Monday, January 30, 2023

Jim Kunstler, "The War Against Us"

"The War Against Us"
by Jim Kunstler

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy.” - Chris Hedges

"The question you might ask these days: how did we weaponize everything in American life against ourselves? Can you name an institution that is not at war with the people of this land? The exact mechanisms for all that bad faith stand in plain sight these days, and persons responsible can be easily identified. What’s missing are discernable motives. For now, it just looks like the greatest collective act of ass-covering in history.

It’s pretty clear, for instance, that all the criminal misconduct in the FBI/DOJ - continuing to this moment - emanates from the years-long effort to cover up the seditious campaign to nullify Donald Trump starting well before Nov. 8, 2016. All the players in the agencies, and their news media accomplices, stand to lose at least their reputations, if the public cared about how dishonestly they acted. Many of those still working would lose their jobs and their livelihoods too, and quite a few would lose their freedom in prison. So, their motive to keep up the skullduggery is simple self-preservation.

The Covid-19 pandemic looks like a pretty large-scale racketeering operation gone awry with plenty to hide. You have the reckless, symbiotic relations between the US public health bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical companies, and tons of money at stake, plus the colossal ego of hapless Dr. Anthony Fauci wishing to pose as an historic world-saver, another Louis Pasteur or Alexander Fleming. And then you have the amazingly foolish act of imposing an untested, dangerous “vaccine” on the world, and years of lying and covering-up the repercussions of injury and death from it. And then the opaque and nefarious roles of other actors in the story ranging from the CCP to the WEF to the Bill Gates and George Soros empires of money in what looks a genocide.

It’s harder to unpack the enigma of the obviously unfit “Joe Biden” getting installed in the White House. My guess: the Obama claque behind him knew that “JB” was easily manipulable, and that his lame rivals, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Liz Warren, and especially the proud socialist Bernie Sanders, could not be counted on to do exactly what they were told. The Obama claque especially needed a president to appoint agency heads who would cover-up its creation of an Intel Community Frankenstein, and all that monster has inflicted on the American public.

Of course, the main device the claque had for pulling “Joe Biden’s” strings was the flagrant record of his many years of bribery and treason. The major effort to cover-up all that was the DOJ and FBI’s suppression since 2019 of the Hunter Biden laptop, and the most stunning upshot was that the incendiary evidence of bribery and treason came out anyway, because so many copies of the laptop’s hard-drive got distributed. And absolutely nothing was ever done about it, nor about the actual persons - Christopher Wray, William Barr, and Merrick Garland - who worked to squash it, making themselves accomplices to ongoing bribery and treason.

All this criminal misconduct is connected in a foul matrix of lawbreaking. The fact-patterns are well-established. Dozens of excellent books have catalogued the misdeed of RussiaGate and scores of websites daily dissect the shady intrigues around the “vaccine” crusade. The infamies of gross election interference have been systematically laid-out in the Twitter Files of the past two months. Many books, published essays, and videos substantiate the reality of massive ballot fraud in 2020 and 2022, including the felonious role of Mark Zuckerberg’s front org, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, and the election law manipulations or Lawfare goblin Marc Elias.

There’s an understandable wish that upcoming hearings in Congress will lead to a reckoning for all of this. To banish consequence from public life, as we have done, is a pretty grave insult to nature, but who can tell whether accountability might restore our institutions at this point. We may be too far gone. The US is visibly collapsing now: our economy, our financial arrangements, our culture, our influence in world affairs, and our basic consensus about reality. We’re entering a phase of disorder and hardship that is likely to moot the further depredations of a government at war with its people. For one thing, it’s becoming impossible to pretend that this vicious leviathan has the money to carry on because the money is only pretending to be money.

It’s no wonder that the collective ability for sense-making has failed. It will be quickly restored by each of us in the scramble to survive these disorders and hardships. The bewildering hypotheticals of recent years begin to dissolve like mist on the mountain and things come back into focus: your health, your daily bread, your shelter, your associations with other people close to you, your values, and most of all the power of your own choices. Nature, much insulted and maligned, will sort out the rest."

"Massive Price Increases At Aldi! This Is Crazy! What's Next!?"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 1/30/23:
"Massive Price Increases At Aldi! This Is Crazy! What's Next!?"
"In today's vlog we are at Aldi and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:

"Economic Market Snapshot 1/30/23"

"Economic Market Snapshot 1/30/23"
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: creditequity valuationfunding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United Statesother advanced economies, and emerging markets."
Job cuts and much more.
Commentary, highly recommended:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
And now... The End Game...

