"2023: The Year Humanity Died"

"2023: The Year Humanity Died"

By Seraj Assi

"As a Palestinian who was born two generations apart from the Nakba, I have never imagined that one day I would witness the genocide of my people unfold before my eyes in broad daylight. While I always feared the prospect of a Second Nakba, as many Palestinians do, I have never dreamed, not even in my worst nightmares, that I would live it, witness it, and write about it.

In my happy Palestinian innocence, I believed that even if Israel was keen on repeating the Nakba, or attempting to “finish the job of 1948,” as many Israeli officials have threatened over the years, the Free World would not allow it to happen. In my wishful thinking, I believed that the world had learned its lesson since the Nakba. Yes, the world failed the Palestinian people in 1948. Yes, it allowed Israel to carry out its ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion of Palestinians. Yes, it abandoned the Palestinian refugees, and rewarded Israel with a United Nations recognition and membership. But that was 75 years ago, the age of genocides and holocausts. A lot of progress had been made since, I told myself. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. The U.N. evolved. Human rights groups mushroomed. Mandela won the Nobel Peace. True, genocide would occur so often and so uncontested in the decades since, but after the horrific genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the leaders of the Free World seemed to have had enough! They seemed adamant not to allow another genocide to happen - Never Again! Not in Palestine, not again!

Summit after summit, they vowed that such atrocities had no place in the new century. Even when the new century in Palestine ushered in the Second Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo Accords, I still believed that the horrors of the past were in check. Even when Israel mushroomed in size, and the settlements tripled, and the apartheid system was closing in on the Palestinians in the West Bank, and the merciless siege suffocating those in Gaza, where one million children were born and raised in captivity, I still believed that that was the peak of our suffering and nothing remotely close the terrors of Rwanda or Bosnia, or indeed the First Nakba, would happen to us, because the world was watching, and it was ready to dispatch its postwar moral arsenal to stop it!

As a Palestinian, as a human being, I feel that part of me has died in this war.

I was dead wrong. For four bloody months since the Gaza Genocide first unfolded, the Free World has sat there watching, and cheering, and mocking us to death. During the first weeks, I still held onto my naïve optimism. True, the Free World betrayed Palestinians in Gaza; it allowed Israel to act with impunity; it tolerated its war crimes and mass atrocities; it denied the children of Gaza even the pretense of humanity. But ultimately it was bound to come to its senses and unleash its moral diplomacy to end this horror. So I persisted in my optimism. Perhaps the world needed more time to fathom what was happening. Perhaps it was waiting for a few more thousands of Palestinians to be killed before making its drastic move. Yet week after week, the world remained silent, blind to our deaths, deaf to our sufferings.

One month into the bloodshed, after Israel had killed 1,000 children, I said that’s it; the world would make its move now, if only to save the children! But the U.S. responded by vetoing a humanitarian cease-fire that could have saved thousands of innocent lives! A month after, when the death toll of children reached 10,000, I said enough is enough; it’s high time the world acted NOW, because humanity itself is at stake! U.N. officials had already sounded the alarm that Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children,” so no one could pretend they did not know. The time to act was now or never! Yet there was another U.S. veto; another cold hand was raised to issue a new death sentence for Palestinians. Another spit in the face of humanity!

Now I’m lost for words. I have lost faith in humanity. The staggering death toll in Gaza is humanly impossible to fathom or accept without losing our sense of shared humanity. As a Palestinian, as a human being, I feel that part of me has died in this war. I know for certain that I will not emerge from this tragedy the same person I was before. None of us will.

Gaza may be annihilated, but it’s not going anywhere. When the dust of war settles, it will sit on our global conscience for generations to come. It will be a permanent stain on our humanity. The children of Gaza will not forget, if they survive. The living will remember, and the dead will haunt us forever. Gaza will be remembered not only as the crime of the century, but also as the site of our greatest shame, where humanity failed. 2023 will go down in history as the darkest in Palestine - the year humanity died."

- https://www.commondreams.org/

o

Palestinians transport the bodies of loved ones killed during Israeli 

bombardment for burial in Tuffah neighborhood in Gaza City on June 22, 2024.

June 22, 2024: Now 37,551 innocent men, old people, women and 16,000 children killed, 85,911 wounded, and another 8,000 missing and buried under the rubble by US supplied 2,000 lb bombs, which WE to our eternal shame and disgrace allow and support! And, except for the Houthis and Hezbollah, the world sits silently watching this horror and does nothing! Shakespeare wrote, "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." Sartre said, "This is Hell, cleverly disguised just enough to keep us from escaping." I believe them... - CP

- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/l

"This Is Really Starting To Look A Lot Like Ancient Rome"

"This Is Really Starting To Look 

A Lot Like Ancient Rome"

by Simon Black

"In the late summer of 408 AD, a barbarian army under the command of Alaric, king of the Visigoths, set out on a leisurely march across the Italian countryside towards the city of Rome…so that he could burn it to the ground. Alaric had been promised money by the Roman government in exchange for a military alliance between Rome and the Visigoths; but just before the money was supposed to have been paid, the Romans canceled the deal. Talk about a bonehead move.

