"Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96 , On What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives"

"Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96,

On What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives"

by Maria Popova

“When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan observed as she beheld impermanence and transcendence at the foot of a mountain. “By the grace of random chance, funneled through nature’s laws,” the poetic physicist Brian Greene wrote in his beautiful meditation on our search for meaning in a cold cosmos, “we are here.”

And then we are not.

We die. All of us - atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea - you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales and poems, with general relativity and Nina Simone. It is what puts into perspective just how fleeting and vacant and self-embittering all of our angers and blames and resentments are in the end - what beckons us, instead, to “leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.”

That is what the late, great Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924–February 21, 2020) - one of the most original, deepest-seeing poets of our time - explores with great subtlety and profundity disguised as levity in the poem “Immortality” from her final poetry collection, the Pulitzer-winning masterpiece "Alive Together" (public library).

"Immortality"

"In Sleeping Beauty’s castle

the clock strikes one hundred years

and the girl in the tower returns to the world.

So do the servants in the kitchen,

who don’t even rub their eyes.

The cook’s right hand, lifted

an exact century ago,

completes its downward arc

to the kitchen boy’s left ear;

the boy’s tensed vocal cords

finally let go

the trapped, enduring whimper,

and the fly, arrested mid-plunge

above the strawberry pie,

fulfills its abiding mission

and dives into the sweet, red glaze.

As a child I had a book

with a picture of that scene.

I was too young to notice

how fear persists, and how

the anger that causes fear persists,

that its trajectory can’t be changed

or broken, only interrupted.

My attention was on the fly;

that this slight body

with its transparent wings 

and lifespan of one human day

still craved its particular share

of sweetness, a century later.

- Lisel Mueller

“Immortality” by Lisel Mueller (read by Maria Popova) 

- https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/lisel-mueller-immortality

(Two centuries earlier, William Blake explored the same eternal subject though the same creature in his short existentialist poem “The Fly.”)

In the front matter of this altogether miraculous book, where an epigraph would ordinarily appear, Mueller offers a short poem that becomes a kind of chorus line for the entire collection, but emerges as an especially harmonizing counterpart to “Immortality” in particular:

Complement these fragments of the wholly transcendent Alive Together with physicist Alan Lightman on our yearning for immortality in a universe governed by decay, Pico Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence, and Marcus Aurelius on mortality as the key to living fully, then revisit Barbara Ras’s bittersweet, buoyant, perspective-calibrating poem “You Can’t Have It All” and Marilyn Nelson’s magnificent ode to how we fill our impermanence with importance, “Faster Than Light.”

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

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"The Backdoor to Immortality: Marguerite Duras 

on What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death"

“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote as she weighed what gives meaning to our mortal lives in a stunning poem - one of the hundreds that outlived her as she returned her borrowed stardust to the universe at ninety-six. And yet, by some felicitous deviation from logic - perhaps an adaptive imbecility essential for our mental and emotional survival, one of the touching incongruences that make us human - the moment something becomes precious to us, we quarantine the prospect of its loss in some chamber of the mind we choose not to enter. On some deep level beyond the reach of reason, we come to believe that the people we love are - must be, for the alternative is a fathomless terror - immortal.

And so, when a loved one dies, this deepest part of us grows wild with rage at the universe - a rage skinned of sensemaking, irrational and raw, unsalved by our knowledge that the entropic destiny of everything alive is to die and of everything that exists to eventually not, even the universe itself; unsalved by the the immense cosmic poetry hidden in this fact; unsalved by the luckiness of having lived at all against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise; unsalved by remembering that only because ancient archaebacteria were capable of dying, as was every organism that evolved in their wake, we and the people we love and the people we lose came to exist at all."

- Maria Popova

Full article here: https://mailchi.mp/

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Related, highly recommended:

"From Death to Immortality"

"Death in the Afternoon"

"Death in the Afternoon"

by Joel Bowman

"To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, 

all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; 

what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is mortal."

~ Jorge Luis Borges

"Everything is illuminated against its opposite; truth against fallacy; light against darkness; life against death. And who would have it any other way, even if they could? What would life on this mortal coil be, for instance, without the eternity of its terminally mysterious counterpoint?

If there exists a perfect setting for these and associated meditations, it must surely be the magnificent Recoleta Cemetery, located right here in Buenos Aires. On any given weekend, this sacred resting place for thousands of the city’s most famous – and infamous – people is found to be one of the liveliest places in town. Notable interments include a who’s-who list of Argentine writers, painters, poets, musicians, scientists and luminaries from other noble fields of interest. And, because nothing, including death, is beyond the law of equilibrium, a handful of politicians also rot underfoot.

Tourists pour in to adorn Maria Eva Duarte de Perón’s grave with flowers, for instance, bypassing the resting place of a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and a dozen honest writers to do so. Other, temporary attendees pose with Colgate smiles to have their picture taken beside weeping cement angels, frozen, as they are, in a state of perpetual sorrow. Young boys give the “peace” symbol next to the generals’ tombs whose armies laid to waste to tens of thousands of men, not much older than they, the bodies of whom are long forgotten, their makeshift graves unmarked.

