"I, Santos"

"I, Santos"

Introducing the perfect man for Congress...

by Bill Bonner

Youghal, Ireland - "As every sentient biped now knows, Mr. George Santos lied to get himself elected to Congress. The poor man is now the butt of jokes for standup comics all over the country. He provides the Democrats with evidence – if any more were needed – that Republicans can’t be trusted….while distracting the public from their own agenda, which is ruining the country.

But here at Bonner Private Research, we judge not. We just keep our eyes and ears open. We don’t really care about George Santos, but we’re very curious about the system of government that selects a low-life hustler like him as a decider. In the interest of understanding better how our democracy really works, we let him explain himself:

Trust Me, I’m Lying: “Alright. So, I lied. Big whoop. I said I graduated from Baruch College. I never actually set foot in the school. I said I went to the prestigious Horace Mann prep school. Nope. I said my grandparents were holocaust survivors. They were not. I said I worked for Goldman Sachs. I never did. I said I was Jewish. Then, I clarified. I was ‘Jew-ish,’ but not a Jew. I said I was ‘half-Black’, Ukrainian…and lost employees in the Pulse nightclub mass shooting. None of those things are true. I said my mother died on 9/11. (She was shocked to hear it! She didn’t die until 15 years later.)

Somehow, I went from being penniless in 2020….to having millions of dollars to spend on my campaign in 2022. I claimed to own apartment buildings….and made money by selling used yachts. I was the key man in a hedge fund. Of course, there is more to that story….and I’m sure it will come out in due time.

After a 7-year marriage to a woman I realized I was gay…and now have a ‘husband’…which you can take any way you want.

And so now the press – which asked almost no questions when I was running for office – is having fun catching me up in what must seem like an almost never-ending series of falsehoods. The public is appalled. The voters say they were “deceived.” And the media is feeling proud of itself…for “unmasking” a Republican fraudster.

But there is more to the story. And I’m grateful to Bonner Private Research for giving me a chance to tell it. After all, to accuse a politician of lying is like accusing a prostitute of being unchaste. Of course, he lies. That is just the nature of his work. Imagine the candidate who didn’t lie. The voters would want nothing to do with him:

I have to tell you that if I’m elected I won’t make any of you richer. You have to do that yourself. And if I, as a member of Congress, slip a little earmark into the budget so someone gets public money, it just means we’ll have to take it from someone else. Or, if I vote for a program where the feds ‘do something’ for you, it will have to be done at your own expense. The federal government has no money…and no power…that doesn’t come from you.

I’m not going to build a house for you. I’m not going to plant cabbages or raise cattle to lower your food costs. I’m not going to teach your children. Or lower the price of gasoline. And I can’t make you any healthier either. You know how to do that. Just don’t eat so much, exercise…and so forth.

And the Ukraine? Are you serious? As near as I can tell it’s just an excuse to send more of your money to Pentagon contractors and neocon think tanks. So, if you want your government to give you something, or to do something for you, vote for the other guy.

Big F**king Deal: That candidate would be quickly consigned to the graveyard of political careers. Because he wouldn’t give the voters what they want. Then, what good could he do?

I, on the other hand, was practically born for Congress. I got elected. That proves it. Yes, I embellished my resume. Big F**king Deal. The important thing is that I’m a good liar…practiced…and confident. I can make connections with the voters, by telling them what they want to hear. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

So what if I didn’t have grandparents who were Holocaust survivors; that’s not my fault. And what if I didn’t really go to Horace Mann; my parents couldn’t afford the $60,000/yr tuition; so what? So what if I wasn’t always gay; what business is it of anyone else?

Compare those lies to the trillion-dollar fibs embedded in the New Deal, the Great Society, the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, Make America Great Again, the War on Terror. My lies are harmless…and more important, free. They cost the voters nothing. I only lie about myself.

But wait. They show that George Santos is untrustworthy…that he is a rascal. Yes, of course they do. But those are just the threshold qualifications for a Member of Congress; I passed the entry test with flying colors. And now…throw him out because he lies? If you were to apply that test, how many politicians would survive?”

