"How Could You? A Dog's Story"

  

"How Could You? A Dog's Story"
by Jim Willis

"When I was a puppy I entertained you with my antics and made you laugh. You called me your child and despite a number of chewed shoes and a couple of murdered throw pillows, I became your best friend. Whenever I was "bad," you'd shake your finger at me and ask "How could you?" - but then you'd relent and roll me over for a bellyrub.

My housetraining took a little longer than expected, because you were terribly busy, but we worked on that together. I remember those nights of nuzzling you in bed, listening to your confidences and secret dreams, and I believed that life could not be any more perfect. We went for long walks and runs in the park, car rides, stops for ice cream (I only got the cone because "ice cream is bad for dogs," you said), and I took long naps in the sun waiting for you to come home at the end of the day.

Gradually, you began spending more time at work and on your career, and more time searching for a human mate. I waited for you patiently, comforted you through heartbreaks and disappointments, never chided you about bad decisions, and romped with glee at your homecomings, and when you fell in love.

She, now your wife, is not a "dog person" - still I welcomed her into our home, tried to show her affection, and obeyed her. I was happy because you were happy. Then the human babies came along and I shared your excitement. I was fascinated by their pinkness, how they smelled, and I wanted to mother them, too. Only she and you worried that I might hurt them, and I spent most of my time banished to another room, or to a dog crate. Oh, how I wanted to love them, but I became a "prisoner of love."

As they began to grow, I became their friend. They clung to my fur and pulled themselves up on wobbly legs, poked fingers in my eyes, investigated my ears and gave me kisses on my nose. I loved everything about them, especially their touch - because your touch was now so infrequent - and I would have defended them with my life if need be. I would sneak into their beds and listen to their worries and secret dreams. Together we waited for the sound of your car in the driveway. There had been a time, when others asked you if you had a dog, that you produced a photo of me from your wallet and told them stories about me. These past few years, you just answered "yes" and changed the subject. I had gone from being your dog to "just a dog," and you resented every expenditure on my behalf.

Now you have a new career opportunity in another city and you and they will be moving to an apartment that does not allow pets. You've made the right decision for your "family," but there was a time when I was your only family.

I was excited about the car ride until we arrived at the animal shelter. It smelled of dogs and cats, of fear, of hopelessness. You filled out the paperwork and said "I know you will find a good home for her." They shrugged and gave you a pained look. They understand the realities facing a middle-aged dog or cat, even one with "papers."

You had to pry your son's fingers loose from my collar as he screamed "No, Daddy! Please don't let them take my dog!" And I worried for him and what lessons you had just taught him about friendship and loyalty, about love and responsibility, and about respect for all life. You gave me a goodbye pat on the head, avoided my eyes, and politely refused to take my collar and leash with you. You had a deadline to meet and now I have one, too.

After you left, the two nice ladies said you probably knew about your upcoming move months ago and made no attempt to find me another good home. They shook their heads and asked "How could you?"

They are as attentive to us here in the shelter as their busy schedules allow. They feed us, of course, but I lost my appetite days ago. At first, whenever anyone passed my pen, I rushed to the front, hoping it was you - that you had changed your mind - that this was all a bad dream... or I hoped it would at least be someone who cared, anyone who might save me. When I realized I could not compete with the frolicking for attention of happy puppies, oblivious to their own fate, I retreated to a far corner and waited.

I heard her footsteps as she came for me at the end of the day and I padded along the aisle after her to a separate room. A blissfully quiet room. She placed me on the table, rubbed my ears and told me not to worry. My heart pounded in anticipation of what was to come, but there was also a sense of relief. The prisoner of love had run out of days. As is my nature, I was more concerned about her. The burden which she bears weighs heavily on her and I know that, the same way I knew your every mood.

She gently placed a tourniquet around my foreleg as a tear ran down her cheek. I licked her hand in the same way I used to comfort you so many years ago. She expertly slid the hypodermic needle into my vein. As I felt the sting and the cool liquid coursing through my body, I lay down sleepily, looked into her kind eyes and murmured "How could you?"

Perhaps because she understood my dogspeak, she said "I'm so sorry." She hugged me and hurriedly explained it was her job to make sure I went to a better place, where I wouldn't be ignored or abused or abandoned, or have to fend for myself - a place of love and light so very different from this earthly place. With my last bit of energy, I tried to convey to her with a thump of my tail that my "How could you?" was not meant for her. It was you, My Beloved Master, I was thinking of. I will think of you and wait for you forever. May everyone in your life continue to show you so much loyalty."

- http://www.crean.com/jimwillis/star-xcloseup.jpg

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"If there are no dogs in Heaven, 

then when I die I want to go where they went."

 - Will Rogers

Dogs are better souls than we could ever hope to be...

The Daily "Near You?"

 
Alliston, Ontario, Canada. Thanks for stopping by!

"Choices..."

"The human life is made up of choices. Yes or no. In or out. Up or down. And then there are the choices that matter. Love or hate. To be a hero or to be a coward. To fight or to give in. To live. Or die. Live or die. That's the important choice. And it's not always in our hands."