Nowhere does irony live a fuller life than in a cemetery. Walking among the deceased, reading bookend dates on the bronze plaques, one is reminded of the finite nature of all things; organisms, currencies, political regimes, class structures. When the cemetery was constructed, back in 1822, it must have been a good ride from the exclusive barrios of San Telmo and Montserrat. The rich probably wouldn’t have been caught dead around the grounds of the Monks of the Order of the Recoletos, nor near the shabby, patchwork graveyard that was built there the same year the group disbanded.

Half a century later - and with Argentina still reeling from the War of the Triple Alliance and its own, subsequent civil war - a yellow fever epidemic tore through the capital city. Its wealthier, southern quarters were among the worst hit areas. Death toll estimates range from thirteen to twenty-five thousand. The clase alta packed up and moved north, largely into and around the Recoleta barrio. As such, the marbled vaults came to be populated with members of this same aristocracia, who, though they escaped the fever, came to rest here eventually just the same.

Today, you could buy an entire building in San Telmo for the same price as some of the finely appointed homes in Recoleta. An entire block in Montserrat might go for half that much.

And so it goes. People die…cities and empires crumble to the ground…and time, indifferent to the fleeting anguishes and triumphs of men, presses on.

At the turn of the 20th century, Argentina was ranked as the 8th most prosperous nation on earth. Only Belgium, Switzerland, Britain and a handful of former English colonies - including the United States – were more favorably positioned, economically. In 1913, Argentina’s bustling, cosmopolitan capital, Buenos Aires, had the thirteenth highest per capita telephone penetration rate in the world. Her per capita income was, around this time, 50% higher than in Italy, almost twice that of Japan and five times greater than its northern neighbor, Brazil. Argentina’s industry churned out quality textiles and leading edge, refrigerated shipping containers carried her prized beef, first introduced in 1536 by the Spanish Conquistadors, from the fertile plains of the pampas to the farthest reaches of the known world.

As the century wore on, protectionist policies at home and increased competition from the export-led, post-WWII economies – particularly from Japan and Italy – undermined Argentina’s international advantage. From 1900 through to the beginning of the new millennium, Argentina’s real GDP per person grew at a rate of 1.88% per year. Brazil outpaced her handily, clocking a 2.39% annualized growth rate. Japan, starting with a real GDP per person of just over $1,500 (2006 dollars) at the turn of the twentieth century, grew an average of 2.76% per year. By the middle of last decade, Japan’s real GDP per person had doubled that of Argentina. By 2020, it was more than quadruple.

The phenomenon is so conspicuous, the local Argentines even have a joke for it. “There are four types of countries in the world,” they lament. “First world. Third world. Japan, where nobody can figure out how they did so much with so little. And Argentina, where nobody can figure out how we did so little with so much.”

War, currency debasement, civil unrest, military rule and the catalyzing agent of political aspiration, harbored by the equally corrupt and inept, all conspired to stultify this once-proud nation’s potential. The great Argentine poet and essayist, Jorge Luis Borges, described one such retarding factor with characteristic flare and wit: “The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”

On a comfortable Sunday afternoon in late February, an elderly group of well-dressed gentlemen met at their favorite restaurant, right by the gate to the Recoleta Cemetery, for lunch. They took a table outside, one in the shade and with a view of the passing foot traffic. The waiters, having brought the regulars the same thing, more or less, every Sunday for as long as they could remember, immediately set about filling their table. There was bife de lomo and chorizo sausages, mozzarella and buffalo tomatoes and papas fritas by the pile. Rich, Argentine Malbecs and Cabernets flowed freely and the merriment of the group soon became infectious. They flirted with the pretty waitresses and joked with patrons at the nearby tables.

After more than a few bottles, one of the gentlemen got chatting with an Australian editor of no particular importance. “I am a judge here,” he eventually told the younger man. “My friends and I have seen it all in this city…riots, economic crises, war, people’s entire life savings wiped out overnight.”

One of his friends lent over and placed a knowing hand on the judge’s shoulder. “Today, we enjoy the moment,” he said to his lifelong friend, before adding, one long finger pointed over the cemetery wall, “because tomorrow…ha ha…well, you know our next stop old man.” And the table erupted in laughter, as the sun set over the angel’s heads in the background.

Cheers,"

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

The Daily "Near You?"

Tillsonburg, Ontario, Canada.

Thanks for stopping by!

"Eventually You Understand..."

"That's where it all begins. That's where we all get screwed big time as we grow up. They tell us to think, but they don't really mean it. They only want us to think within the boundaries they define. The moment you start thinking for yourself - really thinking - so many things stop making any sense. And if you keep thinking, the whole world just falls apart. Nothing makes sense anymore. All rules, traditions, expectations - they all start looking so fake, so made up. You want to just get rid of all this stuff and make things right. But the moment you say it, they tell you to shut up and be respectful. And eventually you understand that nobody wants you to really think for yourself.

- Ray N. Kuili, "Awakening"

The Poet: John O'Donohue, "In These Times "

"In These Times"

 "In these times when anger

Is turned into anxiety,

And someone has stolen

The horizons and mountains,

Our small emperors on parade

Never expect our indifference

To disturb their nakedness.

They keep their heads down,

And their eyes gleam with reflection.

