"Life Under Biden"

"Life Under Biden"

by Jim Rickards

"An Historic Turning Point Election: This was a historic, turning-point election. Turning-point elections are the most historic because they put the country on a different path: Party Politics in 1800, Populism in 1828, Civil War in 1860, Liberalism in 1932, and Conservatism in 1980. Every 100 years, America gets a president who shakes the establishment and cleans out the Washington sewers. In the 1800s it was Andrew Jackson. In the 1900s it was Teddy Roosevelt. In the 2000s, it’s Donald Trump.

There is no doubt that Trump and Biden would lead America in almost opposite directions with profound consequences for the future of the country and for future elections. If Trump had won, we would have gotten more of the same, which is saying a lot. Trump would offer more tax cuts (or at least preserve the tax cuts we’ve received). He’d offer less regulation, a major accomplishment of his first term. Trump would continue the trade war with China and expand it in ways that would move jobs back to the United States (or at least get them out of China into friendlier countries such as Vietnam and India).

He would also curtail Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property and cut off Chinese tech investment in the United States. Trump has also stopped foreign installation of sensitive 5G telecommunications systems from Huawei and ZTE, which are hidden arms of the Chinese military. Trump built alliances to constrain Chinese expansion efforts. His main breakthrough was the Quad Alliance of the U.S., Japan, Australia and India that effectively surrounds and can interdict China’s sea lanes to the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Trump also made great strides toward Middle East peace with the first two Israeli-Arab peace treaties in twenty-five years – one with the UAE and one with Bahrain. Other peace treaties with Israel may have followed. Finally, Trump was imposing crippling sanctions on Iran that would have forced it to negotiate in good faith on its nuclear program or crush its economy in ways that would also impede its efforts at terrorism and nuclear weapons.

With Trump, what you see is what you get: Lower taxes, less regulation, more jobs, no new wars, peace in the Middle East, and peace through strength in confronting Iran and China. With four more years, Trump could have accomplished his goals and perhaps be ranked among the ten most significant presidents of all time.

The Scenario Under a Biden Administration: Biden is another matter entirely. First of all, Biden is running for president in name only. He has never been that bright. He has accomplished little in his almost fifty years in public service. He is physically frail and clearly suffering acute cognitive decline.

If Joe Biden does win, he’ll be 78 years old when sworn in and 82 years old at the end of his first term. Both marks are the oldest in U.S. history for a president. Some individuals are still sharp in their late 70s. Biden is not one of them. The result is that Biden will never be president de facto. With Trump out of the picture, Democrats wouldn’t need him anymore. Steps would be taken at some point to remove him from office on the grounds of mental incapacity under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Nancy Pelosi recently proposed legislation to set up a commission to do just that as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution. But while he remains in office, who will be the real president in a Biden administration? There are three camps contending for power:

The first camp is the Biden family led by Joe Biden’s wife Dr. Jill Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden’s brothers Jim Biden and Frank Biden. These are the individuals who have been enriched through association with Joe Biden by using or selling access to Biden’s power to win lucrative investment management roles, consulting engagements, construction contracts and other remunerative pursuits. The Biden family will want to keep Joe in power (with Jill Biden pulling the strings) in order to keep their shakedown operation intact and avoid scrutiny.

The second camp is led by Kamala Harris and those who control her, including the Obama crew and the Resistance. If Biden is removed under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, Harris becomes Acting President. If Biden resigns under threat of removal, Harris becomes the president. She would be a front for the Obamas and Valerie Jarrett who would operate through a cabinet consisting of Obama family retainers including Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Sally Yates and Eric Holder.

The third camp is led by the extreme left wing of the party including Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (and The Squad), Elizabeth Warren and radical organizations such as BLM. This group is already embedded in the Biden campaign as part of a deal whereby Bernie Sanders agreed to end his primary campaign and endorse Joe Biden in exchange for Biden adopting most of the Sanders platform.

The most likely outcome is that the Obama crew and the Bernie Bros will join forces and run the Biden family off the road. The Bidens will be allowed to keep their Chinese and Russian money and will not face any scrutiny or prosecution in exchange for going away quietly. The Obama crew will take charge of foreign policy (to preserve Obama’s deals on Iran, the Paris Climate Accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership), while the Bernie Bros will get domestic policy including much higher taxes, free healthcare, free tuition, forgiveness of student loans, guaranteed basic income, Modern Monetary Theory and the Green New Deal.

A “Blue Wave” Could Have Meant The End of Republican Power in U.S. Politics: One initiative all Democrats can agree on is radical change in U.S. governance to ensure that Republicans never take power again. This agenda means ending the Senate filibuster so the Senate can operate with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes needed today. Democrats would add Puerto Rico and D.C. as states to ensure four new Senate seats that will likely all be Democrats.

