Monday, February 5, 2024

Free Download: Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

"In the myth, Sisyphus (Σίσυφος), wayward king of a Greek city-state, antagonized the Gods something fierce by not acting right. Basically, he killed some people he wasn’t supposed to kill and had sex he shouldn’t have, etc. The details don’t matter; his transgressions aren’t the point of the story. What the point of the story is that, as punishment, they cursed him to an eternity of repeating the same task, over and over, only to have his work, each time he completed it, rendered moot.

Via GreekMythology.com: “Zeus, fed up with Sisyphus' tricks and cunning as well as his hubris - believing he was more cunning than Zeus - punished him to eternally push a boulder uphill. However, as soon as he would reach the top of the hill, the boulder, like a rolling stone, would roll off and Sisyphus had to push it back again. This daunting task, symbolizing the endless rolling of stones, represents the futile yet persistent endeavors that define the human spirit. This myth later inspired French philosopher Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus' unyielding labor as a metaphor for the human struggle against the absurdity of life, a cornerstone concept in existentialist philosophy.”

Via Britannica: “Influenced by the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Camus argues that life is essentially meaningless, although humans continue to try to impose order on existence and to look for answers to unanswerable questions. Camus uses the Greek legend of Sisyphus, who is condemned by the gods for eternity to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got it to the top, as a metaphor for the individual’s persistent struggle against the essential absurdity of life. According to Camus, the first step an individual must take is to accept the fact of this absurdity. If, as for Sisyphus, suicide is not a possible response, the only alternative is to rebel by rejoicing in the act of rolling the boulder up the hill. Camus further argues that with the joyful acceptance of the struggle against defeat, the individual gains definition and identity.”
o
“A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus on Our Search for
Meaning and Why Happiness Is Our Moral Obligation”
by Maria Popova

“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) wrote in his 119-page philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” in 1942. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”

One of the most famous opening lines of the twentieth century captures one of humanity’s most enduring philosophical challenges – the impulse at the heart of Seneca’s meditations on life and Montaigne’s timeless essays and Maya Angelou’s reflections, and a wealth of human inquiry in between. But Camus, the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature after Rudyard Kipling, addressed it with unparalleled courage of conviction and insight into the irreconcilable longings of the human spirit.

In the beautifully titled and beautifully written “A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning” (public library), historian Robert Zaretsky considers Camus’s lifelong quest to shed light on the absurd condition, his “yearning for a meaning or a unity to our lives,” and its timeless yet increasingly timely legacy: If the question abides, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or biographical interest. Our pursuit of meaning, and the consequences should we come up empty-handed, are matters of eternal immediacy.

Camus pursues the perennial prey of philosophy – the questions of who we are, where and whether we can find meaning, and what we can truly know about ourselves and the world – less with the intention of capturing them than continuing the chase.”

Reflecting on the parallels between Camus and Montaigne, Zaretsky finds in this ongoing chase one crucial difference of dispositions: “Camus achieves with the Myth what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed for Montaigne’s Essays: it places “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”

For Camus, however, this astonishment results from our confrontation with a world that refuses to surrender meaning. It occurs when our need for meaning shatters against the indifference, immovable and absolute, of the world. As a result, absurdity is not an autonomous state; it does not exist in the world, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world.”

Camus himself captured this with extraordinary elegance when he wrote in “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.”

To discern these echoes amid the silence of the world, Zaretsky suggests, was at the heart of Camus’s tussle with the absurd: “We must not cease in our exploration, Camus affirms, if only to hear more sharply the silence of the world. In effect, silence sounds out when human beings enter the equation. If “silences must make themselves heard,” it is because those who can hear inevitably demand it. And if the silence persists, where are we to find meaning?”