Alaric was a decorated warrior at the head of a powerful army. And the Western Roman Empire, by comparison, was barely even functional anymore. The government was bankrupt, the currency was a joke, the economy was in the dumps, the military was weak, the borders were nonexistent…and there was no sense of unity in Roman society.

So it clearly made no sense to turn Alaric into an enemy. But then again, the emperor in the west was a weak, incompetent stooge named Honorius, whose legacy is so horrendous that he consistently ranks among the worst emperors in Roman history. And there’s some pretty stiff competition on that list. Alaric, to his credit, actually tried to avoid conflict with the Romans and work out a resolution. But Honorius refused to negotiate…so Alaric gathered his troops and marched towards Rome.

Now, at that point in history, the city of Rome itself wasn’t even the capital of the western empire anymore; it had been moved to Milan, and then to Ravenna. But Rome was still among the largest and most prominent cities in the world, even in the early fifth century. And Alaric knew that sacking it would send shockwaves across the empire.

Alaric and his barbarian army were practically unopposed on their way to Rome; according to the ancient historian Zosimus, in fact, their march was so leisurely it was as if they were “at some festival” rather than heading to war. They arrived in the fall of 408 AD and encircled the city, cutting it off from any resupply…meaning it would only be a matter of time before residents all starved to death and the Visigoths plundered the city.

The destruction of Rome was an unthinkable cataclysm. And so, with the barbarians literally at the gates, Honorius finally agreed to negotiate a deal. And it was a costly one - many times more expensive than their original agreement. That should have been the end of the story… and yet Honorius found a way to screw it all up again.

Early the following year in 409 AD, Honorius tried to double-cross Alaric by sending troops to ambush the Visigoths. The attack failed, and Alaric was infuriated by this violation of their treaty. Again, to his credit, Alaric tried negotiate a peaceful solution, and he asked for lands, titles, and tribute as compensation. But Honorius-- who at that point was a highly experienced diplomat-- instead sent an insulting letter back to Alaric. Talks quickly broke down, and Alaric turned back towards Rome in late 409.

Once again - and only after the barbarians were at the gate -  the government finally agreed to Alaric’s demands… and the destruction of Rome was narrowly avoided for a second time. Yet then Honorius managed to screw it up for the third time in a row. The following year, in 410 AD, Alaric and Honorius were set to meet near the capital city of Ravenna to discuss peace and cooperation. But Alaric and his men were ambushed just prior to the meeting by Roman troops. He survived. And, completely fed up with Honorius, Alaric took his troops back to Rome for the third (and final) time in two years.

The Visigoths entered the city on August 24, 410 AD through Rome’s Salarian Gate, about 3 kilometers north of the Colosseum. Alaric and his men spent three full days sacking the city. Almost everything of value was stolen or destroyed. Cultural treasures were defaced, monuments were ripped down, buildings were burned to the ground, and the city’s residents were killed or enslaved.

It was difficult to not think of this story when news broke about the debt ceiling ‘resolution’ late last week, because the two situations share many parallels. The sack of Rome in 410 AD was a crisis of their own making. Decades of terrible strategic and financial decisions had reduced Rome to a shell of its former greatness, weakening the western empire considerably. Their enemies noticed.

The United States is in a similar position; decades of terrible decisions have led to a $37.4 trillion national debt that grows by leaps and bounds every single year. Through its completely irresponsible addiction to spending, the government has weakened the country considerably… and America’s adversaries have noticed.

In the early 400s, Rome was led by a complete buffoon who, despite all of his years in government service, engineered a crisis by refusing to negotiate or to take an obvious risk seriously…only to ultimately cave and narrowly avoid an earth-shattering catastrophe.

This is a clear similarity to the debt ceiling fiasco that we see playing out now. The risk was obvious…and yet the guy who shakes hands with thin air refused to negotiate until the last minute, just barely averting disaster. Waiting until the last minute to just barely avoid a major catastrophe is not a viable problem solving strategy. Neither is kicking the can down the road.

Yet every few years the debt ceiling becomes a major crisis. They consistently wait until the last minute, hastily negotiate a short-term patch, and kick the can down the road for another few years while they take the country even deeper into debt, until the whole cycle begins anew.

The Romans tried to do the same thing with the Visigoths: negotiate a terrible, last minute solution. Make the problem worse. Repeat. This approach didn’t work in the early 400s, and it won’t work today. As the sack of Rome demonstrated, when you’re constantly taking things to the brink of disaster, eventually someone is going to go too far.

