Monday, December 18, 2023

John Wilder, "On Winning The Big Fight"

"On Winning The Big Fight"
by John Wilder

"We’ve talked about the bigger picture recently. The bigger picture includes Elite Overproduction and The Wealth Pump. What we haven’t discussed so much is how the Left subverted so many of our institutions. I think we have the why down pretty well, but let’s go to the “how” of the situation.

It starts with Vladimir Lenin: “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.” Yup, Lenin said that. Or at least someone typed that he said that. I mean, someone besides me. And when Lenin said it, it was probably in Russian and I imagine he needed a breath mint, because I always imagined he’d smell like cabbage and B.O.
Regardless, Lenin’s idea was to propagandize kids from the start. And, in the Soviet Union, he could get away with that because the Soviets had the secret police and the bravado and the people thought they were at their mercy. I think Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn said it best:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation....We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

In the United States we were entirely different – there has yet to be a secret police that could act with impunity against Enemies of the State. Oh, sorry, forgot about Ruby Ridge and Waco and January 6 protestors and the ATF and FBI. I guess we do have one, but ours is on a shorter (for now) leash since they still have to pretend that the Constitution exists.
But to get to where we are now, things had to start to rot. The rot in America really started in academia, specifically colleges. And, the colleges that were targeted were the education departments of the colleges. Why?

Here’s Lenin’s statement again: “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.” Now, in my experience, teachers generally start teaching when they’re in their early 20s and stop sometime after they become petrified wood. I think my kindergarten teacher was born in the late Triassic, but my first-grade teacher was maybe 22.

If you’re a Lefty in a rural farm school district, you’re not going to get away with much, especially if the other teachers are all married and religious conservatives. But over time, bureaucracies always swim Left. I recall the first really Leftist teacher that showed up at my school. She was fresh out of college, and was a substitute. She went on a long rant about income redistribution and lots of other commie talking points.

Since it was middle school and she was a substitute, she got about as much respect from the students as Joe Biden would if he guest-hosted Jeopardy!, which is zero. “You know, you have to answer the question in the form of a question like my dead son, who was in the military did.”

These teachers had to bide their time, move into the administration, and slowly build a majority. Of course, this didn’t happen all at once, it evolved. And once it evolved, it did what Leftists always do: they radicalized themselves more and more until only the most Leftist idea survives. I was blessed to have “conservative” and left-leaning teachers, but no real Leftists. But in the big cities and in Blue State? Lenin would be proud.

But that’s only a part of it. Pop culture is important, too. I recall reading once that because Fonzie in Happy Days said, “The Fonz don’t go to sleep without sweet smelling teeth,” that toothbrushing doubled among the 8- to 14-year-old set.

Propaganda works, and the younger you get the kid, and the more hours that you have with the kid, the deeper the hook sets. That’s where television came in. Before the big cable invasion, before the Great Fragmentation of the streaming services and multitudes of video sharing services, there was the Big Three. CBS®, NBC™, and ABC©. These three dominated the airwaves, and produced content that was beamed directly into the brains of Americans from when they got up to when Pa Wilder turned off the TV after watching the 10:30 weather.

In between, it was filling brains with Leftist propaganda. Norman Lear (who just died) was one of the biggest proponents of Leftist propaganda on television, and made tens of millions. It really was Lear who made me question if the ideas of freedom and nationalism that I’d had since I can remember could ever be funny, or if the only humor could come from the Leftist perspective.

Of course, I know now that the brainwashing didn’t hold, and that we’re actually a lot funnier than the Left because our humor is based on Truth, and the only way that they’re funny is when they set up a construct. In order to poke fun at the Right, they had to construct an Archie Bunker and use him as their strawman. And Norman Lear created him. And had shows that showed that "strong womens don’t need no man" ("On Day At A Time").

