"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

○

"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

"Just a Game"

"Just a Game"

by Bill Bonner

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – "This weekend, we hosted a wedding for our daughter. What a production! Your editor gave the customary “Father of the Bride” speech. Here’s a photo of the set-up.

You’re probably eager to hear the details. But that will have to wait…

Money Doesn’t Guarantee Victory: Today, we’re following up from Friday. We were looking at war… and armies… and how they become corrupt and incompetent. And we follow up by looking back to the ancient world. The Achaemenid Empire of Persia was the world’s hegemon – the USA of the 4th century B.C.

Imagine what it must have been like for the handful of soldiers at Thermopylae. They had been sent to defend the pass into Greece. They looked out and saw thousands of gleaming helmets… swords… bright-colored tunics… and wicker shields. Ancient Greek historian Herodotus puts the number of Persians assembled by Xerxes, King of the Achaemenid Empire, at 2.5 million. The real number was surely much, much lower.

Still, the Greeks were outnumbered by at least 20 to 1… including by the legendary Persian “immortals” (roughly equivalent to America’s Delta Force). The Greeks were wiped out at Thermopylae… but they won the war.

The naval Battle of Salamis destroyed the Persian fleet. Then, fearing having his vast forces cut off, Xerxes retreated. Almost all of his soldiers died from starvation and disease as they struggled to get back across the Hellespont.

Money does not guarantee victory in war… or in anything else. Often, it gets in the way. And of all the parasitic, degenerate, incompetent elite groups of the U.S. empire, the military/industrial complex is the biggest… and the most adept at separating the public from its money. Despite spending many times more than any enemy – real or imagined – the Pentagon has a record of failure at least equal to the feds’ other major boondoggles. The War on Poverty… the War on Drugs… or the War on COVID-19 – none can match the military, neither in squandering money… nor in pernicious consequences.

Fiasco War: Wait… You may think… “Ok, it’s such a big organization; it’s inevitable that some money will be badly spent. But it’s better to spend too much on defense than too little.” That’s not the way it works. You get what you pay for. Pay top dollar for a military; you get an army that’s good at getting paid. But soldiers are best when they are lean… not when they are fat. And the officers are best when they are promoted and rewarded for winning wars, not for losing them.

The 20-year debacle in Afghanistan, for example, was a huge defeat for the U.S. But it provided career-long enrichment opportunities for the Pentagon. The brass rotated through the Hindu Kush, punched up their resumes, got their medals and their “combat” pay… boosting their retirement compensation. Meanwhile, they were spending trillions of dollars. So it was not exactly a surprise that when their careers in the military were over, they went to work in cushy sinecures with defense contractors.

In other words, the skills the officers learned had nothing to do with winning a war. Instead, they got to be very good at lobbying Congress and keeping the money headed in their own direction. Which is how they managed to get a $24 billion increase – even after conducting a fiasco war for two decades. And now, always seeking more money, the whole officer corps is super sensitive to political fashions. It no longer even tries to win wars. Instead, it stretches them so as to squeeze out more money… while promising to fight like a lion against racism, global warming, inequality, and other bugaboos!

Real War: Our question for today: What will happen when these people face a real war? We may already know. Last October, the Pentagon conducted a major wargame… apparently trying to model what might happen if the U.S. went head-to-head with China in Asia. In July, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, reported the results. Speaking at a conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association, he revealed that the U.S. got its tail whupped.

The Afghanistan adventure not only corrupted America’s armed elite, it also provided a 20-year opportunity for enemies to study U.S. equipment, tactics, and strategy. Hyten reports: "An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us… They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it." In short, he added, the Pentagon “failed miserably.”

Complete Annihilation: Our friend, Byron King, former aide to the United States Chief of Naval Operations, elaborates: "Opposing forces wrecked the entire complex of U.S. logistics. Rear bases came under fire, while aircraft and ships at sea were targeted by long-range missiles. There’s just no hiding anymore from people with sufficient technology to find you.

Even worse, most U.S. weapons were outranged by new systems recently deployed by China, much of it based on advanced Russian designs. It’s a long-term U.S. failure in research, development and procurement. When the balloon went up, most U.S. forces near-immediately lost the ability to coordinate attacks and/or return fire. Much of the targeting data was worthless in any event, while systems used for aiming and guiding munitions also failed. To the extent that communications worked at all, much of the data were corrupted or hacked.

It’s not overstating to say that, in this one wargame, far from home, the U.S. lost vast numbers of people and equipment. In real world terms, think of casualty numbers in the tens of thousands. Of entire bases obliterated. Of hundreds of airplanes lost. Of dozens of ships sunk. And that’s just in the first few days. The wargame ended with American forces defeated and devastated. U.S. allies were similarly shredded. And U.S. interests in the Western Pacific and Asia were annihilated."

