Friday, July 12, 2024

"The Old Evil"

"The Old Evil"
I returned to occupied Palestine, from where I had reported for The New York Times,
after two decades. I experienced once more the visceral evil of Israel’s occupation.
by Chris Hedges

Ramallah, Occupied Palestine: "It comes back in a rush, the stench of raw sewage, the groan of the diesel, sloth-like Israeli armored personnel carriers, the vans filled with broods of children, driven by chalky faced colonists, certainly not from here, probably from Brooklyn or somewhere in Russia or maybe Britain. Little has changed. The checkpoints with their blue and white Israeli flags dot the roads and intersections. The red-tiled roofs of the colonist settlements - illegal under international law - dominate hillsides above Palestinian villages and towns. They have grown in number and expanded in size. But they remain protected by blast barriers, concertina wire and watchtowers surrounded by the obscenity of lawns and gardens. The colonists have access to bountiful sources of water in this arid landscape that the Palestinians are denied.

The winding 26-foot high concrete wall that runs the 440 mile length of occupied Palestine, with its graffiti calling for liberation, murals with the Al-Aqsa mosque, faces of martyrs and the grinning and bearded mug of Yasser Arafat - whose concessions to Israel in the Oslo agreement made him, in the words of Edward Said, “the Pétain of the Palestinians” - give the West Bank the feel of an open air prison. The wall lacerates the landscape. It twists and turns like some huge, fossilized antediluvian snake severing Palestinians from their families, slicing Palestinian villages in half, cutting communities off from their orchards, olive trees and fields, dipping and rising out of wadis, trapping Palestinians in the Jewish state’s updated version of a Bantustan.

It has been over two decades since I reported from the West Bank. Time collapses. The smells, sensations, emotions and images, the lilting cadence of Arabic and the miasma of sudden and violent death that lurks in the air, evokes the old evil. It is as if I never left.

I am in a battered black Mercedes driven by a friend in his thirties who I will not name to protect him. He worked construction in Israel but lost his job - like nearly all Palestinians employed in Israel - on Oct. 7. He has four children. He is struggling. His savings have dwindled. It is getting hard to buy food, pay for electricity, water and petrol. He feels under siege. He is under siege. He has little use for the quisling Palestinian Authority. He dislikes Hamas. He has Jewish friends. He speaks Hebrew. The siege is grinding him, and everyone around him, down. “A few more months like this and we’re finished,” he says puffing nervously on a cigarette. “People are desperate. More and more are going hungry.”

We are driving the winding road that hugs the barren sand and scrub hillsides snaking up from Jericho, rising from the salt-rich Dead Sea, the lowest spot on the earth, to Ramallah. I will meet my friend, the novelist Atef Abu Saif, who was in Gaza on Oct. 7 with his 15-year-old son, Yasser. They were visiting family when Israel began its scorched earth campaign. He spent 85 days enduring and writing daily about the nightmare of the genocide. His collection of haunting diary entries have been published in his book “Don’t Look Left.” He escaped the carnage though the border with Egypt at Rafah, traveled to Jordan and returned home to Ramallah. But the scars of the genocide remain. Yasser rarely leaves his room. He does not engage with his friends. Fear, trauma and hatred are the primary commodities imparted by the colonizers to the colonized.

“I still live in Gaza,” Atef tells me later. “I am not out. Yasser still hears bombing. He still sees corpses. He does not eat meat. Red meat reminds him of the flesh he picked up when he joined the rescue parties during the massacre in Jabalia, and the flesh of his cousins. I sleep on a mattress on the floor as I did in Gaza when we lived in a tent. I lie awake. I think of those we left behind waiting for sudden death.”

We turn a corner on a hillside. Cars and trucks are veering spasmodically to the right and left. Several in front of us are in reverse. Ahead is an Israeli checkpoint with thick boxy blocks of dun colored concrete. Soldiers are stopping vehicles and checking papers. Palestinians can wait hours to get past. They can be hauled from their vehicles and detained. Anything is possible at an Israeli checkpoint, often erected with no advance warning. Most of it is not good. We back up. We descend a narrow, dusty road that veers off from the main highway. We travel on bumpy, uneven tracks through impoverished villages.

It was like this for Blacks in the segregated south and Indigenous Americans. It was like this for Algerians under the French. It was like this in India, Ireland and Kenya under the British. The death mask - too often of European extraction - of colonialism does not change. Nor does the God-like authority of colonists who look at the colonized as vermin, who take a perverse delight in their humiliation and suffering and who kill them with impunity.

The Israeli customs official asked me two questions when I crossed into occupied Palestine from Jordan on the King Hussein Bridge. “Do you hold a Palestinian passport?” “Are either of your parents Palestinian?” In short, are you contaminated? This is how apartheid works.

The Palestinians want their land back. Then they will talk of peace. The Israelis want peace, but demand Palestinian land. And that, in three short sentences, is the intractable nature of this conflict.

I see Jerusalem in the distance. Or rather, I see the Jewish colony that lines the hills above Jerusalem. The villas, built in an arc on the hilltop, have windows intentionally narrowed into upright rectangles to double as gun slits.

We reach the outskirts of Ramallah. We are held up in the snarl of traffic in front of the sprawling Israeli military base that oversees the Qalandia checkpoint, the primary checkpoint between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It is the scene of frequent demonstrations against the occupation that can end in gunfire.

I meet Atef. We walk to a kebab shop and sit at a small outdoor table. The scars of the latest incursion by the Israeli army are around the corner. At night, a few days ago, Israeli soldiers torched the shops that handle money transfers from abroad. They are charred ruins. Money from abroad will now be harder to get, which I suspect was the point.

Israel has dramatically tightened its stranglehold on the more than 2.7 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, who are surrounded by more than 700,000 Jewish colonists housed in some 150 strategically placed developments with their own shopping malls, schools and medical centers. These colonial developments along with special roads that can only be used by the colonists and the military, checkpoints, tracts of land that are off limits to Palestinians, closed military zones, Israeli-declared “nature preserves” and military outposts form concentric circles. They can instantly sever the flow of traffic to isolate Palestinians cities and towns into a series of ringed ghettos.