Those shows weren’t aimed at parents – they were aimed at kids, so Norman could pump his Leftism into their brains when the teachers were off duty. Norman made millions attempting to destroy everything that made American culture strong, and when Reagan was elected, Norman took in tens (if not hundreds) of millions and tried to continue on building a cultural subversion mechanism, People for the American Way©, which, even now, funnels money to Leftists. This subversion took decades, of course, and it brought us to where we are.

Thankfully, the tide is turning. Home schooling is great for counteracting Leftism impact on kids and more people are opting for it. Places like Modern Mayberry don’t care much for Leftism in schools. The media chokehold the Left had forever is weakening – they can’t channel our minds on just three channels for 12 hours a day.

Let’s look at the other side: “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a state of free men that won’t yield to tyranny.” Do we want to win? We have to show up. With our children."

"We've All Heard..."


The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can’t pretend we haven’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still, sometimes, we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug, until we can’t anymore, until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin meant: That knowing is better than wondering. That waking is better than sleeping. And that even the biggest failure, even the worst, most intractable mistake, beats the hell out of never trying.”
- “Meredith”, “Grey’s Anatomy”

Jim Kunstler, "In the Game of Strip Poker, Someone Ends Up Naked"

"In the Game of Strip Poker, 
Someone Ends Up Naked"
by Jim Kunstler

“Joe Biden,” is only the most obviously weak device in the feckless and misbegotten regime installed via the blob’s US color revolution of 2020. This sort of coup d’état, you understand, was well-rehearsed by our combined intel, 4-gen war, and propaganda units over the decades prior in fractious foreign places like Kyrgyzstan (2005), Egypt (2011), and Ukraine (2014). So, it was only a matter of time before these geniuses turned their political black magic on the home front, against their own citizens. But wasn’t it ol’ Karl Marx himself who observed that tragic history repeats as farce?

Thus, the farcical pageant, in a land of fake everything, of America’s fake government attempting to rescue itself from the web of lies and subterfuge it so cleverly spun for itself to keep all its sundry rackets going. For instance: the preposterous idea that “Joe Biden” is running for reelection. Does anybody over age seven, even in Beverly Hills, believe this whopper? I doubt it. But the absurd meme is repeated endlessly in the relic newspapers and floundering cable news channels, and for one reason: elite members in the party behind all this mischief - that is, the Democratic Party of Chaos - are desperate to avoid prosecution for things like seditious conspiracy to defraud the electorate, bribery, and treason.

They have two reasons to be really afraid. One, of course, is Donald Trump, the once and increasingly probable future president, and Bobby Kennedy, the outsider warrior personifying America’s erstwhile interest in the eternal verities. Both of them promise to bring a heavy hand down on the coupsters, going back to the coup preliminaries in the Obama White House, and including the Clintons, more than one US attorney general and their adjutants, a groaning raft of former and current high officials in and around the blob’s vicious intel “community,” and the public health rogues who engineered the Covid-19 fraud and vaccine crime.

The blob’s weakness and idiocy are clearly on display in the four court cases against Mr. Trump, which look like a cartoon of thieves throwing stuff out of a hijacked furniture truck at the cars in pursuit behind them. There’s DA Alvin Bragg’s joke case in Manhattan around the dead-on-arrival Stormy Daniels business. End-of-story, as T0ny Soprano always liked to say. New York’s AG, Letitia James, vowed to get Mr. Trump on something, anything, while electioneering, and delivered a bullshit case to Judge Arthur Engoron that is sure to get tossed on appeal — and will eventually get both Ms. James and the Judge disbarred (and possibly prosecuted) for their trouble. There’s Fulton County (GA) DA Fani Willis’s laughable RICO rap against Trump, Guiliani, et al,. for complaining about the obviously janky ballot-counting activity there in 2020.

