Friday, November 25, 2022

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Far beyond the local group of galaxies lies NGC 3621, some 22 million light-years away. Found in the multi-headed southern constellation Hydra, the winding spiral arms of this gorgeous island universe are loaded with luminous young star clusters and dark dust lanes. Still, for earthbound astronomers NGC 3621 is not just another pretty face-on spiral galaxy. Some of its brighter stars have been used as standard candles to establish important estimates of extragalactic distances and the scale of the Universe.
This beautiful image of NGC 3621 traces the loose spiral arms far from the galaxy's brighter central regions that span some 100,000 light-years. Spiky foreground stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy and even more distant background galaxies are scattered across the colorful skyscape.”

"A Pueblo Indian Prayer"

"Hold on to what is good, even if it's a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe, even if it's a tree that stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do, even if it's a long way from here.
Hold on to your life, even if it's easier to let go.
Hold on to my hand, even if someday I'll be gone away from you."
~ A Pueblo Indian Prayer

Kahlil Gibran, The Madman"

 

"The Madman"
"It was in the garden of a madhouse that I met a youth with a face pale and lovely and full of wonder. And I sat beside him upon the bench, and I said, “Why are you here?” And he looked at me in astonishment, and he said, “It is an unseemly question, yet I will answer you. My father would make of me a reproduction of himself; so also would my uncle. My mother would have me the image of her seafaring husband as the perfect example for me to follow. My brother thinks I should be like him, a fine athlete. And my teachers also, the doctor of philosophy, and the music-master, and the logician, they too were determined, and each would have me but a reflection of his own face in a mirror. Therefore I came to this place. I find it more sane here. At least, I can be myself.” Then of a sudden he turned to me and he said, “But tell me, were you also driven to this place by education and good counsel?”
And I answered, “No, I am a visitor.”
And he answered, “Oh, you are one of those who live in the madhouse on the other side of the wall...”
- Kahlil Gibran

"The Consequences of Our Choices..."

Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.”
- Richard Bach, “Running From Safety”

"How It Really Is"

 

"How To Get Your Money Out of the Bank?"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 11/25/22:
"How To Get Your Money Out of the Bank?"
"Do you need to make arrangements for the crash. 
Here’s a detailed plan on how to get your money out of the bank."
Comments here:

"America’s ‘Dark Cluster Decade’"

"America’s ‘Dark Cluster Decade’"
A look into the murky past to see where we might be heading...
by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "In the late 1950s, led by the great decider, Mao Tse Tung, and the communist party, China engineered what was to become one of the darkest decades in human history. It was based on lies. And it set in motion a financial and social disaster. A real “cluster,” as kids say today. It was an ambitious crusade. The whole society – its government, politics, economics, finances, and industries – were all brought together, like an attacking army, to transform China into a modern industrial powerhouse.

At the time, China was an agrarian society. Most people still tilled the soil… and stuck to their traditional ways of life. It wasn’t the most sophisticated economy in the world. But it was capable of supporting 600 million people. In Mao’s new plan, farmers were forced onto collective farms. Private plots were made illegal. People who tried to keep their own gardens were branded as ‘counter-revolutionaries,’ and often tortured, imprisoned, killed outright, or worked to death.

So too, the customs of the countryside were banned. The ‘old things’ were supposedly holding China back. So, weddings, funerals, feasts – traditional rituals of rural society – were outlawed. They were replaced by propaganda meetings and ‘struggle sessions,’ in which those who didn’t go along were beaten… forced to admit their ‘crimes’… and often executed. The bigger the lie, the more it needs to be protected from the truth.

A Great Leap Backwards: Early on, Mao had played a little trick on his enemies. He invited criticism. This flushed out his adversaries, conservative intellectuals, and ‘bourgeois elements.’ Later, these people were targeted. The intellectuals were sent to the countryside, where they were worked and starved. The resistors were tortured, tried, and killed.

Critics learned to keep their mouths shut. Even at the height of the madness… when millions were dying, and it was obvious that the modernizing crusade was a ghastly failure… there was very little criticism or debate. The result? The biggest ‘cluster’ – mistakes combined with lies, arrogance and unrestrained power – in history.