Next, Democrats would pack the Supreme Court with six new liberal Justices to wipe out the recently achieved conservative majority after the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. Once these changes are in place, Democrats could take further steps to eliminate the Electoral College, which means that California and New York alone will choose all future presidents.

If these governance changes were in place, the Bernie Bros’ agenda could be implemented with ease and without fear of opposition from the courts. But, it looks like this entire agenda will be stopped in its tracks. To ram it through, Democrats would have had to take control of the Senate. With the White House, Senate and House of Representatives controlled by Democrats, Republicans would be powerless to stop them. But, it appears that the Republicans are going to retain control of the Senate. If that holds, the Democrats’ more radical legislation will never make it out of the Senate.

One of the reasons the stock market rallied so much after the election is because it expects gridlock in Washington, meaning no punitive taxes or other policies harmful to markets. So if Biden holds on and Republicans hold onto the Senate, you can expect a lot of bickering and a lot of gridlock. And that might not be the worst thing."

- dailyreckoning.com

"Dems Committed Election Treason: Coup Underway Right Now"

"Dems Committed Election Treason:

Coup Underway Right Now"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Even though every mainstream media (MSM) outlet has now called this 2020 election for Joe Biden, journalist Alex Newman says don’t buy it. This is a continuing psyop to cover and ignore massive election fraud unlike ever seen before in the free world. Newman explains, “This is a flagrant effort to steal this election. We actually warned that this was coming months ago. I said the Deep State was planning a coup d’état, a Color Revolution, and vote fraud was a central element of that operation. Now, you are seeing the other pieces fall into place. As Donald Trump challenges this, they are going to send out the mobs. They are going to send out Black Lives Matter and Antifa to go riot and loot. We are already starting to see a little bit of that in Oregon and New York. It’s going to get a whole lot nastier because Donald Trump is not just going to roll over and say okay, you can just steal the election and I’m going home.”

The MSM is playing a very important role in this massive election fraud scenario. Newman contends, “Controlling the narrative is probably the most crucial element. They just need to make enough people think this is reality, and they can almost get away with it. We are now seeing a full blown effort on that front. Every time you see President Trump’s statements on this, the MSM says Donald Trump is falsely claiming the election was rigged. Of course there was vote fraud, and I gave 20 examples of it in my most recent article.”

Newman goes on to say, “This is on a whole other level. They are not just trying to steal our money, they are trying to steal our country, our future, our liberties and our constitutional system of government. That is, by definition, treason. It is waging war against the United States. The fact that no charges are being filed and no investigations going on it tells you everything you need to know about AG Barr, the DOJ and the FBI. There is a coup underway right now, a coup d’état. Their goal is a complete overthrow of the United States of America.”

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with journalist Alex Newman, who writes for many outlets such as The New American, The Epoch Times and his own site Liberty Sentinel.org.

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Related, highly recommended:

"'Meet The New Resistance' - 

Mark Levin Rages At Democrats' 'Cloward-Piven' Chaos Plan"

“Civil War it Is Then”

“Bond Market Will Blow Up; Economic Fruition 2021; Americans Nearing Financial Disaster; Poverty”

Jeremiah, Babe,

“Bond Market Will Blow Up; Economic Fruition 2021; 

Americans Nearing Financial Disaster; Poverty”

"American Requiem"

"American Requiem"

By Chris Hedges 

"Well, it’s over. Not the election. The capitalist democracy. However biased it was towards the interests of the rich and however hostile it was to the poor and minorities, the capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse. The iconography and rhetoric remain the same. But it is an elaborate and empty reality show funded by the ruling oligarchs - $1.51 billion for the Biden campaign and $1.57 billion for the Trump campaign - to make us think there are choices. There are not. The empty jousting between a bloviating Trump and a verbally impaired Joe Biden is designed to mask the truth. The oligarchs always win. The people always lose. It does not matter who sits in the White House. America is a failed state. 

“The American Dream has run out of gas,” wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. “The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.”

There were many actors that killed America’s open society. The corporate oligarchs who bought the electoral process, the courts and the media, and whose lobbyists write the legislation to impoverish us and allow them to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and unchecked power. The militarists and war industry that drained the national treasury to mount futile and endless wars that have squandered some $7 trillion and turned us into an international pariah. The CEOs, raking in bonuses and compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars, that shipped jobs overseas and left our cities in ruins and our workers in misery and despair without a sustainable income or hope for the future. The fossil fuel industry that made war on science and chose profits over the looming extinction of the human species. The press that turned news into mindless entertainment and partisan cheerleading. The intellectuals who retreated into the universities to preach the moral absolutism of identity politics and multiculturalism while turning their backs on the economic warfare being waged on the working class and the unrelenting assault on civil liberties. And, of course, the feckless and hypocritical liberal class that does nothing but talk, talk, talk. 

