Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Chet Raymo, “The Silence”

“The Silence”
by Chet Raymo

“The hiding places of my power
Seem open; I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all, and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel…”

“These few lines from Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” leapt off the page at me. They capture well enough what my life has become. All those years of teaching, of writing in the Boston Globe, were years of sharing public knowledge, knowledge that had been vetted by the scientific community. The work was not about me. The teacher was me, the writer was me, but what I taught and wrote was reliable, consensus knowledge of the world. A student in my classes or a reader of my newspaper columns would have been hard pressed to know my politics or my religion or the nature of the questions that came in the darkest hours of the night. And that is the way it should have been; that was my homage to objectivity.

Those were valuable years, years of building up a sturdy polder in the sea of mystery, a place to stand with a firmness of foot. And now, in retirement, with time on my hands- and on my mind- I find myself more inclined to explore what Wordsworth called “the hiding places of my power.” I approach. They close. I touch with my hand the surface of the pond that Pat wrote about the other day; my hand comes out of the depths to meet me. I see by glimpses. It is, I suppose, a kind of forgetting. With the forgetting comes a certain freshness. My fingertip touches the surface of the world from above and from below, and concentric circles spread outwards, rippling, like a soundless sound, and I struggle, in words, as best I can, to give a substance and a life to what I feel.

This does not mean, I trust, that I am going soft, finding supernaturalist religion or getting all New Age squishy as “age comes on.” I keep my feet planted on solid fact and read my weekly “Science” and “Nature” along with my Wordsworth. No, it is rather a simple freedom to explore the hiding places, attending to private particulars as opposed to public universals, listening for the small voice that whispers from the nooks and crannies of yet unassimilated reality.

There is a passage in “The Prelude” where a young Boy (the poet?), standing in evening air by the glimmering lake, makes a mimic hooting with his hands to his mouth and the owls answer. Twooo-twooo. And the reply. Twooo-twooo. Then, unaccountably, the answers cease. And in the silence the boy becomes more keenly aware than ever of water, rocks, and woods, and mountain torrents, “that uncertain heaven, received into the bosom of the steady lake.” Thoreau has something similar. He rejoiced in owls; their hoot, he said, was a sound well suited to swamps and twilight woods. The interval between the hoots was a deepened silence, suggesting, to Thoreau, “a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.” It is that that I now attend: the deepened silence between the hoots.”

"The Hand We're Dealt..."

“Bad things don’t happen to people because they deserve for them to happen. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s just… life. And no matter who we are, we have to take the hand we’re dealt, crappy though it may be, and try our very best to move forward anyway, to love anyway, to have hope anyway… to have faith that there’s a purpose to the journey we’re on.”
- Mia Sheridan

“Touched With Fire”

“Touched With Fire”
by Paul Dalio

“My name is Paul Dalio. I’m a filmmaker, husband of my NYU film school classmate, father of two children and bipolar. Of these labels, the one I’m certain stands out in your mind is bipolar - and not in a good way. That’s no fault of your own, since you probably don’t know much about it other than what you’ve heard. I’m either right about this assumption or wrong about it. But either way, I’m certain of it because of my past experiences with the stigma that surrounds it.

So how do I deal with this label? I could remove the “I am” part to avoid it defining me and just say “I have” in which case I would have to add the word “disorder” to “bipolar,” which isn’t exactly the ideal fix. I could say I have a mental illness or am manic-depressive. But other than that, what label do I have to choose from that’s not a disorder, disease, illness or defect in my humanity?

The recent attempts to fight stigma have been to say “you are not your illness,” but I and others of my kind can’t swallow that because we can’t get around the fact that God weaved that illness into the fabric of our DNA, since bipolar is genetic and has been running through our family trees since the origin of our being.

I remember when I received the label at age 24. It was just after I could have sworn I saw God lift the veil and unfold the entire miracle of the universe before my eyes. I was thrown into a hospital, pumped full of drugs and came down only to be told that I wasn’t experiencing anything divine; I just triggered a lifelong illness that would swing me from psychotic manias to suicidal depressions with progressive intensity until I would most likely fall into the 1-in-4 suicide statistic - unless I took my meds, which made me feel no emotion.

If you can imagine missing feeling sad, it’s the only thing worse than pain. All every medical book had to offer was that if I stayed on these meds, I could live a “reasonably normal life.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I was pretty sure it sounded like “just get by.” So I stepped out of the hospital, knowing I wouldn’t be the sane person I used to be and not wanting to be this new human diseased me.

Six months later, I came across a book, "Touched with Fire", by Kay Jamison. It was the first medical text showing a tangible correlation between bipolar and artistic genius, profiling some of the greatest artists in history. Kay Jamison is a psychologist who in the middle of her time at UCLA went manic. She was going to hide it at first, afraid of how her psychiatric community would react, but she decided to be open about it and write books about it, one of which was "Touched with Fire."