This search for meaning was not only the lens through which Camus examined every dimension of life, from the existential to the immediate, but also what he saw as our greatest source of agency. In one particularly prescient diary entry from November of 1940, as WWII was gathering momentum, he writes: “Understand this: we can despair of the meaning of life in general, but not of the particular forms that it takes; we can despair of existence, for we have no power over it, but not of history, where the individual can do everything. It is individuals who are killing us today. Why should not individuals manage to give the world peace? We must simply begin without thinking of such grandiose aims.”

For Camus, the question of meaning was closely related to that of happiness - something he explored with great insight in his notebooks. Zaretsky writes: “Camus observed that absurdity might ambush us on a street corner or a sun-blasted beach. But so, too, do beauty and the happiness that attends it. All too often, we know we are happy only when we no longer are.”

Perhaps most importantly, Camus issued a clarion call of dissent in a culture that often conflates happiness with laziness and championed the idea that happiness is nothing less than a moral obligation. A few months before his death, Camus appeared on the TV show Gros Plan. Dressed in a trench coat, he flashed his mischievous boyish smile and proclaimed into the camera: “Today, happiness has become an eccentric activity. The proof is that we tend to hide from others when we practice it. As far as I’m concerned, I tend to think that one needs to be strong and happy in order to help those who are unfortunate.”

This wasn’t a case of Camus arriving at some mythic epiphany in his old age – the cultivation of happiness and the eradication of its obstacles was his most persistent lens on meaning. More than two decades earlier, he had contemplated “the demand for happiness and the patient quest for it” in his journal, capturing with elegant simplicity the essence of the meaningful life – an ability to live with presence despite the knowledge that we are impermanent: ”We must” be happy with our friends, in harmony with the world, and earn our happiness by following a path which nevertheless leads to death.”

But his most piercing point integrates the questions of happiness and meaning into the eternal quest to find ourselves and live our truth: ”It is not so easy to become what one is, to rediscover one’s deepest measure.”
o
Freely download “The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Albert Camus, here:

I Allegedly, "Real Estate Bubble Burst"

Full screen recommended.
I Allegedly, 2/5/24
"Real Estate Bubble Burst"
Comments here:

"How It Really Is"


Jim Kunstler, "Brace for Impact"

"Brace for Impact"
by Jim Kunstler

“It’s not enough to say it’s nuts, 
you have to explain why it’s so nuts.”
– Terrance McKenna

“Joe Biden’s” victory dance in South Carolina - down on the ol’ Democratic Party Plantation, where they grows votes - didn’t last long. By Sunday, a rogue satellite named Tucker Carlson was spotted orbiting over Russia, Russia, Russia, a country you have to say three times so that people get how serious it is. Carlson threatens to actually sit down in the same room with Putin, Putin, Putin - the antithesis of “Joe Biden,” since Putin actually operates as head-of-state - and convey Mr. P’s thoughts and opinions to the citizens of America via the rascally social media platform called “X.”

Do you realize the danger of exposing Americans to what this Putin might say? Hearing him express his thoughts about the world situation in a leisurely format - which Putin does regularly among his own people (I’ve seen him do it!) - is liable to inform Americans that their own political leadership is a party of mental illness.

Even without this new provocation of a Carlson/Putin colloquy, folks in the land of the free and the home of the brave have begun to grok just how insane things have gone under “Joe Biden” blobism. And that darn conversation comes just egg-zackly at the moment when our Senate is attempting to package a bill tying a $60-billion taxpayer gift to Ukraine with a “border security” law that will forbid more than 8,500 foreigners on any given day to enter the USA illegally. Sweet deal, huh? Er...maybe not. On the House side of Congress, Speaker Mike Johnson says, “No way, José.”