From aluminum economic ground,

The media wraps everything

In a cellophane of sound,

And the ghost surface of the virtual

Overlays the breathing earth.

The industry of distraction

Makes us forget

That we live in a universe.

We have become converts

To the religion of stress

And its deity of progress;

That we may have courage

To turn aside from it all

And come to kneel down before the poor,

To discover what we must do,

How to turn anxiety

Back into anger,

How to find our way home."

~ John O'Donohue,

from "To Bless the Space Between Us"

Free Download: Albert Camus, "The Plague"

"Everyone knows that plagues have a way of recurring throughout history, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on us out of the sky. There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise. When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting in the way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else - they did not believe in plagues."

- Albert Camus, "The Plague"

○

"'The Plague' is a cultural classic fictional novel written by French author Albert Camus. The novel is originally written in French and named “La Peste”. The novel was initially published in 1947 and was later translated into English and published by Stuart Gilbert as "The Plague." The novel covers the unfortunate events and horrific scenes of a plague in Northern Africa in Oran a city in French Algeria. The inspiration behind this novel was some plagues that hit Oran before. The stories in the novel are from the choleric epidemic and bubonic plague. The author has shown these epidemics more extreme and deadlier. The book is considered existentialism.

The author describes the plague as a natural equalizer as it has no preferences and no targets. The plague comes and takes everyone with it whether someone is poor, rich, evil, innocent, religious, atheist or anyone else everyone is going with this nature’s marvel. The author emphasizes that despite so much horror, wreckage, and devastation this natural phenomenon teaches or at least makes people survive whether they try or not. The author also discusses the reaction of the people at this difficult time of life as not everyone reacts the same in such a harsh atmosphere.

Freely download "The Plague", by Albert Camus, here:

https://www.pdfdrive.com/the-plague-d196973890.html

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: The Major Banks Are Loading Up On Commodities"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/5/22:

"Markets, A Look Ahead: 

The Major Banks Are Loading Up On Commodities"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"None Stayed To Fight - Chaotic Retreat of Ukrainian Troops"

Full screen recommended.

"None Stayed To Fight - Chaotic Retreat of Ukrainian Troops"

Greg Hunter, "Insane Globalists Collapsing World Economy"

"Insane Globalists Collapsing World Economy"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"In his USAWatchdog.com interview just two weeks ago, legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong said, The New World Order’s so-called ‘Great Reset’ plan for humanity is ‘falling apart,’ and pointed out, “They are basically desperate at this stage. I don’t think they anticipated the amount of resistance they are getting.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is enormous resistance to the New World Order plans. Armstrong, who has new data from his Socrates computer analysis, is out with a fresh critical update. Armstrong explains, “It’s just total insanity. They are, really at this stage, completely collapsing the world economy. You have Apple and all these companies; there are over 300 American companies in Russia. Their assets are going to be seized. They are all now in a panic mode to get out, and you are going to see the same situation with China. This is insane. It really is insane, and you just don’t do this. I can’t believe these governments have listened to this sort of advice. It’s really, really disastrous. What creates world peace is not nuclear weapons. It’s economic, basically. As long as everybody benefits, then you are not going to bite the hand that feeds you. When you start cutting off trade on both sides, you are wiping out the global economy. That is what has provided world peace since WWII. By 2023, I don’t see this backing off. Once you have undermined the global financial economy, you have removed the benefits and then it does turn to war.”

Armstrong sees a “serious problem with a war cycle in early 2023” but hopes it does not go full nuclear. The financial war has already gone nuclear.

Before the end of this year, Armstrong’s “Socrates” computer program sees a “panic cycle” for the 2022 mid-term elections, mainly for the Democrats. Armstrong explains more about this in the interview.

Armstrong says inflation is here to stay, and it’s going to be huge in some areas. Armstrong sees gasoline rising to $8 to $10 per gallon sometime in 2023. Armstrong says buy everything you think you will need because it will never be cheaper, and it may not even be there in the future at any price. Food is high on Armstrong’s list, and he says have good old fashion cash on hand because of cyber-attacks and power outages that he sees coming in some areas. Armstrong also sees an average of 25% inflation by 2024. This, again, is according to his “Socrates” computer program. Armstrong says “the commodity cycle will take off in 2024.” Armstrong sees everything going up in price, and that includes gold and silver. Interest rates will also be headed up, and the stock market is not going to do well in a trend that sees interest rates rising.

Armstrong says communism is what the New World Order really wants. Armstrong says, “The globalists want communism, but the problem with communism is it does not work - period.”

Armstrong blames the western world leaders for the mess the world is in today. Armstrong says, “It’s their fault. . . .This is the worst crop of world leaders I have ever seen, and I have been consulting governments for 40 years. . . . The level of stupidity on the world stage is stunning.”

Armstrong is also predicting the “civil unrest will not only continue", but “it will get much worse.”

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with Martin Armstrong, author of “Manipulating the World Economy,” which has 70 fresh new pages in the 5th edition of this very popular book. (There is much more in the 1 hour and 12-minute in-depth interview.)

- https://rumble.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Your Only Choice..."

“When swimming into a dark tunnel, there arrives a point of no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back. Your only choice is to swim forward into the unknown… and pray for an exit.”

