"95 Questions to Help You Find Meaning and Happiness "

"95 Questions to Help You Find Meaning and Happiness"

by Marc Chernoff

"At the cusp of a new day, week, month or year, most of us take a little time to reflect on our lives by looking back over the past and ahead into the future. We ponder the successes, failures and standout events that are slowly scripting our life/s story. This process of self-reflection helps us maintain a conscious awareness of where we've been and where we intend to go. It is pertinent to the organization and preservation of our long-term goals and happiness. The questions below will help you with this process. Because when it comes to finding meaning in life, asking the right questions is the answer.

1. In one sentence, who are you?

2. Why do you matter?

3. What is your life motto?

4. What's something you have that everyone wants?

5. What is missing in your life?

6. What's been on your mind most lately?

7. Happiness is a ________?

8. What stands between you and happiness?

9. What do you need most right now?

10. What does the child inside you long for?

11. What is one thing right now that you are totally sure of?

12. What's been bothering you lately?

13. What are you scared of?

14. What has fear of failure stopped you from doing?

15. What will you never give up on?

16. What do you want to remember forever?

17. What makes you feel secure?

18. Which activities make you lose track of time?

19. What's the most difficult decision you've ever made?

20. What's the best decision you've ever made?

21. What are you most grateful for?

22. What is worth the pain?

23. In order of importance, how would you rank: happiness, money, love, health, fame?

24. What is something you/ve always wanted, but don't yet have?

25. What was the most defining moment in your life during this past year?

26. What's the number one change you need to make in your life in the next twelve months?

27. What's the number one thing you want to achieve in the next five years?

28. What is the biggest motivator in your life right now?

29. What will you never do?

30. What's something you said you'd never do, but have since done?

31. What's something new you recently learned about yourself?

32. What do you sometimes pretend to understand that you really do not?

33. In one sentence, what do you wish for your future self?

34. What worries you most about the future?

35. When you look into the past, what do you miss most?

36. What's something from the past that you don't miss at all?

37. What recently reminded you of how fast time flies?

38. What is the biggest challenge you face right now?

39. In one word, how would you describe your personality?

40. What never fails to frustrate you?

41. What are you known for by your friends and family?

42. What's something most people don't know about you?

43. What's a common misconception people have about you?

44. What's something a lot of people do that you disagree with?

45. What's a belief you hold with which many people disagree?

46. What's something that's harder for you than it is for most people?

47. What are the top three qualities you look for in a friend?

48. If you had a friend who spoke to you in the same way that you sometimes speak to yourself, how long would you allow that person to be your friend?

49. When you think of home,what, specifically, do you think of?

50. What's the most valuable thing you own?

51. If you had to move 3000 miles away, what would you miss most?

52. What would make you smile right now?

53. What do you do when nothing else seems to make you happy?

54. What do you wish did not exist in your life?

55. What should you avoid to improve your life?

56. What is something you would hate to go without for a day?

57. What's the biggest lie you once believed was true?

58. What's something bad that happened to you that made you stronger?

59. What's something nobody could ever steal from you?

60. What's something you disliked when you were younger that you truly enjoy today?

61. What are you glad you quit?

62. What do you need to spend more time doing?

63. What are you naturally good at?

64. What have you been counting or keeping track of recently?

65. What has the little voice inside your head been saying lately?

66. What's something you should always be careful with?

67. What should always be taken seriously?

68. What should never be taken seriously?

69. What are three things you can't get enough of?

70. What would you do differently if you knew nobody would judge you?

71. What fascinates you?

72. What's the difference between being alive and truly living?

73. What's something you would do every day if you could?

74. At what time in your recent past have you felt most passionate and alive?

75. Which is worse, failing or never trying?

76. What makes you feel incomplete?

77. When did you experience a major turning point in your life?

78. What or who do you wish you lived closer to?

79. If you had the opportunity to get a message across to a large group of people, what would your message be?

80. What's something you know you can count on?

81. What makes you feel comfortable?

82. What's something about you that has never changed?

83. What will be different about your life in exactly one year?

84. What mistakes do you make over and over again?

85. What do you have a hard time saying no to?

86. Are you doing what you believe in, or are you settling for what you are doing?

87. What's something that used to scare you, but no longer does?

88. What promise to yourself do you still need to fulfill?

89. What do you appreciate most about your current situation?

90. What's something simple that makes you smile?

91. So far, what has been the primary focus of your life?

92. How do you know when it's time to move on?

93. What's something you wish you could do one more time?

94. When you're 90-years-old, what will matter to you the most?

95. What would you regret not fully doing, being, or having in your life?"

- http://www.marcandangel.com/

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The Daily "Near You?"