And then, there are US AG Merrick Garland’s two cases against the former president. The DC case brought under Special Counsel Jack Smith, claiming that Mr. Trump somehow led an “insurrection” at the US Capitol on 1/6/21. This turkey was rehearsed in earlier House J-6 Committee hearings, so shabbily staged that Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) arranged to have all the evidence destroyed (including witness deposition transcripts) as soon as the hearings wrapped. Mr. Trump’s defense is probably immaterial in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC courtroom. But one of the case’s main predicates, the law against “obstructing official proceedings,” is about to be adjudicated in the US Supreme Court involving convicted J-6 defendants. If the court tosses it, Jack Smith’s case goes out the window too. If not, and Mr. Trump is successfully railroaded by Judge Chutkin, you can be sure the appeal will be expedited to SCOTUS and die there. If there even is a trial before the election of 2024. In any case, Mr. Trump will still be on the ballot next November.

The second Garland/Jack Smith case is the most interesting. That would be the Mar-a-Lago documents case. According to the reporter who styles himself as “Sundance” at The Last Refuge news site, the purpose of the August 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid was not to seek classified documents at issue in a dispute between the former president and the National Archives - as the public has been given to understand by the blob’s news media. The actual purpose was to find a 10-inch-thick dossier of documents collected over many months by Mr. Trump’s deputies to be used in future prosecutions of DOJ, FBI, and other officials and private persons (including Hillary Clinton, the DNC, the DNC’s law firm Perkins Coie,) who were implicated in the Russia collusion hoax, especially after the failure of Special Counsel John Durham to even depose many of these parties and persons.

There were apparently many copies made of Mr. Trump’s dossier, and distributed among anti-blobsters, but these were all heavily redacted - names were all blacked out. The binder at Mar-a-Lago was unredacted and this was what the FBI was after in the August 2022 raid. Is there any chance by now that the FBI hasn’t disposed of 10,000 emails and documents that were in its possession pertaining to the Russia hoax and other crimes? Do you suppose that the unredacted Trump doissier was the only copy? I wouldn’t. So far, Mr. Trump and his lawyers have not mentioned this. Why wouldn’t they play this hand close to the chest? Will it be consequential in the long and tortured course of things? What do you think?"

Gregory Mannarino, "Beware Of 2024! Expect Much More Devastating And Expanding War"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/18/23
"Beware Of 2024! Expect Much
 More Devastating And Expanding War"
Comments here:

Adventures With Danno, "Items Disappearing At Walmart! This Is Not Good! What's Next?"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 12/18/23
"Items Disappearing At Walmart! 
This Is Not Good! What's Next?"
"In today's vlog, we are at Walmart and are noticing a lot of different items that are disappearing off the shelves. With already high prices on everything, this brings concern that grocery items may be going up again!"
Comments here:

"Economic Market Snapshot 12/18/23"

"Economic Market Snapshot 12/18/23"
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...
o

"Alert! USA Declares War On Yemen; Russia Loads Nukes; N. Korea Launches EMP Ready ICBM; ISW Warning!"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 12/18/23
"Alert! USA Declares War On Yemen; Russia Loads Nukes; 
N. Korea Launches EMP Ready ICBM; ISW Warning!"
Comments here:

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Jeremiah Babe, "My Reaction To 'Civil War' Trailer, It's Ominous And Real"

Jeremiah Babe, 12/17/23
"My Reaction To 'Civil War' Trailer,
 It's Ominous And Real"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
"Civil War" trailer.

The Poet: William Stafford, "The Gift"

"The Gift"

"Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come - maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."

- William Stafford

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Full screen recommended.
Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Life, magnificent life...

"Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit." 
- A.W. and J.C. Hare 

"A Look to the Heavens"

“What created this unusual planetary nebula? NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in the featured image. In modern times, though, for reasons unknown, it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in red) in specific directions that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners. These shells and patterns have been mapped in impressive detail by recent images from the Wide Field Camera 3 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope.
What lies at the nebula's center is unknown, with one hypothesis holding it to be a close binary star system where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star. NGC 7027, about 3,000 light years away, was first discovered in 1878 and can be seen with a standard backyard telescope toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).”

"The True Measure..."