For the first time, I heard words, shining right through every medical book’s thick printed clinical ink, describing something I could be proud to be. I was like, Yeah, that’s what I am. I’m “touched with fire.”

It would be destructive for me to deny all four seasons of the bipolar fire. When summer’s mania exceeds its stay and the fall shadows grab hold of your brain, you can feel your will within each withering leaf clinging to the trees of the entire forest surrounding you slipping as they fall down on you. When winter rolls around and your soul retreats deep beneath the frozen ground, and it’s calling your body down, it feels like your ashes are fighting gravity. And when spring comes again, it extends a warm invitation to rise too high and repeat the bipolar cycle that will lay waste to your lives.

Likewise, it would be unwise for a doctor to deny that on those manic summer nights, when we look out our hospital windows, we can see the stars pulsing spirals of fire across the sky, as God lifts the veil and unfolds the entire universe before our eyes. We know that humanity’s most beloved image of the sky was seen through a sanitarium window with Van Gogh’s manic eyes, and that scientists have recently discovered a phenomenon in nature that occurs in the sky called turbulence which, while painted perfectly in Van Gogh’s manic sky, is invisible to the human eye.

The reasons why it would be unwise for a doctor to deny this is because if the doctor acknowledged that maybe there was something to it, that maybe it wasn’t just some misfiring synapsis flashing through a crack in our minds, maybe we saw something that was just too beautiful to prove, he would also be able to remind the patient that while Van Gogh may have seen that sky through manic eyes, he didn’t paint it when he was manic, because he didn’t need the mania to have the fire.

And that doctor would then be able to assure the patient that he doesn’t want to stomp out that fire, that over time with gradual adjustments in medications they would work together to make sure the patient keeps that fire, and sustains it without letting it get out of control and burn down his mind, leaving his life in ashes.

How much more receptive would a patient be to treatment if the patient was told that the treatment was to nurture a gift they had, instead of terminate a disease they had? When out of all the poets who received the Pulitzer - the prize awarded to those who made the biggest contributions to the human spirit - 38 percent of them were bipolar, how can we simply label it a human disorder? Think how much more they could contribute to the human spirit if they knew it could be used as a gift to humanity, instead of something to hide from humanity?

However, in order for this to work, the doctor has to be able to trust the patient just as much as the patient has to be able to trust the doctor. My doctor trusted me, since he saw I was impeccable with my health habits, I was patient, willing to wait years before finally feeling full rich emotion, and that I would be satisfied without mania. So in return, he was never satisfied until I felt I had full rich emotion. I now feel deeper, richer emotion and more creativity than I ever did before bipolar, to the point where I can call it a gift, so much that given the opportunity I wouldn’t want a “cure.”

Still, I know I’ll always be walking a tightrope, but you get better at it over time, and like the guy who crossed the twin towers, you learn not to fall. And the higher the stakes and tighter the wire, the stronger and more disciplined you’re forced to become in order to survive. It’s only when things are so dark you can’t see hope one inch in front of your eyelids and it’s so cold, your soul is so numb, you don’t even know if it still exists, when just as your dim glow is this close to being blown out by your own lips a sudden spark of grit and will to live breaks into a flame of desperation, raging to blaze its way into the light of day again. So by the time you finally rise, the light in all those sunbathing souls combined couldn’t hold a candle to the fire in just one of your eyes. And when you combine that with the bipolar fire, no matter what anyone labels you, that’s something they can’t deny.

Van Gogh said, “What am I in the eyes of most people? - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.”

I’m sure what he meant is, if you step out of the MoMA after seeing “Starry Night” and you walk by a crazy man gazing up at the sky with wide crazy eyes, before you cross the street to avoid walking past him, maybe you’ll see him differently now that you saw through his eyes. And instead of saying “he’s bipolar,” maybe you’ll say, or at least think, “Oh, he’s touched with fire.”

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/30/21: "This Is A Set Up... Market Poised For A Big Move. BE READY!"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/30/21:
"This Is A Set Up... Market Poised For A Big Move. BE READY!"
Related:

On Wednesday, President Biden will unveil the first part of a two-part stimulus plan aimed at infrastructure, climate change, and social programs. While initial reports pegged the next round of stimulus at $3 trillion, the Washington Post's Jeff Stein now reports that new spending could top $4 trillion, while new taxes to pay for it - some of which Biden will also unveil Wednesday - could total over $3 trillion.

The two-pronged package Biden will begin unveiling this week includes higher amounts of federal spending but also significantly more in new tax revenue — with possibly as much as $4 trillion in new spending and more than $3 trillion in tax increases, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private dynamics. One person familiar with the matter said that the early infrastructure draft did not include every tax increase the White House was eventually considering including in its ultimate proposal, and that the administration believes the tax hikes can also advance its goal of reducing income inequality. -WaPo"

The Daily "Near You?"