Derby, Kansas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"On The Meridian Of Time..."

“On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.”

- Henry Miller

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything"

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s

Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and

Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning"

by Maria Popova

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims: "Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism! How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?

[…]

Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I slept and dreamt

that life was joy.

I awoke and saw

that life was duty.

I worked - and behold,

duty was joy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.

[…]

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

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

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Return”

“The Return”

“Suddenly the window will open

and Mother will call,

it's time to come in.

The wall will part,

I will enter heaven in muddy shoes.

I will come to the table

and answer questions rudely.

I am all right, leave me

alone. Head in hand I

sit and sit. How can I tell them

about that long

and tangled way?

Here in heaven mothers

knit green scarves;

flies buzz.

Father dozes by the stove

after six days' labor.

No - surely I can't tell them

that people are at each

other's throats.”

- Theodore Roethke

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, "Must Watch! Markets, A Look Ahead: Special Report”

Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/29/21:

"Must Watch! Markets, A Look Ahead: Special Report”

- https://traderschoice.net/

Greg Hunter, "Fed Prints Money or the Whole Thing Blows Up"

"Fed Prints Money or the Whole Thing Blows Up"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Financial writer, market analyst and precious metals expert Craig Hemke says the Fed has all but said it was going to delay the so-called “taper” of easy money policies–forever. This is why gold and silver spiked as the dollar tanked on Friday. Hemke contends, “The Chinese, four months in a row, have been net sellers of Treasuries. They’re not buying them. Well, somebody has got to buy. Congress just announced this week that they came to a deal where they are going to spend $4.1 trillion on what is allegedly called infrastructure. The money has got to come from somewhere. There is this notion that they are just going to raise taxes on rich people. Rich people are just going to change how they spend and do their taxes. Who is going to loan us money? It’s not going to be the Chinese or other foreign countries because they don’t have confidence in us anymore. So, the money is going to come from somewhere. Of course, the Fed is going to keep monetizing the debt because if they don’t, interest rates have got to rise to a point people are willing to loan it to the U.S. If interest rates go to 3% or 5%, the whole thing blows up.”

Hemke points out, “All we can do is prepare for a time when this finally implodes because it will. Confidence will eventually collapse. Confidence is like Hemingway’s explanation of how he went bankrupt. He was asked, ‘How did you go broke?’ He said, ‘At first slowly, and then, all at once.’ Confidence gets chipped away a little bit at a time like what you are seeing in Afghanistan, and then, all at once. That is eventually what is going to happen. You’ve got to be using this time to prepare for that. Econ 101 teaches you if you are increasing supply (of dollars) and decreasing the demand, the price falls and the dollar collapses. Inflation spins out of control. Then, you have to do all these other things to try to keep interest rates from going up. All the plates start to collapse that Fed Head Powell is trying to spin.”

Hemke says all this dollar printing and interest rate suppression is a good thing for precious metals and a very bad thing for the U.S. dollar. Hemke explains, “You’ve got people saying I don’t want to use the dollar anymore. These are all significant consequences to everything that led up to the last three weeks, but now, the events of the last three weeks are spinning it that much faster.”

Hemke is still expecting gold and silver to close much higher by the end of the year. How much higher is anyone’s guess? There are some things you can count on, and Hemke predicts, “Covid is not going away. Confidence in the U.S. monetary system continues to get chipped away. The taper is impossible. The Fed not monetizing the debt is impossible, they have to... prices of gold and silver are going to soar.”

- https://usawatchdog.com/

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

 with Craig Hemke of the popular website TFMetalsReport.com

- https://rumble.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, “Return To Freedom”

Full screen recommended.

2002, “Return To Freedom”

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Close to the Great Bear (Ursa Major) and surrounded by the stars of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici), this celestial wonder was discovered in 1781 by the metric French astronomer Pierre Mechain. Later, it was added to the catalog of his friend and colleague Charles Messier as M106. Modern deep telescopic views reveal it to be an island universe - a spiral galaxy around 30 thousand light-years across located only about 21 million light-years beyond the stars of the Milky Way. 

Along with a bright central core, this stunning galaxy portrait, a composite of image data from amateur and professional telescopes, highlights youthful blue star clusters and reddish stellar nurseries tracing the galaxy's spiral arms. It also shows off remarkable reddish jets of glowing hydrogen gas. In addition to small companion galaxy NGC 4248 at bottom right, background galaxies can be found scattered throughout the frame. M106, also known as NGC 4258, is a nearby example of the Seyfert class of active galaxies, seen across the spectrum from radio to X-rays. Active galaxies are powered by matter falling into a massive central black hole.”