(Santos is right. The lies that matter are those that involve spending other people’s money…squandering the nation’s wealth…and turning its people into dependent numbskulls. Since press reports have exclusively focused on the lies that don’t matter, we know nothing about his lies that do matter. He is said to be a disciple of Donald Trump, so we assume he is a cretin. But giving him the benefit of the doubt…. his policy predilections may be no worse than the other 534 benighted scoundrels on Capitol Hill.)

Decent Dishonesty: “Am I really worse than the others,” Santos asks. “Yes, in a sense…my lies are more obvious and more disprovable. But they are the kind of lies that reveal the truth…they help ‘The People’ see the real nature of their political system. And it might inoculate them against the real liars.

Suppose I, rather than Colin Powell, had stood before the world and made the fraudulent ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ accusation. Who would have believed me? The US might have been spared the Iraq War. And suppose I had been on watch last week, when Congress voted on the $1.7 trillion, 4,000+ page budget bill. Maybe my endorsement would have been enough to make New York Times reporters wonder what was in it.

And who better than I to rise to my feet and applaud that showman Zelenskyy, in his preposterous military get-up? It takes one to know one. And if I had made the case for military aid to the Ukraine, the war might have ended 6 months ago. Last year, the Ukraine got $120 billion – twice as much as the whole Russian defense budget. Anyone who looked into the affair for more than a minute knows that the whole thing – like WWI, Vietnam, or the War on Terror – is a deadly scam.

That’s why having recognized liars in Congress is so important. It helps remind the press and the voters to ask questions. And the questions bring out the truth. And I, Santos, can make it happen. I am the liar who lets the truth out of the bag. I am also what the voters want. I am gay. I am straight. I am a Jew. And a Catholic. I am a Trump man…and an LGBTQ+ representative. I am a conservative; I’m a liberal. I am Black. I am Ukrainian. I am a Republican…and ready to support any fool cause the voters want. Do they want Green Energy? They got it! Do they want to bomb the Russkies back to the stone age? I’m their man. Do they want more stimmies? More unemployment toppers? More fake money at more fake interest rates?

I’m the guy they want. The perfect Member of Congress. With something for everyone…and nothing for everybody.”

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

Bank Panic and Bank Runs"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 1/1/23:

"Bank Panic and Bank Runs"

"People in Russia starting to freak out. They are lining up at the bank to get money out. The ATMs are closing and they are worried about getting cash and their pensions being funded."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"China Entering WW3: In 30 Days Everything Changes"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 1/1/23:

"China Entering WW3: In 30 Days Everything Changes"

"I make an error in this video in mentioning the election as triggering Nov 2021 economic downturn, of course this was not the election year. The cause of the downturn was likely the conflict that would start in early 2022 and the feds interest rate hikes."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Housing Crash Begins As US Housing Market Enters 2023 In A Massive Bubble"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist 1/1/23:

"Housing Crash Begins As US Housing Market 

Enters 2023 In A Massive Bubble"

"If you’re waiting for a housing market crash so that home prices become affordable again, analysts say you won’t have to wait that long. The market is expected to spiral downward this year as a series of indicators suggest that more trouble is ahead. Experts warn that the free-fall has already begun, and we’re now witnessing eerily similar circumstances to the 2008 disaster.

From December 2021 to December 2022, housing affordability has plunged by almost a third. That explains why single-family home sales fell for the 11th straight month. Even Warren Buffett’s favorite metric suggests that a major reversal is underway. The Berkshire Hathaway Inc CEO once explained that one of the key metrics he watches for a downturn in the housing market is a reduction of housing starts. With more and more Americans being turned off by high mortgage rates and builders being forced to cut back, construction on new homes declined by almost 6.5% from October levels, and 4.1% from November levels, and this trend will likely continue through 2023. Compared to the same time last year, housing starts actually dropped by 9%.

