They witnessed the law and FBI regulations being broken. And what did they do? Become whistleblowers? Leak to the press? Resign in protest? Make an arrest on their own?

Certainly not. Like good Mafioso, they observed the code of Omerta. And they hedged their bets by buying personal liability insurance to protect themselves if a new attorney general started asking pertinent questions. Aside from that, they continued to be Good Germans and follow orders as willing participants in the greatest political scandal in U.S. history.

One of the anonymous agents typed, “Hahah this is a nightmare.” He was referring to the investigation, but the truth is the nightmare is ours. There was no one in the FBI or the Justice Department with the moral courage to put a stop to this coup. There was no one willing to defend the Constitution or the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump. They kept quiet and kept their jobs at the expense of their honor and our country.

Conservatives can stop dreaming about a groundswell of law enforcement officers and government officials bravely remembering their oaths. Federal law enforcement officers who will refuse to obey unconstitutional orders from a Biden/Harris administration. The left has both Omerta and the FBI. We are on our own."

- https://www.cagle.com/

"The Only Final Sin..."

"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is 

getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

- Hunter S. Thompson

“Don’t Forget How Strange This All Is”

“Don’t Forget How Strange This All Is”

by David Cain

“Jerry Seinfeld joked that if aliens came to earth and saw people walking dogs, they would assume the dogs are the leaders. The dog walks out front, and a gangly creature trailing behind him picks up his feces and carries it for him.

Throughout my life I’ve had moments where I felt like one of these visiting aliens, where something I knew to be normal suddenly seemed bizarre. I remember walking home from somewhere, struck by how strange streets are: flat strips of artificial rock embedded in the earth so that our traveling machines don’t get stuck in the mud.

Everything else seemed strange too. Metal poles bending over the road, tipped by glowing orbs. Rectangular dwellings made of lumber and artificial rocks. The background noise is always the hum of distant traveling machines, and all of this stuff was built and operated by a single species of ape.

Even stranger was the fact that these strange things usually don’t seem strange. I know I’m not the only one who has felt this. A few people have shared similar experiences with me, and according to “The School of Life”,  it was a central theme in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel “Nausea.“

Sartre apparently believed that the world is far stranger and more absurd than it normally seems. Most of the time, however, we ascribe a kind of logic and order to the world that it doesn’t really have, so that we’re not constantly bewildered by it. Sometimes we momentarily lose track of that logic, and the true strangeness of life is revealed. In these moments, we see the world as it is when it’s been “stripped of any of the prejudices and stabilizing assumptions lent to us by our day-to-day routines.” In other words, we occasionally see the world as if for the first time, which could only be a very strange experience indeed.

Although I know this experience isn’t unique to me, I had no idea whether most people could relate. So when I discovered the surprisingly popular podcast “Welcome to Night Vale,” I felt that a small but significant part of my experience had been understood. Night Vale is a fictional desert town, and each episode of the podcast is about 20 minutes of broadcasts from its public radio station. The host reads public service announcements, advertisements, community news and weather, and messages from the City Council. That would be extremely boring, except that almost everything that happens in the Night Vale is incredibly strange, even impossible.

The first announcement in the first episode is a reminder from City Council that dogs are not allowed in the dog park, and neither are citizens, and if you see hooded figures in the park you are not to approach them. In an unrelated matter, there is a cat hovering four feet off the ground next to the sink in the men’s washroom at the radio station. It cannot move from its spot in mid-air, but it seems happy, and staff have left food and water for it.

Wednesday has been canceled, due to a scheduling error. There is a glowing cloud raining small animals on a farm at the edge of town. A large pyramid has appeared in a prominent public space, apparently when nobody was looking. 

I imagine that when most people hear about WTNV, they listen to five minutes of it and turn it off. It feels like a joke at first, or at best, bad art. I kept listening, thinking the weird happenings are some kind of allegory, or a code to be deciphered. But they’re not. The story stays absurd, kind of like an over-the-top Twin Peaks, where none of the weirdness ever gets explained.

Everything is weird until it’s familiar: I was listening to the podcast on headphones, walking down our local riverside path, and I passed an older couple sun-tanning. I’ve seen people tanning a thousand times, but only then did the activity strike me as completely hilarious. In our world, people sometimes take off all their clothes—or at least as much as society will allow—so that they can get radiation burns from a glowing ball in the sky. Even though everyone knows this practice increases your chances of developing a fatal disease, people still do it because they like the color of the burned flesh. Skin burned to a certain tone confers social benefits for a few weeks.

The fact that we live on a planet at all would be unbelievable if we weren’t already used to it. Nobody could have dreamed up this setting: life is set on one of many ball-shaped rocks moving in circles around a bigger, glowing ball. And we have great affection for these other balls. When officials demoted Pluto to a minor ball, people were outraged, even though none of them had ever actually seen it. When the spaceship sent to take pictures of Pluto finally arrived, we discovered it had a giant white heart on its side. It had been loving us back the whole time!