If there is one group that deserves our deepest contempt it is the liberal elites, those who posture as the moral arbiters of society while abandoning every value they purportedly hold the moment they become inconvenient. The liberal class, once again, served as pathetic cheerleaders and censors for a candidate and a political party that in Europe would be considered on the far-right. Even while liberals were being ridiculed and dismissed by Biden and by the Democratic Party hierarchy, which bizarrely invested its political energy in appealing to Republican neocons, liberals were busy marginalizing journalists, including Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who called out Biden and the Democrats. The liberals, whether at The Intercept or The New York Times, ignored or discredited information that could hurt the Democratic Party, including the revelations on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was a stunning display of craven careerism and self-loathing. Biden’s campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America.

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are, the election has illustrated, oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. Restoring the rule of law, universal health care, banning fracking, a Green New Deal, the protection of civil liberties, the building of unions, the preservation and expansion of social welfare programs, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the forgiveness of student debt, stiff environmental controls, a government jobs program and guaranteed income, financial regulation, opposition to endless war and military adventurism were once again forgotten. Championing these issues would have resulted in a Democratic Party landslide. But since the Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate donors, promoting any policy that might foster the common good, diminish corporate profits and restore democracy, including imposing campaign finance laws, was impossible. Biden’s campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America. At least the neofascists have the courage of their demented convictions. 

The liberal class functions in a traditional democracy as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It ameliorates the worst excesses of capitalism. It proposes gradual steps towards greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with supposed virtues. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements. The liberal class is a vital component within the power elite. In short, it offers hope and the possibility, or at least the illusion, of change. 

The surrender of the liberal elite to despotism creates a power vacuum that speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues, fill. It opens the door to fascist movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the absurdities of the liberal class and the values they purport to defend. The promises of the fascists are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth. Once the liberal class ceases to function, it opens a Pandora’s box of evils that are impossible to contain. 

The disease of Trumpism, with or without Trump, is, as the election illustrated, deeply embedded in the body politic. It is an expression among huge segments of the population, taunted by liberal elites as “deplorables,” of a legitimate alienation and rage that the Republicans and the Democrats orchestrated and now refuse to address. This Trumpism is also, as the election showed, not limited to white men, whose support for Trump actually declined. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the behavior of Russia’s useless liberal class, which he satirized and excoriated at the end of the 19th century, as presaging a period of blood and terror. The failure of liberals to defend the ideals they espoused inevitably led, he wrote, to an age of moral nihilism. In "Notes From Underground", he portrayed the sterile, defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who hold up high ideals but do nothing to defend them. The main character in Notes From Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms Russia as it now dooms the United States. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action. 

“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being.”

The refusal of the liberal class to acknowledge that power has been wrested from the hands of citizens by corporations, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have been revoked by judicial fiat, that elections are nothing more than empty spectacles staged by the ruling elites, that we are on the losing end of the class war, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. 

The “idea of the intellectual vocation,” as Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay "This Age of Conformity," “the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization - has gradually lost its allure. And, it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout.” The belief that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human progress, Howe wrote, “is trumpeted through every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional advertising and scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents.” 

“The truly powerless people are those intellectuals - the new realists - who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,” Howe wrote. “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades - as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’ - that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” 

Populations can endure the repression of tyrants, as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict I covered for The New York Times. 

The historian Fritz Stern in "The Politics of Cultural Despair", his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, wrote of the consequences of the collapse of liberalism. Stern argued that the spiritually and politically alienated, those cast aside by the society, are prime recruits for a politics centered around violence, cultural hatreds and personal resentments. Much of this rage, justifiably, is directed at a liberal elite that, while speaking the “I-feel-your-pain” language of traditional liberalism, sells us out.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

We are in for it. The for-profit health care system, designed to make money - not take care of the sick - is unequipped to handle a national health crisis. The health care corporations have spent the last few decades merging and closing hospitals, and cutting access to health care in communities across the nation to increase revenue - this, as nearly half of all front-line workers remain ineligible for sick pay and some 43 million Americans have lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. The pandemic, without universal health care, which Biden and the Democrats have no intention of establishing, will continue to rage out of control. Three hundred thousand Americans dead by December. Four hundred thousand by January. And by the time the pandemic burns out or a vaccine becomes safely available, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million, will have died. 

The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control - wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police - buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent.

The economic fallout from the pandemic, the chronic underemployment and unemployment - close to 20 percent when those who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being rehired and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line are included in the official statistics - will mean a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. Hunger in US households has already tripled since last year. The proportion of US children who are not getting enough to eat is 14 times higher than last year. Food banks are overrun. The moratorium on foreclosures and evictions has been lifted while over 30 million destitute Americans face the prospect of being thrown into the street. 