“Since Oct. 7 it is hard to travel anywhere in the West Bank,” Atef says. “There are checkpoints at the entrances of every city, town and village. Imagine you want to see your mother or your fiancée. You want to drive from Ramallah to Nablus. It can take seven hours because the main roads are blocked. You are forced to drive through back roads in the mountains.” The trip should take 90 minutes.

Israeli soldiers and colonists have killed 528 Palestinian civilians, including 133 children, and injured more than 5,350 others in the West Bank, since Oct. 7, according to the UN human rights chief. Israel has also detained over 9,700 Palestinians - or should I say hostages? - including hundreds of children and pregnant women. Many have been severely tortured, including doctors tortured to death in Israeli dungeons and aid workers killed upon their release. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners to free up space for more.

Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, was in the past spared the worst of Israeli violence. Since Oct. 7, this has changed. Raids and arrests take place almost daily in and around the city, sometimes accompanied by lethal gunfire and aerial bombardments. Israel has bulldozed or confiscated more than 990 Palestinian dwellings and homes in the West Bank since Oct. 7, at times forcing owners to demolish their own buildings or pay exorbitant fines.

Heavily armed Israeli colonists have carried out murderous rampages on villages east of Ramallah, including attacks following the murder of a 14-year-old colonist on April 12 near the village of al Mughayyir. The colonists, in retaliation, burned and destroyed Palestinian homes and vehicles across 11 villages, ripped up roads, killed one Palestinian and wounded more than two dozen others.

Israel has ordered the largest West Bank land seizure in more than three decades, confiscating vast tracts of land northeast of Ramallah. The extreme rightwing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who lives in a Jewish colony and is in charge of colonial expansion, has promised to flood the West Bank with a million new colonists.

Smotrich has vowed to obliterate the distinct areas in the West Bank created by the Oslo accords. Area A, which comprises 18 percent of the West Bank, is under exclusive Palestinian control. Area B, nearly 22 percent of the West Bank, is under Israeli military occupation, in collusion with the Palestinian Authority. Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank, is under total Israeli occupation.

“Israel realizes that the world is blind, that no one will force it to end the genocide in Gaza, and no one will pay attention to the war in the West Bank,” Atef says. “The word war is not even used. This is called a normal Israeli military operation, as if what is happening to us is normal. There is no distinction now between the status of the occupied territories, classified as A, B and C. The settlers are confiscating more land. They are carrying out more attacks. They do not need the army. They have become a shadow army, supported and armed by Israel’s rightwing government. We have lived in a continuous war since 1948. This is simply the newest phase.”

Jenin and its neighboring refugee camp are assaulted daily by Israeli armed units, undercover commando teams, snipers and bulldozers, which level entire neighborhoods. Drones equipped with machine guns and missiles, as well as warplanes and Apache attack helicopters, circle overhead and obliterate dwellings. Medics and doctors, as in Gaza, are assassinated. Usaid Kamal Jabarin, a 50-year-old surgeon, was killed on May 21 by an Israel sniper as he arrived for work at the Jenin Governmental Hospital. Hunger is endemic.

“The Israeli military carries out raids that kill Palestinians and then departs,” Atef says. “But it returns a few days later. It is not enough for the Israelis to steal our land. They seek to kill as many of the original inhabitants as possible. This is why it carries out constant operations. This is why there are constant armed clashes. But these clashes are provoked by Israel. They are the pretext used to continually attack us. We live under constant pressure. We face death daily.” The dramatic escalation of violence in the West Bank is overshadowed by the genocide in Gaza. But it has become a second front. If Israel can empty Gaza, the West Bank will be next.

“Israel’s objective has not changed,” he says. “It seeks to shrink the Palestinian population, confiscate larger and larger tracts of Palestinian land and build more and more colonies. It seeks to Judaize Palestine and strip the Palestinians of all the means to sustain themselves. The ultimate goal is the annexation of the West Bank.”

“Even at the height of the peace process, when everyone was mesmerized by peace, Israel was turning this peace proposal into a nightmare,” he goes on. “Most Palestinians were opposed to the peace accords Arafat signed in 1993, but still they welcomed him when he returned. They did not kill him. They wanted to give peace a chance. In Israel, the prime minister who signed the Oslo accords was assassinated.”

“A few years ago, someone daubed a strange slogan on the wall of the U.N. school east of Jabaliya,” Atef wrote from the hell of Gaza. “‘We progress backwards.’ It has a ring to it. Every new war drags us back to basics. It destroys our houses, our institutions, our mosques and our churches. It razes our gardens and parks. Every war takes years to recover from, and before we’ve recovered, a new war arrives. There are no warning sirens, no messages sent to our phones. War just arrives.”

The Jewish settler colonial project is protean. It changes its shape but not its essence. Its tactics vary. Its intensity comes in waves of severe repression and less repression. Its rhetoric about peace masks its intent. It grinds forward with its deadly, perverted, racist logic. And yet, the Palestinians endure, refusing to submit, resisting despite the overwhelming odds, grasping at tiny kernels of hope from bottomless wells of despair. There is a word for this. Heroic."

"How It Really Is"

"Fredwitz on War II"

"Fredwitz on War II"
by Fred Reed

"Oh help. As I write, the mumbling egg plant in the White House shovels money and arms into two wars, neither necessary, and he and Lockheed Martin prepare for a third, also unnecessary, over Taiwan, which is none of their business. Since in the Federal Bubble on the Potomac there is chatter at the mental level of water-dwelling marsupials of sending American troops into these, perhaps a bit of thought might be a good idea.