But still, the boom in construction seen in 2021 and in the first two quarters of 2022 is about to inundate the market with new supply, and that’s the perfect recipe for crashing prices, says David I. Kranzler from investing.com. Another breathtaking contraction in housing prices is just a matter of time, Krenzler stresses. Although the lending abuses that occurred in the run-up to the last bubble haven’t been repeated, the economic reality for millions of Americans remains undeniably stark, the expert notes. We don’t have mortgage-backed securities anymore, but the housing market is rapidly freezing right now. Fewer buyers are willing to commit to new purchases due to the higher monthly payments while fewer sellers are willing to list their homes in a weakening market, particularly considering that declining prices could mean taking a loss.

Put it together, affordability is plunging, mortgage costs are going through the roof, and a flood of newly built homes is about to enter the market, vastly increasing supply. It goes without saying that this is a very dangerous combination. The risks of a real estate collapse continue to mount, and a series of stocks will also suffer, just as we saw during the last crash. “That’s because consumers have so much of their wealth tied to their homes,” Kranzler explains. “The bottom line is that the housing market is in serious trouble. So it’s imperative to protect your portfolio from another “Lehman moment.”

The fact that many real estate companies are already in deep financial trouble further proves that the housing market meltdown is already upon us. At the same time, in the past quarter, investor home purchases also plummeted by 30%. Homebuilders are also being impacted by this tighter environment. Cancellation rates have accelerated during the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter, jumping to over 20% from 13% in the previous quarter.

The housing market crash is just starting to build momentum. If we observe the sizable decline in existing home sales in November – 7.7% from October on a seasonally adjusted basis and the 35.4% plunge year-over-year, we can clearly see that conditions are deteriorating alarmingly fast. That actually marked the biggest yearly decline since autumn 2008. Officials say that conditions are different this time around. And that may be partially true. But unfortunately, the result is going to be the same."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Disturbed "The Sound Of Silence"

Full screen recommended.

Disturbed, "The Sound Of Silence", Live version.

Singer David Draiman

134 million views.

Full screen recommended.

Disturbed, "The Sound Of Silence", Release version.

Singer David Draiman

867 million views.

"A Look to the Heavens"

“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly. 

The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160728.html

"Once Upon a Time, The End"

"Once Upon a Time, The End"

by Martin Zamyatin

 "Those that can make you believe absurdities 

can make you commit atrocities."

- Voltaire

"The small group of devoted followers gathered around Chicago housewife Dorothy Martin sat in stunned silence as the clock on her suburban living room wall struck midnight on the twentieth of December, 1954…and nothing happened. Many had left jobs and spouses and given away all their money and possessions in order to await the arrival of alien beings from the planet Clarion, who Martin had assured them would descend at that appointed hour, carrying the faithful few off in their flying saucers just before huge floods engulfed the planet Earth. Finally, four hours after their scheduled departure time, Martin broke her silence. 

As the group readjusted their bras, belts, and zippers - having been instructed to discard any metal objects which might interfere with the aliens’ telepathic radio transmissions - their tearful host revealed the reason why their intergalactic rescuers had failed to appear: Apparently it had all been only an elaborate test of faith, and the group’s advanced state of enlightenment had saved the entire planet from a watery destruction!

Surprisingly, only one or two of Martin’s followers were unconvinced by this perfectly rational explanation. Among them, however, was social psychologist Leon Festinger, who had secretly infiltrated the group. Festinger would later write about Martin - using the pseudonym of Marian Keech - in his groundbreaking 1958 book, "When Prophecy Fails." (Not surprisingly, Festinger is credited with coining the psychological term ‘cognitive dissonance.’) 

Following publication of Festinger’s book, the group predictably collapsed under the weight of public ridicule. Martin fled to Peru to warn the clueless natives about the imminent re-emergence of Atlantis, before later resurfacing in Arizona, where she joined crackpot L. Ron Hubbard’s nascent pseudoscientific movement, Scientology.

It seems that for as long as people have inhabited the world, they have anticipated its imminent demise. (In fact, the oldest known apocalyptic prediction is depicted on Assyrian tablets from 2800 BC.) In what may be the earliest example in European folklore, a Frankish villager wandered off into the forest in 591, only to be accosted by a swarm of ravenous flies. Overwhelmed, the poor fellow completely lost his mind and returned to his village clothed in animal pelts, claiming he was Jesus Christ, sent to gather his flock before the coming Rapture. (Perhaps resenting the competition, a local bishop hired a gang of thugs to capture the Lord of the Flies, who they rapturously hacked into little bits.)