There is no check left on corporate power. The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control - wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police - buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent. People of color, immigrants and Muslims will be blamed and targeted by our native fascists for the nation’s decline. The few who continue in defiance of the Democratic Party to call out the crimes of the corporate state and the empire will be silenced. The sterility of the liberal class, serving the interests of a Democratic Party that disdains and ignores them, fuels the widespread feelings of betrayal. An American tyranny, dressed up with the ideological veneer of a Christianized fascism, will, it appears, define the empire’s epochal descent into irrelevance."

- https://scheerpost.com/

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Why is the sky near Antares and Rho Ophiuchi so colorful? The colors result from a mixture of objects and processes. Fine dust illuminated from the front by starlight produces blue reflection nebulae. Gaseous clouds whose atoms are excited by ultraviolet starlight produce reddish emission nebulae. Backlit dust clouds block starlight and so appear dark. 

Antares, a red supergiant and one of the brighter stars in the night sky, lights up the yellow-red clouds on the lower center. Rho Ophiuchi lies at the center of the blue nebula near the top. The distant globular cluster M4 is visible just to the right of Antares, and to the lower left of the red cloud engulfing Sigma Scorpii. These star clouds are even more colorful than humans can see, emitting light across the electromagnetic spectrum.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120828.html

“The 5 Characteristics of Incredibly Resilient People”

“The 5 Characteristics of Incredibly Resilient People”

by Smita Malhotra, M.D. 

“I remember the day I found out that my aunt had cancer. Although she was the most positive person I had ever met, I still worried about how she would handle such an overwhelming diagnosis. Looking back, now that her cancer is in remission, she continues to be the most positive person I know. But even more than that, she is what I call an elegant spirit.

Cancer, in my aunt's world, was a small valley hidden amongst the many glorious peaks of her life. While she may have had some moments of despair as we all do when we find ourselves alone in our thoughts, unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, she never showed this to the world outside. She never complained. During her treatment, she continued to go to work and share her passion. She turned long days of chemotherapy in the hospital into a party with her friends where they would share stories, laugh and play cards. Life threw her an arrow, and she, an archer herself, caught this arrow and created her bow. She knew that she could not control the fact that this arrow had come to her, but her bow could hold it stable. Instead of defeating her, the arrow ultimately strengthened her.

As a physician, I have met many such elegant spirits. Their resilience is awe-inspiring. They have the ability to handle even the most devastating diagnosis. How then, do people cultivate such strength? And how can we do that for ourselves? Here are five things resilient people have in common:

1) They practice mindfulness: Mindfulness is the art of paying attention to your life on purpose. Mindful people monitor the thoughts that come through them. However, instead of reacting to their negative thoughts, they observe them like a storm that is passing through. Furthermore, they pay attention to what is right in their lives. They give it strength and value, thereby turning up the volume on the beauty that surrounds them. They understand their role in the universal flow of life. They realize that they are a part of a divine cycle of life and death. And in this understanding, they remain like the eye at the center of a tornado. The world will continue to change around them. But at the center of this tornado, is their mind, where there is tranquility and calm.

2) They don't compare themselves to others: They don't spend their time feeling sorry for themselves. They realize that every soul has a different journey and therefore it is pointless to compare the path of your life with someone else. They are continually trying to be the new and improved version of themselves. And as long as they are better than they were yesterday, they know they are on the right path. They are their own measuring stick of success.

3) They understand that after every big setback is an even bigger transformation: I remember in medical school when part of our rotation was to learn how to deliver bad news to patients, I shadowed a physician who informed a young 40-year-old woman that she had stage four breast cancer. Immediately, without missing a beat, this woman said, "I know one thing. After every big setback is an even bigger transformation." Resilient people understand this. They see difficulties as stepping stones to a transformation.

4) They find humor in everything: Laughter, in its very highest form, is a spiritual practice. It connects us to the part of our soul that heals. When we laugh with others, we gain a sense of interconnectedness and belonging. Laughter may help lower our blood pressure and increase our vascular blood flow. It can do wonders for our health. Resilient people look for reasons to laugh. They find humor in the mundane. They understand that paying attention to the ordinary is what makes life extraordinary.

5) They do not try to control their lives: Gary Zukav wrote about elegant spirits like this: “The journey of a hawk depends on both the hawk and the wind. The wind is your life. It is all the things that happen from the time you are born and the time you go home. Elegant spirits don't know what will come up next, the same way that hawks don't know which way the wind will blow next. This doesn't bother them, because they don't try to control their lives any more than hawks try to control the wind. Resilient people do not try to control their lives. They surrender to the flow of the wind. They adjust their sails and ride the next wave of their life.”