Sunday, January 29, 2023

"Red Alert! It's Starting...There's Only One Way This Ends"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 1/29/23:
"Red Alert! It's Starting...
There's Only One Way This Ends"
Comments here:
o
A critically important article:

"Perfect Financial Storm; Surviving On Food Stamps"

Jeremiah Babe, 1/29/23:
"Perfect Financial Storm; Surviving On Food Stamps"
Comments here:
o

"Alert! They Signal The End Of ‘Petro’ Status! 2023 Petrodollar Collapse"

Full screen recommended.
"Alert! They Signal The End Of ‘Petro’ Status! 
2023 Petrodollar Collapse"
by Epic Economist

"The sovereignty of the almighty U.S. dollar is in great danger, with many global economic superpowers, including Saudi Arabia, now signaling that the end of its petro status is near, meaning that soon oil sales and revenues in global markets will no longer be denominated in U.S. dollars, which can result in unspeakable consequences for the U.S. economy. A dollar collapse is now in motion, according to new reports and warnings from strategists that are familiar with the matter. And that’s what we’re going to investigate in today’s video.

One of the main pillars still maintaining the dollar in place as the leading global currency reserve is crumbling down. Its petro status, which determines that global transactions of oil and oil-based fuels are denominated in U.S. dollars, is being threatened by the US worsening relations and rising tensions with other major geopolitical and economic superpowers.

It has been revealed to the public that white papers and essays written by globalists specifically highlight the need for a smaller role for the US currency as well as the promotion of the decline of the American economy as a way to introduce Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and implement a new global currency system completely controlled by the IMF.

Over the past six years, the relationship between Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China has grown immensely. Commodity and raw material deals between the three nations are becoming more and more common, and this has also prompted a silent but steady steady distancing of the Saudis from the dollar. Meanwhile, the rate of bilateral transactions between Russia and China conducted in dollars has declined from 90% in 2015 to 41% in 2021.

Moreover, as China seeks to purchase its oil in yuan rather than dollars, last week they may have found another seller in Saudi Arabia. On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia announced at Davos that they are now willing to trade oil in alternative currencies. A few moments after, Xi Jinping pledged to increase efforts to promote the use of the Chinese yuan in energy trade.

In essence, the U.S. weakening relations with Eastern nations are being exploited to create a catalyst for the end of the dollar’s petro status. Now more than ever, the dominoes are set in motion for a dollar collapse. This is similar to the developments that led to the downfall of the British Sterling decades ago as the global petro currency. And today, globalists have the perfect excuses to dump their dollar holdings, and that’s all thanks to the poorly managed monetary policies enacted by the federal government and the Federal Reserve.

The repercussions of the loss of reserve status will be catastrophic for the U.S. economy. The dollar dominance is the only thing that is still keeping our system together. If the dollar ceases to be the main international trade mechanism, “the trillions upon trillions of dollars the Fed has created from thin air over the years will all come flooding back to the US through various avenues, and hyperinflation (or hyper stagflation) will be the result,” Smith warns.

You’ll probably see the mainstream media and government officials trying to find a new scapegoat to blame inflation on, and saying that “nobody could have seen this coming.” But the truth is that many people saw it coming, and they’ve been alerting for a long time that the dollar is reaching the end of an era."
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Yanni, "Live At The Acropolis - 'Standing in Motion'”

Full screen recommended.
Yanni, "Live At The Acropolis - 
'Standing in Motion'”

"A Look to the Heavens

"Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. 
Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen at the right of the starry field of view. Inside the nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation. With the eerie hue of dust reflecting bluish light from hot young stars of NGC 7023, the Iris Nebula stands out against the dark just left of center. In the broad telescopic frame, these fertile interstellar dust fields stretch almost seven full moons across the sky."

Chet Raymo, “Yet…”

“Yet…”
by Chet Raymo

“My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose,
but queerer than we can suppose.”
- J. B. S. Haldane

“Legend has it that after reciting his official recantation, kneeling on the floor of the Holy Office in Rome before assembled officials of the Inquisition, Galileo whispered, “And yet it moves.” To save his life, or at least to avoid some dank dungeon and perhaps torture, the old man had publicly denied that he ever believed or taught that the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the other way around. The public recantation was real enough. Whether Galileo whispered the private qualification we’ll never know. It makes a lovely story. In any case, he was allowed to go back to Florence under house arrest and in the final years of his life invented (I will dare to assert) mathematical physics.

And yet it moves. The Earth goes spinning around the Sun with its sister planets. The Sun whirls with its neighboring stars around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way drifts with its attendant galaxies toward the Andromeda cluster. The Milky Way Galaxy, the Great Andromeda Galaxy, and their lesser galactic companions, the so-called Local Group, dance somewhere near the outer edge of the Local Supercluster of galaxies. Which are but the tiniest swarm of galaxies in the whole outward-racing shebang.