The failure of one apocalyptic prophecy not only failed to deter its devoted followers but in fact spawned several entirely new religions. When the world failed to end as predicted in the ‘Great Disappointment’ of 1843-44, Massachusetts preacher William Miller’s tens of thousands of followers splintered off to found the Seventh Day Adventists, as well as the obnoxious doorknockers known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. When the next fateful year of 1874 passed without the desired fireworks, the latter’s charismatic founder, Charles Taze Russell, explained that Jesus had indeed returned, but was invisible to all except the truly devout. (Predictably, few dared admit to being lacking in the requisite level of faith.) 

The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, had declared way back in 1832 that 1890 would be the year of Jesus’s long awaited return engagement. (Later jailed for fraud, Smith somehow failed to predict his own deliverance by an angry mob at age 39.) Russell revised the fateful year to 1881…then 1914…and finally, 1918. (The latter dates spanned World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic, events that while apocalyptic for many, fell short of being world ending.)

Our own time has seen the horrors of the Peoples Temple - in which 914 adults and children committed suicide in the jungles of Guyana in 1978; the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists - 75 of whom died in the FBI standoff at Waco in 1993; Aum Shinri Kyo -whose poison gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1994-95 left 19 innocent people dead; and -neither least nor unfortunately, last - Heaven’s Gate, 39 of whose members committed suicide in 1996, fully expecting (like Dorothy Martin) their spirits to be carried away by aliens hiding in the wake of an approaching comet.

It was probably no coincidence that all of these cults were acting in anticipation of an impending Bible-inspired Day of Judgement. One is tempted to blame these kinds of incidents on the delusions of a small minority of misguided religious fanatics, except that millions of people alive today are expecting an imminent Biblical apocalypse. In a 2012 global poll, fully one out of 7 people said they thought the world would end during their lifetime - and rather ominously, Americans topped the list of doomsayers at 22%. Since their government has the means to fulfil their death wish many times over, one can only hope their gloomy prediction won’t one day become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just call it a bedtime story for humanity."

- http://www.321gold.com/editorials/

"We Often Discover..."

“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.

We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; 

and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.” 

- Samuel Smiles

"Cycles, Systems and Seats in the Coliseum"

"Cycles, Systems and Seats in the Coliseum"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"Contrary to first impressions, I am not a doom-and-gloomer; I'm a systems-cycles-er, meaning I'm interested in where systems and cycles are heading. Cycles work because we're still running Wetware 1.0 which entered beta testing around 200,000 years ago and was released, bugs and all, around 50,000 years ago. Since the processes and inputs haven't changed, neither do the outputs.

Nature is a mix of dynamic, semi-chaotic systems (fractals, etc.) and cyclical patterns which tend to operate within predictable parameters. Why should human nature and human constructs (societies, economies and political realms) be any different?

So longterm success breeds complacency, hubris, economic and intellectual sclerosis, draining political infighting and the overproduction of parasitic elites, to use Peter Turchin's apt description. Consumption of resources expands to soak up every last bit of what's available and then the supply of goodies plummets for a multitude of completely natural and predictable reasons (sunspot/solar activity, El Nino, etc.) and a host of unpredictable but equally natural semi-chaotic extremes (100-year droughts, floods, etc.).

Wetware 1.0's go-to solutions to all such difficulties are rather limited:

1. Ramp up magical thinking. If a couple of human sacrifices ensured good harvests in the good old days, let's slaughter a couple hundred now - and if that doesn't work, then...

2. Do more of what's failed spectacularly and slaughter a couple thousand fellow humans, because darn it, maybe everything will turn around if we just kill another couple dozen. This requires ignoring the novelty of the current challenges and clinging to what worked so well in the past even as whatever worked in the past can't possibly work now because circumstances are fundamentally different.