Listening to Night Vale reminds us that our world is no less strange, just more familiar. If in our world, as in Night Vale, taco shops sometimes became encased in amber, we would accept that as a fact of life after seeing it a few times. But that’s no weirder than the fact that in order to live, we must breathe a gas that combusts so easily and so violently that every city has to have specialized departments dedicated to shooting water onto anything at a moment’s notice. (Bill Bryson captures this strangeness beautifully in “A Short History of Nearly Everything.“)*

You can see the weirdness in almost any normal phenomenon by imagining how you’d describe it to someone not from Earth or any place like it. Water falls uncontrollably from the sky? Pop culture is obsessed with people who pretend to be other people in moving pictures? We eat fresh food grown on the opposite side of the planet? What?

So our world is really weird and chaotic, which is a helpful thing to realize, because we suffer so much insisting that it should be sensible and orderly. We have to live in a very strange place, and when we forget that it’s strange due to familiarity blindness, it can seem like something’s always gone temporarily wrong. We become preoccupied with returning society to a kind of balance or sanity that it never had, often berating or abusing certain people or certain groups in the process. It’s quite a relief to remember that life was always nuts.

Albert Camus (who is an obvious influence in Night Vale) argued that the universe is always absurd and chaotic, yet we’re always trying to find meaning and order in it. When you listen to Night Vale, making sense is the first thing your mind tries to do with what it hears, and it can’t. When you relax that need for the events to make sense, something softens. You stop straining. You listen more for the moment and less for how each moment serves everything else. You gain a sense of humor about the whole thing, however dark it gets.

Because it requires listeners to voluntarily open up to extreme strangeness, Night Vale has made me a less uptight about our own society’s political and cultural nonsense. I am seeing society less like a troubled person who was once sane, and more like a funny-looking animal, adorably knocking things over by accident. milky way

The three options: Camus thought our unreasonable demand for meaning and sense was fundamental to human beings, and that it creates a ton of pain for us. He saw only three ways to respond to life’s absurdity: we can deny it (usually by claiming that a God has designed it this way), we can commit suicide, or we can embrace the weirdness and live in it wholeheartedly. The last option, he figured, was the only good one. When you stop expecting the world to be sensible, suddenly it all makes sense.

Embracing the weirdness takes the edge off of everything, even death. Whenever you’re worried about “big picture” ideas, such as war, climate change, crime, corporate greed, you can remember that this whole weird thing called life just happened, and it’s always fresh and interesting, even though nobody really asked for it. And in that light, the thought of it ending one day doesn’t seem distressing at all - when your time comes, all you can do is say, “Wow, that was odd.”

- http://www.raptitude.com/2015/09/how-strange/

"Fat Mary Comes to Call"

"Fat Mary Comes to Call"

By Bill Bonner

"There’s been so much to talk about this week… Donald Trump’s almost miraculous three-day recovery from the Black Death… His sudden discovery of fiscal virtue – putting an end to negotiations on a new bailout boondoggle… and then, his sudden lapse… announcing that he was “ready to sign” more giveaways… (or, at least, where it might improve his chances of being re-elected – forget the Blue Cities!) The upcoming Doomsday Debt Debacle… And Friday brings news that the White House is “open to bigger stimulus bill as Mnuchin, Pelosi talk” (Bloomberg).  As we discussed yesterday, an economy cannot be “stimulated.” It can only be distorted… and perverted. Both parties are in favor of more perversion; but, behind in the polls, the Trump team is probably more antsy for it.

Originario War: Anyhow, with so much going on, we didn’t have time to tell you what happened last weekend. For the benefit of new readers, we’ve been quarantined down here on our ranch in Argentina for seven months. It’s not a bad place to be locked up… We can ramble around in a space the size of Utah without ever crossing a public road. 

Trouble is, there’s a war going on here. It’s between the landowners and some “native American activists” – the Originarios – who’ve invented a lost tribe of Indians… and claim to be taking back their ancestral lands. On Saturday… their local Pocahontas came to visit.

Maria La Gorda was one of the brightest students at the local school. Of course, up here in the mountains, there weren’t a lot of Elon Musks or René Descartes in the class; the competition was weak. Still, the school mistress thought Maria could grow up to be a nurse… or a schoolteacher herself. But it didn’t work out that way.

Now, “Fat Mary,” as she is known locally, is about 40 years old, and lives up in a pretty valley with no road access. It is so remote that in the 15 years we’ve been here, we have visited only once, though it is part of our ranch. It is high up… and hidden behind bare mountains. But it is up there where our water comes from.

Looking down on Maria’s valley.

Maria has had six children. Some have grown up and moved away. Three are said to still be with her.  “Who is her husband?” we once asked naively. “Up here, they say ‘it is the wind,’” came the answer.