Begin with the dismal record of the American military in actually fighting wars. Go back a way. In Vietnam American forces, with enormous superiority in air power, artillery, armor, and helicopters lost. In Afghanistan, with even greater superiority over peasants with rifles and not much-else, the American military lost. Just now in the Red Sea an aircraft carrier and several destroyers have for months tried to keep ragtag Yemenis from blocking traffic to the crucial Suez Canal and–failed. After more than two years of of pushing the war in Ukraine, America’s puppet army is losing. And now Washington wants to fight…China.

Why undertake anything so obviously cockamamie? The reasons are several. Start with the insular complacency of a city long accustomed to immense international power and unable to see that it no longer has it. Many who hold the reins in the city are old men who remember the world of decades ago when an aircraft carrier could intimidate almost any country, including China. This isn’t then, but the old have difficulty noticing. Add a Congress incontinently ignorant of anything but the politics of Washington and of their home states There is nobody on the House China committee who reads, speaks, or writes Chinese. Yet Congress inveighs fiercely against Beijing like a swarm of feral hamsters.

We have all heard repeatedly that America is the Indispensable Nation, Exceptional, the Sole Superpower, the Shining City on a Hill that other countries want to imitate. I will hope that most of us take this as the forgettable political boilerplate that it is. But there are many in Washington who actually believe it. They are smug, self-assured, and unable to think beyond the walls imposed by belief. Many are highly intelligent, making it easy to ignore the opinions of lesser mortals. They read each other, talk to each other, and drink together.

The sense of superiority, even invincibility, leads to disasters. If you are the Sole Superpower, you don’t really have to ask what other countries can do, think or want. You don’t have to plan realistically or ask What If?

What if, for example, the Russian fleet shows up in support of China? If North Korea seized the chance and invades South Korea, giving Washington two major wars at once? If China sinks tankers going to Japan and Taiwan, neither of which has oil? If Washington insouciantly bombs the Chinese mainland, which it will, and China or Russia hits the Pentagon and Capitol with sub-launched missiles? What does the sole superpower then do?

Consider the war in Ukraine. Washington went into it (the rest of the country didn’t know where it was) sure that losing was impossible. After all, Russia was backward, technologically primitive, and (as we heard over and over) "a gas station pretending to be a country.” If there was an effort actually to understand what Russia could do no sign of this appeared.

Washington was, however, sure of many things. Russia could not withstand a long war. It has. Its currency would collapse. It didn’t. (Remember Field Marshal Joe in the White House chortling that “The ruble is rubble?” It wasn’t.) The Russian public would rise and oust Putin. It didn’t. The rest of the world would rally around Washington and isolate Russia diplomatically. It didn’t. The sanctions would collapse the Russian economy. They didn’t. NATO’s superior weapons and tactics would crush Russian forces. They didn’t. Russia would run out of artillery ammunition and missiles. It didn’t. NATO did.

All of this demonstrates a catastrophic failure of the intelligence agencies, an ignorance of, among other things, Russia’s economic structure and capacity, will to fight, motives, and weaponry. For this we pay billions.

So: Washington has painted itself into a corner. If it negotiates, this will amount to a surrender. The gargantuan inflamed egos will not easily acceptthat the Sole Superpower has just lost in a war it concocted itself. A loss would disastrously reduce Washington’s military credibility. NATO might realize that it had been taken for a ride and decline to do it again. Taiwan might figure out that it was being set up to fight China, a short distance across the water, as a second Ukraine.

Possibilities Washington didn’t foresee, smugly regarding Russia as an enlarged Guatemala. A desperate Washington is capable of fathomless stupidity. There is talk of provoking a Europe wide war, even attacking Russia itself. Oh good.

Here I offer Fred’s Fourth Military Law: Military stupidity comes in three levels: Normally stupid; really, really stupid; and invading Russia. It isn’t good for you. Charles XII tried it, as did Napoleon and Hitler. With identical results.

Inside the Beltway, “American boots on the ground” sounds scary, even decisive. No. American weaponry, its chief purpose being to funnel money to the arms industry, has performed poorly in the Ukraine. The vaunted M1 tank burns like any other. Russia has a large advantage in missiles, both in numbers and sophistication, including hypersonics. The F-16 fighter, apparently thought of as a sort of hypergalactic Star Wars craft, first flew in 1976, though it is not actually a biplane. The enlisted ranks in particular are rotted by low recruiting standards, diversity hiring, sexual curiosities and homosexuals. One thinks of the 35th Squealing Demons Regiment, or the frightful Tranny Berzerkers.

Bear in mind that a military is less a fighting force than a psychological condition, an element of this being pathological optimism. An army will not fight if it is told that it consists of mediocre infantry, poorly trained and led, and not really as well armed or led as the potential enemy. Consequently they are regularly assured that they are the most formidable, death-dealing troops in this or any nearby universe.

This makes for misjudgement, as does the fact that wars, whatever their alleged causes, are actually consequences of secretions from those parts of men that women say men think with. Countries fight war after war after war after war, not because it is a good idea but because it is what men do, like packs of wild dogs.

This is why wars so seldom turn out as the aggressors expect. In 1914 Germany started WWI, and lost. In 1939, it started WWII, and lost. In 1941 the Japanese attacked America, and lost. After this, the French re-invaded Vietnam, and lost. Then the Americans invaded Vietnam, and lost. The russians invaded Afghanistan, and lost. Then the Americans invaded Afghanistan, and lost. Then the Americans started a war in Ukraine, and are losing. Now they want a war with China.

I’m going to change my phylum. This one doesn’t look to have much future, and anyway it is embarrassing."
o
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 statesgovernmentssocieties, or paramilitary groups such as mercenariesinsurgents, 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."

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...
o
Freely download Carl Von Clausewitz, "On War", here:

"Grave Faults..."