It was, of course, only a “game.” Real life will come later. Stay tuned."

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"How It Really Is"

 

"Global Economic Chaos is Running Rampant"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly, AM 10/4/21:

"Global Economic Chaos is Running Rampant"

"Regardless of where you are at there are supply chain issues. Real Estate is about to crash with the glut of properties about to enter the market. We are experiencing Global Economic Chaos and there are no sign of it slowing down."

○

"International Shipping Group Issues Red Alert Letter Warning of

 Imminent Global Supply Chain Collapse… Widespread Famine, 

Power Grid Failures and Economic Ruin Are Right Around The Corner"

Gregory Mannarino, "AM/PM 10/4/21"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 10/4/21:

"Inflation Continues To Surge - It's About To Get Much Worse"

- https://traderschoice.net/

○

Gregory Mannarino, PM 10/4/21:

"Shock-tober? Is A Stock Market Crash Really Imminent?"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"Bank Accounts And ATMs Shutdown; Zillow Outbidding You; Electricity Shortage Means Empty Shelves"

Jeremiah Babe, PM 10/3/21:

"Bank Accounts And ATMs Shutdown; Zillow Outbidding You;

 Electricity Shortage Means Empty Shelves"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 10/3/21: "Markets, A Look Ahead"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 10/3/21:

"Markets, A Look Ahead"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"Banks Around World Are Suffering Big Outages: Millions Of Customers In Lurch At Worst Possible Time"

Fill screen recommended.

"Banks Around World Are Suffering Big Outages: 

Millions Of Customers In Lurch At Worst Possible Time"

by Epic Economist

"A systemic meltdown has shaken the financial world this week as dozens of banks started to suffer repeated outages all around the globe. Just this week, banks' system was down in seven countries across five continents, leaving tens of millions of customers extremely frustrated. In the US, thousands of customers reported outages in the Bank of America app on October 1st, right when rent, utilities, and other bills are often due. Many of them revealed that even after the system was allegedly restored, some operations weren't working, which left them late on several bills and forced them to pay credit card interest.

But despite the major inconvenience, things could be a lot worse. For instance, in New Zealand, now in its seventh week of nationwide lockdown, millions were left without access to their money as banking services were down at a time all local branches were closed. One of the country’s largest lenders, Kiwibank, faced a major outage on Tuesday after a DDoS attack on New Zealand’s third-largest Internet provider resulted in IT crashes at a number of lenders, including Commonwealth Bank and Anz Bank.

Of course, New Zealand and the US aren't the only countries facing massive outages within their banking systems in recent weeks. In banks across the UK, South Africa, Venezuela, Japan, and Mexico operating failures were also reported recently. At least 24 million account holders of Mexico’s largest bank, BBVA Mexico, were left unable to use the bank’s ATMs, its mobile app, or make in-store payments for over 20 hours starting in the morning of September 12. Strangely enough, less than a week after the BBVA outage, Santander Mexico also faced an operational crash that left customers across the country unable to use their debit cards at the ATM or in stores. One more time, it was said the problem was related to internal failures.

Some financial analysts argue that the outages are linked to a cyber attack planned by highly professional illegal organizations. Cyber theft has become common in the country due to the lack of enforcement of existing laws and the absence of adequate legal tools to hold attackers accountable for their actions. Meanwhile, in the UK, where the Financial Conduct Authority said to be “deeply concerned” about the increasing number of technology outages over the years, the regulator’s executive director of supervision, Megan Butler, revealed that the number of "incidents of operation resilience breaks” reported in 2021 have surged by 300 percent year-on-year. Butler argued that this is a "growing trend," and the number of reported IT failings continues to increase.

Late in July, the websites of six big banks -- Lloyds, HSBC, TESCO Bank, Bank of Scotland, Halifax, and Barclays -- collapsed allegedly due to a global Internet outage caused by a software update failure at hosting service Akamai. One month later, the apps of five of the six banks went down for days. Several customers faced acute financial losses and consequently saw their credit ratings deteriorate. Millions were unable to make mortgage payments and have fallen behind on their bills. More than 1,300 clients became victims of identity theft.

In Venezuela, 16 million customers of the country’s biggest bank, Banco de Venezuela, recently suffered a five-day outage as the bank’s online platform crashed. At the same time, in Japan, Mizuho Bank, one of Japan’s three megabanks, suffered from its eighth consecutive IT system failure on September 30 - recording almost one disruption every month. During the latest incident, a system error triggered a major delay in foreign exchange transactions.