- https://apod.nasa.gov/

"I Would Rather Have..."

"When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair."

- Nadezhda Mandelstam

"The Most Deluded People..."

"There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded

people are those who choose to ignore what they already know.”

- John Heywood, 1546

The Daily "Near You?"

Bessemer, Alabama, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"‘Ultra-Vaxxed’ Israel Sees Huge Surge in COVID as ‘Experts’ Avoid the Only Logical Conclusion"

"‘Ultra-Vaxxed’ Israel Sees Huge Surge in COVID 

as ‘Experts’ Avoid the Only Logical Conclusion"

By J.D. Rucker

"Israel is one of the most vaccinated nations in the world. 80% of their eligible population is vaccinated, far beyond what was once being touted as a “herd immunity” level necessary for life to return to normal. Despite their success in getting their population to have experimental drugs injected into their bodies, the country is suffering through a huge spike in cases. Tuesday had nearly the highest new case total the nation has seen since the pandemic began.

There have been plenty of reasons given for this. Some point to Israel opening up and letting people take off their masks for a short time. Others say it’s normal for there to be occasional spikes following mass vaccinations, ignoring literally every successful vaccine in world history. Then, there are those who are trying to move the goalpost, blaming the Delta Variant for forcing us to accept that the vaccine are more of a deterrent than protection.

One particularly clueless news anchor compared the vaccines to watches, saying “Some watches are waterproof while others are water-resistant.” She seemed to feel smart after revealing her analogy.

What you won’t hear anyone in government, mainstream media, academia, or Big Tech tell us is the only logical conclusion: The “vaccines” aren’t working.

An article at The Daily Beast discussed the circumstances in Israel. As mandated by the powers-that-be, they swayed the sentiment of the article towards promoting the vaccines despite the facts on the ground. But, as Israel’s coronavirus czar Dr. Salman Zarka said, “Unfortunately, the numbers don’t lie.”

The massive surge of COVID-19 infections in Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries on earth, is pointing to a complicated path ahead for America. In June, there were several days with zero new COVID infections in Israel. The country launched its national vaccination campaign in December last year and has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 80 percent of citizens above the age of 12 fully inoculated. COVID, most Israelis thought, had been defeated. All restrictions were lifted and Israelis went back to crowded partying and praying in mask-free venues.

Fast forward two months later: Israel reported 9,831 new diagnosed cases on Tuesday, a hairbreadth away from the worst daily figure ever recorded in the country - 10,000 - at the peak of the third wave. More than 350 people have died of the disease in the first three weeks of August. In a Sunday press conference, the directors of seven public hospitals announced that they could no longer admit any coronavirus patients. With 670 COVID-19 patients requiring critical care, their wards are overflowing and staff are at breaking point.

“I don’t want to frighten you,” coronavirus czar Dr. Salman Zarka told the Israeli parliament this week. “But this is the data. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t lie.”

What happened? Here’s what happened. We were conned. We’re still being conned. The “vaccines,” which are nothing like any successful vaccines from the past, have failed miserably. For a nation to be as heavily vaccinated as Israel to be going through a spike in Covid cases cannot be categorized as anything other than proof that they do not work. Period. End of story.

Unfortunately, it’s not the end of the story. Logic has been tossed out the window. The article continues to try to explain away what’s happening: "The complex and sobering truth is that no single policy or event brought Israel to this crisis, Hagai Levine, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor of epidemiology, told The Daily Beast. A deadly set of circumstances came together to put Israel on the precipice, most of which can be summed up as: “We are still in the midst of a pandemic, and there is no silver bullet.” “All the vectors have influenced the rise in morbidity,” he said.

But the principal causes of Israel’s current predicament are the dominance of the extremely infectious Delta variant, which was carried into the country by Israelis returning from foreign vacations during the weeks in which Israel dropped all restrictive measures- along with the worrisome decrease in vaccine efficacy after about six months.

Israel vaccinated its population almost exclusively with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which received full FDA approval on Monday and remains the gold standard for the prevention of severe illness due to the coronavirus.