Elkin, North Carolina, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"A Better Friend Than We Deserve..."

“You’d help if you could, wouldn’t you, boy?” I said. “It’s no wonder they call you man’s best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by…”
- Connie Willis

A Timely Repost: “Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song Reduces Anxiety by Up to 65 Percent”

Full screen highly recommended.
“Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song
Reduces Anxiety by Up to 65 Percent”
By Melanie Curtin

“Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves. So here’s a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth. Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one’s health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.

Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck. The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.

According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date. In fact, listening to that one song- “Weightless”- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants’ overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates. That is remarkable.

Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created “Weightless”, Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener’s heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza.

In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you’ve got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.

Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, “‘Weightless’ was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous.” So don’t drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:

10. “We Can Fly,” by Rue du Soleil (Café Del Mar)
7. “Pure Shores, by All Saints
6. “Please Don’t Go, by Barcelona
4. “Watermark,” by Enya
2. “Electra,” by Airstream
1. “Weightless, by Marconi Union

I made a public playlist of all of them on Spotify that runs about 50 minutes (it’s also downloadable).”

The Poet: Maya Angelou, “Alone”

“Alone”

“Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home,
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone.
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong,
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use,
Their wives run round like banshees,
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone,
But nobody,
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know…
Storm clouds are gathering,
The wind is gonna blow.
The race of man is suffering,
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody,
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody,
Can make it out here alone.”

- Maya Angelou

"I Hope I End Up..."

“I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, “Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case.” I will turn and say to them, “It is you who are the basket case! For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!” And maybe, the passersby will drop a coin into my cup.”
- Henry Rollins

"A Walk in the Woods"

"A Walk in the Woods"
by Bill Bonner

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "It must have looked like this in 7th century Europe. Largely deserted. Overgrown. The ruins of an earlier civilization… covered in vines and trees. We are wandering in our own woods… and exploring the downswing of civilization. What causes it to walk backward? How do people forget how to do things… or lose track of what made them prosperous and free? Why does progress go into reverse?

Every day, here at the Diary, we see the bread and circuses – trillions of dollars’ worth of real wealth (purchased with phony “dollar” tokens) squandered – $5 trillion in the last 12 months… and more coming. We see, too, how the fake money – like fake road signs – sends people off in the wrong directions. Investors bet on money-losing companies. The government throws away trillions on delusions, boondoggles, and vote-buying. Households stop saving. Businesses shift from trying to create real wealth on Main Street to chasing after fast profits from SPACs, cryptos, and NFTs. Everybody wants to get rich. But nobody wants to do the hard work of building real wealth.

Battle Against Nature: Funded by an apparently inexhaustible well of EZ money, Americans wallow in fantasies that must make the gods roar with laughter. They think they can borrow their way out of debt… and print their way to prosperity. And if they can create fake money, why not fake math?

Yesterday, we saw that activists are targeting arithmetic as “racist” or “patriarchal.” Two plus two only equals four, they claim, because dead white males say so. But over in the English department, the battle against nature has been raging for years. "Everybody believes they can” is now correct, according to the woke grammarians (to avoid using the masculine pronoun “he” to refer to a person of unknown or inconsequential gender).

And there are new “rules” popping up all the time. Jane Austen and Emily Brontë could write about “females.” But no more. Here’s Buzzfeed: "When you refer to a woman as a female, you’re ignoring the fact that she is a female human. It reduces a woman to her reproductive parts and abilities. Also, not all women are biologically female, and the conflation of “female” to “woman” erases gender-nonconforming people and members of the trans community."

And here’s the latest trend from WND News: "Rutgers University recently determined that speaking and writing English correctly is – just like math – also totally racist. The school’s English department is altering its grammar standards to “stand with and respond” to the Black Lives Matter movement and emphasize “social justice” and “critical grammar” over irrelevancies like correct spelling and grammar. The English Department is even offering an internship titled “Decolonizing the Writing Center” to make writing “more linguistically diverse.”

What brings down an empire? These trivialities and vanities? Or the big issues – money and war? Probably both.

Inflation Sightings: When the money goes, everything goes. And now… there goes the money! Here’s MarketWatch: "Even now, the housing market is on fire, with prices surging across the world. “This is a way of spending that can also drag in some of that surplus labor,” [former Morgan Stanley managing director Manoj Pradhan] said. But the rise in house prices doesn’t show up in official measures of inflation.

The Fed already is trying to address the challenge of coming inflation readings that, into May and June, may show 3.5% to 4% year-over-year gains. “I will tell you that anything above 3.5%-4% will create a significant breakdown in correlations [between stocks and bonds], because people have not seen inflation really in a big way in the advanced economies for the last 30 years,” he said.