"Another bank that has been plagued by repeated IT system problems is South Africa’s largest lender, Standard Bank. In late April, the bank suffered “hardware issues” that downed its internet, mobile, and ATM channels for over a week, leaving customers unable to pay their bills or access cash," the writer reported. “If you are a large retail bank, you are probably dealing with legacy systems”, the deputy chief executive of the Prudential Regulation Authority, Lyndon Nelson, said during the investigation. Nelson mentioned that when fintech companies add new features to their apps, big banks usually do the same even if they don't have enough tech support to do it right. They need to launch similar services “for competitive reasons,” he argued.

The truth is that banking app failures or a sudden crash on IT systems are a recipe for chaos. If things get turbulent when outages crash IT services for a couple of days, just imagine what would happen when these disruptions last for weeks on end. Now more than ever, it's essential to secure your assets in a safe place, because whether it's a power shortage, a bank outage, a cyberattack, or a stock market crash, your assets can be wiped out in a snap of fingers."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Endless Horizon"

Deuter, "Endless Horizon"

Full screen recommended. Feel it...

○

"I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colors and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, not any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.

That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. 

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue." 

- William Wordsworth,

"Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"

○

“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that 

only loneliness can help you find them again. 

Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. 

Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.”

- Gregory David Roberts, "Shantaram" 

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Dark markings and colorful clouds inhabit this stellar landscape. The deep and expansive view spans more than 30 full moons across crowded star fields toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard, the obscuring interstellar dust clouds seen toward the right include B59, B72, B77 and B78, part of the Ophiuchus molecular cloud complex a mere 450 light-years away. 

Click image for larger size.

To the eye their combined shape suggests a pipe stem and bowl, and so the dark nebula's popular name is the Pipe Nebula. Three bright nebulae gathered on the left are stellar nurseries some 5,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Sagittarius. In the 18th century astronomer Charles Messier included two of them in his catalog of bright clusters and nebulae; M8, the largest of the triplet, and colorful M20 just above. The third prominent emission region includes NGC 6559 at the far left. Itself divided by obscuring dust lanes, M20 is also known as the Trifid. M8's popular moniker is the Lagoon Nebula."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211001.html

Freely Read “Shantaram” Online, by Gregory David Roberts

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope.

Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.

In the end that’s all we have – to hold on tight until dawn.”

- Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”

“Shantaram”

by Gregory David Roberts

“Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in “Shantaram,” a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means “man of God’s peace,” which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence. He served two years and leaped over the wall. He was imprisoned for a string of armed robberies performed to support his heroin addiction, which started when his marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. All of that is enough for several lifetimes, but for Greg Roberts, that’s only the beginning.

He arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. When they return to Bombay, they take up residence in a sprawling illegal slum of 25,000 people and Linbaba becomes the resident “doctor.” With a prison knowledge of first aid and whatever medicines he can cadge from doing trades with the local Mafia, he sets up a practice and is regarded as heaven-sent by these poor people who have nothing but illness, rat bites, dysentery, and anemia. He also meets Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman, with whom he falls in love. Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Karla’s connections are murky from the outset.

Roberts is not reluctant to wax poetic; in fact, some of his prose is downright embarrassing. Throughout the novel, however, all 944 pages of it, every single sentence rings true. He is a tough guy with a tender heart, one capable of what is judged criminal behavior, but a basically decent, intelligent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially anyone he knew. He is a magnet for trouble, a soldier of fortune, a picaresque hero: the rascal who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. His story is irresistible. Stay tuned for the prequel and the sequel.” 

– Valerie Ryan

Freely read “Shantaram” online, by Gregory David Roberts, here:

- https://www.readanybook.com/online/565858

There is a download option for registered users.

Greg Hunter, "Red October – End of World as We Knew It"

"Red October – End of World as We Knew It"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Clif High is an Internet data mining expert who has many well-documented correct forecasts. He predicted that Bitcoin would rise to $64,000 (it did) when it was less than $10 per unit. High uses something he calls “Predictive Linguistics” and computer programs to sort through billions of bits of information on the Internet to predict future trends and events. High’s recent data shows everything is in the process of breaking down. Food production, trucking, health services, millions will get very sick and many of them will die, the military breaks down, political system breaks down and the financial system will suffer a horrible unfixable crash. High says the breakdowns are getting so bad that he is calling this month “Red October.” In short, the breakdowns will wake up the masses to all the evil that has been hidden. High says, “We can follow these things on up to find out where the real evil is, and I hope we don’t destroy our ability to do that in the process of cleaning this out. We are, at this point, where the ‘normies’ are going to wake up. But what are they going to wake up to? Are they going to wake up to Biden cheated? Are they going to wake up to Biden the traitor at the request of the CCP? That he assisted the CCP in cheating? Or are they going to wake up to Biden the Globalist working with the CCP stooges? There are so many layers it’s going to take a long time for people to come to some understanding. I think, basically, they will get to a point that they say that’s good enough, I don’t need to know anymore.”