“Only the following items should be considered to be grave faults: not respecting another's rights; allowing oneself to be paralyzed by fear; feeling guilty; believing that one does not deserve the good or ill that happens in one's life; being a coward. We will love our enemies, but not make alliances with them. They were placed in our path in order to test our sword, and we should, out of respect for them, struggle against them. We will choose our enemies.”
- Paulo Coelho, "Like the Flowing River"

Adventures With Danno, "Stocking Up At Costco And Aldi!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 7/12/24
"Stocking Up At Costco!"
"In today's vlog, we travel to Costco, and are buying things, and trying some new food items! We shop around Costco showing what we think are the best deals that make the membership worth it! With grocery prices increasing do to inflation, and other reasons, we are traveling around to find the best sales, and deals, so you don't waste your money! It's getting rough out here with prices skyrocketing, and stores struggling to get in products."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, PM 7/12/24
"Items At Aldi Everyone Should Be Buying!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Aldi and are finding all kinds of their Aldi Saver Deals!  As grocery prices continue to rise in most of our main supermarkets, Aldi has put together some pretty amazing sales that we should definitely take advantage of!  We show you all of the savings, so get your notepad ready!"
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "The US Dollar Downfall Will Rapidly Worsen From Here"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/12/24
"The US Dollar Downfall Will Rapidly Worsen From Here"
Comments here:

Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable: Johnson & McGovern - Weekly Intel WrapUp"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 7/12/24
"INTEL Roundtable: 
Johnson & McGovern - Weekly Intel WrapUp"
Comments here
o
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 7/12/24
"Col. Douglas Macgregor: US Foreign Policy on the Brink"
Comments here

"WTF Alert! NATO 'Nuclear Capable' F-16s Will Strike Russia Within Days, Border Closures"

Canadian Prepper, 7/12/24
"WTF Alert! NATO 'Nuclear Capable' F-16s 
Will Strike Russia Within Days, Border Closures"
Comments here:

Jim Kunstler, "The Cover Your Ass Olympics"

"The Cover Your Ass Olympics"
by Jim Kunstler

“If the entire political and media elite can manufacture the lie for 4+ years that candidate now-President Biden isn’t cognitively impaired, what else might they have lied about and are lying about now?” - Stephen Miller

You can’t deny that “Joe Biden” did his goodest last night facing down a half-dozen pre-selected reporters representing blob-adjacent news orgs such as Reuters and NPR at the post-NATO meetup damage-control event billed as a “news conference.” Only a week after he declared himself to be the “first black woman vice-president,” he pivoted to correct the record, telling the DC press corps that he’d “picked Vice-president Trump to be vice-president...” and everyone in the room saw that they were back in that mortifying scene in The Caine Mutiny when the confused and incompetent Captain Queeg reaches for the ball bearings in his pocket.

At the end of the harrowing hour, he minced his way offstage, leaving his Party of Chaos evermore sore perplexed as to how they might lever this burnt-out old hack out of the nomination they foolishly secured for him months ago. It ain’t gonna be easy, as “JB” repeatedly insisted he had no intention of stepping aside, despite the forces mustering against him in Congress, the media, and Hollywood. Even CNN is turning on him. Meanwhile, the #VeepTrump clip went viral on social media. So much for damage control.

You understand, don’t you, what a fiasco the 75th Anniversary DC NATO meetup itself was? Everyone in the room, including the key prime ministers and presidents, could sense how flimsy the alliance now appears, as led by our maundering near-zombie president. Like “Joe Biden,” NATO’s raison d’être has been exposed as badly out-of-date and dangerously unhinged. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg kicked things off declaring that “Ukraine is on an ‘irreversible’ path to NATO.” This controverts what everybody in NATO knows is Mr. Putin’s clearest red line, and is therefore either a jape or a bit of recklessly provocative idiocy.

The truth of the matter is this: following its transition out of the failed Soviet experiment thirty years ago, Russia was never a threat to its European neighbors. All the talk of Vladimir Putin seeking to reassemble the old USSR empire was knowingly false, as is the chatter now about Russia looking to invade Europe. What Russia actually sought was to be regarded, once again, as a normal European nation able to conduct normal business with the rest of Europe. The USA wouldn’t allow it.

Exactly why remains partially mysterious. Surely, post-1991, it was in the interest of US military contractors to maintain their Cold War revenue streams. To do that, a foreign hobgoblin had to be invoked - and perhaps China was not the best candidate, since it had begun manufacturing everything on sale in the Walmart - so Russia, with practically no export economy, was cast in that role. And the politicians, too, surely liked creaming off their share of that military-industrial revenue stream, so they went along policy-wise, with figures like John McCain and Lindsay Graham leading the charge. But the US intel blob and State Department had darker motives, driven by an animus that has slowly revealed itself to be insane - just as the Democratic Party has turned obviously insane, adopting a playbook that could have been written by Franz Kafka.

Being likewise insane, the intel blob and the neocons at State harbored an unappeasable hatred toward Russia that, since the Soviet collapse, allowed no accommodation and gelled into a naked avarice for seizing the resources of Russia with a long-term plan to subvert the Russian state, break it up the way they broke up Serbia in the 1990s, and direct a corporate looting operation of Russia’s oil and mineral riches. Ukraine was the doorway they had to go through to get that done.

And so, the blob and State neocons overthrew democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and installed Poroshenko followed by Zelensky. Veep “Joe Biden” was given the Ukraine “portfolio,” making him a sort of viceroy, and he took full advantage, plopping his son Hunter on the board of Burisma, the huge Ukrainian natgas company that American oil and gas companies drooled over. Hunter managed to milk the Ukrainian government for tribute to the Biden Family bank accounts far above the roughly million-dollar-a-year salary he grifted from his no-show job on the Burisma board. (Hunter also apparently dabbled in a set of bioweapons labs set up in Ukraine by the CIA.) Thus, along with the sheer insanity of the CIA and State Department, the Biden family had a deep and criminal involvement in Ukraine that had to be concealed.

That degenerate relationship has been revealed since the discovery of the laptop that Hunter stupidly left in a Wilmington computer repair shop, and all the disclosures that have followed - including the sedulous recovery of bank records for the many shell companies the Bidens used to conceal their moneygrubbing in Ukraine and other foreign lands. When Mr. Trump first scented it in the fall of 2019, they impeached him for it. But now that he threatens to return to the White House, the blobists and the Bidens are running out of options to evade an accounting for all this mischief. That desperation is what drives disintegrating “Joe Biden” to remain president and to continue pressing the malevolent and foolish proxy war against hobgoblin Russia and its vilified president, Mr. Putin. So, now you know."