About 10 years ago, a surly breeze blew across the valley. It brought with it a public health nurse from Peru. He was hired to go around to the local people and do what he could to keep them healthy.  Alas, he dispensed more than antibiotics. He brought a message of insurrection. He is now the “chief” of the local tribe. Maria is one of his most enthusiastic admirers. 

The police had told us to expect a visit. But not from Maria. Instead, a small, wiry man named Juan, who was squatting on our land, was supposed to come and ask permission to remain. Maria and Juan came into the courtyard and took seats at the center table. “We’ve come to tell you that we represent the originario community,” Maria began. “And we’re here to tell you that this is our land. And we will do what we want on it. You think you can buy it. But it is not for sale. Someone stole it from my [great… great… great, etc.] grandfather. Now, we’re taking it back.” Maria wasn’t pussyfooting around. In a few words, she had set the terms of the debate. They were the owners, she asserted, not us.

Uphill Battle: “But Maria,” we argued. “You don’t get title to land just because you had an ancestor who lived on it. If that were the case, I could go back to Ireland and claim land there. Or the descendants of the Manhattan tribe could claim Times Square. There is a system of laws… and rights to private property. It’s been around for hundreds of years.”

Maria, unimpressed by our arguments, insists that because she is an originaria, she doesn’t have to pay attention to the laws of white men… particularly those who arrived in the country only 15 years ago and whose grasp of the local idiom is still only más o menos.

“You think you can come in with your pockets full of money and take over. But this farm belongs to the people who have always been here… who have worked it for hundreds of years.” Maria is loose on the details. There are no people here who’ve worked the land for hundreds of years. The whole area was depopulated after the Battle of Gualfin. The surviving indigenous people were shipped off where they wouldn’t cause any trouble.  Was that nice? Was that fair? Of course not. But it was the way property changed hands in the entire New World, North America as well as South America, in the 16th and 17th centuries. Trying to reverse 500 years of property titles is going to be an uphill battle.

More to It: Besides, the whole tribe is as counterfeit as its Peruvian chief.  “Maria’s family came from over near Chile,” explains the foreman. “Everybody knows it. None of the families are original to here. They came fairly recently. And the tribe they say they are part of was exterminated even before the Spanish arrived – by the Inca. They just invented this tribe thing because it lets them get away with not paying their rent.”

But there’s more to it than that. The rent is so low, it’s almost not worth collecting. And the property itself has very little value. It’s not just about money, in other words.  Maria and her “community” think they are undoing the wrongs of the past and making the world a better place… at least, for them. She and other renters are supposed to give us five goats for every 100 they have in their herds. We don’t want the goats. And they’re not saleable. But it is part of the ritual, the barleycorn that proves the relationship. We are the owners. They are renters.

Maria doesn’t buy it. “God put us here. We are meant to be owners… with all the water… the housing… and the food… we need.” “God was pretty cheap with the water,” we muttered.

Immediate Concern: How Maria knows what God has in mind was never clarified. But there was no point in arguing with her. Besides, the real object of the conversation was the weasely little man sitting next to her. Juan. They were like Jack Sprat and his wife. Maria must have eaten every piece of fat that came her way; Juan ate none.

But it was Juan who had the immediate concern. He is a squatter. Maria, tucked away in her mountain fastness, causes few problems. But Juan built a house smack dab in the middle of the farm… without permission. We came back one year… and there it was.  And whatever bogus claim Maria may have to originaria status, Juan has none. He has no land. He only came over from a neighboring farm a couple of years ago. And only to shack up with another woman, Maria’s neighbor.

Juan admitted to the police that he was not from our farm… and had no right to build the house. Last week, he told them that he would behave from now on, and sign a document declaring that he was living on our land. And that he would ask our permission to remain. That would have been fine with us. We didn’t expect him to pay rent. We wouldn’t demand to tear the house down. All we wanted was a piece of paper… proof that the land was ours, not his. But in coming to see us, he followed Maria’s lead.  “I’m not going to sign anything,” he said. “It won’t cost you anything… and I’m not going to throw you out…” “No, I won’t sign.” “Then I’ll have to throw you out.” “I’ll die first… You’ll have to carry me out.” “Oh no… Don’t die…” we roared with laughter. “We’re just talking about property rights. It’s not that serious.”

Why Bother? After a while, we gave up on the conversation. There was nothing to be gained. They have their position; we have ours.  Normally, you’d refer this to the police or the courts. But why bother? We’ve already denounced Juan four times. The police are sick of hearing about it. And they can’t do much, either. Anyone who claims to be an originario is a protected species. It’s almost impossible to evict him. 

Readers may wonder why we bother at all. There’s no money in it. And don’t we have problems enough already? But there are some problems you just can’t solve. We can’t get the originarios off our land. And we can’t make it rain. Maybe that is what keeps us here… the majestic futility of it. We live on the edge… on the rim of the abyss. We can’t defeat our enemies. But, at least, as long as we are engaged in combat, we are still alive.