So, do you really want to chance this Putin guy actually explaining calmly and clearly to folks here how our own State Department cooked up this war in Ukraine, and keeps it going month after month? Figures such as the ex-conservative Bill Kristol (now blob cheerleader), want to prevent the Tucker Carlson satellite from re-entering the USA after its Moscow visit. Mr. Kristol is apparently under the illusion that we are at war with Russia. Somebody please inform him that this is just not so. Strictly speaking, Russia is just another European nation that Americans can visit on a visa. That’s a fact, Jack. And if you happen to be there, and you’re a journalist, and Putin, Putin, Putin agrees to an interview, well...you sit down and talk to the guy...and record it...and let people around the world decide what to think about it.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds a little...I dunno...fascist-y to me. Which is the dirty secret of the Party of Mental Illness that folks in the USA are beginning to grok. All their blather about “our democracy” is a smokescreen for the lust to shutdown free speech at all costs and push everybody around. It will be interesting to see who shows up at the jetway when Mr. Carlson actually does land back in America. The FBI, you think? With a set of leg-irons (like they did with Peter Navarro)?

Mr. Putin might also explain how immigration works in Russia, Russia, Russia, where you have to fill out an application, explain who you are, and be evaluated as worthy to enter. Not everybody makes the grade. But, surprise, surprise, surprise, not everybody seeks to enter a country with good intentions. Can you imagine that? The Party of Mental illness in America does not believe that anyone can have less than good intentions. At least that’s what they pretend (because they are mentally ill). So, anyone at all can drift across the Mexican border into the USA. They call that “diversity and inclusion.” It’s a thought problem.

We are letting a lot of people with probably less than good intentions into our country. The home folks are getting a bit riled up about it. The home folks are certainly not falling for Nikki Haley’s bullshit. Nikki Haley is trying to out-Biden “Joe Biden.” She appeared the other night as the featured guest-star on the blob’s comedy show, Saturday Night Live, doing her impression of a mentally ill presidential candidate. Nikki excels at that. She is represented by the blob’s CIA talent agency. The same agency handles the vote tabulation machines around the USA, so let’s see how Nikki does in the South Carolina Republican primary on February 24. “Joe Biden” got 97 percent of the vote there last week. Stunning and awesome! Can Nikki beat that?

The Zephyrs of spring are hardly nascent and even in the cruel depths of winter we are beginning to see an uprising stir throughout Western Civ. The farmers have had enough of being pushed around, overtaxed, and blustered and have taken the lead in disrupting the bad intentions of the Euroblob. The American truck convoy is headed to Texas to assist the Texans in controlling the border that the USAblob refuses to control. The court cases against Mr. Trump are wobbling like $1.99 gyroscopes. And who was not horrified by the act that E. Jean Carroll put on with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC? There is your political mental illness in a neat snapshot. Do you really want your country to be like that?

E. Jean Carroll is on Maddow laughing about what she’s going to do with Trump’s money: “First thing, Rachel, you and I are going to go shopping. What do you want? Penthouse? It’s yours” as her lawyer cringes beside her. pic.twitter.com/CrhKF8CPZv
- Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 30, 2024"

Gregory Mannarino, "AM/PM 2/5/24"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 2/5/24
"War Rages On With No End In Sight, 
'All Wars Are Bankers Wars' And This Will Get Worse"
Comments here:
o
Gregory Mannarino, PM 2/5/24
"Economic Meltdown 'Blame Game', 
The FED Is Laying The Groundwork Now"
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Market Data Center, Live Updates:

"World War III Prelude, 2/5/24"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/5/24
"Alert: NATO Moves Forces On Ukraine;
 Poland Issues Air Alert Warning; Russian Mobilization Begins"
Comments here:
o
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/5/24
"Ray McGovern: The Role of Intel in Attacking Iraq"
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Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/5/24
"Col. Douglas Macgregor: To Bomb or Not to Bomb Iran"
Comments here:

"Economic Market Snapshot 2/5/24"

"Economic Market Snapshot 2/5/24"
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

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Jeremiah Babe, "All Hell Is Breaking Loose"

Jeremiah Babe, 2/4/24
"All Hell Is Breaking Loose
Global Debt Hyper-Balloon; They Want War"
"All hell is breaking loose, no one is coming to save you. 
Prepare to be on your own, get your preps in order, time is running out."
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"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything"

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s 
Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and 
Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning"
by Maria Popova

“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.