3. Seek scapegoats. It's those darn witches. Burn a bunch of them and our troubles will magically disappear.

4. Go take what we need from some other tribe. What's our oil doing under their sand?

5. Consolidate power and wealth in the hands of elites whose failures exacerbated the crisis. Because the obvious solution (to the elites with cushy offices around the palaces and temples) to repeated failures of a leadership that only excels in one thing, squandering rapidly depleting resources on infighting and self-aggrandizement, is to give us all the remaining wealth and power. Hey, this makes perfect sense once you understand #2 above.

6. Demand sacrifices of the many to protect the privileges of the few. The Empire needs some warm bodies to fend off the Barbarians, because it would be a real shame if the Barbarians reached our palatial estates and disrupted the flow of wine and festivities. No worries when you come back on your shield; the bureaucracy will give you a decent burial and your spouse and kids can join the multitude of half-starved beggars waiting for the dwindling distributions of bread and circuses. But never mind that, did you hear about the upcoming games in the Coliseum? Good seats are going fast.

7. Eat your seed corn to keep the party going awhile longer. Not every human group had the luxury of borrowing "money" to keep the fast-unraveling party going awhile longer, so they consumed their seed corn and drained the last of their reserves--which is the same thing as borrowing "money" from a future with diminishing resources and productivity.

8. Maintain supreme confidence that "it will all work out fine because it's always worked out fine" without any sacrifice required of "those who count." What's forgotten is that the luxe greatness that is now teetering on the precipice of ruin was won by the sacrifices of the elites far exceeding the sacrifices of the many.

Back in the day, joining the elite and maintaining one's position required constant sacrifices on behalf of the common good, and strict adherence to public virtue. Now that's all forgotten, and all that remains are elites possessed by the demons of shameless greed and self-interest.

The idea that debt, leverage, speculation, greed, exploitation and parasitic elites can expand exponentially forever is magical thinking. Yet that is precisely what America and the rest of the global economic order insists is true and will always be true, forever and ever.

By all means, reject those horrid, awful doom-and-gloomers who look at systems and cycles. Everything will be fine as long as you secure seats for the next games at the Coliseum - they should be spectacular - but not in the way you expect."

- https://www.oftwominds.com/

"It's a New Era"

"It's a New Era"

By Charles Hugh Smith

"This dynamic - making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era - receives little attention or understanding. Eras may last decades, and only those who've lived long enough to recall previous eras have experienced the transition from one era to the next. The era of financialization, globalization and low-cost, abundant oil/natural gas began over 40 years ago in 1981.

The era of digital/Internet technologies took off about 30 years ago. All of these dynamics accelerated in the early 2000s, roughly 20 years ago. Only those 60 and older experienced working in a previous era (pre-1981).

All of these dynamics are entering a phase of nonlinear turbulence as the changes are outpacing these highly streamlined/optimized systems' ability to self-correct. This nonlinear instability is being accelerated by doing more of what worked in the previous era, in the mistaken belief that the 2020s are simply an extension of the eras that began 40 and 30 years ago.

The fixes that worked in the past won't resolve the nonlinear instability because all these dynamics have reached saturation: adding more debt no longer generates organic expansion of productivity, all it does is inflate an even larger and more unstable credit-asset bubble.

Globalization has been optimized to the point of saturation: the potential downsides to national security outweigh any remaining marginal gains in corporate profitability. Financialization has so distorted the economy that gambling on useless speculations is now viewed as the best (or only) way to get ahead. When a system has absorbed all it can absorb, adding more is just a waste of resources.

We've entered a new era, and so the fixes and incentives that worked in the past 40 years no longer work. The idea that the past 30 years were not a permanent era but an anomaly that's come to an end doesn't compute for everyone who has only experienced the "glorious 30" years of cheap energy, soaring assets and falling prices due to hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization.

The idea that this new era may evolve unpredictably is also anathema to a technocratic culture and economy that prides itself on forecasting and controlling everything with credit and money. The previous 40 years of material abundance has nurtured a belief that the solution to any scarcity is to create more money, as some of this new money will inevitably flow into eliminating the scarcity. The idea that some scarcities cannot be fixed by creating more money doesn't compute. It may turn out that all the lessons we learned in the past 40 years will not only be useless in this new era, they will be disastrously counter-productive.