Trip to Pucarilla: Our ranch is at the end of the road (Gualfin means “the place at the end”)… where civilization ends… and the wild mountains begin. There are no farms further west, just ragged peaks, puma, vicuna, volcanoes, the salt flats of “the dead man,” and a high desert.  In one part of the Atacama desert west of here, it has never rained… and the air is so thin, travelers crossing over to Chile are advised to take oxygen tanks with them.

But there are quiet, idyllic moments, too. Ceasefires… truces… in the ongoing battle.  On Sunday, we took our usual afternoon holiday… this time, driving over to Pucarilla, the tiny valley where our grapes are grown. It is a beautiful place. And the weather was beautiful, too – sunny and warm. It is springtime. The vines have begun to sprout leaves. 

But here, it is also the most dangerous time of the year. Each spring – October, November, and December – the ranch faces disaster. It has not rained here since January or February. Everything is parched. Many of the cattle have been taken down to another farm. The remaining ones are moved around… kept alive by eating every dried-up weed on the ranch. We had a picnic under an old grape arbor…

Our picnic spot

…and then crossed a field of dry grass down to the river.

No Water: There was no water. We could walk down the middle of the riverbed without getting our boots wet. This time of year, there is never much water… But it is unusual for the river to be completely dry.  A reservoir up the valley collects what little water there is. We need every drop of it to keep the grapes alive until January… hoping that the summer rains will come on schedule. 

Some years, they don’t come at all. And then, the grass dies, the grapes shrivel, and the cattle go hungry.  Three years ago, a drought forced us to shut down almost completely, taking all the cattle off the farm. There was nothing left for them to eat.

We drove up to look at the reservoir, hoping to see it brimming with cool water. But there was little water in it.  “This is going to be a bad year,” we said to ourselves.

Getting Serious: Back at the house on Sunday evening, Samuel, one of the farmhands, stopped by. “I guess La Gorda told you,” he said. “Told us? She told us that she was the owner of the ranch. What more was there to say?” Samuel smiled. La Gorda had threatened him a month ago. She said if he dared to go into her valley, she’d go to the police and accuse him of rape.

“She didn’t mention the water?” “No…” “Well, I went up the valley yesterday. They cut off the water to Pucarilla. They put up a little dam. They’re using our water. I guess they think they own that, too.”

Now, the situation is getting serious. We could laugh at Maria and Juan and their fantasies. But cutting off our water is real.  Without the water coming down from the upper valleys, even as little as it is, we will soon be finished. “Go back up there tomorrow. Take Pablo and Gustavo with you. If the river is blocked, unblock it. Okay?” “Yes, Boss.”

To be continued…"

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"Do You Believe..."

"Do you believe," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?" 

"Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?" 

- Voltaire

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad" (Ben-E.dit)

Moby,

"Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad" (Ben-E.dit)

“Money Printing Goes Crazy; Economic Danger Everywhere; Credit Tightens; Purchasing Power Destroyed”

Jeremiah Babe,

“Money Printing Goes Crazy; Economic Danger Everywhere; 

Credit Tightens; Purchasing Power Destroyed”

Gregory Mannarino, "Wake Up America And The WORLD! You Are Being Played"

  

Gregory Mannarino,

"Wake Up America And The WORLD! You Are Being Played"

- https://tradershoice.net/

"Where Is The Compassion?"

"Where Is The Compassion?"

by Bill Rice, Jr.

"Where is compassion for the millions who’ve suffered harm from lockdowns? Like myself, I’m sure many Americans are starting to grow tired of being labeled “insensitive” or “uncaring” or lacking compassion because we are perceived as not caring about “at-risk” people who might contract the coronavirus. Let’s talk about “compassion for our fellow man.”

• Where’s the compassion for the single mom who is increasingly struggling to purchase diapers or baby formula for her children? Where’s the compassion for the victims of child abuse, which is no doubt spiking due to the collapse of the economy?

• Where’s the compassion for those who have already committed suicide, or attempted suicide or will do either in coming months and years?

• Where’s the compassion for the tens of thousands of business owners who have permanently closed their businesses, or for the tens of millions of unemployed former employees? Where’s the compassion for those who have been forced to declare bankruptcy, or are agonizing over doing this?

• Where’s the compassion for the millions of college students who are experiencing increased levels of anxiety and depression over draconian campus policies that keep them isolated and prevents them from receiving a real education?

• Where’s the compassion for the younger school children who are unnecessarily living in fear? Where’s the compassion for the same children who can’t even play or socialize with other children anymore?

• Where’s the compassion for the hundreds of millions of people in impoverished nations who will suffer famine, misery or death because food logistic systems are falling apart?