Oh, the full name of Kunstler's website is so true...

Thursday, July 11, 2024

Jeremiah Babe, "Prepare For An Economic Crash Landing"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/11/24
"Prepare For An Economic Crash Landing
The FED Is Losing The Fight Against Inflation"
Comments here:

"The Only Question..."

"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether
 it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it." 
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Musical Interlude: Soothing Relaxation, "Dance of Life"

Full screen recommended.
Soothing Relaxation, "Dance of Life"
Be kind to yourself, forget all the troubles 
for a little while and enjoy this beautiful video...

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a mere 35 million light-years away, toward the constellation Leo. Relatively bright in planet Earth's sky, NGC 3521 is easily visible in small telescopes but often overlooked by amateur imagers in favor of other Leo spiral galaxies, like M66 and M65. It's hard to overlook in this colorful cosmic portrait, though. Spanning some 50,000 light-years the galaxy sports characteristic patchy, irregular spiral arms laced with dust, pink star forming regions, and clusters of young, blue stars.
Remarkably, this deep image also finds NGC 3521 embedded in gigantic bubble-like shells. The shells are likely tidal debris, streams of stars torn from satellite galaxies that have undergone mergers with NGC 3521 in the distant past."

"Humanity Today..."

"Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."
- Edward O. Wilson

Chet Raymo, “The Sea Grows Old In It”

“The Sea Grows Old In It”
by Chet Raymo

“The poet, like the electric [lightning] rod, must reach from a point nearer to the sky than all surrounding objects down to the earth, and down to the dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses. His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to be seen, and smelled and handled.” 
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Ah, Mr. Emerson. This seems about as good a description of poetry as one is likely to find. I love the image. Not a hand reaching up to grasp the hand of Zeus, the hurler of bolts, but merely a pointed rod that reaches higher than any surrounding objects. A pen-point, scratching the firmament. Not a conductor reaching down to the earth, but deeper, into the wet inkpot of the soul.

Not lofty thoughts, airy philosophies, gnostic arcana. Rather, ideas that come wrapped in the stuff of the senses. Ideas that must be unwrapped the way you’d peel an orange, or pry open an oyster, or stir up from the bottom of a bowl of soup. The electric fire of the heavens captured and stored in the Leyden jar of physical self.

Take, for example, Marianne Moore’s “The Fish”, a poem that has been endlessly analyzed without ever giving up its secrets. Anyone who stands on that rocky shore with the poet, looking into the wave-washed chasm - the sea as fluid as breath, as hard as a chisel- takes away a lesson as profound as any one might learn in school, perhaps without being able to articulate exactly what the lesson is. The experience is simply there, to be seen, smelled, handled, in the weave and wave of animal bodies, in the intricate rhyme and syllabication of the poem. Truth- crow-blue, ink-bespattered, hatcheted, defiant.

I’d go further. I’d say that Emerson’s description of poetry can be equally applied to science, or to any human attempt to attract the spark of Zeus. One must lift one’s rod beyond the scratch and tumble of the everyday, while keeping its foot buried in the dark wet soil of lived experience.”
“The Fish”

“Wade through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave,
cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the sun,
split like spun glass,
move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices -
in and out, illuminating
The turquoise sea of bodies.

The water drives a wedge of iron through the iron edge of the cliff;
whereupon the stars, pink rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green lilies,
and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other.

All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice -
all the physical features of accident -
lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes,
these things stand out on it;
the chasm-side is dead.
Repeated evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive its youth.
The sea grows old in it."
- Marianne Moore

"The Reality Of Life..."

"Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth."
- Malcolm X

"Symbols Of The Collapse"

"Symbols Of The Collapse"
by Addison Wiggin

“A society is in decay, final or transitional, 
when common sense really becomes uncommon.”
– G.K. Chesterton

"Early in the morning Wednesday, a random passerby in Fells Point witnessed a row home collapse under its own weight. Fells Point is a gentrified neighborhood in Baltimore. It's on the Patapsco River between the Inner Harbor and the Francis Scott Key Bridge that collapsed several weeks ago. We have a special interest in the neighborhood because we’ve lived there on four different occasions in our 30 year history with the city. At night, it’s kind of sketchy, but it’s also a fun place with bars, restaurants and live music.

The row-home that collapsed on Wednesday was originally built as one of hundred of thousands of tenement building for shipyard workers, maritime, factory, rail and infrastructure workers, many of them Polish, Italian, Greek, Irish and African American minority communities.

Baltimore City currently owns over 13,000 vacant buildings and another 20,000+ desolate urban lots. In a recent mayoral race, as is perennially true, what to do with these city properties and the neighborhoods around them plays a central role in policy debates.

The city is effectively bankrupt. The politicians, notoriously corrupt. Fells Point is one of the more fortunate neighborhoods, because it has retained an historically economic important nightlife community. Yet, the city is somehow responsible for miles of squalor without the resources to deal with them or any interest from the private development community. “White flight” has contributed to a declining population since the post-World War II era, seen across the nation in many large cities since the 1950s.

There are 311 post-industrial cities in the United States with a population greater than 100,000 people according to the U.S. Census, 38 with a population greater than 500,000 and 9 greater than a million. Each one has a problem with aging infrastructure that includes post-industrial housing. Many of these cities are left with the crime and infrastructure issues similar to Baltimore City.