The world changes. People don’t. They depend on honest money. When they don’t have it, things fall apart. Little understood about the Great Leap Forward is that it came after China had been completely flattened – by inflation. Between 1941 and 1949, Shanghai’s commodity index rose from 16 to 150,000,000,000,000. This is what gave Mao his communist victory. Nor was he the first dictator to come to power on a flood of inflation. Germany’s inflation of the early 1920s was what enabled Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

When people can’t trust their money, they learn not to trust their government or their neighbors. Then, how do you hold a society together? Raw power. In ancient Rome, for example, in what historians call the “crisis of the 3rd century,” the silver denarius – the bedrock coin of the Roman economy – gradually got stripped of its silver content…until there was less than 1% left. This ‘inflation’ reduced the value of the denarius by 99.9%. And it so unsettled Roman society that only the military could maintain control. During this period – 200AD – 300AD – Rome had 26 emperors, every one of them from the military. And only one of them died a natural death. All the others were killed…often by their own troops. Or, in the case of Nero, a suicide.

Unfunny Money: Herewith, a few predictions...
• Under pressure, the Fed will ‘pivot.’ That could happen within weeks.
• Inflation will get worse. Prices will go up in fits and starts…but with no relief.
• What follows will be a Dark Cluster Decade…a chaotic period, with falling incomes and serial, unpredictable crises.

Yes, America’s decider elites have begun their own version of a Great Leap Forward…a leap into what they see as a better future. And unless you take precautions, I don’t think it is a future you’re going to like. Who are these deciders? University professors, lobbyists, politicians, activist billionaires, media and entertainment personalities, Wall Street honchos, Pentagon jefes, and Washington heavies.

And like China’s communists, they are shutting down their critics. Whether the subject is the Covid lockdowns, ‘gender reassignment,’ or the war in the Ukraine, only one point of view is permitted. Say the wrong thing and you are branded as a “Putin asset,” or a “white supremacist,” or a ‘climate denier’ or just ‘anti-science.’ You are not just wrong; you are evil. You deserve to be locked down and shut up. Canceled.

Unfortunately, in public affairs, the ‘wrong’ conclusion is often the right one. If the power grab by America’s wealthy elites in Washington and Wall Street goes unchecked, the next ten years will bring a ‘cluster’ for America, a destructive mess of inflation, recession, cut-throat politics, social disorder…and huge financial losses. Oh…and that’s the best case. As the Chinese example shows, it could be much worse. More tomorrow..."

"What It's Like When The Lights Go Out In A Warzone"

Full screen recommended.
Gonzalo Lira,
"What It's Like When The Lights Go Out In A Warzone"
Comments here:

"Russia’s Electric War"

"Russia’s Electric War"
by Pepe Escobar

"Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know."
- T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

"Spare a thought to the Polish farmer snapping pics of a missile wreckage – later indicated to belong to a Ukrainian S-300. So a Polish farmer, his footfalls echoing in our collective memory, may have saved the world from WWIII – unleashed via a tawdry plot concocted by Anglo-American “intelligence”.

Such tawdriness was compounded by a ridiculous cover-up: the Ukrainians were firing on Russian missiles from a direction that they could not possibly be coming from. That is: Poland. And then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, weapons peddler Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, sentenced Russia was to blame anyway, because his Kiev vassals were shooting at Russian missiles that should not have been in the air (and they were not). Call it the Pentagon elevating bald lying into a rather shabby art.

The Anglo-American purpose of this racket was to generate a “world crisis” against Russia. It’s been exposed – this time. That does not mean the usual suspects won’t try it again. Soon. The main reason is panic. Collective West intel sees how Moscow is finally mobilizing their army – ready to hit the ground next month – while knocking out Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure as a form of Chinese torture.

Those February days of sending only 100,000 troops – and having the DPR and LPR militias plus Wagner commandos and Kadyrov’s Chechens do most of the heavy lifting – are long gone. Overall, Russians and Russophones were facing hordes of Ukrainian military – perhaps as many as 1 million. The “miracle” of it all is that Russians did quite well.

Every military analyst knows the basic rule: an invasion force should number three times the defending force. The Russian Army at the start of the SMO was at a small fraction of that rule. The Russian Armed Forces arguably have a standing army of 1.3 million troops. Surely they could have spared a few tens of thousands more than the initial 100,000. But they did not. It was a political decision.

But now SMO is over: this is CTO (Counter-Terrorist Operation) territory. A sequence of terrorist attacks – targeting the Nord Streams, the Crimea Bridge, the Black Sea Fleet – finally demonstrated the inevitability of going beyond a mere “military operation”. And that brings us to Electric War.