Their unparalleled success for decades may blind us to the power of previous solutions to make our problems worse than they would have been had we recognized the new era for what it is rather than seeing the future as a seamless extension of the previous era. This dynamic - making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era - receives little attention or understanding.

This dynamic helps us understand why systems that seemed permanent and forever can destabilize and fall apart with astonishing speed. We thought we were fixing it by doing more of what worked in the past, but we were actually accelerating the turbulence and destabilization. We have a hard time letting go of the idea that the recent past is an accurate guide to the future. In stable eras, it generally is, but not when an era ends and a new one begins."

- https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

The Daily "Near You?"

Cheadle, Stockport, United Kingdom. Thanks for stopping by!

Khalil Gibran, "A Tear and A Smile"

Full screen recommended.

Read by Shane Morris

Khalil Gibran, "A Tear and A Smile"

"A Tear and A Smile"

"I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart

For the joys of the multitude.

And I would not have the tears that sadness makes

To flow from my every part turn into laughter.

I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.

A tear to purify my heart and give me understanding

Of life's secrets and hidden things.

A smile to draw me nigh to the sons of my kind and

To be a symbol of my glorification of the gods.

A tear to unite me with those of broken heart;

A smile to be a sign of my joy in existence.

I would rather that I died in yearning and longing

than that I live Weary and despairing.

I want the hunger for love and beauty to be in the

Depths of my spirit, for I have seen those who are

Satisfied the most wretched of people.

I have heard the sigh of those in yearning and Longing,

and it is sweeter than the sweetest melody.

With evening's coming the flower folds her petals

And sleeps, embracing her longing.

At morning's approach she opens her lips to meet

The sun's kiss.

The life of a flower is longing and fulfilment.

A tear and a smile.

The waters of the sea become vapor and rise and come

Together and are a cloud.

And the cloud floats above the hills and valleys

Until it meets the gentle breeze, then falls weeping

To the fields and joins with brooks and rivers

to Return to the sea, its home.

The life of clouds is a parting and a meeting.

A tear and a smile.

And so does the spirit become separated from

The greater spirit to move in the world of matter

And pass as a cloud over the mountain of sorrow

And the plains of joy to meet the breeze of death

And return whence it came.

To the ocean of Love and Beauty - to God."

"Most People Will Lose The Economic War In 2023; Households Are Broke"

Jeremiah Babe, 1/1/23:

"Most People Will Lose The Economic War In 2023;

 Households Are Broke"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"May Sarton on How to Live with Tenderness in a Harsh World"

"May Sarton on How to Live with Tenderness in a Harsh World"

By Maria Popova

"This world is radiant with beauty. This world is also capable of bone-chilling brutality and the small, corrosive daily cruelties that salt our days with sorrow. For a sensitive person to live with the duality, to keep the light aflame without turning away from the darkness that needs illumination, may be the most difficult thing in life - and the most rewarding.

What it takes, and how it rewards us, is what the great poet and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores in a journal entry from her altogether dazzling 1977 book "The House by the Sea" (public library). With an eye to the daily reality of teenagers killing with firearms - a reality that, in the decades since, has been magnified from interpersonal violence to mass shootings - she considers the long roots of desensitization, fanged into the body of the world with every war: "What have we done to our children that such indifference is possible? A total disconnection between the act and the human terror and despair involved?"

In a passage of stunning prescience and relevance to our own epoch, she answers: "We are in a period where torture is taken for granted almost everywhere, and where the so-called civilized peoples must go on eating candy and drinking whiskey while millions die of hunger. So one has to extrapolate the morally indifferent boys to the whole ethos in which they live. And at the root of it all is the lack of imagination. If we had imagined what we were doing in Vietnam it would have had to be stopped. But the images of old women holding shattered babies or of babies screaming ended by passing before our eyes but never penetrating to consciousness where they could be experienced. Are we paying for Vietnam now by seeing our children become monsters?"