One very big wakeup call is going to come from our crashing financial system. High explains, “This hyperinflation is showing up everywhere. We will have the real markets, cost of potatoes, gold, silver and Bitcoin and those things that are outside the dollar system. This month, October, I think we will start a bull run in commodity prices that is similar to what happened in Venezuela. That will be our financial systems last gasping breaths. It will be shuttering and shaking through October, November, and I don’t know if it will be through much of December. This will be a very crushing time, a very burdensome time. People need to know we will get through this. It’s not going to be the end of the world, but it will be the end of the world as we knew it, but the end of the world as we knew it was oppressive. It was from the people that kept us enslaved. This is a very terrible time indeed, but it liberates us.”

High also sees in the data people will wake up to being purposely poisoned and murdered, and this is actually “asymmetrical warfare.” The Deep State players such as government bureaucrats, drug company executives and doctors who pushed this will face an outraged grieving public. High says, “This will turn very, very ugly. I don’t even like to talk about it because there is nothing you can do about it. They will come to understand that this was deliberate... the data says individuals will take revenge on the people who actually injected them.

High goes into detail of what he is seeing in the data for years into the future, and it’s not pretty for the evil people who perpetrated this crime against humanity. High explains, “I am also of the opinion that will carry up the chain, and you will see people take revenge on, basically, world leaders, you know, the politicians and the Bill Gates of the world.”

High says the data is telling him that “cash will be king” even though the Federal Reserve may go completely away. High also sees gold at “$20,000 per ounce” and silver vaulting higher day after day. High contends when it comes to silver in the low $20 per ounce range, “they are actually paying you to take it.” High also says, “The price of the white metal should be at least $600 per ounce. They are suppressing it by about $580 per ounce, and that means it’s very cheap to buy at the suppressed price.”

High says Bitcoin will go to “at least $100,000 per unit” and maybe much higher by the end of 2021. High’s data also says, “At least 30% of the normies will be awake by the end of October with many more to follow in November and December.”

- https://usawatchdog.com/

"Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with data mining expert Clif High, and he goes on a deep data dive as to what is likely to happen from now to the end of 2021. (What is written here is a fraction of what is in this 1 hour and 34 min. interview. Because of the length, I will not be posting on Tuesday or Wednesday.)"

- https://rumble.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Machias, Maine, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

“Whatever Your Fate Is..."

“Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment - not discouragement - you will find the strength there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures, followed by wreckage, were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”

~ Joseph Campbell

"In A Civil War The Authoritarian Left Would Be Easily Beaten – But It Won't End There"

"In A Civil War The Authoritarian Left Would Be 

Easily Beaten – But It Won't End There"

by Brandon Smith

"There are a lot of assumptions and misconceptions when it comes to the notion of a second civil war within the US. What I see most often is the argument that the political left has “already won” the war without firing a shot and that a rebellion would be crushed under the heel of a newly a-wokened military industrial complex and a leftist controlled federal government. The problem is, this argument is extremely naive and ignores the bigger picture.

I think there are a couple of reasons why certain people press the leftist supremacy theory: First, they greatly fear the idea of a kinetic war breaking out and find the idea of combat repellent. So, they act as if a shooting war cannot ever be won. They hide their fear behind a veil of “rationalism” and thin hopes of a completely passive resistance. They figure that if they can’t fight and win, then no one else can fight and win.

Second, the motives of some of these people are more nefarious than fearful. One of the primary functions of 4th Generation (psychological) warfare is to convince a target population that “resistance is futile.” If you can make them believe that winning is impossible then they may not fight at all, and thus the prophecy is self fulfilling.

Luckily this method of propaganda does not seem to be working on a large number of Americans. That said, there are many layers to the scenario of civil war. While the extreme cultism of leftists is relegated to a small percentage of the population, they are supported by almost every major institution in our nation. The federal government supports and protects them. Some state and local governments support and protect them. The mainstream media avidly sings their praises. Most corporations and Big Tech platforms support them and spread social justice doctrine along with them. And, all globalist foundations support, organize and even fund them.

All the people that the political left used to consider evil are now on their side. This gives their small cult unprecedented social power and a number of political weapons to use when they desire to threaten or harm people who disagree with them. For now, most of this power is actually used to terrify other people on the left.