A worldwide financial meltdown triggered by the United States defaulting on its debt was very narrowly avoided. This time. Who’s to say that when this comes up again in 2025 that some idiot politician won’t take things too far? The really ridiculous thing about the debt ceiling crisis was that it shows the inability of the US government to negotiate responsibly…with itself! This was literally a case of American politicians trying to resolve their differences with other American politicians. How is this going to work out when the people on the other side of the table aren’t from another US political party…but from the Chinese Communist Party?

It’s worth thinking about given how the specter of conflict continues rising; just over the weekend, a Chinese naval vessel intentionally maneuvered to within 150 meters of US and Canadian ships in the Taiwan Strait. And this was just one of many obvious escalations in recent months.

The last point worth mentioning is that the sack of Rome illustrates how dangerous complacency can be. When Alaric showed up in 408 AD for the first time, the city’s destruction was avoided. When he showed up the second time in 409 AD, the city’s destruction was avoided again. So you can probably imagine that when Alaric and his barbarian army were on the way to Rome for the third time in 410 AD, the city’s residents probably felt confident that their leaders would once again figure out a last minute solution. That misplaced confidence in their incompetent leaders cost Romans dearly."

- https://www.sovereignman.com/

"The Only Consequence..."

"What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end,

of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."

- John Ruskin

Greg Hunter, "No Way Financial System Survives"

"No Way Financial System Survives"

by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Financial writer and precious metals broker Bill Holter has been documenting all the unpayable debt that has been building up in the financial system like cancer. The latest black hole of default is coming from a big bank in Japan. Norinchukin Bank is selling $63 billion in Treasuries and other sovereign bonds to stay afloat. Then there is recent news announced by the FDIC that 63 US banks (the names are being kept secret) have more than $500 billion in losses, and let’s not forget about the trillions in losses sitting on the books of European banks ready to suck the world into a black debt hole. This is just a few of many on a long list of destabilizing problems that can tank the entire over-indebted financial system. 

Holter warns, “The list is so long, it could be a banking problem. It could be a derivatives problem. It could be a derivatives problem in the stock market, the bond market and you could see a failure to deliver in silver. Some type of warfare could crash the system. You could see warfare in Ukraine, Israel or Tiawan. The system is so unstable, at this point, it could be anything that could bring it down. Unpayable debt is not just a US problem. This is all over the world. Central banks are having to issue huge amounts of debt because we are in the exponential decay phase. We are exactly where Richard Russell said we would be 20 years ago. It’s inflate or die, and the only way to inflate is to create more money supply.”

Add to that the $10 trillion in debt the US Government has to roll over by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the US government piles on $1 trillion in new debt every 100 days. What could go wrong?

Holter said the last time he was on USAW that there was a little less than a 50% chance we would even have an election. Now, he predicts it is more likely there will be no 2024 Presidential Election. Holter says, “There is no way the system, as it is now, survives. It’s mathematically impossible. So, if it is mathematically impossible, are they going to blow smoke up until the day it blows up? Or are they going to do something to blow it up and then say our programs and policies were working except for XYZ this or whatever. They have to kick the table over. They cannot allow the table to fall over on its own because then there is going to be finger pointing. To avoid the finger pointing, they have got to kick the table over.”

Holter also thinks gold is going to exponential numbers to back all the debt the USA has. If you go with the 8,030 tons of gold the government claims is in Fort Knox, you will need a dollar price of gold at “$125,000 per ounce for 100% gold backing of the dollar.”

Holter also says, “The dollar is being pushed out of the global financial system. Demand for dollars is shrinking at a time when borrowing demand is rising.” This is a going to be a disaster for America and anyone holding dollars in the future.

In closing, Holter says, “The financial collapse that is coming will be worse than anything we have ever experienced. This is going to be far worse than the Great Depression simply because society itself is far worse. Back in the Great Depression, you had neighbors helping neighbors. Today you will have neighbors picking on other neighbors like vultures.” There is much more in the 51-minute interview.

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One 

with financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter:

- https://rumble.com/

"The Very Idea..."

"In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth,

and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the

alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted."

- Michael Musto

"Oh How It Really Is"

 

"Cosmic Consolation for Human Hardship: The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on How to Live with Life"

"Cosmic Consolation for Human Hardship: 

The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on How to Live with Life"

by Maria Popova

"In those seasons of being when life boughs you down low with world-weariness, when the sun of your soul is collapsing into a black hole, when you despair of humanity’s twin capacity for inhumanity and are no longer able to hold without heartache Maya Angelou’s eternal observation that we are creatures “whose hands can strike with such abandon that in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness” - in those seasons of being, there is great solace in remembering that what we call human nature, with all of its terrors and transcendences and violent contradictions, is a humble subset of nature itself: In nature, where stars are always being born and die and give us life, creation and destruction are always syncopating; in nature, the seasons are always changing; in nature, every loss reveals what we are made of, and that is a beautiful thing.