Sarton offers a cure for this deadly indifference - a cure that honeys this twenty-first-century soul with its poignancy and its potency: "I am more and more convinced that in the life of civilizations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that has not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything - ends in anomie. The structures break down and there is nothing to “hold onto.” It is understandable that at such times religious fanatics arise and the fundamentalists rise up in fury. Hatred rather than love dominates. How does one handle it? The greatest danger, as I see it in myself, is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence - nature, the arts, human love. Maybe that is why the pandas in the London Zoo brought me back to poetry for the first time in two years."

Complement this fragment of the wholly ravishing "The House by the Sea" with Sarton on the cure for despair, then revisit Walt Whitman, writing shortly after his paralytic stroke, on what makes life worth living and Mary Oliver on the measure of a life well lived."

- https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/

"2023: The Future Has Arrived: The End of 500 Years of Conquistador Civilization"

"2023: The Future Has Arrived: 

The End of 500 Years of Conquistador Civilization"

By Batiushka

"Foreword: It is often said that the systemic Western European superiority complex, a disease which consists of the self-justified domination and exploitation of the surrounding world, began with the First ‘Crusade’ (1096-1099). Technically, this is true, but before it there were other events which we may call ‘Pre-Crusades’. For example, there was the massacre by the barbarian Frankish leader Charlemagne of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in 782. This bloodbath was the foundation of Frankish Europe, which still survives as the core of the lies of the EU today. After the collapse of Charlemagne’s Europe and a period of consolidation, 200 years later there came the events of the earlier eleventh century which did exactly presage the First Crusade at its end. First, there was the Frankish ‘Reconquista’ Crusade which began to accelerate in the eleventh century in Iberia. Then came the ‘Norman’ (in fact they were the collective campaigns of all the Frankish-made scum of North-Western Europe) Crusades or Conquests in Sicily, Southern Italy and in England in 1066.

Like these ‘Pre-Crusades’, the genocidal ‘conquests’ of the First Crusade essentially took place inside Europe, or else close by in the Near East. These Viking-type raiding and trading military expeditions, led on horseback and operating from castles, were expanded into Western Europe (the Celtic lands invaded from the Frankish base in England) and into Eastern Europe (the Baltics and Russia). However, the revolution came with the export of this aggressive Eurocentric mentality to distant lands through the ‘Conquistadors’ (same word) in what we now call Latin America 500 years ago. They were the fruit of Columbus’ imperialist and capitalist venture of 1492 and were followed by da Gama’s money-seeking ventures to southern Africa and India in 1497. They triggered a global revolution because they led to the worldwide genocide and plunder of other peoples and the destruction of their civilizations. Clive of India, Rhodes of Africa, Clinton of Serbia, Bush of Iraq and Biden of the Ukraine were only the conquistadors of later times. However, today we are seeing the end of their Conquistador Civilization.

Our Great Reset: Thus, now we come to the end of the vital crossroads year of 2022 and a revolution that happens only once every 500 years. What we had been waiting for over so many years is now here. The date of 24 February 2022 has already gone down in world history. With the incredibly aggressive refusal of Washington to allow the Kiev puppet regime to grant freedom to the people of the Donbass, Russia has been obliged to turn to Defense Plan B, to partial mobilization and the demilitarization and liberation of all of the Ukraine and even beyond, as the suicidal attitudes of the Western world will oblige it to do. A limited operation has had to be turned by Western aggression into a full-scale war and the US/West/NATO has deprived itself of peace and prosperity through its suicidal sanctions. It means the end of Western Conquistador Civilization. Thus, we try to peer over the horizon into 2023 and beyond. What will come once the Ukrainian war is over?

Some who follow the Western reporting of the conflict may be surprised by these statements. However, that reporting has been a strange mixture of delusional fantasies/wishful thinking and straightforward propaganda, organized by Western secret services and PR agencies, omitting truth, logic and reality. Venal journalists have been ordered to report such nonsense from on high – otherwise, they would have lost their careers and their income. Such reporting has essentially been destined to try and keep Western peoples under control in the hardships they are facing as a result of the suicidal decisions of their US-controlled political elites.