Paving the way to a DMZ: The Electric War is being handled essentially as a tactic – leading to the eventual imposition of Russia’s terms in a possible armistice (which neither Anglo-American intel and vassal NATO want). Even if there was an armistice – widely touted for a few weeks now – that would not end the war. Because the deeper, tacit Russian terms – end of NATO expansion and “indivisibility of security” – were fully spelled out to both Washington and Brussels last December, and subsequently dismissed.

As nothing – conceptually – has changed since then, coupled with the Western weaponization of Ukraine reaching a frenzy, the Putin-era Stavka could not but expand the initial SMO mandate, which remains denazification and demilitarization. Yet now the mandate will have to encompass Kiev and Lviv. And that starts with the current de-electrification campaign – which goes way beyond the east of the Dnieper and along the Black Sea coast towards Odessa.

That brings us to the key issue of reach and depth of Electric War, in terms of setting up what would be a DMZ – complete with no man’s land – west of the Dnieper to protect Russian areas from NATO artillery, HIMARS and missile attacks. How deep? 100 km? Not enough. Rather 300 km – as Kiev has already requested artillery with that kind of range.

What’s crucial is that way back in July this was already being extensively discussed in Moscow at the highest Stavka levels. In an extensive July interview, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov let the cat – diplomatically – out of the bag:“This process continues, consistently and persistently. It will continue as long as the West, in its impotent rage, desperate to aggravate the situation as much as possible, continues to flood Ukraine with more and more long-range weapons. Take the HIMARS. Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov boasts that they have already received 300-kilometre ammunition. This means our geographic objectives will move even further from the current line. We cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Vladimir Zelensky, or whoever replaces him, will control to have weapons that pose a direct threat to our territory or to the republics that have declared their independence and want to determine their own future.”

The implications are clear. As much as Washington and NATO are even more “desperate to aggravate the situation as much as possible” (and that’s Plan A: there’s no Plan B), geoeconomically the Americans are intensifying the New Great Game: desperation here applies to trying to control energy corridors and setting their price.

Russia remains unfazed – as it continues to invest in Pipelineistan (towards Asia); solidify the multimodal International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), with key partners India and Iran; and is setting the price of energy via OPEC+.

A paradise for oligarchic looters: The Straussians/neo-cons and neoliberal-cons permeating the Anglo-American intel/security apparatus – de facto weaponized viruses – won’t relent. They simply cannot afford losing yet another NATO war – and on top of it against “existential threat” Russia.

As the news from the Ukraine battlefields promise to be even grimmer under General Winter, solace at least may be found in the cultural sphere. The Green transition racket, seasoned in a toxic mixed salad with the eugenist Silicon Valley ethos, continues to be a side dish offered with the main course: the Davos “Great Narrative”, former Great Reset, which reared its ugly head, once again, at the G20 in Bali.

That translates as everything going swell as far as the Destruction of Europe project is concerned. De-industrialize and be happy; rainbow-dance to every woke tune on the market; and freeze and burn wood while blessing “renewables” in the altar of European values.

A quick flashback to contextualize where we are is always helpful. Ukraine was part of Russia for nearly four centuries. The very idea of its independence was invented in Austria during WWI for the purpose of undermining the Russian Army – and that certainly happened. The present “independence” was set up so local Trotskyite oligarchs could loot the nation as a Russia-aligned government was about to move against those oligarchs.

The 2014 Kiev coup was essentially set up by Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski to draw Russia into a new partisan war – as in Afghanistan – and was followed by orders to the Gulf oil haciendas to crash the oil price. Moscow had to protect Russophones in Crimea and Donbass – and that led to more Western sanctions. All of it was a setup.

For 8 years, Moscow refused to send its armies even to Donbass east of the Dnieper (historically part of Mother Russia). The reason: not to be bogged down in another partisan war. The rest of Ukraine, meanwhile, was being looted by oligarchs supported by the West, and plunged into a financial black hole.

The collective West deliberately chose not to finance the black hole. Most of the IMF injections were simply stolen by the oligarchs, and the loot transferred out of the country. These oligarchic looters were of course “protected” by the usual suspects.

It’s always crucial to remember that between 1991 and 1999 the equivalent of the present entire household wealth of Russia was stolen and transferred overseas, mostly to London. Now the same usual suspects are trying to ruin Russia with sanctions, as “new Hitler” Putin stopped the looting.