There are many moderate democrats that have a distaste for the lunacy of social justice warriors, but they are so afraid of being labeled heretics, racists, fascists, etc. that they keep their mouths shut or support draconian policies because they think they have to in order to defend their political team. Limp-wristed moderates and old school democrats that go along to get along are almost as big a problem as hardcore leftists because they don’t have the guts to stand up to the bullies in their own political circles.

This is how we end up with around half the country in support of vaccine passport mandates, a totalitarian agenda which would give government complete control over the health decisions of individual Americans, complete control over how businesses operate and who they are allowed to hire, not to mention complete control over the economic participation of the average citizen.

Vaccine passports are the ULTIMATE POWER in the hands of government to decide the life and death of individuals and their families. And, not surprisingly, the political left and democrats are by far the biggest group backing the government and the globalists on this agenda.

This places our nation in a difficult position; the political left desperately wants to control the lives of others while conservatives and some moderates just want to be left alone. We are at an impasse. We cannot share the same spaces, we cannot share the same government and we may not even be able to share the same land mass. Our ideals are mutually exclusive. We believe in freedom and individual responsibility and they simply do not.

Make no mistake, an outright conflict is coming in the US and the people in alternative media circles that fear it need to come to terms with that fear and accept the inevitability of war. The sooner they do this the sooner they can take action to mitigate the damage to their families and communities. There will come a day very soon when you will have to defend your freedoms and the freedoms of future generations with your life. Embrace the suck and move on.

In recent articles I have outlined peaceful steps that can be taken by conservative states and counties to combat the establishment’s tyrannical medical mandates as well as Critical Race Theory propaganda and other trespasses against free thinking people. These steps include offering sanctuary to people and businesses that are under attack by the federal government for non-compliance, as well as the steps states need to take to pursue soft secession (Read my article ‘How States And Communities Can Fight Back Against Biden’s Covid Tyranny’).

Breaking away from the political left and starting fresh is socially and economically possible. It’s not as far fetched as some people believe. But then again, authoritarians usually can't stand the idea of letting people just walk away and separate. They have a desperate need to micromanage and dominate EVERYONE. I hold out very little hope that leftists or globalists will allow us to live in peace; they will try to force their ideology on us at the barrel of a gun.

When it comes down to average leftists, their movement is a paper tiger, a mirage. In the event of civil war the political left in the US would be easily annihilated. There are some that argue otherwise, and these are the standard claims they usually make:

A Woke Military? Let’s Not Get Ahead Of Ourselves… The primary paranoia over confrontation with leftists is the new woke propaganda being spread by the Department of Defense in the form of military recruitment ads. Firstly, as I outlined in detail in my article ‘There Will Never Be A Woke US Military – Here Are The Reasons Why’, polling of military personnel shows around 30% identify as Republican and 40% identify as Independent, with the majority of the independents being Libertarians and Constitutionalists. In other words 70% of the US military leans conservative in their principles.

The military brass going woke is meaningless if the majority of soldiers are not going to follow them into battle to oppress their own people. We are seeing this already in terms of the current serving that are refusing to take the experimental covid vaccines. Polling in the summer suggested that at least 50% of soldiers would refuse to take the mRNA vax. The DoD claims that at least 70% of soldiers are now vaccinated but this is unconfirmed and probably an exaggeration designed to manufacture a false consensus. We will soon know the real stats because the Biden Administration is threatening “dishonorable discharges” for soldiers that refuse to comply.

The assertion here is that with freedom minded people leaving the services in droves, this opens the door to a fully woke military of the far left. This presupposes that woke leftists actually want to join the military or that they are capable of meeting the bare minimum standards. They are not.

Over 75% of Americans ages 18-24 are ineligible for the US military because of lack of education, obesity, physical problems, psychological problems and criminal history. This negates 24 million people from the 34 million in this age range for recruitment. Since 70% of the military is conservative/libertarian, this means that either more young conservatives are healthy enough to pass the recruitment phase, or, far more conservatives are interested in volunteering; or it could be both factors combined.

Sure, the DoD could drastically lower their recruitment standards, but then they would have a woke gaggle of weaklings as a fighting force. This only works in our favor.

In any case, just because 30%-50% of soldiers leave in the face of the vaccine mandates, this does not mean that the void will be filled by leftists. In fact, it is likely that the void will not be filled at all and the military will be left to stagnate as recruitment collapses. The pool of talent is already small and the DoD just shrank their options by at least 30% more.

To summarize, there will never be a woke US military. The institution would collapse before it ever reached such a “lofty” goal. Biden’s vaccine mandates are in a way highly beneficial for conservatives and freedom advocates, because they are forcing the current serving off the fence. Soldiers will now need to consider what liberties they are willing to violate just to stay in the military, because it’s not going to stop with a couple forced vaccinations, it’s going to escalate. We may see a massive influx of discharged soldiers joining the liberty movement in the near future because of Biden’s totalitarian behaviors.