If you don’t think America is already in a state of collapse, you’re either not paying attention, or living in one of the places fortunate enough not to decline first. Just one data point we stumbled on this week helps to explain why:
Proposed: Decline is here. And it’s getting uglier. Politicians either are unwilling to do anything about it. They can’t. Or are exploiting “social justice” issues for their own self-interest. Today, Michael Snyder shows the details on how the breakdown of authority is already underway in an increasingly larger part of the country. One of the places he mentions hits close to home to me – physically. That’s because it’s only 15 or so miles from a farm that’s been in the Wiggin family for 5 generations. To see that level of collapse so close to where we’ve lived in “quaint” New Hampshire is eye opening."

The Daily "Near You?"

Marana, Arizona, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "One"

"One"

"The mosquito is so small
it takes almost nothing to ruin it.
Each leaf, the same.
And the black ant, hurrying.
So many lives, so many fortunes!
Every morning, I walk softly and with forward glances
down to the ponds and through the pinewoods.
Mushrooms, even, have but a brief hour
before the slug creeps to the feast,
before the pine needles hustle down
under the bundles of harsh, beneficent rain.

How many, how many, how many
make up a world!
And then I think of that old idea: the singular
and the eternal.
One cup, in which everything is swirled
back to the color of the sea and sky.
Imagine it!

A shining cup, surely!
In the moment in which there is no wind
over your shoulder,
you stare down into it,
and there you are,
your own darling face, your own eyes.
And then the wind, not thinking of you, just passes by,
touching the ant, the mosquito, the leaf,
and you know what else!
How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you,
even your eyes, even your imagination."
~ Mary Oliver

"The Worst Part..."

 

"When I Am Old"

"When I Am Old"
Author Unknown

"When I am old… I will wear soft gray sweatshirts… and a bandana over my silver hair… and I will spend my social security checks on my dogs. I will sit in my house on my well-worn chair and listen to my dogs breathing. I will sneak out in the middle of a warm summer night and take my dogs for a run, if my old bones will allow… When people come to call, I will smile and nod as I show them my dogs… and talk of them and about them…the ones so beloved of the past and the ones so beloved of today… I will still work hard cleaning after them, mopping and feeding them and whispering their names in a soft loving way. I will wear the gleaming sweat on my throat, like a jewel, and I will be an embarrassment to all… especially my family… who have not yet found the peace in being free to have dogs as your best friends… These friends who always wait, at any hour, for your footfall… and eagerly jump to their feet out of a sound sleep, to greet you as if you are a God, with warm eyes full of adoring love and hope that you will always stay,

I’ll hug their big strong necks… I’ll kiss their dear sweet heads… and whisper in their very special company… I look in the mirror… and see I am getting old… this is the kind of person I am… and have always been. Loving dogs is easy, they are part of me. Please accept me for who I am. My dogs appreciate my presence in their lives… they love my presence in their lives… When I am old this will be important to me… you will understand when you are old, if you have dogs to love too."
Full screen recommended.
Alan Parsons Project, "Old And Wise"


"How It Really Is"

 

Greg Hunter, "USAWatchdog.com Will Be on Hiatus for the Next Few Weeks"

"USAWatchdog.com Will Be on 
Hiatus for the Next Few Weeks"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Since going online with USAWatchdog.com in August of 2009, we have never been off the air for any considerable time. Starting today and for the next few weeks, we will not be doing new content, but we will be posting comments. So, feel free to do some street reporting and trade information on the site. We will be tending to your comments. We will also be working on servers and improving our online security. We are attacked continuously, and we need to take the time to make improvements to keep the site viable and secure. So, feel free to comment, and remember to check out our sponsors listed below that help keep us on the air. We will be back in a few weeks delivering more great USAW content for the rest of 2024 that will be interesting and wild, to say the least."

"Your friend, brother and newsman,
Greg Hunter"

Adventures With Danno, "Massive Sales At Kroger!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 7/11/24
"Massive Sales At Kroger!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Kroger and are noticing some unbelievable sales going on. Groceries have been ridiculously overpriced, but we are seeing Kroger have some of the best deals we've seen in years! Shop with me at Kroger as we discover these great savings together!"
Comments here:

Dan, I Allegedly, "Why Your Favorite Restaurant is Closing - Businesses Are Doomed!"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 7/11/24
"Why Your Favorite Restaurant is Closing - 
Businesses Are Doomed!"
"Join me at the Orange County Zoo for a deep dive into why the commercial real estate debacle is more disastrous than ever. With businesses shifting to remote work, office buildings are bleeding money, and interest-only loans are coming due. The fallout? Restaurants, dry cleaners, and countless other businesses are getting crushed under the weight of this collapse."
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "The Most Massive Fraud In World History! People Are Being Destroyed!"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/11/24
"The Most Massive Fraud In World History!
 People Are Being Destroyed!"
Comments here:

Wednesday, July 10, 2024

"Words In Pain: Letters On Life And Death"

"Words In Pain: Letters On Life And Death"
by Maria Popova

"Half a century before Frida Kahlo made her impassioned case for atheism as a supreme form of freedom and moral courage, before Robinson Jeffers insisted that the greatest spiritual calling lies in contributing to the world’s store of moral beauty, before Simone de Beauvoir looked back on her life to observe that “faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly [while] the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself,” a German-Jewish Englishwoman by the name of Olga Jacoby (August 15, 1874–May 5, 1913) — the young mother of four adopted children - took up the subject of living and dying without religion, with moral courage, with kindness, with radiant receptivity to beauty, in stunning letters to her pious physician, who had just given her a terminal diagnosis. These are more than letters - they are symphonies of thought, miniature manifestos for reason and humanism, poetic odes to the glory of living and the dignity of dying in full assent to reality.

First published anonymously by her husband in 1919 and hurled out of print by wartime want, the letters were discovered a century after their composition by the scholar Trevor Moore, who was so taken with them that he set about identifying their author. Drawing on the family dynamics unfolding in the letters and poring over the British census, he eventually uncovered Jacoby’s identity, tracked down her descendants, and teamed up with her great-granddaughter, Jocelyn Catty, to publish these forgotten treasures of thought and feeling as "Words in Pain: Letters on Life and Death" (public library).