People that have overcome hardships, tremendous obstacles or disease often feel that life goes from black and white in the before to many beautiful colors in the after. The have turned up the volume of beauty in their lives. They practice mindfulness. They stop comparing themselves to others. They find humor in everything. And they know that they have been transformed.”

- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

"Curious..."

Curious how often you humans manage to 

obtain that which you do not want."

- Mr. Spock

"Just Look At Us..."

"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality" 

- Michael Ellner

Aren't you sick and tired of all this, Good Citizen? 

○

"Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth"; but there isn't one. It is like betting on the future of the human race - I might wish to lay a bet that the human race would destroy itself by the year 3000, but there is nowhere to place the bet. On the contrary, I am involved in the world and must try to see that it does not blow itself to pieces. I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should spring into action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: "You scare me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first." So she told me that I had no love for my future generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position. 

As Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died, "It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so." You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise."

- Alan Watts

“Sharing Grief: Opening to Receive Comfort”

“Sharing Grief: Opening to Receive Comfort”

by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM

“Grief is part of the human experience, and sharing our vulnerability helps create truly close bonds. When we experience something that causes us to feel shock and sadness, we may feel the urge to withdraw from life. It may seem like remaining withdrawn will keep us protected from the world, but during these times it is important to reach out to those trusted and precious people who care about us the most. Even with our best information and reasoning, we never know when someone else’s experience or perspective can give us additional information that we need. The universe speaks to us through many channels, and when we open ourselves up to receive its messages, we also receive nurturing care from a loving partner in life’s journey.

Grief is part of the human experience, and sharing our vulnerability is what creates truly close bonds in our relationships. Opening ourselves up in this way gets to the core of our being, past all of our defenses and prejudices. When life seems to crack the outer shell of our world, we are both raw and fresh at the same time. It is then that we discover who is truly willing to walk with us through life. We also see that some of those sent to us may not be the ones we expected to see. Regardless, we learn to trust in the universe, in others, in our own strength and resilience, and in the wisdom of life itself.

Sharing grief allows us to ease our burden by letting someone else help carry it. This helps us process our own inner thoughts and feelings through the filter of a trusted and beloved someone. We may feel guilty or selfish, as if we are unloading on someone who has their own challenges. Although, if we think about it, we know we would do the same for them, and their protests would seem pointless. Remember that not sharing feelings with others denies them the opportunity to feel. We may be the messenger sent by the universe for their benefit, and it is on this mission that we have been sent. By sharing our hopes and fears, joys and pains with another person, we accept the universe’s gifts of wisdom and loving care.”

- http://www.dailyom.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

 
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "What I Have Learned So Far"

"What I Have Learned So Far"

"Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I

not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,

looking into the shining world? Because, properly

attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.

Can one be passionate about the just, the

ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit

to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a

story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.

Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of

light is the crossroads of- indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone."

~ Mary Oliver

"And Never, Never To Forget..."

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget." 

- Arundhati Roy

Musical Interlude: Roger Whittaker, "I Don't Believe In If Anymore", Playlist

Roger Whittaker, "I Don't Believe In If Anymore", Playlist

"If I knew then what I know now..."

"How It Really Is, And Will Be"

"I Am Done"

"I Am Done"

by OHMama

"I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.

My 1940s born Dad raised me to be patriotic and proud, to love the war bird airplanes of his era as much as he does, and to respect our flag and our country as a sacred thing. I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift a person could have. I grew up thinking that our country was as strong, and honest and true as my Dad. I grew up thinking I was free.

As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from under us.

I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.

We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year without going into debt.

At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.

I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the medicine cabinet.

I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.

I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility.

Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence.

And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.

And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They’re probably relieved that upstart Trump is gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.

I will not vote again; they’ve made it abundantly clear that my voice doesn’t matter. Whatever irrational, suicidal lunacy the nanny states thinks is best is what I’ll get. What it decided I need is a geriatric pedophile who shouldn’t be charged with anything more rigorous than choosing between tapioca and rice pudding at the old folks home, and a casting couch skank who rails against racism while being a descendant of slave owners.

I’m free to dismember a baby in my womb and kill it because “my body my choice”, but God help me if I won’t cover my face with a germ laden Linus-worthy security blanket or refuse let them inject genetically altering chemicals into my body or my child’s. I can be doxed, fired, shunned and destroyed for daring to venture that there are only 2 genders as proven by DNA, but a disease with a 99+% survival rate for most humans is a deadly pandemic worth murdering an economy over. Because science. Idiocracy is real, and we are living it. Dr. Lexus would be an improvement over Fauci.

I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heartbreaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.

I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to or from the society they live in.