But lets say that Biden is hypothetically able to muster a combined force of alphabet agencies and portions of the military into an army of jackboots to suppress the population, what about all the technology and weaponry they would have at their disposal? Well, superior technology didn’t help the military much in the war in Afghanistan, and American civilians have access to far superior training and equipment compared to the Taliban. Conventional armies are notoriously weak against asymmetric warfare tactics. In the end wars are won by people and tactics, not weaponry.

Conservatives Own The Gun Culture And Firearms Training: Beyond the military, US gun culture is dominated by civilian conservatives. Leftists are slowly beginning to realize that being anti-gun is sabotaging their own agendas, and many started buying firearms in the past 18 months. But owning guns is not the same thing as knowing how to use them. It would take leftist many years, perhaps decades to catch up to the pure knowledge base that conservatives have when it comes to firearms and tactical training. These things have been passed down through conservative families for generations. And, again, most combat veterans are also conservative.

This is not to say that there are no leftists out there that are firearms proficient. I’m sure there are a few. But most of the time when leftists get together with guns the results are either painfully embarrassing or dangerous. Just check out THIS VIDEO from Angry Cops on the BLM inspired “Not F$%king Around Coalition” (NFAC) group. Not only do they end up shooting each other, but their representatives don’t even understand the basics of how their own rifles function when they argue that the negligent discharge was the “gun’s fault.”

And let’s not forget the good old ‘John Brown Gun Club’ and their rocken’ recruitment videos that made us choke on our own tears of laughter a few years ago. The leftists are shockingly inept when it comes to guns and combat skills. They are a minimal threat to conservatives if civil war is the issue.

You Can’t Win If You’re Not Willing To Die For What You Believe In: Leftists are adamant about their ideologies and they are keenly interested in demanding OTHER people die for the cause. But, when they are forced to face personal risk to achieve their directives, they will usually run. You can see this in the mob confrontation with Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha; a horde of leftists were perfectly willing to chase him down with the intention of killing him, but when he turned to fight and a few of them got shot (including Joseph Rosenbaum, a convicted pedophile), the mob’s enthusiasm suddenly evaporated.

Why do they run? Because their religious fervor for Marxism is an act. It’s not real. Deep down, they don’t even believe in what they are doing, and this is what separates freedom fighters from all other armed forces. We accept the possibility of death and fight in the face of overwhelming odds because the goal of freedom is worth it. Most authoritarians and useful idiots, when faced with dying for their ideology, will abandon the cause. They have entered the fight with a built-in disadvantage.

The Real Fight Will Not Be With Average Marxist Leftists: Half the states in the US now have some form of anti-mandate laws or executive orders in place. Half the country is vehemently against the vaccine passports. If Biden continues on his current path, a soft secession of red states will begin and the mandates will be ignored. This will leave Biden with a handful of options. He will invariably seek to punish red states using economic pressure and cutting off federal funds, and when that doesn’t work he will have to put boots on the ground and use Orwellian methods to attack dissidents.

Should civil war erupt (and I’m positive at this point that this is unavoidable), leftists will not last long. The majority of veterans and a large portion of the military are not going to fight against their own people, and they may even step in to assist. A large number of police and sheriff’s are also conservative and are unlikely to intervene. So, the question is, who is willing to die for leftists and their cult? I suspect not many.

But, the people behind the leftist movement, the globalist foundations that fund them, have a vested interest in eliminating conservative ideals and heritage. Globalist institutions working with the Biden Administration will surely seek to intervene. They will call us “white supremacists” even though many conservatives are black and brown. They will call us evil nationalists, even though there is nothing wrong with a national identity that values freedom. They will say we are “insurrectionists” even though we will be acting in self defense against an authoritarian regime. They will call us terrorists while using terrorist tactics and false flags against us. And, they will claim that we are far too dangerous to be allowed to maintain our own nation or our own states.

Their main rationale will probably fall to the US nuclear arsenal. They will claim that a nation of terrorists cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, and at the first sign that Biden (or Kamala) is losing control, there will be a call for UN intervention. Count on it. An international force would be organized to try to stop us from existing. This is where the REAL fight would begin.

The political left is a footnote, and while we should continue to remain vigilant as they push their agenda it is important to remember that there are much bigger fish to fry and we need to plan for the next dozen battles, not just the first. How we conduct ourselves from here on may determine whether or not freedom survives for many decades to come."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Life, In Short..."

“It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be.”