Notice how they try to throw lipstick on the pig by calling the Pfizer injections the “gold standard for the prevention of severe illness due to the coronavirus.” This is what we’re faced with, but there’s a silver lining to their new rhetoric. If the “vaccines” are good for preventing serious illness and not effective at preventing infection, shouldn’t that make vaccine mandates unnecessary? It comes down to personal choice if the vaccinated are just as contagious as the unvaccinated, which clearly seems to be the case.

Logic is unlikely to sway the vaccine pushers. They want mandates and it will take the combined efforts of those who love freedom to prevent America from becoming like Australia… or worse."

- https://www.globalresearch.ca/

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Related:

• "Unthinkable Thoughts"

• “A Pathologist Summary Of What These Jabs 

Do To The Brain And Other Organs”

• "Comirnaty CV19 Vax Approval is Actually 

Fraudulent "

"It’s What You Know For Sure..."

“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interests,’ as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.“

- Nouriel Roubini

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.

It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

- Mark Twain

“There Is No Reality Anymore…”

“There Is No Reality Anymore…”

by Thad Beversdorf

“I‘d love to change the world, but I don‘t know what to do,

so I’ll leave it up to you…”

“What a great lyric that is from the late 60′s, early 70′s English band “10 Years After.”* I believe this describes that uneasy feeling of discontent that sits deep in the stomach, beneath the day to day exteriors, of so many people today. The world is like a black hole in that it seems to be getting smaller and smaller as the years go by but also heavier and heavier with each passing day.

When I was a teenager and my friends and I were taking reality obscuring substances, one of my buddies (this means you Nichol) would stop us at certain points throughout the night for a reality check. This was just a few moments where we ‘d all gather our senses to make sure the world was still right and then we’d venture back into obscurity. I feel that reality is an old world term. There is no reality anymore. With advances in technology came unending possibilities of if you can dream it they can make it so. The ubiquitous flow of information ensures that the truth is always available but never known with certainty. It means there is no such thing as a reality check. It’s like that dream inside a dream inside a dream. Which reality is real anymore? How deep does the rabbit hole go?

We are raised with pretty standard ideals of what the world is meant to be but these ideals seem to take place only in the movies. It must be incredibly difficult for our young people to reconcile the two worlds, I know it is for me. That which they learn as a child and that which they find has replaced it as a young adult. Our leaders are despicable, arrogant and egotistical fools who pretend we elect them because we don’t see them for what they are. But we elect them because we feel we have no choice. We know what we want the world to be. We know what it should look and feel like. And we know it is not the world in which we live today. I know I’d love to change the world but I don’t know how and so I’ll leave it up to you. And so we continue to move forward down this path, each step uneasy as though something ungood is lurking just around the next corner.

We are able to put that feeling out of our minds for the most part but our subconscious is always aware that things are off. We have all kinds of self help books and new age theories that attempt to make sense of it all and explain why we just aren t happy the way we envision happy should be. Perhaps the only reality is the reality that the world isn’t what we had hoped it would be and we don’t know how to make that right. I’d love to say that if we just stand up and do the right thing, act from our hearts and have good intentions that it could change the world. But quite honestly there are ill-intentioned people that are constructing this new world in which we sub-exist.It is them and us, but they’d never say it that way. Certainly though their intention is not for us to co-exist along side them.

But so we carry on and we, move forward, to the best of our abilities. We accept the good with the bad and acknowledge that everything is a trade off. We believe that if we go to college we stand a better chance in life and so we borrow our first 10 years of post college wages to get an edge over the next guy who is doing the same. When we get out of school we know that it is time to buckle down and get serious. We put our lives on hold in order to focus on the future with the idea that one day we will be sitting on the porch with the person we love, the one we put on hold for all those years, and we will then enjoy our life’s work then.

But then we get further in debt because we need a sleeker car and we need a bigger house but it’s ok because we can just work a little more. And then the kids come and as far as we got to know them they are great, I think. But it’s ok because they just finished college and now they’ve moved back in as the job market is tough out there and so we’re paying off their student loans. Eventually they get away and begin their life’s journey and they take their debt with them. And then we realize, god I’m almost 60. But it feels great because that means soon I’ll be there on the porch getting to know the one I love again and life will be grand at that point.

But then we turn 65 and we realize all those policies that were implemented by all those well-intentioned decision makers have actually left us with very little. And we say it’s ok because we’d be bored anyway just sitting on the porch. And so we take a job waving at people in Walmart but feel like OMG how did I get here. But the shift ends and we go home anxious to spend time with the one we love because, although it’s a terrible thought, we are aware we’re both getting long in the tooth. And so we arrive home only to realize the one we love is now sick and that it’s too late for our days sitting on the porch getting to know each other again. We do everything we can but we cannot afford to help that person who stood quietly behind us all those years as healthcare costs are unrealistically out of touch with reality. And then it hits us that despite taking all the right steps to ensure we have a great life we failed to ever really be happy, to really love and to really accept love. And then it really hits us, this world provides but one shot.