- Dan Brown

Must Watch! "Is Klaus Schwab the Most Dangerous Man in the World?"

Full screen recommended.

AwakenWithJP, 

"Is Klaus Schwab the Most Dangerous Man in the World?"

"This video is one that I found worth watching all the way through."

- Robert W Malone MD, MS

- https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/

○

Who is RW Malone, MD? Why does my voice matter?

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…"

~ "A Tale of Two Cities"

"I am an internationally recognized scientist/physician and the original inventor of mRNA vaccination as a technology, DNA vaccination, and multiple non-viral DNA and RNA/mRNA platform delivery technologies. I hold numerous fundamental domestic and foreign patents in the fields of gene delivery, delivery formulations, and vaccines: including for fundamental DNA and RNA/mRNA vaccine technologies.

I have approximately 100 scientific publications with over 12,000 citations of my work (per Google Scholar with an “outstanding” impact factor rating). I have been an invited speaker at over 50 conferences, have chaired numerous conferences and I have sat on or served as chairperson on HHS and DoD committees. I currently sit as a non-voting member on the NIH ACTIV committee, which is tasked with managing clinical research for a variety of drug and antibody treatments for COVID-19.

I received my medical degree from the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. I completed the Harvard Medical School fellowship as a global clinical research scholar in 2016 and was scientifically trained at the University of California at Davis, the University of California at San Diego, and at the Salk Institute Molecular Biology and Virology laboratories. I have served as an assistant and associate professor of pathology and surgery at the University of California at Davis, the University of Maryland, and the Armed Forces University of the Health Sciences.

My partner in all of this is Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD. She likes to stay behind the scenes, but you can be assured that in almost all of my professional endeavors, she has been and will be involved. She also is well published and has an extensive CV. We have been together since high school (over 45 years) and have been married for 42 of those. We live on a horse farm in Virginia, which has become our own personal “Galt’s Gulch”. An idea that we embrace and build upon. Having an intentional community is one of the tenets of how we live.

So, what has brought me to the point of daily podcasts, interviews, op-eds, advocacy with legislators and building a twitter feed of almost a half million people? It started with my own experiences and concerns regarding the safety and bioethics of how the COVID-19 genetic vaccines were developed and forced upon the world, and then then expanded as I discovered the many short-cuts, database issues, obfuscation and frankly, lies told in the development of the Spike protein-based genetic vaccines for SARS-CoV-2. Personal experiences involving identifying, developing, and trying to publish peer-reviewed academic papers focused on drug repurposing and the rights of physicians to practice medicine as well as what I have seen close colleagues go through have further influenced me. Finally, as unethical mandates for administering experimental vaccines to adults and children began to be pushed by governments, my research into what I believe is authoritarian control by governments that are being manipulated by large corporations (big finance, big pharmaceutical, big media and big technology) influenced my changing world view.

Now, I have always been taught and believed that vaccines must be developed in conjunction with life saving treatments for an emerging infectious disease or a pandemic. I am a vaccinologist. I invented the core mRNA vaccine technology platform. I have spent much of my career working on vaccine development. I have also had extensive experience in drug repurposing for infectious disease outbreaks. I am not an antivaxxer in any way, shape or form. But I do believe that the short cuts that the USG have taken in bringing the mRNA and the adenovirus vaccines to market for this pandemic have been detrimental and contrary to globally accepted standards for developing and regulating safe and effective licensed products.

I have now done hundreds of podcasts and interviews. I am a regular guest on many shows and have written many editorials that have been published in mainstream newspapers. Along with many other physicians and scientists advocating early treatment, I have toured globally to help educate physicians and the public about early treatment options while also opposing the unethical mandates.

I used to believe that the FDA, NIH, and CDC were working for the people, not big pharma. I thought that if we could just re-purpose already known, safe drugs for emerging infectious diseases, we could quickly find ways to reduce the death rate. I thought that drug and vaccine development were regulated by the Federal government for the common good. What I have learned over the last two years is that regulatory capture of the federal government has warped and shaped the work of Congress and Federal agencies to such an extent that they no longer represent what is in the best interests of the nation, the world, and humanity.

The more I have expressed data-based concerns about what is happening with the vaccines, the US Federal and WHO responses, the more I have been censored, defamed, and subjected to various forms of character assassination by big tech and legacy media. I am not alone in being targeted. Mainstream media has attacked and censored me and other prominent physicians/scientists who do not recite the governmental narrative. This has been developed into a standard process and deployed worldwide as a technique for suppressing physician dissent – quite literally hunting physicians deemed guilty of thoughtcrimes (such as questioning vaccine safety and effectiveness) or of the “sin” of treating patients with lifesaving drugs in an outpatient setting. What is happening is not right, it is not proper and it is not fair. So, let get down to fixing it.

Substack as a publishing model: On Substack, I post timely articles, research analysis, podcasts and commentary relating to immunology, virology, vaccines, and all aspects of public health and policy- with a particular focus on the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. I explore issues that may be too controversial for the first generation social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn which are all controlled by Big Technology companies and their large investment firm owners. I also write more in-depth articles and post podcasts that are censored by other media platforms, such as YouTube. I often throw in tips for healthy living and surviving COVID as well as how to best tolerate governmental intrusion. On occasion, guest writers will join me here to present their work. I encourage comments and questions from my subscribers."