- Bill Bryson

"The Human Condition"

"The Human Condition"

by Meanings of Life

"Man remains largely unknown of himself. What are we, in our innermost recesses, behind our names and our conventional opinions? What are we behind the things we do in our lives, behind what we see in others and what others see in us, or even behind things science says we are? Is man the crazy being about whom Carl Gustav Jung spoke ironically, when he demanded a man to treat? Is man the Dr. Jerkyll that contains in himself a criminal Mister Hyde, and more than a personality, and contradictory feelings?

Are we the result of our dreams, as Prospero, in the Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” asked? Are we able to raise our nature and become the dignified beings evoked by Pico de la Mirandola (It’s the seeds a man cultivates that "will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God")?

Almost two centuries ago, Spencer characterized the contradictory features of natives from the African east coast: "He has at the same time good character and hard heart; he is a fighter, conscientious, good in a precise moment, and cruel, pitiless and violent in the other; superstitious and rudely irreligious; brave and pusillanimous, servile and dominator, stubborn and at the same time fickle, relied to honor views, but without signs of honesty, niggard and economical, but careless and improvident".

It’s probably a good definition of a certain primitive man, to whom we are undoubtedly connected. But we are also cultural and ethic beings. We are able to change our values and behaviors. As William James says, human beings can change their lives through their mental attitudes. We can grow ethically. We can dominate part of our own instincts. And that’s why we can be different from the indigenous African described by Spencer. More: our thought dignifies us ("All the dignity of man consists in thought", says Blaise Pascal). We are, in many senses, the conscience of the Universe, and its utmost elaborated product. As Edgar Morin says, "in the core of our singularity, we carry not only all the humanity, all the life, but also all the cosmos, including its mystery, present in the heart of our beings".

We are creators, creator beings, and, in a sense, we can create, or recreate ourselves. All goes through our mind. It is our mind that constructs our truths and errors, and also the most sublime things in the Universe. And yet evil and stupidity exist in us. Sometimes we fall, we are stroked, and life reveals its cruelty, and we may think as Mark Twain, and say that it was a pity that Noah had arrived late to the ark. In our innermost recesses, there is also the cruelty and the inhumanity of life. Charles Darwin showed that we are descendants of inferior life forms: we have been long ago a "bush and a bird, and a fish silently swimming in the waters", to use the poetic terms used by Empedocles in its "Purifications."

From a genetic and evolutionist point of view, we contain in us the survival reflexes and the aggressiveness of the life forms that preceded us: "All that threatened the cave man - dangers, darkness, famine, thirst, ghosts, demons – all has passed to the interior of our souls, all troubles us, grieves us, threatens us from inside." (Morin). Besides, we are also beings that can differ significantly from each other. We are equal, but also different. "The awake involve a common world, but dreams deviate each one to its own world," Heraclites rather enigmatically declares. He thought we can’t help sleeping and living in illusory worlds, even when awake.

For all these reasons, Blaise Pascal’s celebrated definition of the human being, despite the hard language, not exactly agreeable to our ears, is undoubtedly one of the most powerful that can be applied to the rather unknown being that we can’t help being to ourselves: "What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel this tangle?"

- http://www.meaningsoflife.com/

"I Had An Experience..."

"I had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision of the universe that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not - that none of us - are alone! I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope. But... that continues to be my wish."

- "Ellie Arroway", "Contact" by Carl Sagan

"The Great Thing..."

"The great thing about the internet is that you get to meet people you

would otherwise only meet if you were committed to the same asylum."

- Robert Brault

"Love, Death, and Whitman: Poet Mark Doty on the Paradox of Desire and the Courage to Love Against the Certitude of Loss"

"Love, Death, and Whitman: Poet Mark Doty on the Paradox

 of Desire and the Courage to Love Against the Certitude of Loss"

by Maria Popova

"Love and death come to us on common terms - unbidden and total, impervious to protest, naked of pretension. They also come to us entwined: Every love is a franchise of grief, for to love anything is to accept its loss - by a dissipation of ardor or of atoms, the atoms constellating the beloved or the atoms constellating us and the consciousness that does the loving, certain to one day go the way of every other consciousness and every other love that ever was and ever will be.

In some deep sense, this inevitability of loss is precisely what makes love so ecstatic - a concentrated experience of aliveness consecrated by its own perishability. Walt Whitman touched on this with his tender, unflinching hand when he asked, “What indeed is beautiful, except Death and Love?”; when he observed that “to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” He meant, I think, the luckiness of having lived at all, for death is only possible where life, improbable against the austere odds of the universe, once existed.

That inescapable interplay is what poet Mark Doty explores throughout his incandescent book "What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life" (public library) - part biography, part memoir, part lyric meditation on life, love, and their consanguinity with death.