The difference is that the plan of using Ukraine as just a pawn in their game is not working. On the ground, what has been going on so far are mostly skirmishes, and a few real battles. But with Moscow massing fresh troops for a winter offensive, the Ukrainian Army may end up completely routed. Russia didn’t look so bad – considering the effectiveness of its mincing machine artillery strikes against Ukrainian fortified positions, and recent planned retreats or positional warfare, keeping casualties down while smashing Ukrainian withering firepower.

The collective West believes it holds the Ukraine proxy war card. Russia bets on reality, where economic cards are food, energy, resources, resource security and a stable economy. Meanwhile, as if the energy-suicide EU did not have to face a pyramid of ordeals, they can surely expect to have knocking on their door at least 15 million desperate Ukrainians escaping from villages and cities with zero electrical power. The railway station in – temporarily occupied – Kherson is a graphic example: people show up constantly to warm up and charge their smartphones. The city has no electricity, no heat, and no water.

Current Russian tactics are the absolute opposite of the military theory of concentrated force developed by Napoleon. That’s why Russia is accumulating serious advantages while “disturbing the dust in a bowl of rose-leaves”. And of course, “we haven’t even started yet.”

Jim Kunstler, "A Light in the Darkness"

"A Light in the Darkness"
by Jim Kunstler

“Sooner or later, there will be push-back against the Dems attempt to turn the USA into some kind of obese transgender liberal Wakanda run by crooks, freaks and thugs.” - The Saker of the Vineyard

The really stunning thing about Elon Musk’s campaign to clean up the back-stage rats’ nest at Twitter is that he’s the lone authority figure in the land who dared to act against the degenerate political Left’s impudent and remorseless cancellation of everything that held together America’s consensual reality.

Think of it: all the college presidents and deans, all the corporate CEOs, all the judges, all the governors, mayors, and agency heads, all the news editors and network producers who did nothing and said nothing about the wholesale demolition of truths, values, and principles carried out by Woke-Jacobin maniacs under their watch. And what’s more appalling: they all pretended not to notice each other’s craven inaction and silence.

And now, Mr. Musk strikes a blow almost every day, and with amazing insouciance, as if his effort to re-ignite free speech is the most self-evidently natural thing anyone in-charge might seek to do. And let’s face it: whatever Twitter started out as, however seemingly trivial this Internet app for social chit-chat was conceived to be, it evolved into an essential arena for public argument - especially as the old leaders in the American news business slouched into routinely retailing every sort of lie possible about public affairs that matter. (And as that happened, Twitter became for a number of years Mainstream Media’s enabler and chief enforcer of programatized untruth.)

So far, it’s hard to fault Mr. Musk’s performance just a little short of one month after taking ownership of Twitter. He acted swiftly finding the locus of rot in the company, and swept out thousands of petty tyrannical censors competing for Woke brownie points squashing free inquiry. He explained his actions plainly, without ornament, in Twitter’s own concise format. He laid out his own doubts and quandaries about a moderation board to establish responsible limits of fairness. He put important questions of procedure, such as yesterday’s proposed general amnesty for suspended accounts, to a vote. He did all this with wry humor based on an appreciation of how absurd Twitter’s internal culture had become.

He also offered succinct and apparently honest overviews of how his campaign was going against the background of our disordered national condition, and interesting insights into the disorder itself:

"Mainstream media will still thrive, but increased competition from citizens will cause them to be more accurate, as their oligopoly on information is disrupted.”

"SBF [Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX] is ineffective altruism, but they thought he was saying he was in effective altruism. Easy misunderstanding.”

It’s hard to overstate how damaging Twitter’s dark years of insidiously massaging public opinion have been to this country. Open debate could have clarified the fog of deliberate disinformation surrounding everything Covid-19. It would have been much harder for public health officialdom to gaslight America over the origin of the disease, and probably impossible to conceal the nefarious operations behind the Emergency Use Authorization, the suppression of effective early treatments, and the ties to drug companies’ profits. The result of that has been the broad deployment of dangerous and deadly pseudo-vaccines that have killed millions and disabled many more. The absence of honest debate has turned doctors into murderers and accomplices to genocide.

The scope of this bureaucratic crime is really outside the experience of most Americans, who never imagined that their elected and appointed leaders would act against them with such rank dishonesty, cruelty, and bad faith. But there it is. And if Twitter continues to open up, the more likely that the responsible parties will be held accountable.

Likewise, the now-pervasive Kafka-esque program of political persecution carried out against citizens by government officials, including the many seditious schemes of RussiaGate, the ongoing, escalating mischief around elections, and the use of the FBI and DOJ as a combined secret police and kangaroo court apparatus.