It moves. Oh, yes, it moves, and Galileo didn’t know the half of it. His inquisitors didn’t know any of it, but they thought they knew all of it. And their descendants still claim infallibility. But let me not beat up on the dogmatists. We should all whisper to ourselves now and then, “And yet, and yet.” Our descendants may be surprised at our own naivety. Wholly new paradigms may be required before we understand the origin of the universe or the mysteries of biological development and consciousness.

Such a little word, “yet.” Maybe the most significant word in our vocabulary.”

The Poet: Alfred, Lord Tennyson,"The Charge of the Light Brigade"

"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
Read by John Davies

"The Battle of Balaclava, fought on 25 October 1854 during the Crimean War, was part of the siege of Sevastopol to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, Russia's principal naval base on the Black Sea. The Charge of the Light Brigade was a charge of British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British forces, had intended to send the Light Brigade to prevent the Russians from removing captured guns from overrun Turkish positions, a task well-suited to light cavalry.

However, there was miscommunication in the chain of command, and the Light Brigade was instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one well-prepared with excellent fields of defensive fire. They reached the battery under withering direct fire and scattered some of the gunners, but they were forced to retreat immediately. Thus, the assault ended with very high British casualties and no decisive gains.

The events are best remembered as the subject of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's narrative poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), published just six weeks after the event. Its lines emphasize the valor of the cavalry in bravely carrying out their orders, regardless of the obvious outcome. Blame for the miscommunication has remained controversial, as the original order itself was vague, and the officer who delivered the written orders with some verbal interpretation died in the first minute of the assault."
As glorified by Hollywood:
Full screen recommended for all parts.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:

"We Must Marvel..."

“In our society, confidence leads to knowledge – which leads to power – which leads to pride – which leads to a fear of seeming ignorant – which constricts learning like an iron vise. We must understand that confidence is a blessing, for it is the embodiment of self-love, and through it we find the fuel for innovation and progress. We must realize that ignorance is merely the opportunity to learn more. And lastly, we must marvel rather than groan at the fact that there will always be more to learn… Only then will we be free of the intellectual prisons we have so readily caged ourselves within.”
- Zeb Reynolds

"Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity"

Full screen recommended.
"Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity" 
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stupid ones we are defenseless - reasons fall on deaf ears. Bonhoeffer's famous text, which we slightly edited for this video, serves any free society as a warning of what can happen when certain people gain too much power."

The Daily "Near You?"

Sand Springs, Oklahoma, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Don't Think You Can Escape...

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impassible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance.

Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” 
– Strauss & Howe, “The Fourth Turning”

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: The Market Can Run But It Can't Hide"

Gregory Mannarino, 1/29/23:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: 
The Market Can Run But It Can't Hide"
Comments here:

"The FDIC Is A Scam"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 1/29/23:
"The FDIC Is A Scam"
"Let’s face it we all have a lot of faith that if there is a bank failure that we will get our money. I’m sure after this video, you will not feel so comfortable and confident that they may ever pay us back. Today I share letters that the FDIC sent other subscribers, as well as the EDIE calculator."
Comments here:

"How It Really Is"

Jethro Tull, "Locomotive Breath"

"Massive Shrinkflation At Dollar Tree! This Is Ridiculous!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 1/29/23:
"Massive Shrinkflation At Dollar Tree! This Is Ridiculous!"
"In today's vlog we are Dollar Tree, and are noticing massive food products that have shrunk in size! We are also noticing a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Traveling With Russell, 1/29/23:
"Russian Owned Hypermarket After 11 Months of Sanctions"
"Take a look inside a Russian Owned Hypermarket in Moscow, Russia. After 11 months of sanctions, see what its like inside this typical Russian owned hypermarket. What can you buy, what is available."
Comments here:

"Douglas Macgregor, "Russians Started Massive Offensive In Eastern Ukraine"

Full screen recommended.
"Douglas Macgregor, 
"Russians Started Massive Offensive In Eastern Ukraine"
Comments here:

"Relax..."

"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to
TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing."
- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"

"Businessman Pulled Away This Older Man's Chair At A Restaurant And Learned A Life Lesson"

Full screen recommended.
"Businessman Pulled Away This Older Man's Chair 
At A Restaurant And Learned A Life Lesson"
Clarence Purvis, a 90+-year-old gentleman, eats lunch daily with a picture of his late wife, and when he was asked why, everyone had to hold back their tears...
Comments here:
o

Saturday, January 28, 2023

Douglas Macgregor, "Russia Mobilizes 700,000 Troops for a New Offensive"

Douglas Macgregor,1/28/23:
"Russia Mobilizes 700,000 Troops for a New Offensive"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Neil H, "Spellbound"

Neil H, "Spellbound"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Do you see the bat? It haunts this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. While the Veil is roughly circular in shape and covers nearly 3 degrees on the sky toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus), NGC 6995, known informally as the Bat Nebula, spans only 1/2 degree, about the apparent size of the Moon. That translates to 12 light-years at the Veil's estimated distance, a reassuring 1,400 light-years from planet Earth. 
In the composite of image data recorded through narrow band filters, emission from hydrogen atoms in the remnant is shown in red with strong emission from oxygen atoms shown in hues of blue. Of course, in the western part of the Veil lies another seasonal apparition: the Witch's Broom Nebula."