There is great comfort and calibration in trusting, not with the faith of the pious but with the faith of the naturalist, that even the bleakest seasons pass, and even the most violent forces are counterbalanced by the forces of vitality - cosmic calculus of which the very existence of life is living proof. Such awareness is not a negation of the need for morality, of our moral calling as human beings to right the forces that violate life, but an affirmation of it - for morality would not exist if suffering did not exist.

We are human because we are sensitive to both, susceptible to both, moved by both. That is what the great naturalist and prose-poet of nature John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores in an exquisite 1904 essay reflection titled “An Outlook upon Life,” included a century later in The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs (public library). In the closest Burroughs came to formulating a personal philosophy, distilling his vast view of life into a kind of credo worth borrowing, he writes: "I was born under happy stars, with a keen sense of wonder, which has never left me… and with no exaggerated notion of my own deserts. I have shared the common lot, and have found it good enough for me."

Echoing Whitman - who owes his cultural reverence to Burroughs and who, in the wake of his paralytic stroke, considered what makes life worth living and counseled to “tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies”  Burroughs adds: "Unlucky is the man who is born with great expectations, and who finds nothing in life quite up to the mark. One of the best things a man can bring into the world with him is a natural humility of spirit. About the next best thing he can bring, and they usually go together, is an appreciative spirit - a loving and susceptible heart.

A century and an epoch of discoveries before physicist Freeman Dyson observed that “our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so,” Burroughs exclaims that this world is “a mighty interesting place to live in” and invites the reader into the cosmic reverie that seems to have been the all-suffusing atmosphere of his own life: "If I had my life to live over again, and had my choice of celestial bodies, I am sure I should take this planet, and iI should choose these men and women for my friends and companions. This great rolling sphere with its sky, its stars, its sunrises and sunsets, and with its outlook into infinity - what could be more desirable? What more satisfying? Garlanded by the seasons, embosomed in sidereal influences, thrilling with continents - one might ransack the heaves in vain for a better or more picturesque abode."

Half a century before the Nobel-winning founding father of quantum mechanics Erwin Schrödinger’s dazzling illumination of consciousness as a function of the universe, Burroughs adds: "We may fancy that there might be a better universe, but we cannot conceive of a better, because our minds are the outcome of things as they are, and all our ideas of value are based upon the lessons we learn in this world."

More than the unsurpassable beauty of the planet, however, Burroughs celebrates the sheer sense of belonging to a world - to a totality of being across species and landscapes, a totality the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel had given the name ecology when Burroughs was just beginning his literary life while working as a treasury clerk. He exults: "O to share the great, sunny, joyous life of the earth! to be as happy as the birds are! as contented as the cattle on the hills! as the leaves of the trees that dance and rustle in the wind! as the waters that murmur and sparkle to the sea! To be able to see that the sin and sorrow and suffering of the world are a necessary part of the natural course of things, a phase of the law of growth and development that runs through the universe, bitter in its personal application, but illuminating when we look upon life as a whole!"

A generation after the grief-savaged Darwin solaced his personal loss in the scientific knowledge that the death of the individual is what propels the evolution of the species, and an epoch before science equipped us its cosmic consolation of what happens when we die, Burroughs adds: "Without death and decay, how could life go on? Without what we call sin (which is another name for imperfection) and the struggle consequent upon it, how could our development proceed?

Look at the grass, the flowers, the sweet serenity and repose of the fields - at what price it has all been bought, of what warring of the elements, of what overturnings and pulverizings and shiftings of land and sea… We deplore the waste and suffering, but these things never can be eliminated from the process of evolution. As individuals we can mitigate them; as races and nations we have to endure them… and the evolution of life on the globe, including the life of man, has gone on and still goes on, because, in the conflict of forces, the influences that favored life and forwarded it have in the end triumphed."

In a lovely antidote to human exceptionalism, Burroughs celebrates our shared inheritance with the rest of life, itself exceptional - a bright gift of chance against the staggering cosmic odds of nonexistence: "Our good fortune is not that there are or may be special providences and dispensations, as our [ancestors] believed, by which we may escape this or that evil, but our good fortune is that we have our part and lot in the total scheme of things, that we share in the slow optimistic tendency of the universe, that we have life and health and wholeness on the same terms as the trees, the flowers, the grass, the animals have, and pay the same price for our well-being, in struggle and effort, that they pay. That is our good fortune. There is nothing accidental or exceptional about it. It is not by the favor or disfavor of some of some god that things go well or ill with us, but it is by the authority of the whole universe, by the consent and cooperation of every force above us and beneath us. If we or our fortunes go down prematurely beneath the currents, it is because the currents are vital, and do never and can never cease nor turn aside."