“The real challenge will come in 2022, when a lot of spending will have been deployed into goods or into housing, monetary aggregates will still be high with velocity rising,” he said. He expects the yield curve to steepen further, and that if the Fed implements another Operation Twist or yield curve control, it will push inflation even higher."

Also of interest… While inflation is on the upswing, sperm counts are falling. USA Today has the details: "Sperm counts among men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand declined more than 59% from 1973 to 2011, according to a meta-analysis [Shanna] Swan co-wrote in 2017. At the current rate, half of men in those countries would have no sperm by 2045, while many others would have very low counts, Swan told USA TODAY."

Rising prices. Falling sperm counts. Innumeracy. Illiteracy. Overspending. Dumb wars. Money-printing. Claptrap. An incompetent, greedy elite? What else do you need?

Fallen Empire: Collective human life has both ups and downs. Exploring our own – largely derelict – farm here in Ireland, we find traces of ups from 200 years ago. Some from 500 years ago. The wood structures are long gone. But the stones – walls and bridges – are still here. But now, they are overgrown. Tumbledown. Forgotten. Lost. What happened?

A visitor to England in 600 AD or 700 AD must have seen the same sort of thing. Broken-down villas. Markets covered in vines. Roads neglected. Roman civilization was kaput. Both Roman-era observers, Polybius and Plutarch, noted that birthrates had fallen – first in the upper classes, later in the lower classes. Whether this was true or not, we don’t know.

But we know that Rome went broke, with its currency so worthless that soldiers refused to accept it in payment of wages. The government itself demanded tax payments in gold or silver. So heavy was the tax burden, as the government tried to keep up with its expenses, that farmers sometimes walked away from their land and sold themselves and their families into slavery.

On Your Own: From there, things got worse. Overstretched, with almost constant civil wars, Rome was overrun by Barbarians in the 4th and 5th centuries. Trade came to a halt. Skilled craftsmen went back to tilling the earth. No more aqueducts. No more “Roman” roads. No more high-quality goods, arriving from all over the Empire. The Empire was finished.

In the late 300s, while the Romans struggled to keep the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Sueves, and the Alans beyond the Rhine, Romanized Britannia had its own barbarians to contend with – raiding tribes of Picts, Scoti, and Saxons. Then, around 400, the last of the Roman troops were called away to defend Rome itself. So the Barbarians stepped up their raids. And in 410, leaders in Britannia pleaded with Rome to send back the troops. “You’re on your own,” came the reply from Emperor Honorius.

End of an Era: It wasn’t long after that that Roman rule in Britain came to an end (Ireland was never colonized by the Romans). And so did the Roman-era economy, along with its consumer goods, its money, its skills and technologies, its markets and commercial enterprises, and its comforts.

For a period of roughly 300 years, stonemasonry disappeared from England. During the period of Roman rule, there were thousands of skilled artisans, who knew how to quarry stone… how to burn lime to make mortar… and how to cut and fit the stones together to make fine villas. They knew how to construct a house with mosaics on the floor and central heating beneath it – and a clay tile roof. But in the 6th century, they forgot. And by the 7th century, there was perhaps not a single person in all of Britain who knew how to make a lime mortar. Or “spin” a pot.

There were no more imports from the Mediterranean – wine, olive oil, tableware, jewelry, spices, wheat. Nor was there any market to buy them in… or any money to buy them with. The mints closed. The only money still around had been minted before the Roman Empire collapsed.

People still made earthenware pots and bowls, but they were crude; the potters had forgotten how to make a pottery wheel, and how to get the fine clay they needed.

Farming techniques, tools, and organization were dealt a blow, too – perhaps because so many people died in the Barbarian invasions. Crops were stolen or destroyed. Barns were burnt. Cows, pigs, horses, and chickens were taken away or slaughtered. Fields, pastures, estates, farms, and gardens went “back to nature.”

Gone forever was the gracious, orderly life of the Roman era – with running hot and cold water, courtyards, and frescoes. In its place, were rude wooden huts with dirt floors. Gone, too, were the books… the essays… the ideas and the histories.

Derelict Abbey: Today, there are about 1,200 written works surviving from the Classical Period – Ancient Greece and Rome. There are some from the “dark ages,” too – but they are few and mostly religious texts. No Euclid. No Aristotle. No Plutarch or Pliny. Many of these old “classical” works survived the “dark ages” only because they were hidden away in monasteries… had been translated into Arabic… or copied by monks, who may not have had any idea what they were copying.

One of those monasteries, along the Blackwater River, just down the hill from us, was called Molana.
Molana Abbey (Source: Geograph.ie)

It was founded in 510, but the ruins we see there now were built by Raymond Le Gros (Fat Raymond), one of the Norman conquerors of the 12th century. Raymond was a lieutenant of the Norman leader Richard de Clare, also known as Strongbow. He is also thought to be the builder of the castle on the other side of the road from our lodge house. The stone work there – as well as the scale of it – is different from that of most of the buildings and walls you see in Ireland. It is older. Bigger. The walls are thicker and higher, too. The castle walls are still there… broken in some places, bent in others. They, too, speak to the upside and the downside.