- https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/about

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Related, critically important:

"Unthinkable Thoughts"

Free download: "The Vaccine Death Report"

"I Understand..."

"I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your back on Fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed. My father taught me that, along with a few other things that have kept my life interesting."

- Hunter S. Thompson

○

"I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men, and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others." 

- Ernest Hemingway, "True at First Light"

"U.S. Gas Prices Soar"

Full screen recommended.

NBC News, "U.S. Gas Prices Soar"

"U.S. gas prices are nearing an all-time high now hovering just below $4 a gallon. The cost of gas has increased every day since the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

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Related:

"Weekend Update: Oil, Commodities, Wheat Soaring In Price; 

Mortgage Rates Down; (Inflation Forecast To Worsen)"

"The Ukrainian People Are Being Sacrificed Like Pawns On A Chessboard By The Global Elite"

"The Ukrainian People Are Being Sacrificed Like 

Pawns On A Chessboard By The Global Elite"

by Michael Snyder

"44 million people live in Ukraine, and they are deeply suffering in a war that most of them did not want. Like most of us, the vast majority of Ukrainians just want to live their lives in peace and quiet, but that isn’t going to be possible now. So we should pray for the people of Ukraine, because they are going through a type of hell that is beyond what most of us even have the ability to imagine. And we should be very angry with all of those that caused this war, because it didn’t have to happen.

I want to be very clear about the fact that I do not support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russians could have achieved their goals without a full-blown invasion, but now they have started World War III.

I also want to be very clear about the fact that I place a great deal of the blame for this conflict on the global elite. The Biden administration and other western powers encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to endlessly provoke the Russians and they made all sorts of promises to him. So Zelensky pushed all of his chips into the middle of the table even though the Russians knew that the U.S. and Europe would not fight if they invaded.

Now Russia has called the bluff, and the U.S. and Europe have stayed on the sidelines. They certainly don’t want to fight the Russians, but they have no problem encouraging the Ukrainians to sacrifice countless lives fighting a battle that they can’t possibly win. Asking the Ukrainians to fight Russia is like asking a skinny 10-year-old boy to fight a 25-year-old heavyweight boxing champion. It isn’t a fair fight.

Many Ukrainians have fought bravely for their country, and this has given the Russian military more problems than they originally anticipated. But as Clint Ehrlich has pointed out, Russia’s early struggles actually make the possibility of any sort of a negotiated conclusion to this conflict must less likely… But the humiliating struggles they’ve experienced, which have been broadcast around the world, change the political calculus.

Russia no longer has the option of looking like a magnanimous victor by accepting a negotiated ceasefire. If President Putin accepts something like a conditional surrender that preserves the integrity of the Ukrainian government, that will be spun as a defeat for Russia. It may sound paradoxical from the outside, but Russia’s *tactical defeats* now make *strategic victory* imperative. To preserve Russia’s aspiration to be a superpower, there must be no doubt at the end of the war who the victor was. It must be Russia. By a crushing margin.

Even if it takes longer than originally anticipated, Russia will undoubtedly win this war. And more Ukrainians will needlessly die with each passing day. Of course it was the U.S. and other western powers that set the stage for all of this. In 2014, the Obama administration and other western powers were behind the color revolution which violently overthrew the democratically elected government in Ukraine. That resulted in an extremely violent civil war between the new U.S.-backed government and the separatists which were backed by Russia.

Things were relatively stable during the Trump administration, but then the Biden administration started filling Zelensky’s head with all sorts of ideas about joining NATO and taking Donetsk and Luhansk by force. And Zelensky bought into what Biden administration officials were telling him hook, line and sinker.

The Russians tried to negotiate, but Zelensky and the Biden administration steadfastly refused to compromise. So the Russians felt like they were out of options, and now the Biden administration does not want to fight a war that they helped to cause. And even though his country is now being destroyed, Zelensky is continuing to talk tough… "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued an address to the Russian people on Thursday, according to state media, in which he announced that Russia would pay “reparations” and rebuild “everything” the ongoing war has destroyed in Ukraine."

Oh really? Precisely how does Zelensky plan to achieve that?

The Ukrainian government is also encouraging their citizens to make Molotov cocktails and to set up barriers to block the progress of Russians tanks…"The tone of Zelensky’s speech on Thursday, as reported by the government news site Ukrinform, was significantly less conciliatory than his address to the Russian people last week shortly after Putin began a full-scale assault of Ukraine, in which he emphasized friendly relations between Ukrainian and Russian people and urged Russians to pressure Putin to stop the war. The shift in tone aligns with that of statements from Ukrainian outlets on Wednesday declaring that Russian soldiers would be “slaughtered like pigs” if they attempted to surrender. Ukrainian government social media outlets are actively encouraging civilians to make Molotov cocktails, build roadblocks, and otherwise participate in the war."

Instead of telling women and children to fight the war that they helped to cause, I would like to see Zelensky and his associates get out of the bunker and do some fighting themselves. And I would also like to see Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and other members of the Biden administration fly over to Ukraine and join the battle. Of course the same thing applies to Vladimir Putin. Instead of hiding in a bunker in the mountains, I would like to see him on the front lines.