Rachel Carson - the twentieth century’s great prose-poet of nature, recipient of the John Burroughs Medal, the Nobel of nature writing - would echo this sentiment in her sublime meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life; James Baldwin - the twentieth century’s great prose-poet of human nature - would echo it in his classic insistence that we must “say Yes to life and embrace it whenever it is found” because “the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, [and] the sea does not cease to grind down rock.” A century before Maya Angelou serenaded our shared destiny on this “lonely planet” adrift “past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns,” Burroughs adds:

"Nature is as regardless of a planet or a sun as of a bubble upon the river, has one no more at heart than the other. How many suns have gone out? How many planets have perished?… She has infinite worlds left, and out of old she makes new… Nature wins in every game because she bets on both sides. If her suns or systems fail, it is, after all, her laws that succeed. A burnt-out sun vindicates the constancy of her forces… In an orchard of apple trees some of the fruit is wormy, some scabbed, some dwarfed, from one cause or another; but Nature approves of the worm, and of the fungus that makes the scab, and of the aphid that makes the dwarf, just as sincerely as she approves of the perfect fruit. She holds the stakes of both sides; she wins, whoever loses… Peace, satisfaction, true repose, come only through effort, and then not for long."

With this, Burroughs returns to the animating question of his reflection - what, amid the universe’s ceaseless dance of dissolution, makes human life worth living and what, amid nature’s indifference to our notions of good and evil, backbones a good life: "To have a mind eager to know the great truths and broad enough to take them in, and not get lost in the maze of apparent contradictions, is undoubtedly the highest good."

Complement with Marcus Aurelius on the good luck of your bad luck and Simone Weil on how to make use of our suffering, then revisit Mary Shelley - envisioning a twenty-first-century world savaged by a deadly pandemic, from a nineteenth-century world savaged by the decade-long Napoleonic Wars - on nature’s consolations and what makes life worth living. "

- https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/j

Dan, I Allegedly, "It's Time to Pay the Ransom"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly AM 6/23/24

"It's Time to Pay the Ransom"

"Now we hear that CDK, who was hacked this week, will be paying a multi-million

dollar ransom. This is an awful precedent. Ransom is big business."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: A Great Fall..."

Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/23/24

"Markets, A Look Ahead: A Great Fall..."

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Israeli Nuclear Plant Targeted! War Imminent! Mass Extrication! Samson Option; B-52 Nukes"

Canadian Prepper, 6/22/24

"Alert! Israeli Nuclear Plant Targeted! War Imminent! 

Mass Extrication! Samson Option; B-52 Nukes"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

"Russia May be Forced to Launch a Nuclear Attack Preemptively"

Musical Interlude: 2002, "We Meet Again"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "We Meet Again"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is a dominant member of a small galaxy group a mere 60 million light-years away toward the aquatically intimidating constellation Cetus. Seen edge-on, the island universe spans over 100,000 light-years, a little larger than our own Milky Way galaxy. The colorful, spiky stars decorating this cosmic portrait of NGC 1055 are in the foreground, well within the Milky Way. But the telltale pinkish star forming regions are scattered through winding dust lanes along the distant galaxy's thin disk.

With a smattering of even more distant background galaxies, the deep image also reveals a boxy halo that extends far above and below the central bulge and disk of NGC 1055. The halo itself is laced with faint, narrow structures, and could represent the mixed and spread out debris from a satellite galaxy disrupted by the larger spiral some 10 billion years ago."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

"When the Sky Is No More Than Remembered Light: Mark Strand Reads His Poignant Poem 'The End'”

"When the Sky Is No More Than Remembered Light:

Mark Strand Reads His Poignant Poem 'The End'”

- by Maria Popova

“Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing, 

when the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.”

“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention,” the Pulitzer-winning poet Mark Strand (April 11, 1934–November 29, 2014) observed in contemplating the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe. And yet this universe in which we live is predicated on impermanence, and the lucky accident of our existence is crowned with the certitude of its end from the start. Why, then, are we always so shocked by the finitude of all we hold dear and, above all, by our own mortality? Few are those who can say with sincerity, like Rilke did an exquisite 1923 letter, 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.” Instead, we spend our lives shuddering at any reminder of our inevitable end, unsalved by the miracle of having lived at all.

Montaigne articulated the central paradox of being perfectly in 16th-century meditation on death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Still, lament we do, and some of our greatest art gives voice to that lamentation.

That paradox is what Strand explores with transcendent courage and curiosity in his poem “The End,” found in his "Collected Poems" (public library) - the trove of truth and beauty that gave us Strand’s love letter to dreams.

In this hauntingly beautiful recording, courtesy of The New York Public Library, an aged Strand reads his poignant poem shortly before he repaid his own debt to mortality:

"The End"

by Mark Strand

"Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,

Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like

When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,

Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,

When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down

No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.