Protection from the Enemy: It must have taken an army of masons – or slaves – to put them together. Perhaps, when the last of the Viking raiders came up the river, the locals took shelter behind the castle walls. Or maybe they used them to protect themselves from the English, who invaded later. Or from each other, for the Irish were always quarreling – the O’Briens against the O’Donnells against the O’Tooles against the McMahons… against the McSweeneys… against the McCravashys and the Sheehans… and on and on. There were ups and downs for them, too. It’s amazing any of them survived. To be continued…"

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/30/21: "Markets, A Look Ahead: Must Know Now Updates"

"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/30/21:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: Must Know Now Updates"
Related:
"Shades of 2008: Derivative Bets Blow Up Archegos 
Hedge Fund; Inflict Billions in Losses on Global Banks"
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

3/30/21 "The Archegos Capital Management hedge fund implosion has, thus far, delivered billions of dollars in losses to the shareholders of global banks Credit Suisse and Nomura, whose market values have plummeted; done serious reputational damage to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, both of whom are allowed to own federally-insured banks even after they came close to blowing themselves up in 2008 and surely would have without gargantuan secret bailouts from the Federal Reserve; cut the market value of ViacomCBS in half; dropped the market value of Discovery by 40 percent; shaved billions of dollars off the market value of major Wall Street banks yesterday as rumors ran wild about who is hiding losses; and raised critical questions, once again, about the competency of the Federal Reserve to supervise these federally-insured trading casinos.

The Archegos meltdown has done one more thing. It has reminded the readers of Wall Street On Parade that our decade of hand-wringing over the dangerous brew of allowing federally-insured, deposit-taking banks to own tens of trillions of dollars in opaque, over-the-counter derivatives remains the biggest threat to the financial stability of the United States."
Please view this complete article here:

"Fear Is A Viral Monster"

"Fear Is A Viral Monster"
by Donald Boudreaux

“Reading the late Hans Rosling’s 2018 book, “Factfulness”, during the summer of 2020 creates a sensation of surrealness that would have been absent had I read this volume in 2018 or 2019. On nearly every page of “Factfulness” Rosling busts the popular myth that we denizens of modernity face imminent calamities that will destroy us and the earth. Widespread fears – such as of overpopulation, of terrorism, and of the rich getting richer while the poor stagnate – are methodically revealed to be either completely unjustified or exorbitantly exaggerated.

But today, in the midst of the ongoing lockdowns and with no end in sight to the hysteria over COVID, I’ve lost all of the natural optimism that has long resided within me and that would have otherwise been fortified by Rosling’s splendid work.

Sledgehammered: The image that keeps coming into my head is of a sledgehammer. With brute force, a blunt and heavy instrument was swung down on society by the state. Sledgehammers crush. They demolish. That’s their only function. They do not build. And for as long as the dreadful weight of this particular sledgehammer – the massive mallet that is the COVID-19 lockdown – continues to press down on the rubble that it caused, there is very little opportunity for the human creativity and work effort unleashed by markets to bring about the kind of improvements that Rosling documents.

Will humanity recover? Will we – when the sledgehammer is lifted – rise, dust ourselves off, and climb back on to the happy track that we were on before March 2020? Of course it’s possible. But there’s now a novel reality that makes a renewed continuation of pre-COVID progress much less likely: the sledgehammer itself.

When this sledgehammer is lifted off of us, it won’t be lifted for long. We now know that this awful hammer is there, looming overhead. We have good reason to worry that government officials are likely to smash it down upon us when another communicable pathogen emerges and makes news – as such a pathogen inevitably will, for viral pathogens have been part of human existence from the start. How will entrepreneurship and investment be changed by this ever-present threat of a smashing sledgehammer? The creation, funding, and operation of venues in which individuals come into close physical contact with each other – either for recreation or for work – will surely be much less attractive.

More generally, the newly demonstrated willingness of state officials to destroy, with just a few executive diktats, hundreds of billions of dollars of capital value cannot but push some entrepreneurs and investors into inactivity. Why build, or build grandly, when some pompous governor or mayor – someone whose only ‘skill’ and most intense itch is to exercise power over fellow human beings – can, with a mere signature, smash down a sledgehammer and turn to mush the fruits of years of hard work and sacrifice?

And how will those in power – and those who seek power – be affected by the display by so many people of a sheepish willingness to be ordered by the state into house arrest? Did prime ministers, governors, and mayors know in mid-March just how easy it would be for them to herd millions of the rest of us away from the activities that we human beings have for generations enjoyed? Were these officials aware of their power to convince so many people under their command that each individual poses a poisonous threat to every other individual?