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.”

"Challenges..."

"When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back."
- Paulo Coelho

"People Can’t Stop Spending"

Fill screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 1/28/23:
"People Can’t Stop Spending"
"The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. 
The worst part is that people are in debt more than ever."
Comments here:

The Daily "Near You?"

Maintal, Hessen, Germany. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Arthur O’Shaughnessy, "Music and Moonlight"

"Music and Moonlight"

"We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone seabreakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems…
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Ninevah with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth."
- Arthur O’Shaughnessy
"The Dreamers Of Dreams..."
"The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so nearly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain."
- Iris Murdoch

"How to Handle the Beast"

"How to Handle the Beast"
by David Cain

"The Beast showed up around Christmas last year, and stayed till April. During those months it was difficult to get anything done, or believe getting things done was a thing I could still do. You might know the Beast too. It has many forms. The Doom-Anxiety Beast. The Regret Beast. The Despair Beast. The Shame Beast. Psychologists have names for some of them.

Whatever the form, the Beast has certain characteristics. It saps your sense of agency and forward motion. It robs you of what might feel like your birthright: the basic ability to function to society’s standards. You lose the sense that you can steer the boat. The Beast may stay away for weeks or months or years. Then one Thursday afternoon, when one too many things goes wrong, it darkens your doorway again and you know that life might be different for a while.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s a good thing. Many of you do though. For what it’s worth, I’ll share what I’ve learned about tangling with the Beast.

As you already know, the Beast especially likes to visit during the holidays, or sometimes just after. It takes advantage of stress, isolation, and any sense of non-belonging you already feel. It wants to reduce you to a robotic pattern of habits and appetites. However, it can never quite steal that last bit of agency from you. There is always enough wriggle-space beneath it to do small, defiant things. This bit of space is what we will use to handle the Beast.

Assume your full height: Physically, I mean. The Beast can’t stop you from standing up straight, but it sure doesn’t want you to. It wants you to lower your head and drop your shoulders forward, especially in public – otherwise you might start to consider the possibility that you are in some way worthy, or even formidable. Upright posture doesn’t just symbolize resilience in the face of suffering, it creates the resilience. Be your full height. Return to it again and again.

Remember that the Beast is survivable: The Beast’s presence feels like you’ve been evicted from normal life, at least for now. Nothing is stable, and you can’t do what you need to do. It feels like you can’t possibly live at all until the Beast is gone.

Human history proves this is false. While the Beast can’t be ignored or destroyed, it can be lived with, and it has been. Human beings have cohabited with Beasts forever, often for years at a time. Life still happens during those years. Choices are still made, and good things are still accomplished.

What I’m trying to say is that taking action and finding meaning are possible even while the Beast is present. The conditions are different, but you still have agency. Life is still happening, and it still counts.

Discover the power of small acts of defiance: Whenever you feel the Beast sapping your will, do something – anything – that will improve your situation in even the smallest way. Straighten a crooked picture. Put all your stray pencils into a cup. The point isn’t so much to get things done, it’s to exercise the small bit agency you do have. One little act of defiance proves to both you and the Beast that it cannot clamp down on you completely. The earlier you do this in a day, the greater the effect.

Anything you do get done can weaken the Beast in a different way. By changing the state of things around you, you may be removing one of the Beast’s handholds, such as the laundry on your floor or the call you are not returning.

Lift things and clean: Physical exertion and cleaning up are the closest thing I’ve found to kryptonite for the Beast. A little of either can change a day’s trajectory, and remove more handholds.

Do a daily movement routine, even if it’s really easy. Even if it’s the equivalent of three pushups. Each one weakens the Beast, because it is an act against gravity. You are exercising your agency indirect opposition to the Beast’s inertia.

Get the house to a tidyish state if you can - a single room if you can’t - and keep it that way the best you’re able. Clutter is madness congealed.

Talk to people who know the Beast: Nothing has been as helpful for me as getting to know other people who know the Beast and are willing talk about it. There is tremendous relief to be found just describing your experience to someone:

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
- C.S. Lewis

The goal of talking is not to problem-solve, but to break the illusion that something has gone uniquely wrong for you.

Our species knows the Beast well, but we don’t talk about it much. I suppose that’s because it’s hard to win at the rat race and other public-facing status games when you admit you are suffering. But suffering less is more important."

"How it Really Is"

 

"I Know Why You Did It..."

"There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. 

How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the government. They promised you order, they promised you peace, and all they demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent."
- "V For Vendetta", slightly modified.