When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus

And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,

Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing

When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end."

Complement with the lyrical "Duck, Death and the Tulip", Marcus Aurelius on mortality and the key to living fully, and the great Zen master Seung Sahn Soen-sa’s explanation of death and the life-force to a child, then revisit Strand’s celebration of clouds and everything they mean."

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

The Poet: Fitz-Greene Halleck, "Twilight"

"Twilight"

"There is an evening twilight of the heart,

When its wild passion-waves are lulled to rest,

And the eye sees life’s fairy scenes depart,

As fades the day-beam in the rosy west.

’Tis with a nameless feeling of regret

We gaze upon them as they melt away,

And fondly would we bid them linger yet,

But Hope is round us with her angel lay,

Hailing afar some happier moonlight hour;

Dear are her whispers still, though lost their early power.

In youth the cheek was crimsoned with her glow;

Her smile was loveliest then; her matin song

Was heaven’s own music, and the note of woe

Was all unheard her sunny bowers among.

Life’s little word of bliss was newly born;

We knew not, cared not, it was born to die,

Flushed with the cool breeze and the dews of morn,

With dancing heart we gazed on the pure sky,

And mocked the passing clouds that dimmed its blue,

Like our own sorrows then - as fleeting and as few.

And manhood felt her sway too - on the eye,

Half realized, her early dreams burst bright,

Her promised bower of happiness seemed nigh,

Its days of joy, its vigils of delight;

And though at times might lower the thunder-storm,

And the red lightnings threaten, still the air

Was balmy with her breath, and her loved form,

The rainbow of the heart was hovering there.

’Tis in life’s noontide she is nearest seen,

Her wreath the summer flower, her robe of summer green.

But though less dazzling in her twilight dress,

There’s more of heaven’s pure beam about her now;

That angel-smile of tranquil loveliness,

Which the heart worships, glowing on her brow;

That smile shall brighten the dim evening star

That points our destined tomb, nor e’er depart

Till the faint light of life is fled afar,

And hushed the last deep beating of the heart;

The meteor-bearer of our parting breath,

A moonbeam in the midnight cloud of death."

- Fitz-Greene Halleck

Full screen recommended.

Moody Blues, "The Sunset", "Twilight Time"

"What Is The Point?"

"What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!"

- Douglas Adams, “The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide”

"Just Three Words"

"Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit."

- A.W. and J.C. Hare, "Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers," 1827

"Just Three Words"

by Paul Rosenberg

"The statement I’ll be making today is simple… very simple. Nonetheless, I think it’s of tremendous importance. It’s the type of thing that, if kept sufficiently in mind, can revise your mental universe. It’s the type of thing that makes me want to write, “Meditate on this at least once per day for several years.” This concept can not only revamp you, but could revamp humanity. So, here are those three words: Life reverses entropy. If that sounds too simple or not entirely clear, no problem; I’ll continue. (You can find lengthier discourses in our subscription letters.)

Entropy Versus Life: Entropy (a physics term) is the nature of all inanimate things: rocks, water, air, and so on. These all wind down and wear out eventually. Entropy breaks up concentrations of energy and things; it spreads them out till they are all dispersed and everything is a neutral and useless mass. All inanimate things eventually wind down and wear out. By themselves, they remain tied to entropy.

Living things, on the other hand, reverse entropy. A fruit tree, for example, takes in gasses from our atmosphere, light from the sun, minerals and water from the ground. Then it organizes, concentrates, and harmonizes them… and produces oranges, apples, and so on.

The same can be said for all living things. All of them take material from the entropic, inanimate world and concentrate it, making it useful. This is what life does. And more than the “characteristics of life” we were forced to memorize and repeat in school, this is the nature of life. Truth be told, it should be taught as the central observation of life: Life is recognized by its reversal of entropy.

Mere matter does not organize itself. Life, on the other hand, continues itself only by concentrating, organizing, and productively using mere matter. (There are certain crystals that seem to grow. Properly, however, they accrete rather than grow.)

Plants and animals reverse entropy very effectively. Each, however, is able to reverse entropy in certain ways, but not others. Mankind is the great exception; we can reverse entropy willfully. We choose how we will reverse entropy, and we can choose more and newer ways, seemingly without end… or we can evade such choices.

In this way the old idea of mankind being superior to the beasts is entirely correct; there is nothing on this planet that is remotely like us. We really are “the crown of creation.”

Back to the Three Words: If all of this is true or even just substantially true, there are huge implications:

ͦ  If life is the thing that lies at the center of usefulness and survival (entropy would eventually erase all usefulness and survival), then the function, growth, and positive evolution of life, especially of human life, is a cardinal value… the cardinal value.

ͦ   And if this is so, the restraint of life must be considered a cardinal offense.