That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by readingSome through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.

A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing "Man’s Search for Meaning."

As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure - especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame - these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered - as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past - they are now published in English for the first time as "Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything" (public library).

Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes: "We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this."

Generations and myriad cultural upheavals before Zadie Smith observed that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Frankl considers what “progress” even means, emphasizing the centrality of our individual choices in its constant revision: "Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age."

Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims: "Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism! How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?
[…]
Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity."

Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:

"What remained was the individual person, the human being - and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down - the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one - the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self."

In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds: "Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being."

Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless - the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:

"Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else - preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us."

He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore - the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:

"I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked - and behold,
duty was joy."

In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation - an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity - Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point: "So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down."

In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo two decades later in his superb forgotten essay on the antidote to the hour of despair and life as a moral obligation to the universe, Frankl turns the question unto itself: "At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?"

Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life - it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to - of being responsible toward - life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.

Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance - triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization: "The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.

We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?"

What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms - terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:

"One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions."

With this symphonic prelude, Frankl arrives at the essence of what he discovered about the meaning of life in his confrontation with death - a central fact of being at which a great many of humanity’s deepest seers have arrived via one path or another: from Rilke, who so passionately insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” to physicist Brian Greene, who so poetically nested our search for meaning into our mortality into the most elemental fact of the universe. Frankl writes:

"The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.
[…]
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it - or leave unfulfilled - that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness."

In the remainder of the slender and splendid "Yes to Life", Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival."

Musical Interlude: 2002, "A Gift of Life"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "A Gift of Life"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"A star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas, M16 is also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed image of the region adopts the colorful Hubble palette and includes cosmic sculptures made famous in Hubble Space Telescope close-ups of the starforming complex.
Described as elephant trunks or Pillars of Creation, dense, dusty columns rising near the center are light-years in length but are gravitationally contracting to form stars. Energetic radiation from the cluster stars erodes material near the tips, eventually exposing the embedded new stars. Extending from the ridge of bright emission left of center is another dusty starforming column known as the Fairy of Eagle Nebula. M16 lies about 7,000 light-years away, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake)."

"Maybe..."

“We’ve all heard the warnings and we’ve ignored them. We push our luck. We roll the dice. It’s human nature. When we’re told not to touch something we usually do even if we know better. Maybe because deep down, we’re just asking for trouble.”
- “Meredith Grey”, “Gray’s Anatomy”

If so, we've certainly gotten all we want... and it's only beginning.

Canadian Prepper, "Nuclear War: What They Don't Want You To Know"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/4/24
"Nuclear War: What They Don't Want You To Know"
"An in depth conversation about the lesser known
 aspects of how a nuclear conflict will be fought"
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"Someone Once Told Me..."

"Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, that reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we live it. After all, Number One, we're only mortal."
- Captain Jean-Luc Picard

"15 Restaurants Going Out Of Business Right Now"

Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 2/4/24
"15 Restaurants Going Out Of Business Right Now"
"Discover the challenges faced by 15 restaurants on the brink of closure, from iconic pizza joints like Pizza Inn and Pie Five to beloved buffets like Ryan's and Golden Corral. Explore the impact of the pandemic on well-known chains such as Dave & Buster's, Chuck E. Cheese, and IHOP. Will these dining favorites survive the storm, or are they destined to be memories of the past?"
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o
Jim Rickards, 
"America Is Getting Wiped Out! This Is What's Coming!
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The Daily "Near You?"

Athens, New York, 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

"The War Against Will"

"The War Against Will"
by Paul Rosenberg

"The modern world will allow you to join any of a thousand collectives, but it will punish you for standing on your own, as a self-willed entity. People who commit this crime understand that they are outlaws in the present world. And if at first they don’t understand that, the world makes sure they know.

The world as it is, then, is the enemy of will. This is nothing new, of course, governments have been at war against will since they began: How else can you get people to blindly obey you, to hand over half their income, and to thank you for it? People who possess a full and active will must be convinced to do things, and governments couldn’t function if they had to do that.