You can add to all that the wild irresponsibility of “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, our idiotic provocation of Russia in Ukraine, the surrender of America’s national sovereignty to the globalist Great Re-set cabal and its tools in the World Health Organization, and the domestic campaign by Woke Jacobins to sexually disorder the lives of American children.

I think Elon Musk is right: the Mainstream News Media will now face a venue where it's habitual lying is called out forcefully. You can already see The WashPo and CNN attempt to make small shifts in their coverage of events, which double as efforts to cover-up their past lying in the hopes that the public won’t notice that it happened.

Nothing else so far has confronted the Left’s crusade to overturn American life so stoutly as Elon Musk’s reform of Twitter. It seems to be working. The Wokesters are acting like a gang on-the-run. Pretty soon they’ll be ratting out each other to save their skins. Reality is a harsh mistress when you’ve spent years insulting and mistreating her."

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The Poet: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"

"Ulysses"

"There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me -
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Procol Harum, "A Salty Dog"

"A Thanksgiving Warning: Retailers Are In Deep Trouble; Small Businesses Going Out Of Business"

Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 11/24/22:
"A Thanksgiving Warning: Retailers Are In Deep Trouble; 
Small Businesses Going Out Of Business"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Cycle of Time"; "Challenge From Heaven"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "Cycle of Time"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Challenge From Heaven"

"A Look to the Heavens"

While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the below gorgeously detailed image was recently taken in infrared light by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is seen above primarily because it is backlit by the nearby massive star Sigma Orionis. The Horsehead Nebula will slowly shift its apparent shape over the next few million years and will eventually be destroyed by the high energy starlight.”

Canadian Prepper, "This Is It, We're Scr*wed!"

Canadian Prepper, 11/24/22:
"This Is It, We're Scr*wed!"
"This Is Unbelievable! They are coming for everything."
Comments here:

"Why Are Large Groups Of Animals, Insects And Birds Suddenly Walking In Circles All Over The Globe?"

"Why Are Large Groups Of Animals, Insects And Birds 
Suddenly Walking In Circles All Over The Globe?"
by Michael Snyder

Excerpt: "By now, you have probably heard of a very strange phenomenon that has been taking the Internet by storm in recent days. Large groups of animals, insects and birds have been spotted walking in circles all over the planet, and there is lots of speculation about why this is happening. Some of the potential explanations that have been suggested are blaming this strange behavior on disease, changes in the magnetic field of the Earth, spoiled feed, parasitic brain worms, experiments at CERN, a coming pole shift or spikes in electromagnetic radiation. Personally, I don’t know what to think. Something really weird does seem to be happening, and hopefully we will get some more answers in the coming days."
Full article here:
Full screen recommended.
Warning: Religious appeal at end.

"Died Suddenly"

"The Future is Bleak"
by Chris Black

"I just got done re-watching "Died Suddenly," and it left me feeling hopeless. You see, I thought eventually the evidence would be too much to ignore or hide, but we’ve reached a point where it should be, and nothing is happening.

Insurance companies predicted that a 10% rise in all-cause mortality would be a catastrophic event in the US. We are at 40%. Birthrates are down 70% in Australia, other countries are getting there as well. Still births and miscarriages in some places are up 71 sigma, which is 71 times the standard deviation from the normal, in other words, a statistical impossibility.

These f**king shots are killing people, will kill even more people, and worst of all, it’s sterilizing us. Watching people react to all this plandemic bullshit transformed me into a misanthrope. What I find funny is that excess deaths are up 10-40% and it is not reported on.

Every day when I turned the news on from 2020-2022 it was a reported daily the numbers of covid cases/deaths, then it was unvaccinated cases/deaths. Why all of a sudden did that stop? More people are dying now than during the pandemic and it’s not even acknowledged. Because your news is sponsored by Pfizer. Big Pharma spends the majority of all advertising money and they are flush with taxpayer cash right now."
"Died Suddenly"
by Stew Peters Presents, 11/21/22

"Since the mass vaccinations began, a new phenomenon is being observed in every country of the world: countless perfectly healthy people die suddenly. Large numbers of sports athletes, airplane pilots, bus drivers, celebrities, media personalities... suddenly collapse, many on camera! A quick internet search reveals millions of pages dedicated to this occurrence.This shocking film shows how countless people worldwide have died suddenly after receiving the injections. What is being found in their veins is pure horror...