I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but f**k these motherf**kers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all,  mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

○

Related:

"Trump Says 'Election Far From Over'; 

Biden 'Honored & Humbled' After MSM Declares Him President-Elect"

"US COVID-19 Cases Top 100k For Record 3rd Straight Day As Hospitalizations Near New Highs: Live Updates"

"US COVID-19 Cases Top 100k For Record 3rd Straight 

Day As Hospitalizations Near New Highs: Live Updates"

by Tyler Durden

Sat, 11/07/2020 - 09:02: "The US surged to a new record in cases since Thursday. Hospitalizations may be headed for all-time highs, too, and deaths are mounting as the presidency hangs in the balance. So far, COVID-19 hospitalizations have topped 100k on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (remember, these numbers are reported with a 24-hour delay).

Current hospitalizations rose Thursday to the highest since Aug. 5, Covid Tracking Project data show. That’s about 11% below previous peaks in April and July, although the data didn’t capture all states until shortly before the July peak. Now, the hit to the health-care system is getting worse fast: The number of coronavirus patients is up 16% in the past week. The Midwest remains two to three times worse than every other U.S. region, with 548 daily cases per million people, based on the seven-day average.

States posting record cases Thursday included: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Colorado.Ml

With the world still fixated on the US election, the US saw another 100k+ new COVID-19 cases yesterday, as testing continues to expand, the US has just become the first country in the world to post more than 100k new infections back-to-back.

Globally, the world reported nearly 600k new cases back-to-back in another record as European cases also continued to surge. The number of confirmed cases globally has reached 48,590,825, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The worldwide death toll has hit 1,231,616.

Updated 11/7/20, 7:25 AM ET

Click image for larger size.

- https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Moving back to the US, Pennsylvania coincidentally saw a record number of new cases yesterday as officials scrambled to count votes and reporters descended on the state in droves. Globally speaking, we also saw a record number of new deaths yesterday, though the number of fatalities has declined since, with 8,111 new deaths around the world.

Here's some more COVID-19 news from Friday morning (text courtesy of Bloomberg):

• Russia, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Romania reported surging cases. Meanwhile, U.S., infections increased 1.3% on Friday, with Iowa, North Dakota, Michigan and Colorado seeing the biggest single-day rises, Malaysia recorded its largest single-day increase of 1,755 infections on Friday, even as authorities impose tighter movement restrictions.

• Singapore will allow some bars and nightclubs to re-open from next month in a pilot program as it takes another step toward normalization encouraged by dwindling coronavirus cases.

• While the WHO is studying a mutation of SARS-CoV-2 found in an outbreak in Denmark’s mink population, it doesn’t share the European country’s view that the new strain may lessen the effectiveness of current Covid-19 vaccine candidates, WHO’s Executive Director Michael Ryan said at a briefing.

• Norway’s capital has ordered that cinemas, training centers and swimming halls be closed and has banned the service of alcohol to slow a rise in infections. The curbs come after Prime Minister Erna Solberg on Thursday introduced tighter rules nationwide and implored people to stay home.

• Johnson & Johnson will imminently start clinical trials of its Covid-19 vaccine in South Africa after getting regulatory approval, according to the co-chair of the study in the country. Meanwhile, scientists monitoring wastewater in the Western Cape province detected spikes of the coronavirus in the last three weeks as concerns grow among the government that a lack of compliance with health guidelines may trigger a second wave.

• The rate of increase of Covid-19 infections in England is starting to slow, according to new figures published Friday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. The total rate of infections rose to one in 90 in the week through Oct. 31 in England, according to new figures published Friday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. While this up from the previous published rate of 1 in 100, the increase is less steep compared with previous weeks, according to ONS.

• Romania topped 10,000 new coronavirus cases over 24 hours on Friday for the first time since the pandemic started, ahead of nationwide night-time curfew, shopping hour curbs, school closures and mandatory masks coming into force next week. “People will be unhappy with these measures, but they had to be taken before it’s too late,” the government’s virus task force official Raed Arafat said on Friday. “We still expect an increase in cases for now, so we insist to keep these measures in place for at least 30 days so they have an impact.”

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"Banana Follies - The Mother Of All Color Revolutions"

"Banana Follies - The Mother Of All Color Revolutions"

by Pepe Escobar 

"A gaming exercise of the perfect, indigenous color revolution, code-named Blue, was leaked from a major think tank established in the imperial lands that first designed the color revolution concept. Not all the information disclosed here about the gaming of Blue has been declassified. That may well elicit a harsh response from the Deep State, even as a similar scenario was gamed by an outfit called Transition Integrity Project. Both scenarios should qualify as predictive programming – with the Deep State preparing the general public, in advance, for exactly how things will play out.