• Where’s the compassion for those who spent weeks or months in a hospital - for every health reason - and could not spend a minute with their loved ones, many dying alone by themselves?

• Where’s the compassion for family members who received no comfort from neighbors and friends after their loved one died because these people were not allowed to attend their funeral?

I’m not even mentioning the terrifying disappearance of fundamental rights and liberties that are being forfeited at a mind-boggling pace, or the growth of authoritarian governments. Or our “new normal,” which now censors and bullies those who happen to hold opposing views.

Do most Americans now believe that less freedom and more government control will benefit mankind? Has anyone else noticed the surge in violent crimesoccurring in practically every city in this country?

Am I the only person who has noticed the arguments and fights that have become commonplace over mask and COVID policies? Families and life-long friendships have been destroyed over debates over these issues. Is the extreme polarization of an entire country a positive development for families and society?

I wonder if people realize all of the above is actually happening… or do these people know these things are now commonplace, but simply don’t care? To these people, I’d ask what exactly is your definition of “compassion?”

One would be hard-pressed to find individuals who lack compassion for those who have died due to COVID. However, common sense tells us that “higher risk” citizens are smart enough to take their own precautions. The argument that we should essentially lockdown the world - and everyone should live in constant fear even if their own risks are minuscule - has transformed our country into a grim, unrecognizable place, a world where the worst is probably yet to occur.

COVID has and will continue to claim lives, but 99.9 percent of the country’s population will NOT die from this virus. By now practically every family in the country has already experienced negative consequences or obvious harm… not from the virus, but from the policy responses to the virus. If normal activities continue to be prohibited, the number of Americans who will suffer life-altering hardships will approach 100 percent of our population.

My question: Where’s the compassion for these hundreds of millions of people?"

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

Musical Interlude: Simon & Garfunkel, "Bridge Over Troubled Water"

Simon & Garfunkel, "Bridge Over Troubled Water"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“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.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100211.html

Chet Raymo, “On Saying ‘I Don't Know’"

“On Saying ‘I Don't Know’"

by Chet Raymo

"When Charles and Emma Darwin bought the house that would be their family home for forty years, at Downe, sixteen miles south of London, one of Charles' first improvements was to have the flints removed from the property's chalky meadow. The glassy stones were more than an agricultural nuisance; they were a puzzle to be solved. The countryside about Downe is pretty much pure chalk, and Darwin was confident he knew where the chalk came from: the calcerous deposits of the myriad planktonic organisms that lived in a sea that was once superincumbant upon the land. But what was the origin of the flints and how did they find their way into the chalk?

Tramp across any plowed field in England's chalky North or South Downs and these fist-sized nodules of pure, hard, yellow silica are common underfoot. In the white cliffs along the English Channel they can sometimes be seen interspersed in the chalk as dark bands. The flints are chemically very different from chalk, and their presence in the otherwise pure calcium carbonate has long been something of a geological mystery.

Darwin was baffled. The most plausible modern explanation is that the nodules had their origin in siliceous sponges that grew on the sea floor and other siliceous marine microfossils. When these organisms died, their substance dissolved in sea water and was dispersed within the carbonate ooze, then precipitated out around other organic remains in a process called petrification. This modern explanation sounds a little iffy to me. I'm no geologist, but if someone asked me where the flints came from, I'd say with Darwin: "I don't know." Those three little words - "I don't know" - may be modern science's most important contribution to the world. Yes, we have learned an astonishing amount about how the world works, but of equal significance is our growing awareness of how much we don't know. The physician/essayist Lewis Thomas wrote: "The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance."

Charles Darwin was certainly not adverse to saying "I don't know," and did so frequently in his many letters to family and friends. He was especially ready to confess his ignorance with regard to the big questions, the questions traditionally addressed by religion. Like Einstein and other great scientific minds after him, he was deeply conscious of the profound mystery of existence, and reluctant to cover his ignorance with myth and fable.

In a letter to the American biologist Asa Gray, Darwin wrote: "I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can."

The physicist Heinz Pagels might have been describing Charles Darwin when he wrote: "The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration."

Consciousness of our ignorance is a very modern thing, and an open door to mystery. Darwin counted himself an agnostic, but in his reverence for the creative agency of nature I would count him a devoutly religious man. "There is a grandeur in this view of life," he famously wrote on the last page of "The Origin of Species"; the grandeur Darwin spoke of has more of the divine about it than did any Olympian diety.

Today, Darwin's home has been lovingly restored to what it was in his lifetime, and a visitor can almost feel the spirit of the great man moving through the rooms that once bustled with happy family life. A collection of flints is arrayed on a table in Darwin's cluttered study, as they might have been when Darwin sat beside them pondering their meaning. Those glassy stones were a adamantine reminder of how rich was the mystery of existence and how little of it he yet understood.”

- http://www.sciencemusings.com/

"Know What's Weird?"