Why do we never believe them? For centuries, the global elite have broadcast their intentions to depopulate the world - even to the point of carving them into stone. And yet… we never seem to believe them. Now we have a damning presentation on the truth about the greatest ongoing mass genocide in human history.

This film is not for the faint of heart, as it is an uncensored exposure of the terror inflicted on humanity by the experimental injections. This is undeniable evidence that indeed the jabs are part of a mass depopulation agenda. To further confirm the danger of the injections, I have added several other videos to this page, from world leading scientists. Some break out in desperate sobbing, while warning humanity. This page is a powerful tool to shock millions of people wide awake. Please share it far and wide."
View "Died Suddenly" here:
Related, much information and many videos:

The Daily "Near You?"

Brighton, Colorado, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"You’re Stealing From Me!"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 11/24/22:
"You’re Stealing From Me!"
"When do you stand up to injustice? Have you ever had somebody overcharge you or try to take advantage of you? We need to stand up to these people and tell them “You’re stealing from me!"
Comments here:

"You Are (Not) Alone"

"You Are (Not) Alone"
by Mark Manson

"Each week, I send you three potentially life-changing ideas to help you be a slightly less awful human being. This week, we’re talking about loneliness and all of its many repercussions. Let’s get into it.

1. What's the deal with loneliness? Okay, I gotta admit. I totally teased you guys last week. Towards the end of last week’s email I dropped this bomb: “Loneliness is low-key the root of so many of the mental health and social welfare issues today, yet nobody seems to know how to talk about or solve it.” ...and then moved on as if nothing had happened. No less than eight bajillion of you replied to that email asking me to write about loneliness and explain what I meant, so here we go.

Loneliness is a tough topic to tackle. It’s so widespread, yet we still know little about how or why it happens. First, here are things that we know that are probably true: Loneliness is widespread in the western world. In numerous surveys in the US and Europe, anywhere from 30% to 60% of the population self-reports feeling lonely and/or says that they have no meaningful in-person interactions on a daily basis. What’s more surprising is that younger people often report experiencing more loneliness than older people.

• Loneliness is bad for you. There’s a famous stat that gets bandied about claiming that loneliness shortens your lifespan as much as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. I always think it’s pretty ridiculous how they calculate these factoids, but the point remains: loneliness is unhealthy, both physically and mentally. It raises the risk of anxiety and depression. It also harms your physical health. Studies find that people who are lonely experience more heart disease, high blood pressure, and weaker immune systems.

2. What we don't know about loneliness - Okay, so that sounds pretty bad. But wait, there’s more! Here’s what we don’t know: Why this is happening. Loneliness afflicts the western world in a way that it doesn’t appear to affect other cultures. There are many theories for why this is, but we still don’t have any solid answers. Some point to westerners’ more individualistic culture with less emphasis on family or community. Some blame urbanization and cultural norms around owning your own house, living alone, working independently, etc. Some point to demographic changes: people are having fewer children, move from city to city more often, and spend less time with the elderly. Some point to the decline in religiosity, arguing that religion has historically been the core of human community and camaraderie. It could be any or all of these.

• How to fix it. Again, there are a lot of theories, but we know little for sure. Connections online and through devices seem to be a poor replacement for the emotional and psychological sustenance we get from being around others. Social media and video games are like the diet soda of our emotional well-being — it tastes like we’re hanging out with people, but there are no emotional calories. And in this case, no emotional calories is a bad thing… it’s starving us. Loneliness is both a function of quality and quantity of social interactions. Not only do we need to see people we know often, but we also need to feel some degree of intimacy and trust with those we know.

That said, efforts are being made. In 2018, the UK appointed a “minister of loneliness. Scandinavian countries such as Denmark are having success with “co-housing policies” where a mixture of elderly retired people and young families in need of childcare are “matched” into housing units where they share living spaces and can support each other. But overall, this appears to be a big issue. It’s an issue to the point where the medical world has taken notice and pharmaceutical companies are even questioning if they could develop a drug to treat loneliness much in the same way there are pills to treat depression (sidenote: please f***ing don’t).

3. The dark path from loneliness - But this still doesn’t get at why I think loneliness is “the low-key root” of so many social and cultural issues today. Psychologically speaking, we’re social animals. Most of the meaning and purpose we derive in life comes via our relationships with other individuals or from our perceived role within society, at large. In fact, it appears that our need for human connection is so strong that much of our ability to form functional beliefs about ourselves and the world is tied to our relationships. Like a muscle, you lose empathy if you don’t use it.