Needless to say, none of these global leaders are actually going to participate in the fight. They are way too important for that. Instead, we are going to continue to see women and children face off against Russian tanks, and that is a disgrace. Wouldn’t it be great if the international rules of war were changed to say that those that start a war must fight in it?

But instead of fighting for Ukraine, the global elite are attempting to put lots of pressure on Russia in other ways. For example, all Russian-owned and bred cats have now been banned from international competitions… "An international cat federation has banned all Russian-owned and bred cats from competing in international competitions, in a move that’s sure to stop Putin’s attack on Ukraine."

No, this isn’t a Babylon Bee story. The Fédération Internationale Féline (FIFe) issued a statement saying it “cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing.” Yes, I am sure that the citizens of Kiev, Kharkiv and Mariupol will be greatly encouraged when they hear that.

And as Ukrainian cities are pummeled by relentless shelling, the U.S. Army has decided that now is a great time to be “putting its soldiers through training on gender pronouns”… "While Russia wages a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Army is putting its soldiers through training on gender pronouns and coaching officers on when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery, according to an official military presentation on the subject obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The mandatory presentation, “Policy on the Military Service of Transgender Persons and Persons with Gender Dysphoria,” was given to officers earlier this month along with instructions for them to train their subordinates on the material. Portions of the presentation were provided to the Free Beacon by a whistleblower who was ordered to undergo the training as a high-ranking officer in the Army Special Forces."

As we sit in comfort here in the western world, major Ukrainian cities are being ruthlessly encircled by Russian forces. Millions of Ukrainians will soon be very cold and very hungry as they are relentlessly shelled by the mighty Russian military machine. But most Ukrainians never wanted any of this. If anyone deserves such a fate, it is the global elite that actually caused this war in the first place.

For years, I have been relentlessly warning that we were heading toward a conflict between the U.S. and Russia, but most Americans weren’t interested in such warnings. Now World War III is here, and the global elite think that they are going to be able to watch it from a safe distance. But this won’t just be limited to Ukraine. War is going to spread, and it will eventually deeply affect all of us."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

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Related, highly recommended:

"Is An Economic World War 3 Starting Next Week?"

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"The Conflict in Ukraine is Manufactured By The Same Usual Suspects"

Musical Interlude: Juzzie Smith, "Bluesberry Jam"

Juzzie Smith, "Bluesberry Jam"

The amazingly, ridiculously talented one-man-band! lol

"A Look to the Heavens"

“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.

Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120212.html

"To Tell The Truth..."

"In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves."

- Dorothy L. Sayers

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"The world is a comedy to those that think,

 a tragedy to those who feel. " 

- Horace Walpole, In a Letter, 1770

"It Is Common To Assume..."

"It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge."

- H. L. Mencken

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The Daily "Near You?"

Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Canada

Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Langston Hughes, "Dreams"

"Dreams"

"Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow."

- Langston Hughes

"Life, eh?"

"We said together, wistfully, 'Life, eh?' It says everything without having to say anything: that we all experience moments of joyful or painful reflection, sometimes alone, sometimes sharing laughs and tears with others; that we all know and appreciate that however wonderful and precious life is, it can equally be a terribly confusing and mysterious beast. 'Life, eh?"

- Miranda Hart

“A Short Course in Get-a-Life Science”

“A Short Course in Get-a-Life Science”

by Lore Sjöberg

“There are about 250 million U.S. internet users, according to something I read on the internet, and about a quarter of them use discussion boards, according to something I read on some discussion board. And yet, I’m not seeing much evidence that the corpus of comments clogging the commons is going to produce the next Bertrand Russell, or for that matter the next Nipsey Russell.

There seems to be a certain desperation in the tone of your typical bile-posting poster child. They obsessively stomp from site to site, from article to article, fuming and chafing to share their opinion with the world. Oddly enough, often as not that opinion is “get a life.” I’m not exactly sure what “a life” is in this context, but it’s apparently impossible to capture on video, because I’ve never seen a YouTube comment saying, “Ah, this person truly has a life! Good show!” I was, however, able to isolate the Three Laws of Getting a Life:

1. Life is inversely proportional to time: People who need to get a life invariably, according to online comments, have too much time on their hands.

2. The best way to tell that someone lacks a life is that they are doing something just because they want to. This strikes me as a bit like defining “starvation” as “a bellyfull of homemade ice cream with chocolate sauce,” but you can’t argue with science.

3. Life-deficit is communicable. If you tell someone to get a life, that will often inspire a third party to impress upon you the importance of a life, and your current lack of same.

This led me to wonder: Who has less of a life, the person who needs to get a life, or the person who says “get a life” to the person who needs to get a life?

According to the Second Law, the more self-indulgent and less practical an activity, the less of a life the participant has. While skydiving in a Bulbasaur costume is clearly both fun and pointless, it does require some sacrifice (hours spent sewing, plane rental fees) and it has some benefits (free drinks, casual sex with Pokégroupies). By comparison, telling someone to “get a life” is as easy as it is useless. But then, telling someone who just told someone “get a life” to get a life is clearly even more pointless. That implies that life-deficity can increase infinitely. Shouldn’t there be a lower limit where one has no life at all? (Or, to be more exact, where one has only zero-point life due to quantum fluctuation?)