To prosper, we human beings must cooperate in production – Adam Smith called it the division of labor – and trade extensively. Most of these activities require face-to-face contact among individuals who see each other as partners in cooperation and exchange rather than as threatening carriers of death. And to enjoy what we produce also requires face-to-face contact, for we are a social species.

In possession of dictatorial power unknown just a few months ago, government officials – a group undeserving of much trust even in the best of times – will not shy away from wielding their newly discovered powers. The results will be ugly.

Attentive to Fear: Ironically, in his upbeat book Hans Rosling himself unintentionally offers justification for my pessimism. He does so in a chapter titled “The Fear Instinct.” Here’s a key passage: “When we are afraid, we do not see clearly… Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.

This undeniable reality means that a people in fear are a people who are unlikely to assess with much rationality the pros and cons of government policies. And the greater the fear, the less able people are to detect and resist government overreach.

Who is so naïve as to deny that this reality gives to government officials strong incentives to stir up fear? People who seek positions of political power generally are people who, by this very seeking, reveal that they are especially keen on exercising power over fellow human beings. And so if more power for the state grows out of more fear in the people, state officials have every incentive to exaggerate real dangers and to concoct fake ones. The result is a vicious cycle. The possession of power includes a disproportionately great ability to stir up fear, and stirred-up fear creates more power.”

Further, Rosling’s insights about the media imply that they contribute to this vicious cycle. Here again is Rosling: “We have a shield, or attention filter, between the world and our brain. This attention filter protects us against the noise of the world: without it, we would constantly be bombarded with so much information we would be overloaded and paralyzed. Most information doesn’t get through, but the holes [in our attention filter] do allow through information that appeals to our dramatic instincts. So we end up paying attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts, and ignoring information that does not.

The media can’t waste time on stories that won’t pass our attention filters. Here are a couple of headlines that won’t get past a newspaper editor, because they are unlikely to get past our own filters: “MALARIA CONTINUES TO GRADUALLY DECLINE.” “METEOROLOGISTS CORRECTLY PREDICTED YESTERDAY THAT THERE WOULD BE MILD WEATHER IN LONDON TODAY.” Here are some topics that easily get through our filters: earthquakes, war, refugees, disease, fire, floods, shark attacks, terror attacks. The unusual events are more newsworthy than everyday ones.”

An invisible virus is the perfect troublemaker to portray as an existential monster. Like an evil spirit, it can live, usually silently, within the breast of each of us. And so if a large enough number of us can be convinced that an unseen, vile monster lurks in everyone else, the resulting widespread fear empowers government officials to do what government officials do best – and what they’ve done so horribly over the past year: destroy.”

"The Great Unvaxxed - A 'Fictional' Look At What Lies Ahead"

"The Great Unvaxxed -
A 'Fictional' Look At What Lies Ahead"
by TE Creus

"The vaccine was a resounding success. Yes, there had been a final death rate of 10% among the vaccinated, but this was mostly among the elderly or the already ill, so it was probably not the vaccine’s fault, and if it was, no one could prove it one way or another, and even if they could, well, the vaccine manufacturers were not liable to lawsuits due to the agreements they had made with the various governments. In any case, the pandemic had ended, that was for sure.

Of course the masks and the lockdown mandates continued to be enforced; the reason was that while the pandemic had most certainly been defeated, the virus still existed in its natural form somewhere out there, and so it was vital to continue with the safety procedures to avoid any possible resurgence of the disease.

So what? People got used to it, as they had gotten used to so many other things before that. And was wearing a mask in the end much worse than wearing a helmet or a safety belt? Was being forced to stay at home for a few months every year much different than being forced to be at the office working for five days out of the seven in the week? Rules are rules, and those were not as bad as others that had been instituted in the past.

But there was something that worried the authorities. While most people had predictably complied with the mandatory vaccination campaign, there were a few groups that had refused them, alleging religious or health reasons, and found refuge in rural communities living off the grid. They had abandoned the use of mobile and network technology and so could not be traced so easily, and, since non-digital cash had been abolished, they appeared to have returned to a form of commerce based in the exchange of physical goods.

At first, the authorities ignored them; most people saw them as a minority of loser hicks, “anti-vaxxers” as they had been called in earlier pre-scientific times, and since it was unlikely that too many among the masses would opt for such a harsh lifestyle away from the comforts of modern urban life, they were not seen as a menace.

But what happened, in the end, was that rumors started to appear, even in the cities, about small communities where no one needed to wear masks, and people were dancing and smiling, and food was delicious and natural and people were even – gasp! – falling in love and procreating in natural ways.

Of course this was an obvious and mendacious falsity, but the authorities could not permit such fairy tales to gain acceptance among the people at large. So they started to persecute “the great unvaxxed”, as they called them, or the “free renegades” as they preferred to call themselves.