 

"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,

but pretty soon... everything's different."

- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"

"A Wise Man Once Said..."

“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”

- “Dr. Meredith Grey”, “Grey’s Anatomy"

The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, "A Walk"

 

"A Walk"

"My eyes already touch the sunny hill.

going far ahead of the road I have begun.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

we already are; a gesture waves us on

answering our own wave...

but what we feel is the wind in our faces."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"How the Brain Stops Time"

"How the Brain Stops Time"

by Jeff Wise

"One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from "The Matrix" in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.

Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli. An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat?

Researcher David Eagleman has tackled his very issue in a very clever way. He reasoned that when time seems to slow down in real life, our senses and cognition must somehow speed up-either that, or time dilation is merely an illusion. This is the riddle he set out to solve. "Does the experience of slow motion really happen," Eagleman says, "or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect?" To find out, he first needed a way to generate fear of sufficient intensity in his experimental subjects. Instead of skydiving, he found a thrill ride near the university campus called Suspended Catch Air Device, an open-air tower from which participants are dropped, upside down, into a net 150 feet below. There are no harnesses, no safety lines. Subject plummet in free fall for three seconds, then hit the net at 70 miles per hour.

Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation? To see, Eagleman asked subjects who'd already taken the plunge to estimate how long it took them to fall, using a stopwatch to tick off what they felt to be an equivalent amount of time. Then he asked them to watch someone else fall and then estimate the elapsed time for their plunge in the same way. On average, participants felt that their own experience had taken 36 percent longer. Time dilation was in effect.

Next, Eagleman outfitted his test subjects with a special device that he and his students had constructed. They called it the perceptual chronometer. It's a simple numeric display that straps to a user's wrist, with a knob on the side let the researchers adjust the rate at which the numbers flash. The idea was to dial up the speed of the flashing until it was just a bit too quick for the subject to read while looking at it in a non-stressed mental state. Eagleman reasoned that, if fear really does speed up our rate of perception, then once his subjects were in the terror of freefall, they should be able to make out the numbers on the display. As it turned out, they couldn't. That means that fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.

Eagleman's findings are important not just for understanding the experience of fear, but for the very nature of consciousness. After all, the test subjects who fell from the SCAD tower certainly believed, as they accelerated through freefall, that they knew what the experience was like at that very moment. They thought that it seemed to be moving slowly. Yet Eaglemen's findings suggest that that sensation could only have been superimposed after the fact. The implication is that we don't really have a direct experience of what we're feeling ‘right now,' but only a memory - an unreliable memory - of what we thought it felt like some seconds or milliseconds ago. The vivid present tense we all think we inhabit might itself be a retroactive illusion."

- http://www.psychologytoday.com/

"It May Be Then..."

"Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum."

- W. Somerset Maugham

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; 

it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." 

- Sydney J. Harris

The Daily "Near You?"

 

North Richland Hills, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"A Very Fit Consideration..."

“How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.”

- Christiaan Huygens, (1629-1695)

"The Stage Has Been Set For A Historic National Meltdown"

"The Stage Has Been Set For A Historic National Meltdown"

by Michael Snyder

"Everything that has happened in 2020 so far has set us up for a grand finale that none of us will ever forget. This year we have already witnessed the worst public health crisis in about a hundred years, widespread lockdowns all over the nation, a crippling economic collapse and civil unrest in major cities across America. To say that the American people are in a bad mood would be a major understatement. Now we are less than a month away from a bitterly contested presidential election, and as you will see below, one survey recently found that a majority of Americans are expecting violence. That is extremely unfortunate, but these are the times in which we live. Our country is literally falling apart all around us, and nobody seems to have a way to stop it from happening.

And the worse economic conditions become, the worse the mood of the nation is going to get. On Thursday, we learned that another 840,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week: "The latest jobless claims figures from the Labor Department, which cover the week ending Oct. 2, show that 840,000 workers sought aid last week, about four-times the pre-crisis level. More than 63 million Americans have sought jobless aid since the coronavirus lockdowns began in mid-March."

If someone had told me late last year that 63 million Americans would file new claims for unemployment benefits this year, I would have thought that person was crazy. Prior to 2020, the worst number for a single week in all of U.S. history was 695,000, and now we have been way above that figure every single week of this pandemic.

Of course the layoffs just keep rolling along. Right now, it is being reported that WarnerMedia expects to lay off thousands of workers in the coming weeks: "AT&T’s WarnerMedia is preparing a restructuring that seeks to reduce costs by as much as 20% as the COVID-19 panic drains income from movie tickets, cable subscriptions and TV ads, reports The Wall Street Journal. The layoffs are expected to begin in the coming weeks and would result in thousands of layoffs across Warner Bros. studios and TV channels like HBO, TBS and TNT, the paper said."