In 1909, at age thirty-five, Jacoby was diagnosed with a terminal illness she never names in her letters. Perhaps she was never told - it was customary at the time, and would be for generations to come, for doctors to treat female patients as children and to withhold the reality of their own bodies from them. But she refers to it in her characteristic good-natured humor as a disease of having loved so hard as to have strained her heart.

With their extraordinary intellectual elegance and generosity of spirit, her letters constellate into a masterwork of reason argued with a literary artist’s splendor of expression. Early into the correspondence with her doctor, Jacoby lays out her existential credo: "We always fear the unknown. I am not a coward and do not fear death, which to me means nothing more than sleep, but I cannot become resigned to leave this beautiful world with all the treasures it holds for me and for everyone who knows how to understand and appreciate them… To leave a good example to those I love [is] my only understanding of immortality."

A year into her diagnosis, she magnifies the sentiment with feeling: "Whatever we cannot know let us simply and truthfully agree not to know, but no one must be expected to take for granted what reason refuses to admit. More and more to me this simplest of thoughts seems right: Live, live keenly, live fully; make ample use of every power that has been given us to use, to use for the good end. Blind yourself to nothing; look straight at sadness, loss, evil; but at the same time look with such intense delight at all that is good and noble that quite naturally the heart’s longing will be to help the glory to triumph, and that to have been a strong fighter in that cause will appear the only end worth achieving. The length of life does not depend on us, but as long as we can look back to no waste of time we can face the end with a clear conscience, with cheerful if somewhat tired eyes and ready for the deserved rest with no hope or anxiety for what may come. To me all the effort of man seems vain, and his ideal thrown ruthlessly to the ground by himself, when, after a life of free and joyful effort, he stoops to pick up a reward he does not deserve for having simply done his duty."

Emanating from her letters is evidence of how Jacoby lived her values - her reverence for beauty, her devotion to generosity - in the minutest details of her life. One day, perturbed by the fact that her doctor didn’t have his own volume of Shelley’s poems, she spent two hours hunting the West End of London for the perfect copy that “can be put in your pocket when you go on a lonely ramble amongst the mountains.” Triumphant, with the perfect edition in tow, she told her doctor: “I don’t think any man or woman who has once been happy can read some of his small pieces without feeling all aglow with the beauty of them.” A dying woman, fully alive by the braided life-strands of beauty, generosity, and poetry.

Without the forceful self-righteousness with which fundamentalists impose their views on others, she came to see the fear of death as “only a misunderstanding of Nature.” She writes:
"Not to be afraid when you are all alone is the only true way of being not afraid. Where does your courage come in, when you cannot find it in your own self but always have to grasp God morally?"

When her doctor insists that she must turn to “God” for salvation, Jacoby responds with an exquisite manifesto for what can best be described as the secular spirituality of humanism and the reverence of nature:

"My Dear Doctor,

Like you I believe in a higher power, but, unlike yours, mine is not a kind fatherly one. It is Nature, who with all its forces, beauties and necessary evils, rules our destinies according to its own irrevocable laws. I can love that power for the beauty it has brought into the world, and admire it for the strength that makes us understand how futile and useless it would be to appeal to it in prayer. But towards a kind and fatherly God, who, being almighty, prefers to leave us in misery, when by his mere wish he could obtain the same end without so much suffering, I feel a great revolt and bitterness. Nature makes us know that it cannot take into individual consideration the atoms we are, and for her I have no blame; no more than I could think of blaming you for having during your walks stepped on and killed many a worm (it was a pity the worm happened to be under your foot); but if during these walks your eyes were resting on the beauties of skies and trees, or your mind was solving some difficult problem, was that not a nobler occupation than had you walked eyes downwards, intent only on not killing. 

I think that Nature is striving towards perfection and that each human being has the duty to help towards it by making his life a fit example for others and by awaking ideals which will be more nearly approached by coming generations. In this way life itself offers enough explanation for living; and believing our existence to finish with death, we naturally make the most of our opportunities… Unable to appeal to a God for help, we find ourselves dependent only on our own strong will - not to overcome misfortune, but to try to bear it as bravely as possible. Religion having for an end the more perfect and moral condition of humanity, I truly think that these ideas are as religious as any dogmatic ones."

With a parent- or teacher-like magnanimity, Jacoby extends extraordinary patience to her doctor. To his self-righteous and patronizing remark that he pities her children on account of her atheism, she responds with a humble, generous reflection on how she hopes her nonreligious morality and spirituality would sculpt her children’s character:

"I always feel that we, who are better off, are responsible for having let the poor get so low, and that it is duty, not charity, to help. Charles [her young son], the farmer that is to be, has promised always to keep a cow, to call it by my name, and let the milk of that cow go to the poor around his farm. Should he choose another profession, he will find that the idea of the cow can be worked differently. I hope he will follow my lead in living happy and dying content."

Jacoby takes particular issue with the idea of original sin, with which young minds are so ruthlessly branded and scarred under Christian dogma: "Why start an infant’s life with ideas of fear and sin? Let love be their only religion - a love they can understand and handle. With so many people hungering for love, why give so great a part up to Deity? Acknowledge, Doctor, if you had not had your good share of human love, a mother’s, a wife’s, and your children’s, you would not so well understand the other. A child, I think, is taught untruthfulness when you make him say that he loves God.
[…]
Have you ever come across a baby whose eyes were not all innocence and inquiry? And from the first you crush that innocence with those terrible biblical words. Mind you, they are words only. A sincere man will never agree to them when it comes to his own children, and a generous heart must repel them as strongly when they apply to others."

She turns to another damaging aspect of religious dogma - its stunting of children’s natural curiosity about how the world works by keeping certain scientific truths from them or deliberately displacing those truths with mythic fictions: "As to children’s inquiries, they are often wrongly answered, and the higher the subject, the more you think yourself justified in lying to them. From these same children you expect in return truly felt love, good acts, truthfulness and a desire to learn… You absolutely cripple a child by not allowing him to think clearly on all subjects - and no dogmatic religion will stand thinking.