Their communities were dispersed. Their leaders were arrested. Planting organic, unmodified seeds became illegal. It was dangerous, the authorities alleged. Non-genetically modified crops were unsafe and could lead to sickness or birth defects. Many of the people who lived in the previously free rural communities were arrested and forcibly vaccinated, or were killed in shootings with the police.

But in the end it was not possible to arrest or forcibly vaccinate them all. Now, hidden among the normal population, using fake certificates, there lived an undisclosed number of unvaccinated people, whom the authorities had been unable to locate or identify.

A young woman named Miranda, who was born in a barn in the literal sense, and never vaccinated, was one of them. When organic farming was prohibited and most of the land was taken over by large companies using mechanized agriculture, she was forced to move to a small village where she subsisted doing odd jobs and occasionally teaching art classes. She had learned drawing and painting sill as a child, and was quite talented; she could sing very well too.

She had a fake vaccine certificate that looked for all purposes almost identical to the real ones, and while a bio-test could determine that she had not really taken the shot, or the “jab” as it was popularly called, she was careful never to be in any position that could require any kind of test.

For a few years she and hundreds of others like her had subsisted in this manner, but it was not ideal and never easy. Because before at least the renegades could live freely in their own communities, under their own rules, but now they had to hide and wear masks and follow dictates like everyone else, so what was the point? If they could not be free in any case, why not do like all the others and just take the jab and be done with it?

Miranda thought about it sometimes. But she had promised her parents – who had died in a shootout with the police – that she would always remain faithful to their ideals. And so she refused to compromise. She knew, or hoped, that the current tyranny could not be maintained forever. She wanted to believe that it would be possible, one day, to be free again.

Finally, they got her. It was her own stupid mistake; she was outside, a routine patrol was approaching and she had left her fake certificate at home. This would not normally happen, but she had recently bought a new jacket and had forgotten the certificate in the pocket of the old one. Walking around without a certificate was illegal, so they had to scan her arm, finding no signs of vaccination, and later a second test found no trace of antibodies in her system. Unable to explain the reason, or to produce a valid vaccine certificate – she knew now that the fake one she had at home would now be microscopically analyzed and would not be useful any longer – she was taken to the local jail, and later to a federal prison.

“There is an easy way out of this”, said Captain Antoine Huxley-Ehrlich, chief of the Vaccine Resistance Unit. “Just take the jab, and you’ll be free.” “Never”, replied Miranda. “You’ll have to do it by force.”

That was an option, of course, and legally possible with the recent change in the constitution. But it was not what Antoine wanted. No, she had to freely choose the vaccine. Not only because otherwise she could have become a martyr and inspire other rebels, or because people could start to think that there really was something bad or sinister about the vaccine; but because he firmly believed that winning by persuasion was better than winning by force, and he was convinced of his own righteousness.

He could not understand her stubborn refusal – hadn’t he, like all others, voluntarily taken the vaccine? As a member of the upper classes, he reminded her, he was not required to do it at the time; and yet he had volunteered. Why? Because he believed in law and order, but, most of all, because he believed in the vaccine.

He was sure that sooner or later he would be able to convince her that her uneasiness with the medication had only been caused by the trauma of her childhood experiences, living in a harsh rural area and watching her parents die as criminals fighting the law. But Miranda was indeed very stubborn. She refused all the options she was given. She preferred jail to vaccination and denial to compromise. She even refused to see a psychiatrist. So she lingered in prison for months and months.

One day, the warden brought to her cell a new book that she had requested from the prison library – "Civil Disobedience," by Thoreau. As she began to read, she found a handwritten note stuck between the first pages. “When you get your dinner tonight, ask for salt”, it said. “A friend”, it was signed.

Who could that be? She was puzzled, as it was years since she last had any contact with anyone else from her former community. But later that evening, as the warden brought her dinner, she meekly asked if she could have an extra amount of salt. The warden didn’t betray any sign of recognition or suspicion; she just brought her a small white salt-shaker. There was nothing unusual about it, but when Miranda opened it, from the bottom, she found a small magnetic key and another note inside.

The note explained that the key would open her cell door, and that all the security guards had either been bribed or put out to sleep. She could safely escape. Further instructions indicated how to reach a cabin in the woods nearby where she would be able to join her colleagues from the resistance movement.

She waited until midnight; when all was silent, she tried the key. It worked. She slowly walked out of her cell, then out of the prison, undisturbed. She followed the instructions to cover her face with a mask and her hair with a veil to avoid recognition. She was afraid a patrol would stop her as she left the city, as police presence was constant and sometimes there were curfews, but all the time she saw only a small group of policemen that she had no trouble evading.

She walked for several hours; the note had been clear that she should avoid any form of public transportation. It was already morning when she reached the destination informed, a few miles outside town. She knocked. No one answered. But she turned the handle and realized that the door was unlocked. She entered, very quietly, as if afraid to disturb the eerie silence. Finally, she saw a man sitting in an armchair, his back turned to her. He was wearing a dark jacket and a black fedora hat.