- Dr. Meredith Grey, "Grey's Anatomy"

“This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist. If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...would you slow down? Or speed up?"

- Chuck Palahniuk

"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death. The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"

"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death.

The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls

“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” – Roger Waters

“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund

“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.”

 – Dresden James

“A lie gets halfway around the world before 

the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

 – Winston Churchill

"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.

The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.

But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.

SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,

“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”

Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.

Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”

Postman ended his book by writing: “what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:

“Amused To Death”

by Roger Waters

"Doctor Doctor what’s wrong with me?

This supermarket life is getting long.

What is the heart life of a color TV?

What is the shelf life of a teenage queen?

Ooh western woman,

Ooh western girl,

News hound sniffs the air.

When Jessica Hahn goes down

He latches on to that symbol of

detachment,

Attracted by the peeling away of

feeling,

The celebrity of the abused shell

of the belle.

Ooh western woman,

Ooh western girl,

And the children of Melrose strut

their stuff,

Is absolute zero cold enough?

And out in the valley warm and clean

The little ones sit by their TV screens.

No thoughts to think,

No tears to cry,

All sucked dry down to the very

last breath.

Bartender what is wrong with me?

Why I am so out of breath?

The captain said excuse me ma’am,

This species has amused itself to death.

We watched the tragedy unfold,

We did as we were told.

We bought and sold,

It was the greatest show on earth.

But then it was over,

We oohed and aahed

We drove our racing cars,

We ate our last few jars of caviar,

And somewhere out there in the stars

A keen-eyed look-out

Spied a flickering light.

Our last hurrah.

And when they found our shadows

Grouped ‘round the TV sets,

They ran down every lead,

They repeated every test.

They checked out all the data in

their lists.

And then the alien anthropologists

Admitted they were still perplexed.

But on eliminating every other reason

For our sad demise,

They logged the only explanation left...

This species has amused itself to death

No tears to cry.

No feelings left.

This species has amused itself to

death…"

Roger Waters, “Amused To Death”

- https://www.globalresearch.ca/

○

Freely download “Amusing Ourselves to Death:

 Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, by Neil Postman, here:

- https://interesi.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/amusing.pdf

"We're Here..."

 

The Poet: David Whyte, "One Day"

  

"One Day"

"One day I will say

the gift I once had has been taken.

The place I have made for myself

belongs to another.

The words I have sung

are being sung by the ones

I would want.

Then I will be ready

for that voice

and the still silence in which it arrives.

And if my faith is good

then we'll meet again

on the road,

and we'll be thirsty,

and stop

and laugh

and drink together again

from the deep well of things as they are."

- David Whyte, 

"Where Many Rivers Meet"

○

"The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see -

it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life."

- Robert Penn Warren

"How It Really Is"

 

Benford’s Law Proves Unilateral Fraud Beyond a Reasonable Doubt"

"Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Michigan, Pennsylvania,

 Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties Will Go Red: 

Benford’s Law Proves Unilateral Fraud Beyond a Reasonable Doubt"

by mjwfour

The key takeaway from the graphic is that only Biden’s votes violate Benford’s law, as Trump’s votes follow Benford’s law to a tee. Benford’s law will be used to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was voter fraud in certain areas (Milwaukee, Detriot, Philadelphia, and Allegheny). Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania will be red and Trump will get the corresponding 46 electoral votes.”

Visit web site, click images for larger size.

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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"99.6% of Mail Ballots Went to Joe Biden in Pennsylvania?"

○

"Benford's Law - How Mathematics Can Detect Fraud!"

○

"Wisconsin Poll Workers Allegedly Altered 

Thousands Of Invalid Ballots: Report"

"Binaural Beats Music For Deep Focus, Concentration, Super Intelligence"

Greenred Productions, 

"Binaural Beats Music For Deep Focus, 

Concentration, Super Intelligence"

"Greenred Productions meditation music with binaural beats (brainwave music) can work as sleep music, studying music, relaxing music and many more. Relaxation music can also be used as Spa music and Massage music. Here you can find powerful self-help hypnosis including healing music, Zen music and yoga music. Some sessions are produced for your inner transformation: to overcome fear, elevate your mood and energy levels, and lose weight faster. Meditation music recordings also include reiki music, Zen meditation music and deep trance hypnosis sessions.

We compose instrumental and electronic music that is specially designed to enhance brain function and concentration, spa and massage therapy, and healing music therapy. For this reason, we use binaural beats. There are many types of beats for different daily meditation purposes: Delta Waves – Sleep Music/NREM sleep, Alpha Waves are neural oscillations, Theta Waves (cortical theta rhythm and Hippocampal theta rhythm). Beta waves associated with muscle contractions in isotonic movements, Gamma waves can help to release serotonin, endorphin and dopamine, so it works as happiness music for depression treatment."

Turn it on as background music. Go about your business. It works. As simple as that. I for one will take any edge I can get these days. You should too...

- CP

"It's Not The Load..."

"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it."

- Lena Horne

"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.

○

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"