Jacoby proceeds to offer a lucid and luminous vision for what our moral and spiritual life could look like without religious delusion: "My idea is not a life without religion; it is a nobler religion I want. Of course, very good men have lived and are living, to whom your religion has been a help, but science is progressing daily, and in harmony with it our moral standard should be higher - high enough to do right simply because it is right. A religion that has helped mankind to get somewhat better should be resigned to let a still better one take its place. Like a growing child, humanity must outgrow its infancy, must stand alone one day and be able to stand straight without support.

In a sentiment our modern spiritual elder Parker Palmer would echo a century later in his lovely insistence that “wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life,” she adds: "To me a good man with his failings seems a better ideal than a perfect God. We feel nearer to him and nearer to the possibility of attaining his standard. This kind of ideal actually helps people to improve, and is therefore of more value to the world.

I do believe strongly in universal good, but not in individual good. As I ask for no help from God, I ask for no explanation from him of my sufferings. I just try to suffer the least possible, and still get a fair part of my aim in life - happiness. You see, I am not ashamed to say that to be happy seems to me a reason for living - as long as you don’t make others unhappy."

When her doctor condemns and insults her credo as a weakness, she responds with a passionate defense of what the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell termed our native “hunger of the mind,” which is the supreme strength of our species: "It is knowledge we want, the better and better understanding of magnificent Nature with its powerful laws that forces our soul to love, admire and submit. That is religion! My religion! How can you call it a weak and godless one?
[…]
Science is turning on the light, but at every step forward dogmatic religion attempts to turn it out, and as it cannot succeed it puts blinkers on its followers, and tries to make them believe that to remove them would be sin. This is the only way in which I can understand their continual warning against knowledge."

Four years after her terminal diagnosis, as two world wars staked on religious ideology lay in wait for her children, after four savaging surgeries and a heart attack had left her in constant acute pain, the 38-year-old Olga Jacoby died by self-induced euthanasia, intent to “go to sleep with a good conscience,” a pioneer of what we today call the right-to-die movement - another fundamental human right stymied only by the legal residue of religiosity. Inscribed into her letters is the beautiful source-code of a moral and spiritual alternative to religion - a courageous case for the right to live by truth, beauty, and altruism rather than by dogma and delusion, the heart of which beats in a passage from a letter she penned in the dead of winter two years into her diagnosis:

"Charles may have to suffer from too tender a heart, but the world will be the richer for it, and because of that for his life.
[…]
Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give. Once given out love is set rolling for ever to amass more, resembling an avalanche by the irresistible force with which it sweeps aside all obstacles, but utterly unlike in its effect, for it brings happiness wherever it passes and lands destruction nowhere.

Complement the thoroughly inspiriting "Words in Pain" with Jacoby’s contemporary Alice James - William and Henry James’s brilliant younger sister - on how to live fully while dying, then revisit Tolstoy and Gandhi’s forgotten correspondence from the same era about love as humanity’s only real spiritual foundation."

Scott Ritter, "NATO Vs. Russia, Big War Has Begun"

Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 7/10/24
"NATO Vs. Russia, Big War Has Begun"
Comments here:

"15 Cheap Foods People Can't Afford Anymore"

Epic Economist, 7/10/24
"15 Cheap Foods People Can't Afford Anymore"

"You’re not imagining it – it's much more expensive to stock up your fridge and pantry now than ever before. Even if you pick the cheapest options or purchase the same products as always, your final grocery bill is probably higher than it was a few months ago. And it's safe to say that the difference is much more pronounced when comparing to one or two years ago. In fact, before the pandemic hit, Americans were paying about 36% less for food. And even though official inflation numbers have been falling, there are many manifestations of the painful reality that the cost of living is rising, and food prices are one of them.

 Not only we're paying more, but we're taking home less for our money. Many food producers are shrinking the size of their products because they realized they can't keep raising prices without experiencing a decline in sales. For that reason, these companies have started to sell a smaller amount of product for the same price, so that they can optimize profits without making consumers face sticker shock. Several items that used to be considered cheap have skyrocketed in price this year, becoming a luxury only a few can afford. Today, we listed some examples and the reason why these popular foods are getting out of the reach of many Americans.
Comments here:

Jeremiah Babe, "WW3 Is Very Close, War Is Coming To America; Buying $200K Tiny Homes In A Texas Prison Camp"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/10/24
"WW3 Is Very Close, War Is Coming To America; 
Buying $200K Tiny Homes In A Texas Prison Camp"
Comments here:

Judge Napolitano, "Extreme Fear in Israel - IDF Exhausted & Scared to Fight Hezbollah"

Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano, 7/10/24
"Larry Johnson Exposes: Extreme Fear in Israel -
 IDF Exhausted & Scared to Fight Hezbollah"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Matt Simons, "After The Landslide"

Full screen recommended.
Matt Simons, "After The Landslide"

Oh yeah, we're in the landslide alright...

"A Look to the Heavens"

"These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars. The colors in this remarkably deep composite image clearly show the star forming galaxies with a blue tint and galaxies with older stellar populations with a yellowish cast.
The sharp picture spans about 3/4 degree across the cluster center, corresponding to over 6 million light-years at the cluster's estimated distance. Diffraction spikes around brighter foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy are produced by the imaging telescope's mirror support vanes. In the cosmic vista many galaxies seem to be colliding or merging while others seem distorted - clear evidence that cluster galaxies commonly interact. In fact, the Hercules Cluster itself may be seen as the result of ongoing mergers of smaller galaxy clusters and is thought to be similar to young galaxy clusters in the much more distant, early Universe."
o
Full screen recommended.
"The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D"
o
A Universe of 2 Trillion Galaxies"
"In 2016, a study published in The Astrophysical Journal and led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham using 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope concluded that there are more than two trillion galaxies in the observable universe."
o
"In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three billion Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, 2 trillion galaxies like this. And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us."
- "Dr. Leonard McCoy"