The standard color revolution playbook rules usually start in the capital city of nation-state X, during an election cycle, with freedom fighting “rebels” enjoying full national and international media support. Blue concerns a presidential election in the Hegemon. In the gaming exercise, the incumbent president, codenamed Buffoon, was painted Red. The challenger, codenamed Corpse, was painted Blue.

Blue – the exercise – went up a notch because, compared to its predecessors, the starting point was not a mere insurgency, but a pandemic. Not any pandemic, but a really serious, bad to the bone global pandemic with an explosive infection fatality rate of less than 1%. By a fortunate coincidence, the lethal pandemic allowed Blue operators to promote mail-in ballots as the safest, socially distant voting procedure. That connected with a rash of polls predicting an all but inevitable Blue win in the election – even a Blue Wave.

The premise is simple: take down the economy and deflate a sitting president whose stated mission is to drive a booming economy. In tandem, convince public opinion that actually getting to the polls is a health hazard.

The Blue production committee takes no chances, publicly announcing they would contest any result that contradicts the prepackaged outcome: Blue’s final victory in a quirky, anachronistic, anti-direct democracy body called the “electoral college”. If Red somehow wins, Blue would wait until every vote is counted and duly litigated to every jurisdiction level. Relying on massive media support and social media marketing propelled to saturation levels, Blue proclaims that “under no scenario” Red would be allowed to declare victory.

Countdown to magic voting: Election Day comes. Vote counting is running smoothly – mail-in count, election day count, up to the minute tallies – but mostly favoring Red, especially in three states always essential for capturing the presidency. Red is also leading in what is characterized as “swing states”. But then, just as a TV network prematurely calls a supposedly assured Red state for Blue, all vote counting stops before midnight in major urban areas in key swing states under Blue governors, with Red in the lead.

Blue operators stop counting to check whether their scenario towards a Blue victory can roll out without bringing in mail-in ballots. Their preferred mechanism is to manufacture the “will of the people” by keeping up an illusion of fairness. Yet they can always rely, as Plan B, on urban mail-in ballots on tap, hot and cold, until Blue squeaks by in two particularly key swing states that Red had bagged in a previous election.

That’s what happens. Starting at 2 am, and later into the night, enter a batch of “magic” votes in these two key states. The sudden, vertical upward “adjustment” includes the case of a batch of 130k+ pro-Blue votes cast in a county alongside not a single pro-Red vote – a statistical miracle of Holy Ghost proportions. Stuffing the ballot box is a typical scam applied in Banana Republic declinations of color revolution. Blue operators use the tried and tested method applied to the gold futures market, when a sudden drop of naked shorts drives down gold price, thus protecting the US dollar.

Blue operators bet the compliant mainstream media/Big Tech alliance will not question that, well, out of the blue, the vote would swing towards Blue in a 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 margin. They bet no questions will be asked on how a 2% to 5% positive ballot trend in Red’s favor in a few states turned into a 0.5% to 1.4% trend in favor of Blue by around 4am. 

And that this discrepancy happens in two swing states almost simultaneously. 

And that some precincts turn more presidential votes than they have registered voters.

And that in swing states, the number of extra mysterious votes for Blue far exceeds votes cast for the Senate candidates in these states, when the record shows that down ticket totals are traditionally close.

And that turnout in one of these states would be 89.25%.

The day after Election Day there are vague explanations that one of the possible vote-dumps was just a “clerical error”, while in another disputed state there is no justification for accepting ballots with no postmark. Blue operators relax because the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance squashes each and every complaint as “conspiracy theories”.

The Red counter-revolution: The two presidential candidates do not exactly help their own cases. Codename Corpse, in a Freudian slip, had revealed his party had set up the most extensive and “diverse” fraud scheme ever. Not only Corpse is about to be investigated for a shady computer-related scheme. He is a stage 2 dementia patient with a rapidly unraveling profile – kept barely functional by drugs, which can’t prevent his mind slowly shutting down.

Codename Buffoon, true to his instincts, goes pre-emptive, declaring the whole election a fraud but without offering a smoking gun. He is duly debunked by the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance for spreading “false claims”.

All this is happening as a wily, old, bitter operator not only had declared that the only admissible scenario was a Blue victory; she had already positioned herself for a top security job.

Blue also games that Red would immediately embark on a single-minded path ahead: regiment an army of lawyers demanding access to every registration roll to scrub, review and verify each and every mail-in ballot, a process of de facto forensic analysis. Yet Blue cannot foresee how many fake ballots will be unveiled during recounts.

As Corpse is set to declare victory, Buffoon eyes the long game, set to take the whole thing all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Red machine had already gamed it – as it was fully aware of how operation Blue would be played. The Red counter-revolution does carry the potential of strategically checkmating Blue. It is a three-pronged attack – with Red using the Judiciary Committee, the Senate and the Attorney General, all under the authority of codename Buffoon until Inauguration Day. The end game after a vicious legal battle is to overthrow Blue.