And this is why, when people look at what motivates religious fanatics, conspiracy nuts, and political extremists, time and time again, what they find is abiding loneliness. Rejection and social isolation radicalize people. In the absence of affection and understanding, people fall back onto delusional ideas of revolution and saving the world to give themselves a sense of purpose.

Hannah Arendt, the mid-20th century philosopher and writer, was a German Jew who successfully escaped the Nazis. After the war, she spent years studying totalitarianism, the rise and fall of fascism, the communist revolutions, the horrors of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini and Mao—and more importantly, why these leaders became so popular so quickly among their followers despite the terror they invoked.

She then produced a classic book called "The Origins of Totalitarianism". The book stretches to nearly 500 pages in length and in the end, she comes to a startling conclusion: she argued that loneliness makes people susceptible to the contempt and fragmentation that causes functional societies to collapse into extremism and violence. I will quote her at length here and hope her progeny don’t sue me:

“Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, the preparation of its executioners and its victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and [meaninglessness] which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of the imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.
[...]
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. [The reasoning] which “seizes you as in a vise” appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradiction that seems to confirm a man’s identity outside the relationships with others.”

Basically, once cut off from empathetic social contact to ground us, the only way we make sense of the world is by adopting radical all/nothing views. And within these views, people begin to see a need for radical overthrow of the status quo. They begin to imagine themselves complete victims or destined saviors of society."

Keep in mind, too, that she wrote this in 1951, long before Trump and woke leftists and Twitter were thought to have ruined everything. And perhaps this is the real threat of social media: it does not necessarily make us lonelier or angrier or more selfish or more spiteful — it simply enables the lonely and angry and selfish and spiteful to self-organize and be heard like never before. It used to be that if you were a radical Marxist who wished for violent revolution or if you were a quack who thought Bill Gates was implanting microchips in millions of African children, you kinda had to keep that shit to yourself. You'd cause a lot of awkward silences and shifty side-glances until you’d realized you weren’t being invited to kids’ birthday parties anymore.

So… you’d shut the f**k up. And eventually, you’d start to realize, hey, most people are all right. Things are going to be fine. But now? There’s a forum somewhere full of people with the exact same batshit crazy you have. And what do all humans who have similar yet strange beliefs do when they get together? That’s right, they convince themselves that they’re going to save the fucking world with their knowledge. That is, they go on a crusade. And you and I and everyone else has to listen to them, emboldened and invigorated by their new internet “friends,” as they explain to us at Thanksgiving why Jesus was a communist and the movie Armageddon was really a coded message from QAnon explaining why Bruce Willis doesn’t just run a pedophile ring, but he is secretly a sixteen-year-old boy being held prisoner against his wishes, and...

(F**k, now I’m really going to get sued.) Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah! Loneliness…

Perhaps another way to look at Arendt’s argument is that we run the risk of extremists taking over when it becomes easier for radicals with fringe beliefs to mobilize and organize than the moderate majority. Historically, this mobilization of the extremes was enabled by economic depressions and famines and (gulp) pandemics and whatnot. Today, perhaps social media and smartphones have inadvertently made that mobilization more possible.

But who knows… I could be wrong about all of this. The fact is, we still don’t know enough to say for sure. Until next week..."
Related:

The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"

"The Winter of Listening"

"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.

What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."

- David Whyte,
"The House of Belonging"

"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

"All Earthly Empires Die"

"All Earthly Empires Die"
by Bill Bonner

"'Amor fati' was Nietzsche’s famous expression. It is a Latin phrase with connections to the Stoic writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Literally translated, it means “love of fate.” It is a white shoe yearning for mud. It is a turkey looking forward to Thanksgiving. Or an investor stoically preparing for a bear market.

We use the term to describe the grace and courage you need to meet a complex, unknowable, and uncontrollable future. You don’t know whether the Earth is warming or cooling… whether it is good or bad… or whether you can do anything about it. You don’t know who’s doing “equal work.” You don’t know what equality is… how to measure it… or what to do about it. You don’t know who the bad guy is. It may even be you. It recognizes that we are all God’s fools, living in a world of ignorance, headed towards we don’t know where. Using our brains, we can make progress in our physical, material world. Technical thinking yields pyramids and Eiffel Towers.