“So you’re finally here”, he said. She seemed to recognize the voice, although she couldn’t quite locate it. Was it perhaps someone from her old community? Then he turned towards her. It was Antoine Huxley-Ehrlich. It had been a trap, of course. The idea was to raise her hopes only to crush them, as an additional form of torture, an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. Also, now that she had tried to escape and join a rebel movement, she could be accused of sedition and other charges. She could easily be tried by a military court and condemned to death. And that was exactly what happened.

She was offered a full pardon in exchange for vaccination, but still she refused. If she had to die, then she might as well die on her own terms. Like Saint Joan or the early Christian martyrs, she’d rather burn at the stake or be thrown to the lions than renege. They could not convince her to get the “jab”, but they also did not want to turn her into some sort of hero for a cause, even if a crazy and hopeless one. So they decided that the execution would be done in secret, and the official story would be that, since she had refused several times the vaccination, she was never immune to the virus and had finally contracted the disease.

Today Miranda will be shot. She refused all offers for public announcements of regret and even a last meal. She also refused the blindfold; she did not want anything to cover a single part of her face.

As the executioners raise their rifles, Miranda is not afraid. Her golden hair flutters in the wind, and she looks up at the soldiers with a confident smile. She knows that they can kill her body, but they cannot touch her soul. And as she waits for the bullets to slowly arrive, Miranda sings a song that she remembers from her childhood, a song that her mother taught her and perhaps she also sang before she died:
'And when you come and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead, as dead I well may be
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.'"
"The ‘vaccine passport’ is a digital ID card..."

"...urged Brits to 'call out' others if they were seen 
engaging 'in an odd way,' such as hugging..."

"Don't You Dare..."

 

The Poet: John O'Donohue, "For The Time Of Necessary Decision"

"For The Time Of Necessary Decision"

 "The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it's time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.
We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul's desire."

- John O'Donohue, 
"To Bless the Space Between Us"

Free Download: Nevil Shute, “On the Beach”,

“On The Beach”
by Nevil Shute

“Nevil Shute’s 1959 novel “On the Beach” is set in what was then the near future (1963, approximately a year following World War III). The conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and killing all animal life. While the nuclear bombs were confined to the northern hemisphere, global air currents are slowly carrying the fallout to the southern hemisphere. The only part of the planet still habitable is the far south of the globe, specifically Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the southern parts of South America.

From Australia, survivors detect a mysterious and incomprehensible Morse code radio signal originating from the United States. With hope that some life has remained in the contaminated regions, one of the last American nuclear submarines, the USS Scorpion, placed by its captain under Australian naval command, is ordered to sail north from its port of refuge in Melbourne (Australia’s southernmost major mainland city) to try to contact whoever is sending the signal. In preparation for this long journey the submarine first makes a shorter trip to some port cities in northern Australia including Cairns, Queensland and Darwin, Northern Territory, finding no survivors.

The Australian government makes arrangements to provide its citizens with free suicide pills and injections, so that they will be able to avoid prolonged suffering from radiation sickness. One of the novel’s poignant dilemmas is that of Australian naval officer Peter Holmes, who has a baby daughter and a naive and childish wife, Mary, who is in denial about the impending disaster. Because he has been assigned to travel north with the Americans, Peter must try to explain to Mary how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with the pill should he be killed on the ocean voyage.

The characters make their best efforts to enjoy what time and pleasures remain to them before dying from radiation poisoning, speaking of small pleasures and continuing their customary activities, allowing their awareness of the coming end to impinge on their minds only long enough to plan ahead for their final hours. The Holmeses plant a garden that they will never see; Moira takes classes in typing and shorthand; scientist John Osborne and others organize a dangerous motor race that results in the violent deaths of several participants. In the end, Captain Towers chooses not to remain with Moira but rather to lead his crew on a final mission to scuttle their submarine beyond the twelve-mile (22 km) limit, so that she will not rattle about, unsecured, in a foreign port, refusing to allow his coming demise to turn him aside from his duty and acting as a pillar of strength to his crew.

Typically for a Shute novel, the characters avoid the expression of intense emotions and do not mope or indulge in self-pity. They do not, for the most part, flee southward as refugees but rather accept their fate once the lethal radiation levels reach the latitudes at which they live. Finally, most of the Australians do opt for the government-promoted alternative of suicide when the symptoms of radiation-sickness appear.”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Freely download “On the Beach”, by Nevil Shute, here:
"On The Beach", full movie.
Full screen recommended.

"Denzel Washington's Life Advice Will Leave You Speechless"

"Denzel Washington's Life Advice
 Will Leave You Speechless"
Hat tip to Stucky at The Burning Platform for this.