Red’s top operators have the option of setting up a Senate commission, or a Special Counsel, at the request of the Judiciary Committee, to be appointed by the Department of Justice to investigate Corpse.

In the meantime, two electoral college votes, one-month apart, are required to certify the presidential winner. These votes will happen in the middle of one and perhaps two investigations focused on Corpse. Any state represented at the electoral college may object to approve an investigated Corpse; in this case it’s illegal for that state to allow its electors to certify the state’s presidential results. Corpse may even be impeached by his own party, under the 25th Ammendment, due to his irreversible mental decline.

The resulting chaos would have to be resolved by the Red-leaning Supreme Court. Not exactly the outcome favored by Blue.

The House always wins: The heart of the matter is that this think tank gaming transcends both Red and Blue. It’s all about the Deep State’s end game. There’s nothing like a massive psy ops embedded in a WWE-themed theater under the sign of Divide and Rule to pit mob vs. mob, with half of the mob rebelling against what it perceives as an illegitimate government. The 0.00001% comfortably surveys the not only metaphorical carnage from above.

Even as the Deep State, using its Blue minions, would never have allowed codename Buffoon to prevail, again, domestic Divide and Rule might be seen as the least disastrous outcome for the world at large. A civil war context in theory distracts the Deep State from bombing more Global South latitudes into the dystopian “democracy” charade it is now enacting. And yet a domestic Empire of Chaos gridlock may well encourage more foreign adventures as a necessary diversion to tie the room together. And that’s the beauty of the Blue gaming exercise: the House wins, one way or another."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

Musical Interlude: Foy Vance, Ed Sheeran, "Make it Rain"

Ed Sheeran, "Make it Rain"

Foy Vance, "Make it Rain"

The original, Ed Sheeran's version is the cover.

Must Watch! “Economic Reality Has Begun; FED Will Destroy the Economy; Dollar On Borrowed Time”

Jeremiah Babe,

“Economic Reality Has Begun; FED Will Destroy the Economy;

 Dollar On Borrowed Time”

"Market Fantasy Updates 11/6/20"

"Market Fantasy Updates 11/6/20"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

○

"The more I see of the monied classes, 

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

○

Gregory Mannarino, 

PM 11/6/20: "Post Market Report:

Markets, Lies, Scams, Propaganda, Distractions"

 - https://traderschoice.net/

○

Updated live.

- https://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary

○

- https://markets.businessinsider.com/

○

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

○

- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

○

Daily Update (Nov. 6th to 9th)

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

○

Insanity... 

○

And now... The End Game...

Musical Interlude: Gnomusy, "Dolmen Ridge"

Gnomusy, "Dolmen Ridge"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"No, hamburgers are not this big. What is pictured is a sharp telescopic view of a magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3628, a puffy galactic disk divided by dark dust lanes. Of course, this deep galactic portrait puts some astronomers in mind of its popular moniker, The Hamburger Galaxy.

The tantalizing island universe is about 100,000 light-years across and 35 million light-years away in the northern springtime constellation Leo. NGC 3628 shares its neighborhood in the local Universe with two other large spirals M65 and M66 in a grouping otherwise known as the Leo Triplet. Gravitational interactions with its cosmic neighbors are likely responsible for the extended flare and warp of this spiral's disk.”

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170503.html

"One Summer Night..."

"One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will."

- Rachel Carson

"The Trick..."

“The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable,

or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.”

- Carlos Castaneda

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field "

"White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field" 

 "Coming down out of the freezing sky

with its depths of light,

like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,

it was beautiful, and accurate,

striking the snow and whatever was there

with a force that left the imprint

of the tips of its wings - five feet apart -

and the grabbing thrust of its feet,

and the indentation of what had been running

through the white valleys of the snow -

and then it rose, gracefully,

and flew back to the frozen marshes

to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,

in the blue shadows -

so I thought:

maybe death isn't darkness, after all,

but so much light wrapping itself around us -

as soft as feathers -

that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,

and shut our eyes, not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried,

as through the translucence of mica,

to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,

that is nothing but light - scalding, aortal light -

in which we are washed and washed

out of our bones." 

- Mary Oliver

"The Ways We Miss Our Lives..."

"A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life."

- Richard Ford

The Daily "Near You?"

Yerevan, Armenia. Thanks for stopping by!

"Not Much Mental Distance..."

“A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit - no matter how often he's reminded of it - that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley. Very few toads in this world are Prince Charmings in disguise. Most are simply toads, and they are going to stay that way. Toads don't make laws or change any basic structures, but one or two rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way they get through life. A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell's Angels' view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.”

- Hunter S. Thompson