"Place yourself among those who carry on their lives with passion, and true learning will take place, no matter how humble or exalted the setting. But no matter what path you follow, do not be ashamed of your learning. In some corner of your life, you know more about something than anyone else on earth. The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others."
- Kent Nerburn

"A Person Who Has Remained A Person..."

"A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet for sale, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing, cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity." - Erich Fromm

And so, sometimes, we all get like this...
Full screen recommended.
Pet Shop Boys, "Numb"

So...
"I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go." - May Sarton

Then...
"Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others' faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear." - Rumi

Dan, I Allegedly, "Home Builder in Trouble - I Told You This Would Happen"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 12/17/23
"Home Builder in Trouble - 
I Told You This Would Happen"
"Lennar homes just announced they are liquidating 11,000 multi family units. I told you that this would happen that these home builders have been stretched so thin that all they can do is get out of this as quick as possible. Will it work?"
Comments here:

The Daily "Near You?"

Patrick Springs, Virginia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"This I Believe..."

“This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most
valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind 
to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: 
any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.”
- John Steinbeck

Free Download: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, “On Death and Dying” ("The 5 Stages of Grief")

“Grief may be a thing we all have in common but it looks different on everyone. It isn’t just death we have to grieve. It’s life, it’s loss, it’s change. And then we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes, it has to hurt so bad. The thing we gotta try to remember is that it can turn on a dime. That’s how you stay alive when it hurts so much you can’t breathe. That’s how you survive. By remembering that one day somehow, impossibly, it won’t feel this way. It wont hurt this much. Grief comes in it’s own time for everyone in it’s own way. So the best we can do, the best anyone can do, is try for honesty. The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief is that you can’t control it. The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it when it comes and let it go when we can.”
- Meredith Grey, “Grey's Anatomy”
o
Related:
Freely download “On Death and Dying”, by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, here:

"The Legend of the Starfish"

"The Legend of the Starfish"
Author Unknown

"A vacationing businessman was walking along a beach when he saw a young boy. Along the shore were many starfish that had been washed up by the tide and were sure to die before the tide returned. The boy was walking slowly along the shore and occasionally reached down and tossed the beached starfish back into the ocean.

The businessman, hoping to teach the boy a little lesson in common sense, walked up to the boy and said, “I have been watching what you are doing, son. You have a good heart, and I know you mean well, but do you realize how many beaches there are around here and how many starfish are dying on every beach every day. Surely such an industrious and kind hearted boy such as yourself could find something better to do with your time. Do you really think that what you are doing is going to make a difference?” The boy looked up at the man, and then he looked down at a starfish by his feet. He picked up the starfish, and as he gently tossed it back into the ocean, he said, “It makes a difference to that one.”

"Heaven Knows..."

"You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that."
- E.B. White, in "Charlotte’s Web"

"Burnout"

"Burnout"
by Charles Hugh Smith

"At least once a year, I completely burn out: exhausted, I no longer have the energy or will to care about anything but the bare minimum for survival. Everything not essential for survival gets jettisoned or set aside. This goes with the territory if you're trying to accomplish a lot of things that are intrinsically complex and open-ended - for example, running a business, being a parent, juggling college, work, family, community commitments, etc. 
I am confident many if not most of you have experienced burnout due to being overwhelmed by open-ended, inherently complex commitments.

I don't think burnout is limited to individuals. I think entire organizations and institutions can experience burnout, especially organizations devoted to caring for others or those facing long odds of fulfilling their core purpose. I even think entire nations can become exhausted by the effort of keeping up appearances or navigating endless crises. At that point, the individuals and institutions of the nation just go through the motions of coping rather than continue the struggle. Perhaps Venezuela is a current example.

I have long suspected that in many ways America is just going through the motions.  John Michael Greer (the Archdruid) has brilliantly described a process he calls catabolic collapse, which I would characterize as the stairstep-down of overly complex, costly systems as participants react to crises by resetting to a lower level of complexity and consumption.