ͦ  The subjugation of life and its actions to man-made rules – whether sold as “the wisdom of the ancients,” “the voice of the people,” or whatever – becomes a mass transgression against the functions of life, and thus a transgression against both survival and thriving.

If the three words are true – or anywhere close to true – a great many things are opened to being questioned, and thus to being improved. And so again, I think this is a concept worth holding in your mind and examining over protracted periods of time."

- https://freemansperspective.com/

Freely download "Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers," 

by A.W. and J.C. Hare, here:

- https://ia904500.us.archive.org/

The Daily "Near You?"

Saint Charles, Illinois, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 6/21/24

"INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

Full screen recommended.

Time Of India, 6/22/24

"Israel On High Alert As Hezbollah 

May Launch 'Large-Scale Attack'"

"Latest media reports suggest a massive large-scale attack by Iran-backed Hezbollah group on Israel. According to reports, Hezbollah chief Nasrallah is fearing pre-emptive attack by Israeli Defense Forces and hence is planning to initiate large-scale attack beyond the recent activities."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Times Now, 6/22/24

"What's Hezbollah's 'Grand Welcome' Plan For IDF 

If Israel Attacks Lebanon In Full-Blown War?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

The Poet: John Donne, "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

"For Whom the Bell Tolls"

"No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee."

- John Donne

"Mankind's Favorite Pastime..."

Full screen recommended.

Steve Cutts, "A Brief Disagreement"

"A visual journey into mankind's

favorite pastime throughout the ages."

o

"War"

"War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. Warfare refers to the common activities and characteristics of types of war, or of wars in general. Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant suffering and casualties. While some war studies scholars consider war a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature, others argue it is a result of specific socio-cultural, economic, or ecological circumstances.

The earliest evidence of prehistoric warfare is a Mesolithic cemetery in Jebel Sahaba, which has been determined to be about 13,400 years old. About forty-five percent of the skeletons there displayed signs of violent death, specifically traumatic bone lesions.

Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe. Estimates for total deaths due to war vary wildly. For the period 3000 BCE until 1991, estimates range from 145 million to 2 billion. In one estimate, primitive warfare prior to 3000 BCE has been thought to have claimed 400 million victims based on the assumption that it accounted for the 15.1% of all deaths. For comparison, an estimated 1,680,000,000 people died from infectious diseases in the 20th century."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War

Human nature...We just can't help ourselves, can we? And now the totally insane psychopaths in charge are determined to get us all killed in a world-destroying nuclear war. There's something profoundly, tragically wrong with human DNA...

"Russia May be Forced to Launch a Nuclear Attack Preemptively"

"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

- Vishnu, Bhagavad-Gita

o

Full screen recommended.

Hindustan Times, 6/22/24

"Putin’s Nuke Warning After Biden Allows Ukraine 

To Hit Deep Inside Russia: 'Use All Means Available’"

"Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow will upgrade its nuclear arsenal. Addressing graduates from Russian military institutions, Putin also threatened to use all means available to defend itself should the state's existence be at stake. Putin's warning came after the US allowed Ukraine to use American weapons to strike Russian targets across the frontline." 

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Prof. John Mearsheimer, 6/21/24

"Russia May be Forced to Launch a 

Nuclear Attack Preemptively"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Annie Jacobsen and Lex Fridman, 4/23/24

"How A Nuclear War Starts: 

Second-by-Second Timeline"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Nuclear War Expert Annie Jacobsen, 5/13/24

"The First 20 Minutes of a 

Nuclear Attack Looks Like This"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Annie Jacobsen, 3/12/24

"Why Our Nuke Interceptor Missiles Won't 

Save Us From a Nuclear Holocaust"

"Annie Jacobsen is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author. Her newest book "Nuclear War: A Scenario" looks deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment & is based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

"The Devastating True Scale of Nuclear Weapons"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! USA Is Going To War! Russia 'Gave Advanced Nuclear Missile' To N. Korea!"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 6/21/24

"Alert! USA Is Going To War! 

Russia 'Gave Advanced Nuclear Missile' To N. Korea!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "We're In Massive Trouble And You Know It; US Economy On Life Support"

Jeremiah Babe, 6/21/24

"We're In Massive Trouble And You Know It; 

US Economy On Life Support"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Inner Light"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Inner Light"

"A Look to the Heavens, With Chet Raymo"

“Reaching For The Stars”

by Chet Raymo

“Here is a spectacular detail of the Eagle Nebula, a gassy star-forming region of the Milky Way Galaxy, about 7,000 light-years away. The Eagle lies in the equatorial constellation Serpens. If you went out tonight and looked at this part of the sky – more or less midway between Arcturus and Antares – you might see nothing at all. The brightest star in Serpens is of the third magnitude, perhaps invisible in an urban environment. No part of the Eagle Nebula is available to unaided human vision. How big is the nebula in the sky? Hold a pinhead at arm’s length and it would just about cover the spire. I like to think about things not mentioned in the APOD descriptions.