The present world is built around the restraint of will, and not just on the government level. Advertising, for example, is more or less devoted to implanting subconscious desires and subverting the will with them. In dysfunctional families, manipulating one another – whether by guilt, ridicule, being left out of Papa’s will or whatever – is the currency of the realm.

And so obedience, consumption and acquiescence have become cardinal virtues, and the avoidance of immediate pain the prime directive. As we might paraphrase an old apostle, this world’s God is the belly.

The Willful, For Whom Heaven And Earth Were Created: All human creativity functions on individual will. Everyone interested in creativity knows this, and here are just a couple of passages to make the point:

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is
created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
- Albert Einstein

"This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the
individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."
- John Steinbeck

It is the active will of individuals that has created everything good in this world. Really, life comes down to a choice between creativity and entropy:

• The world (the realm of officialdom, acquiescence and so on) is an incarnation of entropy, winding down and collapsing once the fuel left to it by creative men and women of the past is burned out.
• The creatives, who are willing to take blows in defense of their willfulness, and who bless the world in myriad ways

The willful, then, are creativity incarnate; the universe is and ought to be dedicated to beings of their type. It should also be populated by beings of their type, and I think someday shall be. This is not to say that entropic people can’t make their way out of entropy and join the creatives; in fact they can, and do, on a daily basis. Still, it is a gulf that must be crossed, and the only way across is to act on one’s own will, alone, and for purely self-generated reasons. That is the price.

The Automated War On Will: The great threat of the modern world is a system I call Descartes’ Demon, the Big Data/AI personalized manipulation system that is already in daily use. I held back talking about this for years, seeing that it was too much for people to bear, but the beast has progressed so far that I can’t see holding back any further.

The Matrix, as it turns out, was all too true, and its world is now the world of Facebook, Twitter and especially Google. The real-life version of The Matrix is functional, right now. (See here for explanation, or here for illustration.) What personalized manipulation is really all about is the subversion of individual will. And if you don’t think it’s happening, pull up YouTube on your smart phone, then ask your friend to pull it up on his or hers: You’re already receiving personalized pages. The world is deeply committed to passing this off as trivial and ridiculing those that don’t. But it isn’t trivial; it’s a present and actual war against free will.

We Are Inherently Creative: Humans are inherently creative beings. We cannot create matter out of nothing, but we can mold it to an infinite number and variety of uses. We are the fountains of new and beneficial action in the universe. And we ought to function that way.

I’ll leave you with a few words from Albert Schweitzer: "Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it… It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals." This is what we need… and we need it now."
Full screen recommended.
Those who know, know...

Free Download: John Steinbeck, "The Grapes Of Wrath"

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success."

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”

“...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
- John Steinbeck, "The Grapes Of Wrath"

Freely Download "The Grapes Of Wrath", by John Steinbeck, here:

Adventures With Danno, "10 Food Shortages We Are Noticing In February 2024! It's About To Get Ugly!"

Adventures With Danno, 1/4/24
"10 Food Shortages We Are Noticing
 In February 2024! It's About To Get Ugly!"
"10 food shortage Items we are seeing here in February of 2024! It's getting ugly out here as we continue to see more and more food shortages all across the U.S. and around the world."
Comments here:

Dan, I Allegedly, "Rent Bombshell - You Have to Pay Up"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 2/4/24
"Rent Bombshell - You Have to Pay Up"
"There are real problems with landlord not being able to collect their rent. Well in California it’s time to pay up. Landlords can collect the last 15 months of rent from October 2021 until January 31, 2023."
Comments here:

"How It Really Is"

 
The psychopathic insanity is just so profound...

Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 2/4/24
"America Crossed The Red Line, 
Iran & Houthis Fired Missiles After The Syria Airstrike"
Comments here:

"Why America Will Fall"

"Why America Will Fall"
by Rachel Nichols

"Please note that I’m just the messenger. The past 3 years I have been grieving for the country I once knew. The world which died forever in 2020. We no longer have a country. Half the citizens seem to hate the USA. It’s like discovering your spouse hates your marriage, openly cheats and mocks you in public but refuses divorce or separation because he gets his kicks out of punching you. He enjoys locking you up for months on end and only releasing you when you agree to wear a humiliating, uncomfortable garment. Or submit to a dangerous experimental procedure. This is how our government treats us and at least half the population thinks it’s wonderful.

They burn flags in the streets, deface national monuments and curse their native land. Then they have screeching phony outrage about the J6—blaming all Patriots for what happened there when most of us stayed home quietly minding our own business. Like we had during the Democrat riots during their “summer of love” where they smashed and burned everything on camera to post and brag about. And then laughed and lied brazenly. Calling it “peaceful.”

They are leftist cities run by people who hate their own civilization and want it destroyed. What can you do? If your spouse hates you and wants you dead, there’s no point in pleading with him or her to see a marriage counselor. You need to figure out how to escape the clutches of this dangerous, unstable creep. Not seek reconciliation or unity.

Sadly, because this insanity is everywhere, the best we can hope for is to outlast this madness in private conclaves outside the global system. Once the globalism is announced we will have no moral obligation to obey the Beast System. We are called to be good citizens of our countries. Not a One World Government which the Bible warns about.

The ugly new world the Reset creates will have no free markets to leech off the way the USSR did. Eventually it will collapse upon itself. Those behind it are acting irrationally - like a man sawing off a bough he is sitting on.

Everyone with significant wealth or power seems to be a globalist. The only kind of people who run for president in America. The GOP is just better at hiding their mutual agenda. Along with our crooked government officials threatening us is every citizen who chooses to live by lies. They cannot be trusted either.

Patriots talk and talk about elections. How this candidate or that candidate can save our country. (Nearly always Trump.) I believe that all the people running for the office of emperor president are approved by Mr. Global. Donkey or elephant, it makes no difference. He will be selected by the WEF in order to further their agenda.

Here are two big issues affecting the remains of America that are not being addressed and are beyond solving at this point anyhow.

• The incredible shrinking dollar.
• The Assyrian strategy.

Our dollar is shrinking. Nothing will make it grow again, except starting over with a fresh currency. And that comes with its own set of problems.

The primary agenda behind all the illegals pouring over our borders is not to erase Whitey, nor secure votes for Democrats, nor to use as soldiers against us. (Though extra votes and rootless soldiers are perks.) It is to erase our national culture.

There’s nothing new about it. When the Assyrians conquered a people - such as the nation of Israel - they would take away swaths of the conquered natives and replace them with people of other nations to prevent any threat of uprising. They had no common tongue or shared history or anything to unite them.

People - even on the right - can’t seem to understand what’s happening. None of it is by accident or mistake. “Doesn’t Biden realize how his policies are hurting America?” Dementia Joe may not, but his handlers do. We have already been destroyed as a nation. What used to be America’s federal government has been hollowed out and used as a Trojan horse to overthrow a once free people from within.

Nobody expected it. Many continue to live in denial. But pretending life will continue on as it did before will not make it so. Our best bet is facing the downfall of the petrol dollar and America itself by prepping and preserving bits of culture outside of the prison cities.

Remember that they failed at keeping us locked down permanently. Some of us will escape being caught in their prison cities and pods. Even if we die that’s still better - as long as we die outside. Let their muzzled enablers go into the safety prisons. They’ll get what they wanted and won’t like it. That’s punishment enough. Our best hope is building independent communities, securing local food supplies, and saving energy and ammo for the final stage before the Reset occurs."

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Jeremiah Babe, "Alert! Bankrupt America Is On The Brink Of World War"

Jeremiah Babe, 2/3/24
"Alert! Bankrupt America Is On The Brink Of World War - 
Will You Send Your Kids?"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

Full screen recommended.
Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.
Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."