Personally, I wouldn’t be saddened if WarnerMedia completely shut down on a permanent basis. They produce an endless barrage of garbage programming that is corrupting the minds of millions of Americans, and our society would definitely be better off without them. But at the same time that millions upon millions of Americans have been losing their jobs, those at the very top of the economic food chain have been getting even wealthier thanks to the Federal Reserve’s reckless intervention in the financial markets.

At this point, the top one percent of all Americans have more than 15 times more money than the bottom 50 percent combined: "According to the latest Fed data, the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4% of all household wealth in the U.S.), while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9% of all wealth)."

If you think that there isn’t a lot of resentment out there, then you haven’t been paying attention. We are seeing the rise of a “Robin Hood mentality” among many that live in deeply impoverished areas, and when things get really crazy out there they are going to be hitting wealthy neighborhoods really hard.

Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that this upcoming election could potentially be the spark that sets off a lot more civil unrest. Personally, I have such a bad feeling about what is going to happen, and I believe that having so many people voting by mail could cause all sorts of problems. In fact, even the mainstream media is admitting that we could see a million ballots that are sent through the mail rejected for one reason or another: "Absentee ballot rejections this November are projected to reach historic levels, risking widespread disenfranchisement of minority voters and the credibility of election results, a USA TODAY, Columbia Journalism Investigations and PBS series FRONTLINE investigation found.

At least 1.03 million absentee ballots could be tossed if half of the nation votes by mail. Discarded votes jump to 1.55 million if 75% of the country votes absentee. In the latter scenario, more than 185,000 votes could be lost in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – states considered key to capturing the White House."

Any system of voting that could potentially disenfranchise a million voters is deeply broken and should not be used. But at this point it is too late to do anything about it. More than 6 million people have already voted, and more votes are being sent in with each passing day.

Of course millions of other Americans are also deeply concerned about the integrity of this election. Just check out the results of a recent YouGov survey: "The YouGov poll of 1,999 registered voters found that nearly half – 47% – disagree with the idea that the election “is likely to be fair and honest.” And that slightly more than half – 51% – won’t “generally agree on who is the legitimately elected president of the United States.” The online poll was conducted Oct.1-2 and has a margin of error of +/- 2.56 percentage points." In essence, about half the country believes that this election may not be legitimate. That is a major national crisis right there.

In addition, YouGov has also found that 56 percent of Americans believe that there will be “an increase in violence as a result of the election”: "In addition, a YouGov poll of 1,505 voters found that 56% said they expect to see “an increase in violence as a result of the election.” That question had a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points."

This definitely is not the America that I grew up in. In the old days, nobody would have ever imagined widespread violence after a presidential election. Another recent survey discovered that a whopping 61 percent of Americans believe that “the U.S. could be on the verge of another Civil War”.

We have never seen anything like this before, and at this point it is undeniable that our society is breaking down all around us. But instead of bringing us together, the results of this upcoming election are only going to deepen our divisions no matter who wins. Everything that our forefathers worked so hard to build is at risk, and we are getting very, very close to crossing the point of no return."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

"Tomorrow, Come Here Tomorrow…"

"Tomorrow, Come Here Tomorrow…"

by Jim Kunstler

"The Coen Brothers must be writing Nancy Pelosi’s script now, a kind of Macbeth update set in a swampy Potomac lowland at Halloween time: Madam Speaker rides her fabled scepter up in the night sky, around the capitol dome, across the moon’s laughing face, to the White House, trailing vapors of hatred and malice as she curses the Golden Golem within. Her mask matches her designer frock, woven of cobwebs with dark strands of enmity. Her hair is perfect. Her flight-path not so much, as the Golem below easily shoots her down through the oval office window with a rubber band and a paper clip and she augers, smoldering, into the rose garden… Fade out….

Well, tomorrow is here, and exactly the hour this blog regularly gets posted is when Mrs. Pelosi aims to announce her latest scheme for ousting Mr. Trump: perhaps a bill for some kind of new 25th Amendment commission to work around the inconvenience of the law as currently configured, that is, an executive branch prerogative. The stunt has two purposes: 1) to paint Mr. Trump as unfit - a song as old and boring now as I am Woman, Hear me Roar - and 2) to put up a smoke-screen diverting voters attention from her obdurate refusal to compromise on the latest Coronavirus relief bill.

The paranoid hysteria on display among the Party of Chaos suggests that those polls showing Ol’ White Joe Biden up twelve points may just be more media dis-info. The purpose: to claim, when the time comes, that the President won reelection by some kind of subterfuge, and justify an all-out post November 3rd Lawfare offensive to challenge the ballots in every swing-state, and do exactly what they are blaming Mr. Trump for in advance: confounding an orderly resolution of the peoples’ will.