That’s when it struck me, an insight worthy of a Hendrik Lorentz or a Florence Henderson: Needing to get a life isn’t the result of lacking life; life is the result of lacking the need to get a life! The scales were lifted from my eyes and set back in the eye-scale cabinet. Of course! If you spend every waking minute of your limited lifespan doing something drearily important, then you don’t have an abundance of life, you have zero “get-a-life.”

On the other hand, as I’ve learned from either chaos theory or Elliott Smith lyrics, meaninglessness is infinite. There’s always a way to make your actions more pointless and less purposeful. This is easily proven: If you post “Get a life!” you need to get a life less than someone who posts “Get a life!!” Thus, adding an exclamation point makes any activity more, well, pointless. Because there’s an infinite supply of exclamation points (at least according to classical typographic theory), there is no limit to the amount of get-a-life one can reach.

The Universal Get-a-Life Formula: I’ll be publishing the details of my work in an upcoming issue of “The Journal of Cretinology and Loser Science,” but suffice to say I have worked out the Universal Get-a-Life Formula. Here it is:

g’ = (g + 1)cue

…where g is the amount of get-a-life of the individual being commented on, c is the number of words in the comment that suggests that that individual get a life, u is the number of all-uppercase words in the comment, e is the number of exclamation points in the comment and g’ is the resulting amount of get-a-life exhibited by the commenter.

I have arbitrarily decided on Tron Guy as the international standard for one unit of get-a-life. Thus, by definition, Tron Guy has a get-a-life factor of 1 TrG. Most people who spend less than an hour a day using the internet have a get-a-life factor of 0.2 to 0.4 TrG. Charlie Sheen, by comparison, tops out at 6.351 TrG.

Now say someone using the handle “halokillr” visits a video of Tron Guy — or a photo of Tron Guy, or an article about Tron Guy — and leaves the following comment: “GET A LIFE!!!!! ha ha SO DUMB and y r u DOING?!?!!!” According to my calculations, halokillr now boasts a get-a-life factor of 212 times 69, or just over 41 billion.

I await my Nobel Prize.”

- https://www.wired.com/

"Having One Of Those Days?"

 

“Jim Rickards: The New Great Depression Is Where We Are Now”

Full screen recommended.

The Atlantis Report,

“Jim Rickards: The New Great Depression Is Where We Are Now”

"The Center Of The Universe..."

“When science discovers the center of the universe,

a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not it.”

- Bernard Baily

"How It Really Is"

 

"The Real Estate Bubble is About To Explode, With Scott Walters"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly AM 3/5/22:

"The Real Estate Bubble is About To Explode, With Scott Walters"

"One of the hottest topics is Real Estate. I truly feel that we are about to see the bubble pop in a big way. Today on iAllegedly Live we are lucky to have Scott Walters Realtor share his thoughts and expertise on where the real estate market is at and where it’s headed."

"Putin Deserves the Nobel Prize"

"Putin Deserves the Nobel Prize"

by Brian Maher

"Today we may discombobulate and astound you. We may even enrage you. That is because we nominate demon Vladimir Putin for the distinguished Nobel Prize - in medicine. That is correct. Vladimir Putin should be awarded the distinguished Nobel Prize in medicine. Are we out of our wits? After all…He has turned the Hippocratic oath upon its head — and done vast harms. He has laid violent hands upon his neighbors, slaying thousands. He is the consecrated enemy of all civilized men and all civilized nations.

We dispute not one word of it. As we thundered earlier this week: Ukrainian blood - and Russian blood - will forever stain the fellow’s hands. He can never rinse it away. We nonetheless nominate this hellcat for the Nobel Prize in medicine. Again, why?

Here is the answer: The coronavirus has menaced us for two years. We have endured vicious home imprisonments, grave economic privations, government ruthlessness and all species of associated miseries. None of it has leashed the virus. Nor have the vaccines - which is now obvious to any with eyes able to see and willing to see.

Now comes along the Russian berserker… Within the space of days, he has scotched the virus and put it to rout. He has liberated us at last from this hell-sent scourge.

Economist Mr. Martin Armstrong: "The joke running around is that Putin should be nominated for the 2022 Nobel Prize in medicine for he cured COVID-19 in 48 hours – something nobody else has been able to do in three years. Just hours before Biden’s State of the Union, he rescinded the mask requirement. So just hours before, you would get COVID if you did not have a mask. Thanks to Putin, suddenly Congress could actually meet without masks. That is something nobody else could have done in a matter of hours."

We agree. And our applause reaches astonishing decibels, deafening decibels. And so we nominate him… without reservation… for the Nobel Prize in medicine. Or rather, we throw in with his nomination — we are not the first to nominate him.

The august Nobel selection committee will cite Mr. Putin for his “extraordinary efforts to end pandemic of COVID-19”:

To the official statement we might fix an addendum: “Thanks to these extraordinary efforts to end the pandemic of COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci will finally go away.” And so we speak our piece on behalf of Mr. Vladimir Putin. We are forever in his debt. The fellow deserves every last cent of the $1 million check a Nobel Prize winner receives… even if United States sanctions prevent him from cashing it…

Below, James Howard Kunstler has more - much more. As usual, James gives it with the bark off. Read on."