Just as ecosystems have intrinsic carrying capacities, so too do individual humans and human systems. When our reach exceeds our grasp, and the costs of complexity exceed the carrying capacity of the underlying systems, then we have to move down to a lower level of complexity and lower cost-structure/energy consumption.

This sounds straightforward enough, but it isn't that easy in real life. We can't offload our kids and downsize to part-time parenting or magically reduce the complexities of operating a small business (or two). These tasks are intrinsically open-ended. Reductions in stress and complexity such as quitting a demanding job (and earning one-third of our former salary) require long years of trimming and planning.

So what can we do to work through burnout? Since I'm designed to over-commit myself, burnout is something I've dealt with since my late teens. I like to think I'm getting better at managing it, but this is probably illusory. (It may be one of those cases where the illusion is useful because it's positive and hopeful.) I find these responses helpful:

1. Reduce whatever complexity can be reduced. Even something as simple as making a pot of chili or soup to eat for a few days (minimizing daily meal prep) helps. Reduce interactions and transactions.
2. Daily walks - two a day if possible. If there is any taken-for-granted magic in daily life (other than sleep, dreaming and playing music), it's probably walking - especially if you let your mind wander rather than keep working.
3. More naps, more sleep.
4. Avoid the temptations of overly fatty/sweet/carbo comfort food, digital distractions, etc.
5. Keep to positive routines (stretching, walking, etc.), no matter how tired and down you feel.
6. Set aside time to play your musical instrument of choice, preferably improvisation rather than practice.
7. Do whatever calms your mind, even if it requires effort.
8. Do stuff you enjoy and set aside as much of the stuff you actively dislike doing as possible.
9. Set aside solitary time to "do nothing." Lowering the barriers raised by conscious effort, focus and thought may well be critical to our well-being.

This is one conclusion from research cited by Sherry Turkel in "Scientific American": "For the first time in the history of our species, we are never alone and never bored. Have we lost something fundamental about being human?"

I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. Our minds need periods of solitude, aimless wandering (i.e. boredom), time to integrate thoughts and feelings, time to question things and time for introspection. Without these restorative periods, we end up just going through the motions, on an autopilot setting of keeping overly complex lives and systems duct-taped together. This leads to burnout, and eventually to some measure of catabolic collapse/system reset.”
Related:

"The Monstrous Thing..."

“The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off."
- Henry Miller, "Tropic of Cancer"

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: 2024... End Game, Final Solution. Are You Ready For It?"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/17/23
"Markets, A Look Ahead: 2024... End Game, 
Final Solution. Are You Ready For It?"
Comments here:

Adventures With Danno, "Items Disappearing At Kroger!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 12/17/23
"Items Disappearing At Kroger! 
This Is Not Good! What's Next?"
"In today's vlog, we are at Kroger and are noticing a lot of different items that are dissappearing off the shelves. With already high prices on everything, this brings concern that grocery items may be going up again!"
Comments here:

"Israel - Palestine War Update, 12/17/23"

Full, horrifying, screen recommended.
Al Jazeera English, 12/17/23
"Footage Shows Bodies Piled Up 
After Israeli Attack On Gaza School"
"Exclusive video and images obtained by Al Jazeera this morning show bodies piled up inside the Shadia Abu Ghazala School in the al-Faluja area, west of the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. Witnesses said a number of people including women, children and babies were killed execution-style by Israeli forces while sheltering inside the school. “The Israeli soldiers came in and opened fire on them,” a woman at the scene said.  “They took all men, then entered classrooms and opened fire on a woman and all the children with her.” The woman said there were newborn children among them. “The Israeli soldiers executed those innocent families at point blank,” she added. Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud is in southern Gaza in Rafah for the latest developments."
Comments here:

If I say what I'm thinking Blogger will delete this blog in a heartbeat...
o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 12/16/23
"Hamas Takes Gaza; Hezbollah Takes North Israel;
 Houthis Take Red Sea; This War Is Done"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 12/7/23
"Israel Needs To Free 10,000 Palestinian Prisoners 
As Hamas Launches Missiles On Them"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 12/17/23
"USA Fears Houthis? Biden Unsure Of Retaliating 
Amid Fear Of Iran Wrecking Sea Trade "
"Despite an alarming rise in military action by Yemen's Houthis over the Israel-Hamas war, the United States of America is unsure of launching a direct attack on Houthi military sites. A news report has said that the US is considering direct action against the Houthis, but fears escalation of the conflict, and greater involvement of Iran in the ensuing chaos. Washington is nervous even as there is growing fear that Iran and its proxies are disrupting maritime trade through the Red Sea to punish the West for supporting Israel."
Comments here:
"Retaliating" against the Houthis? With WHAT? One precision guided missile strike destroying the $13 billion aircraft carrier's flight deck so nothing can take off or land and what's left is a useless, floating target, which would rapidly be sunk.
o
Full screen recommended.
Times Now, 12/17/23
"Houthis Rain Fire In Red Sea; Yemeni Rebels Attack
 Israeli Port City Eilat; New Front In Gaza War?"
"After attacking commercial ships in Red Sea, Houthi rebels have now targeted Israel's southern port city of Eilat. The Iran backed militant group has confirmed launching drone attacks on Israel’s port of Eilat. While speaking about the drone attacks, Houthi Spokesperson referred to Eilat as ‘Southern occupied Palestine'. Meanwhile, Egypt claimed that it had intercepted an aerial vehicle launched towards Eilat. The Egyptian air defense has reportedly shot down one drone believed to be fired by the Houthis near resort town of Dahab."
Comments here:

Saturday, December 16, 2023

Canadian Prepper, "This Will Be 'The Biggest Event' In the History Of Our Species"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 12/16/23
"This Will Be 'The Biggest Event'
 In the History Of Our Species"
Comments here:

"Food Recalls Everywhere! This Is Unbelievable! What's Next!?"

Adventures With Danno, PM 12/16/23
"Food Recalls Everywhere! 
This Is Unbelievable! What's Next!?"
"Food recalls are happening everywhere! We discuss how these food recalls are happening almost on a daily basis and that we have to be very mindful and prepare accordingly! Quaker granola bars are the latest on this list."
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: 2002, "We Are Always"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "We Are Always"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"A mere seven hundred light years from Earth, toward the constellation Aquarius, a sun-like star is dying. Its last few thousand years have produced the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula, typical of this final phase of stellar evolution. A total of 90 hours of exposure time have gone in to creating this expansive view of the nebula.
Combining narrow band image data from emission lines of hydrogen atoms in red and oxygen atoms in blue-green hues, it shows remarkable details of the Helix's brighter inner region about 3 light-years across. The white dot at the Helix's center is this Planetary Nebula's hot, central star. A simple looking nebula at first glance, the Helix is now understood to have a surprisingly complex geometry."

"The Poet: Wendell Berry, "Leavings"

"Leavings"

“In time a man disappears
from his lifelong fields, from
the streams he has walked beside,
from the woods where he sat and waited.
Thinking of this, he seems to
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there.
But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.”

- Wendell Berry
“Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him – his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition – no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him - neither name nor money to bequeath – a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “Tomorrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.”
- William Makepeace Thackeray, “Vanity Fair”

"I Can't Convince Myself...

“I can’t convince myself that it does much good to try to challenge the everyday political delusions and dementias of Americans at large. Their contained and confined mentalities by far prefer the petty and parochial prisons of the kind of sense they have been trained and rewarded for making out of their lives (and are punished for deviating from them). What it costs them ultimately to be such slaves and infants and ideological zombies is a thought too monstrous and rending and spiky for them even to want to glance at.”
- Kenneth Smith

“If you want to tell people the truth,
 make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
- Oscar Wilde