Is it possible that some Democratic Party voters begin to suspect that the party officials running this game have lost their minds? A good signifier, of course, is the ghostly figure carrying their battle-flag, Mr. Biden, the Flying Dutchman candidate whose mind slips in and out of fog-banks as he navigates the shoals of defeat. Why did the Party ship out with him on the poop-deck? My guess would be: to deflect indictments of himself and many other former officials as the steady flow of documentary evidence gets released by new DNI John Ratcliffe, including a batch this past week showing pretty incontrovertibly that everybody and his uncle in the Obama executive branch was keenly aware that RussiaGate was a Hillary campaign ploy and allowed themselves to be weaponized into the scheme - under the assumption that she couldn’t lose and they’d never be found out.

She lost. They’re found out. Grand juries have been convened by Mr. Durham. Something wicked is coming their way. Their ship is going down and the rats are all squeaking desperately in the scuppers at the rising water. Won’t this all be a shock to that crew of media fabulists who stupidly maintain that the Mueller Report actually proved something - the David Frenches, Max Boots, and Rachel Maddows of this world and their True Believer followers? History is rhyming again. It’s like 1794 in Paris. The Jacobins Reign of Terror comes to its sudden and ignominious end with Robespierre bawling under the national razor. So does today’s Reign of Perfidious Sedition close, with Jim Comey bawling, “I can’t recall,” into his laptop.

Incidental to this is the breaking news - sure to not be reported in The New York Times or by CNN - that one Devon Archer, business partner of Hunter Biden (and John Kerry stepson, Christopher Heinz) has just had his previously overturned conviction for security fraud reinstated by a federal appeals court. Sound abstruse? Yeah, kind of, but, believe me this boy is in some serious hot water, the rap being a federal one, and Mr. Archer now poised to sing like a canary to John Durham’s posse about his various financial exploits in Ukraine and other foreign lands with Joe Biden’s son (and Mr. Kerry’s stepson) in exchange for lighter jail time. You just watch.

Keep your ears pricked also for developments involving Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA) and his role in 2016-17 as an active disseminator of Steele Dossier RussiaGate dis-info in coordination with the George Soros funded Democracy Integrity Project, run by former Dianne Feinstein chief-of-staff Dan Jones and assisted by swamp lawyer Adam Waldman, a Steele / Warner go-between who happened to be a $40,000-a-month lobbyist for one Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and Clinton Foundation doner (at least $1-million) who also employed Christopher Steele as a dis-info errand boy. Unpacking that one will be like unpacking the surgical batting in a sucking chest wound. Scrub for it.

In this now bi-polar nation, the mood swings get wilder by the week. The President had a bit of a rough seven days, what with his Covid-19 treatment at Walter Reed and stunningly rapid recovery, which sent his adversaries into a transport of hebephrenic distemper. Vice-president Mike Pence calmed the waters a little bit in his Wednesday meet-up with the Harris Administration candidate - no doubt the rogue housefly poised above his right ear fed him juicy debating points. Kamala Harris demonstrated a talent for mugging, face-pulling, eye-rolling, and leering. If the veep thang doesn’t work out, she might consider a career as a mime. Her home turf, San Francisco, used to be full of them until the local pols let homeless junkies take over the streets."

- https://kunstler.com/

"Alas..."

“Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play!

No sense have they of ills to come, nor care beyond today.”

- Thomas Gray,

“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”

- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than 

sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 10/09/2020"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up 10/09/2020"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"It’s official, there will be no more debates unless Joe Biden decides to take on the President in person. The so-called “Presidential Debate Commission” now says the next debate should be virtual, and President Trump said no way. The Trump campaign says, “Swamp creatures to now rush to Joe Biden’s defense by universally cancelling an in-person debate is pathetic.” President Trump says he will “do a rally instead” now that he has been cured of Covid and released by his doctors. Something else that is “pathetic” is Speaker Pelosi taking another run at President Trump using the 25th Amendment. It ain’t going to work.

The Vice Presidential Debate is now history. Who won? It’s hard to tell. Harris went on the attack early and often and looks like she tied up Pence with the phrase “I am speaking,” even though she didn’t really say much. She pushed identity politics and systemic racism issues of the Left. Harris did not answer direct questions about packing the Supreme Court with far Left Marxist liberals if the Biden Harris team won. Pence, on the other hand, scored some points about economic policy, destroying ISIS and continued tax cuts. Pence missed some opportunities to hit up Harris over $ 1.5 million in China payoffs to Hunter Biden and did not tag her for the violence encouraged by her party that never spoke out about burning down cities around the country. Pence won, and the only thing the Dems can talk about is “I am speaking,” which ain’t going to win an election.

Another 840,000 people filed for unemployment claims in the latest numbers to come out of the Department of Labor. The stimulus deal looks dead as the President has broken off talks because he says Speaker Pelosi is “not negotiating in good faith.” Trump does have some options to continue unemployment payments, but a stimulus deal would be much better to get the economy back to work."

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he talks 

about these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up.