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"Putin to the Rescue!"

by James Howard Kunstler

"Say what you will about Russia’s Cleanup-in-Aisle-Four operation in Ukraine. It sure changed the subject from the murderous COVID-19 madness - cooked up by political therapists who have all the answers for our salvation - to the hard realities of power politics. And at just the right time, too, as ever more hard data leaks through the bastions of captured corporate media to morally indict the criminal public health establishment and their elected enablers throughout Western Civ.

In other words, the whole COVID story was falling apart. Though the CDC and the FDA were hiding and fudging all their numbers as best they could, the insurance actuaries and the humble morticians had no such inhibitions about reporting an upsurge in strange deaths. Whistles were blowing over the botched Pfizer approval trials. The world was beginning to grok how dishonest, deadly and sinister the whole COVID caper really was - from the engineered origins of the disease to the lethal mechanisms of the “vaccines” -  when it became necessary to divert the world’s attention.

Plus, the oaf Justin Trudeau badly tipped his hand on the West’s tilt into tyranny… and American truckers were revving up their convoys… someone, please, do something! Get Russia back in the center ring! And so the floundering establishment activated the still-potent workings of mass formation to fire up what looked like Act 1 of World War III. Forgive me for saying what I will about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The U.S. authorities wanted it. They set it up nakedly by replaying the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, and they refused to negotiate in good faith as to their using Ukraine as a forward base for NATO on Russia’s border. The Russians couldn’t have been plainer about their intentions. They’ve been telling the U.S. to keep Ukraine neutral for over a decade, to not outfit the place for military shenanigans.

What part of that did America not understand? Every part, apparently - and on purpose. It raises the question, of course, as to whether we actually have an interest in that faraway land. I think the answer is: not hardly, except as a utensil of control and antagonism against Russia. As to the people of Ukraine, let’s be honest: We put them in harm’s way, and then we cried crocodile tears over them - most mawkishly in the increasingly bizarre ritual we call the State of the Union message. All those yellow-and-blue lapel pins and fashion accessories. What pathetic pretense.

Who in the U.S. government, from our founding in 1789 to 1991 - while Ukraine was part of Russia in one way or another - gave a passing thought to Ukraine? Answer: nobody. And then, after the crack-up of the USSR, Ukraine was “in play.” It all culminated in the 2014 CIA-sponsored “color revolution” that ousted then-president Viktor Yanukovych, who was inclined to join Russia’s Eurasian Customs Union of trade relations rather than the U.S.-wished-for NATO or EU.

And ever since then it has been one American intrigue after another - including a brisk trade in grift and bribery by the Biden family, the Clinton syndicate, the next gen of Kerrys and other entitled elites from over here selling their influence.

And now the economic sanctions on Russia, which are sure to blow back on the countries issuing them. Europe has to pretend that it doesn’t need Russian oil and gas, that it doesn’t need cheap uranium to run their nuke power plants, that it doesn’t need the Baikonur Cosmodrome to launch their satellites and so on.

More likely, these moves will accelerate the collapse of Western Civ’s banking system and stock and bond markets and erode the U.S. dollar’s role as the global reserve currency - a long-standing “exorbitant privilege” for getting stuff from all over the world in exchange for promises to pay some Tuesday in the distant future.

The reader may ask: Why does this blog appear to take Russia’s side in the current conflict against the U.S. and our supposed allies? Answer: Why would you trust a government (ours) and its captive news media after years of their blatant lying and tyrannical overreach? These parties appear to be at war against their own people, that is, against us - certainly more than Russia is. Especially in the historic moment when all our mendacious “narratives” are being exposed as false? Russian collusion? Indictments underway and more to follow? COVID-19?

A mega-crime of mass homicide spawned by a matrix of pharmaceutical racketeers, corrupt government officials and accomplice news organizations? Stolen elections? Don’t, for Gawd’s sake, even try looking at the slime trail of evidence. I won’t bother listing the many transgressions of Wokery against our culture and history. And all of a sudden, it appears a lot of American citizens have had enough of being deceived. I’m with them.

Now consider this: What if it turns out that Russia can complete its Cleanup-in-Aisle-Four operation relatively quickly, with a minimized loss of life and damage to the everyday infrastructure of Ukraine, and arrange things there afterward so that Ukraine is not a menace to anyone, either Russia or the West?

I sincerely believe this is their intention - just as I sincerely believe that their leadership is actually sane, and ours appears not to be. Perhaps Russia will even offer Ukraine (or its rearranged regions) assistance in recovering from the foolishness it played along with to its own sorrow? What if Russia actually has no intention of starting World War III? Will we keep trying to start it anyway?

Whoever is behind “Joe Biden” has done all they can to derail American Life, and the feckless leadership of Euroland has also seemed avid to trash its future. There is a welling movement, in America, at least, to resist all that, to sweep these degenerates out of power and make a concerted course correction in the direction of sanity, rectitude, liberty and generosity of spirit toward each other.

An awful lot of trouble has already been set in motion by the idiots running things. There is a difficult slog ahead. Is your head screwed on? Where will you stand?"

- dailyreckoning.com