If the Sun were at the bottom of the spire, Alpha centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, would be about halfway up the column. Sirius, the brightest star in Earth’s sky, would be near the top. Let’s say you sent out a spacecraft from the bottom of the spire that travelled at the speed of the two Voyager craft that are now traversing the outer reaches of the Solar System. It would take more than 200,000 years to reach the top of the spire.

The Hubble Space Telescope cost a lot of money to build, deploy, and operate. It has done a lot of good science. But perhaps the biggest return on the investment is to turn on ordinary folks like you and me to the scale and complexity of the universe. The human brain evolved, biologically and culturally, in a universe conceived on the human scale. We resided at its center. The stars were just up there on the dome of night. The Sun and Moon attended our desires. “All the world’s a stage,” wrote Shakespeare, and he meant it literally; the cosmos was designed by a benevolent creator as a stage for the human drama. All of that has gone by the board. Now we can travel in our imagination for 200,000 years along a spire of glowing, star-birthing gas that is only the tiniest fragment of a nebula that is only the tiniest fragment of a galaxy that is but one of hundreds of billions of galaxies we can potentially see with our telescopes.

Most of us still live psychologically in the universe of Dante and Shakespeare. The biggest intellectual challenge of our times is how to bring our brains up to speed. How to shake our imaginations out of the slumber of centuries. How to learn to live purposefully in a universe that is apparently indifferent to the human drama. How to stretch the human story to match the light-years.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"The Great Stagger"

"The Great Stagger"

by The Zman

"One of the curious things about the Roman Empire is how it managed to stagger on for so long after the second century. The third century is actually called The Crisis of the Third Century, because the empire was in chaos. Yet, the empire managed to get through that period and carry on for roughly two more centuries. In time, Historians will probably puzzle over the same question regarding America. How is it that it staggers on despite the obvious problems?

A popular theme in science fiction is one where the human explorers stumble upon alien technology and they are baffled as to what it does. It’s not that they know the purpose but cannot figure out how to make it work. It’s that they don’t understand the purpose of the technology. The implication is that the aliens were so advanced that they were creating tools to solve problems humans have yet to contemplate. The gap between the aliens and humans is so great that it cannot be bridged.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind when thinking about the modern world. The evidence is pretty good that Western man is dumber than his ancestors. We have more overall knowledge than our ancestors, but our ability to add to it is in sharp decline along with our ability to use it. The people in charge now struggle to do the basics of government, like maintain order and the infrastructure. In America, streets are crumbling and there are regular power failures in parts of the country.

A good small-scale example is the city of Baltimore. All of the machinery that was put in place back when it was an important city is still in place. The people running that machinery today are not doing so well. They clearly lack the intellectual firepower to operate that machinery. Baltimore is one of the most dangerous cities in the world and it is suffering from a steady population decline. The political class is so incompetent they can’t even run the graft system properly.

This was all true before the Covid panic. One thing that kept Baltimore afloat was the tourist and sports industry. In the summer, tourists would come to the well-guarded inner harbor. People from the surrounding areas would come in for sports games and the surrounding restaurants. All of that was shuttered by the panic, which means the tens of millions in tax dollars never arrived. Then there was the cost of the Covid panic itself, which had further crippled the city administration.

When you look at many American cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Newark and so on, the question is not “How did they get to this point?” The question is, “How have they not collapsed by now?” Part of it, of course, is the surrounding infrastructure that keeps them propped up. In the case of Baltimore, the rest of the state is taxed to keep Baltimore City government going. Federal dollars pour in to keep the cops on the streets and the schools open for business.

That’s fine for cities, but that cannot work for the country as a whole. Like those cities, the national government is increasing incompetent. Both official political parties are in such steep decline that the next election will offer a choice between another carny barker and a certified dementia patient. The sober minded will always feels as if the current age sits on the shoulder’s of giants, but the gap between the best we have today and just a few generations ago is breathtaking.

Of course, no one can really know what is happening. The media told us over 50 million people were thrown out of work due to the panic. The empty streets seem to confirm it, but they also tell us unemployment is below 10%. The stock market has returned to the levels it was at before the panic. The media also tells us that the riots we saw were a figment of our imagination. How can anything work when no one can be sure of anything being told to them by the rulers?

Like Rome for close to three centuries, America staggers on, despite the problems and the decline of the ruling class. In the case of Rome, there was no organized force capable of toppling her. In the case of America, the global order assumes America will be the pivot point, the fulcrum on which order balances. As long as people are being fed and have shelter, they will not rise up to challenge the rulers. Like Rome, the great stagger will continue until the corpse of the empire collapses."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/