Ignorance Everywhere: But there is another part of life, which has a mind of its own. It does not bend readily to our desires or yield to our intelligence. It is the part of life whose purposes are unknown. The first and most important Commandment, according to Jesus, was not to fight it, but to love it.

But ignorance can be a charm. You just have to take it seriously. And appreciate it. Recognizing your own ignorance will inform your newfound modesty. You will be aware of it. And fiercely proud. Nobody will be humbler than you are! And since you are so chummy with ignorance, you will see it everywhere – in every headline, every public announcement, every speech on the floor of the Senate… and every crackpot comment from every dummy voter in the empire.

In private affairs, you reduce uncertainty by getting as close to the subject as possible. That is, you avoid secondhand “news” and try to find out for yourself. The more you know about a company, for example, the more confident you can be about investing in it. That’s why the insiders always have the inside track, an advantage that is increased by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s phony “level playing field” propaganda. In public affairs – policy discussions, economics, politics – as you get closer, you become less cocksure. That is, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

In an interesting university study, people were asked to pick out Ukraine on a map… and whether they approved of military intervention in that country. Curiously, the further off they were on the geography (the average guess was 1,800 miles off), the more they favored forceful intervention. In public affairs, ignorance and confidence vary inversely.

Moral Certainty: When we first moved to Baltimore in the 1980s, we noticed this phenomenon in another context. Baltimore was a disaster. Crime, drugs, poverty, venereal disease, broken homes, unwed mothers, corruption – name a social problem; Baltimore had it. And while its leaders had been noticeably unable to solve any of these problems right in their own back yard, the city’s politically correct politicians were loud and clear on one issue: apartheid had to end… in South Africa. Had they ever visited South Africa? Could they find it on a map? Probably not. But they were sure they knew how to make it a better place.

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority,” wrote Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken. “The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”

“I am not too sure,” would eliminate many of the world’s myth-driven, self-inflicted ills – pointless wars, dumb arguments, pogroms, persecutions, and lynchings. And reckless spending of other people’s money.

Imagine a wise Hitler entertaining the idea of building Auschwitz as a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” “Hmmm… I’m not too sure that would solve it… In fact, I’m not too sure there is a problem!”

Imagine Simon de Montfort readying to attack the town of Albi to exterminate the “heretics.” When told that half the people in the town were good Catholics, de Montfort replied: “Kill them all. God will recognize His own.” Suppose he had thought twice… “Hmmm… Maybe this is not such a good idea… Maybe killing people is not what Christianity is all about… Maybe the heretics aren’t so bad… Maybe I’ll take the afternoon off.”

Unwarranted Confidence: The barroom blowhard… so sure he is right about everything… is generally the dumbest guy in the place. And the most dangerous. He’s the one who will stir up a mob… and get himself elected president. The whole system of modern public policy is built on false knowledge and unwarranted confidence. The elite claims to know what is best for you. That is how every politician can claim his proposals would “benefit the American people.” But the only program that would benefit the American people would be to let them decide for themselves what would benefit them. Give them back their money. Stop bossing them around. End the wars. Stop the empire. But who would suggest such a thing?

A book that appeared in 2018, "Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy", by political scientist Christopher Fettweis, argued that power really does corrupt, and that when a nation or an empire gets too much power, its elite develops new opinions.

Rather than seeing itself as one of many nations that must get along with each other, its elites begin to see that they have a special role to play. They become the one, “indispensable” nation, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it. They are the world’s only hope in combatting evil, which they do, as then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo elaborated, with “the righteous knowledge that our cause is just, special, and built upon America’s core principles.”

Thus endowed with a special mission and special powers, and subject to the special rules of the only nation with a trillion-dollar-per-year military/empire budget, the elite develop, in Fettweis’s judgment, a fatal combination of unrestrained hubris, unrealistic paranoia, and unrepentant ignorance. They see danger everywhere, without undertaking any serious study (they assume knowledge comes automatically with raw power). And they think they have not only the right, but the means, to do something about it, even if the danger is largely fantasy.

Damned to Hell: But people always come to think what they need to think when they need to think it. “All earthly empires die,” wrote St. Augustine in 413, a few years before the Vandals destroyed his city and finally brought down the Roman Empire in the West.

The elite contribute, by taking up the myths that help it die. Certainty and ignorance vary proportionally, both on the individual and on a national level. The surer a nation is of its myths… its exceptionalism… its manifest destiny… its policies… and its position at the right hand of God… the more it is damned to Hell."

"How It Really Was"