Well, then that feeling of uneasy discontent that shadowed us when we were young is now an intense pain in our heart. And we look out at the world and we ask ourselves how could this have happened? I did everything they told me I was supposed to do, I did everything right! And it becomes clear that life was a chance to change the world, but we didn’t know what to do, and so we left it up to…”

- http://www.zerohedge.com/

○

*

"How It Really Should Be"

“Sigmund Wollman’s Reality Test”

“Sigmund Wollman’s Reality Test”

by 
Robert Fulghum

  

“In the summer of 1959, at the Feather River Inn near the town of Blairsden in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. A resort environment. And I, just out of college, have a job that combines being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping out with the horse-wrangling at the stables. The owner/manager is Italian-Swiss, with European notions about conditions of employment. He and I do not get along. I think he’s a fascist who wants pleasant employees who know their place, and he thinks I’m a good example of how democracy can be carried too far. I’m twenty-two and pretty free with my opinions, and he’s fifty-two and has a few opinions of his own. One week the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every single day. Two wieners, a mound of sauerkraut, and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury, the cost of meals was deducted from our check. I was outraged.

 On Friday night of that awful week, I was at my desk job around 11:00 P.M., and the night auditor had just come on duty. I went into the kitchen to get a bite to eat and saw notes to the chef to the effect that wieners and sauerkraut are on the employee menu for two more days.

That tears it. I quit! For lack of a better audience, I unloaded on the night auditor, Sigmund Wollman.

I declared that I have had it up to here; that I am going to get a plate of wieners and sauerkraut and go and wake up the owner and throw it on him. I am sick and tired of this crap and insulted and nobody is going to make me eat wieners and sauerkraut for a whole week and make me pay for it and who does he think he is anyhow and how can life be sustained on wieners and sauerkraut and this is un-American and I don’t like wieners and sauerkraut enough to eat it one day for God’s sake and the whole hotel stinks anyhow and the horses are all nags and the guests are all idiots and I’m packing my bags and heading for Montana where they never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut and wouldn’t feed that stuff to the pigs. Something like that. I’m still mad about it.

I raved on this way for twenty minutes, and needn’t repeat it all here. You get the drift. My monologue was delivered at the top of my lungs, punctuated by blows on the front desk with a fly-swatter, the kicking of chairs, and much profanity. A call to arms, freedom, unions, uprisings, and the breaking of chains for the working masses.

As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman, the night auditor, sat quietly on his stool, smoking a cigarette, watching me with sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He’s got good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin, coughed a lot. He liked being alone at the night job – gave him intellectual space, gave him peace and quiet, and, even more, he could go into the kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to – all the wieners and sauerkraut he wanted. To him, a feast. More than that, there’s nobody around at night to tell him what to do. In Auschwitz he dreamed of such a time. The only person he sees at work is me, the nightly disturber of his dream. Our shifts overlap for an hour. And here I am again. A one-man war party at full cry.

“Fulchum, are you finished?”

“No. Why?”

Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know what’s wrong with you? It’s not wieners and kraut and it’s not the boss and it’s not the chef and it’s not this job.”

“So what’s wrong with me?”

“Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don’t know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night.” In a gesture combining dismissal and blessing, he waved me off to bed.

Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes with a truth so hard. Years later I heard a Japanese Zen Buddhist priest describe what the moment of enlightenment was like and I knew exactly what he meant. There in that late-night darkness of the Feather River Inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked my butt and opened a window in my mind.

For thirty years now, in times of stress and strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I’m ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks: “Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?”

I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference. Good night, Sig.”

- http://www.livinglifefully.com/

The Poet: Maya Angelou, “Alone”

“Alone”

“Lying, thinking

Last night

How to find my soul a home,

Where water is not thirsty

And bread loaf is not stone.

I came up with one thing

And I don’t believe I’m wrong,

That nobody,

But nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone,

Nobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires

With money they can’t use,

Their wives run round like banshees,

Their children sing the blues.

They’ve got expensive doctors

To cure their hearts of stone,

But nobody,

No, nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone,

Nobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely

I’ll tell you what I know…

Storm clouds are gathering,

The wind is gonna blow.