Noting how deeply Whitman - the self-anointed poet of the body and poet of the soul - “understood that the particular is always perishing, and therefore all the more to be cherished,” Doty considers the body as an instrument of temporality and cherishment, through which the song of life sings itself and binds us to the chorus of all other bodies:

"Begin with the body: water, vapor, air. You’re the shore on which an ocean of air is constantly breaking, in waves of breath. “Inside” and “outside” of lungs, permeable boundary of skin, eyes, ears, nose, holes in the body for substance passing in and out, no stable and fixed entity that is you, but a moving set of points through which pass water, air, light, food, parts of the bodies of others: their breath, tongues, genitals, hands.

[…]

The world enters us and departs, just as language and image and idea are imprinted upon our consciousness, considered, forgotten, passed on, released."

This perishable, permeable body, with its ceaseless entropic flow, lies at the heart of the paradox of desire - that electric impulse felt in the Body and felt in the Soul, furnishing our most palpable evidence that the two are one. “Behold,” Whitman wrote, “the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern and includes and is the soul.” And so desire becomes a sacrament to the interleaving of love and death, temporal by definition and necessity, its temporality the wellspring of its delirium.

Awake to this fundament of feeling, Doty challenges the damaging Romantic ideal of interminable desire within any given love - a concept by nature self-negating, dishonoring the very thing that gives desire its electric charge: "Even in the imagined paradise of limitless eros, there must be room for death; otherwise the endlessness, the lack of limit or of boundary, finally drains things of their tension, removes all edges… The same body that strains toward freedom and escape also has outer edges, also exists in time, and it’s that doubling that makes the body the sexy and troubling thing it is. O taste and see. Isn’t the flesh a way to drink of the fountain of otherhood, a way to taste the not-I, a way to blur the edges and thus feel the fact of them?"

The longing of the ephemeral body is the Borgesian mirror in which the eternal longing of the soul is endlessly reflected and reflected back, flickering with the bittersweet beauty of our mortal destiny, with the transcendent urgency of life and love. Doty writes: "You need to both remember where love leads and love anyway; you can both see the end of desire and be consumed by it all at once. The ecstatic body’s a place to feel timelessness and to hear, ear held close to the chest of another, the wind that blows in there, hurrying us ahead and away, and to understand that this awareness does not put an end to longing but lends to it a shadow that is, in the late hour, beautiful."

With an eye to Whitman’s central credo, staked on the poet’s ethos that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” and that we are therefore not separate selves but contiguous territories of aliveness made all the more alive and more contiguous by love, Doty writes: "When the Self dissolves into a world of separate selves and death becomes real, love becomes a pact with grief; what is gained then is the inescapably poignant fact of individuality. There will never be another you, and I love the stubborn particularity of you because you will disappear."

Complement these fragments of Doty’s irreducibly splendid "What Is the Grass" with Hannah Arendt on how to live with the fundamental fear of love’s loss and Elizabeth Gilbert on love, loss, and the consecrating power of grief, then revisit Whitman himself on what makes life worth living."

-  https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/

Musical Interlude: Josh Groban, “You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)”

Full screen recommended.

Josh Groban, “You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)”

"A Look to the Heavens"

"These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars. The colors in this remarkably deep composite image clearly show the star forming galaxies with a blue tint and galaxies with older stellar populations with a yellowish cast.

The sharp picture spans about 3/4 degree across the cluster center, corresponding to over 6 million light-years at the cluster's estimated distance. Diffraction spikes around brighter foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy are produced by the imaging telescope's mirror support vanes. In the cosmic vista many galaxies seem to be colliding or merging while others seem distorted - clear evidence that cluster galaxies commonly interact. In fact, the Hercules Cluster itself may be seen as the result of ongoing mergers of smaller galaxy clusters and is thought to be similar to young galaxy clusters in the much more distant, early Universe.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140625.html

Chet Raymo, “A Sense Of Place”

“A Sense Of Place”

by Chet Raymo

“It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together. As far as I know, that never happened. But let’s imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty’s essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944) and from Abbey’s essay “The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them.

“This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.”

“This desert, all deserts, any deserts.”

“On the shady stream banks hang lady’s eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging.”

“Oily growths like the poison ivy – oh yes, indeed – that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.”

“All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats.”

“Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.”

“Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias.”

“Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.”

“The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place.”

“In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don’t. In the Mojave Desert, it’s Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise…”
 
“The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned – they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood.”

“…the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers.”

“Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people’s faces are good.”

“Californicating.”

“To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee.”

“Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?”

“I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen.”

“Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.”

“Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking.”

“In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving.”

“There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.”

“A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see – only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.”

“Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.”

“In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable…”

“New life will be built upon these things.”

“…an unrequited and excessive love.”

“It is this.”

“That’s why.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/