The race of man is suffering,

And I can hear the moan,

‘Cause nobody,

But nobody,

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone,

Nobody, but nobody,

Can make it out here alone.”

- Maya Angelou

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Believe"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Believe"

“Prepare For The End Game; Knowing The Bubbles; Incomes Compromised; Banks Have Conditioned Us”

Jeremiah Babe, PM 8/27/21:

“Prepare For The End Game; Knowing The Bubbles; 

Incomes Compromised; Banks Have Conditioned Us”

"Commercial Real Estate Collapse Triggers 70% Property Value Drop Due To Bankruptcies & Foreclosures"

Full screen recommended.

"Commercial Real Estate Collapse Triggers 70% 

Property Value Drop Due To Bankruptcies & Foreclosures"

by Epic Economist

"The US economy is almost fully reopened at this point. However, several big retailers and shopping malls are either still struggling or shuttering stores and locations at alarming rates. Consumers are just now realizing how ravaging was the carnage. Over the past 12 months, the nationwide drop in retail sales for brick-and-mortar stores was simply unprecedented. It marked the biggest decline in over a decade. Only in 2020, tens of thousands of retail brands filed for bankruptcy, and at least 25,000 stores were permanently closed. But the truth is that the entire brick-and-mortar sector of retail has been suffering from low sales and plummeting foot traffic for years. In 2019, about 9,300 stores closed, and an additional 80,000 stores - which represent 9 percent of all stores in the country - will close in the next two years as a part of the phenomenon known as "retail apocalypse," predicts a report from financial services company UBS.

Already, big household names such as Brooks Brothers, J. Crew, Guitar Center, and Pier 1 have filed for bankruptcy. The most recent bankruptcy filings include Sears, Lucky Brand, Forever 21, and Circuit City. In total, more than 60 major retailers filed for bankruptcy in 2020. Department stores have been particularly hard-hit by the movement restrictions and lockdowns imposed last year as well as the exponential growth in online commerce. There's is no end in sight for the retail apocalypse: Given that consumer patterns won't turn back, nearly half of all remaining mall-based department stores will be shuttered by the end of 2021, according to the real estate research firm Green Street Advisors. And the collapse in brick-and-mortar sales, as well as the massive wave of bankruptcies, are already dramatically impacting shopping malls all across the nation. Industry executives say that there's a huge number of malls that are either facing a financial abyss or already down the abyss and currently on life support.

The past decade has seen hundreds of malls close doors for good, and according to Coresight Research estimates at least a quarter of the roughly 1,000 still remaining will be shuttered in the next three to five years. The alarmingly low revenue has left mall owners unable to keep up with mortgage and loan payments. In recent months, mall delinquency rates have soared, and many properties have seen their value face a painful crash. This chapter of the commercial real estate collapse is being called by industry analysts as the "Mallmageddon". Even though some of the debt-burdened properties are still open and doing business, they still cannot meet all the back loan payments and have defaulted on their debts. Consequently, their value has been slashed over the past couple of months as mall lenders are expiring to face huge collateral, while landlords are either walking away or filing for bankruptcy.

The one million square feet Westfield Palm Desert Mall, which is owned by commercial property giant Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield - a company that recently revealed a $32 billion debt and announced that it would get rid of all its US malls - is now facing a steep decline in its value. After all anchor stores began closing down, the Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield defaulted on the loan payment, and in June 2020, the $125 million loan was transferred to special servicing for payment default. The lenders have taken huge losses. The property, whose collateral was at $212 million is being sold to $55.2 million, amounting to a loss of 74% in value.

Now, one of the biggest worries for the sector is the giant New Jersey landmark: the American Dream mall located at the Meadowlands. The property is in extremely dire financial conditions. Since its opening, the megamall has faced a series of disruptions and it has been struggling to keep up with loan payments as the health crisis delayed its official opening for customers several times and the mall suffered from the extremely unfortunate timing of the worsening of the retail apocalypse. Some of the lenders of the project include J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Soros Fund Management, which are bracing to face losses on about $1.7 billion in construction loans if the mall's poor financial condition doesn't show any improvements soon enough.

Unfortunately, it seems that for both retailers and mall owners, the situation is about to get much worse as several companies are reporting severe supply chain issues, with manufacturers lacking capacity or materials, and distribution networks increasingly backlogged, just as we started to move closer to the busy holiday season. Mass bankruptcies, closures, and foreclosures are still imminent, with the total commercial real estate debt now nearing $21 billion. It's safe to say that things will never come back to normal, and the commercial real estate collapse has just begun."

- https://www.youtube.com/