The US elite is making use of the meagre resources of its NATO vassals (so-called ‘allies’), using as its battlefield the Ukraine and as its cannon fodder Ukrainians and mercenaries. But Russian victory is inevitable, even if delayed because the US is deliberately and suicidally making the Ukraine into its Second Vietnam. The Western elite wants to fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’. (“We don’t care how many Ukrainians will die. How many women, children, civilians and military. We don’t care. Ukraine cannot take the peace decision. The peace decision can only be taken in Washington. But for now we want to continue this war, we will fight to the last Ukrainian.” Former US Senator Richard Blake). Therefore, it is immorally supplying all sorts of lethal arms for hundreds of thousands more of these hoodwinked Slavs to die or to be maimed.

Even if some in NATO dare to send more tens of thousands of the ‘willing’ to be slaughtered in the Ukraine directly, and not pretending to be Ukrainians, as with the many, many thousands of mainly Polish mercenaries at present, many of them already killed, that victory is still inevitable. Given Western aggression and intransigance, Russia has been preparing for a full-scale Continental war ever since 2014. Even if next year the Polish Army with its new 200,000 reservists armed to the teeth by the USA, attacks, Russia is ready. Although the prophecies of elders indicate May 2024 as the end of this ten-year long war (the US elite started it through its paid Ukrainian puppets in 2014), prophecies are always conditional on repentance and we should not try to predict exact details from them. Whatever happens, the next few years are going to see revolutionary transformations worldwide as a result of this war.

The New World Order: The most dramatic event after its defeat in the Ukraine will surely be the retreat of the USA, as it is expelled from Eurasia, a process which began in Vietnam and then continued in Iraq and Afghanistan. The nationalist Trump wanted to withdraw voluntarily, but he was not allowed to, therefore the humiliating US withdrawal will happen by force, as it did in Kabul. ‘Yanks, go home’, chants the whole world, including many in Western Europe, tired of US tyranny. In Eurasia the US now occupies only a few islands (Taiwan, Japan, Singapore), the tips of two peninsulas (Korea and Western Europe) and the seaboard edge Israel. It will have to leave all of these, except for the Non-Palestinian parts of Israel. Taiwan will naturally return to China, Japan will have to find its own way, reconciling itself to a reunited Korea and submitting itself to China economically. For Western Europe, see below.

Once home, the USA will have to lick its wounds and be deoligarchized by popular revolt. The dedollarization of the world economy is already under way, with very serious consequences for the deindustrialized US economy. The American Empire will undergo deimperialization, like the European Empires after 1945, and, if at all possible, have to find some sort of unity, identity and sovereignty in its highly polarized, highly indebted and highly fragilized situation. Outside the US, the world chants ‘Yanks, go home’, but inside the US, ordinary Americans chant: ‘Feds, go home’. It is the same thing. The swamp must be drained. The departure of the USA from Western Europe after its eighty-year long occupation will mean the end of the already much disarmed and futile NATO. The suicidal bankruptcy of the European countries will also lead to the end of NATO’s political and economic arm, the EU.

This will mean the reconfiguration of the tip of the European peninsula and its resovereignization, a process which has already begun in Hungary. In the Western Balkans, Camp Bondsteel, the second largest US base in the world, will be abandoned, and Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia will rearrange themselves in the post-American world, the world of long-awaited justice. The future of Europe is not thousands of miles across the Atlantic, but eastwards, next door, in its natural sources of energy, food, fertilizer and manufactures. Europe as a separate Continent is after all a pure fiction, an artificial construct which was created from and cut off from the Eurasian landmass for purely political reasons. Europe is about to learn this, as it returns to its roots, which Russia alone has kept. A Russian-led Europe provides the prospect of a unity of sovereign but confederal Northern Eurasia ‘from sea to shining sea’, in fact, from Reykjavik to Tokyo. It is the future, in which the USA is utterly irrelevant. Its ‘lies-based order’ of genocidal chaos is over.

Inside Russia itself the transformation has already begun, with treacherous members of the ‘creative class’ gone to their spiritual home in Israel, with Pugachova and Zelensky, as well as across the borders to Georgia and Finland. This cleansing process and the ensuing Re-Russification of Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus will go far. After the deviations of 200 years of Imperial Russia – and there were very serious deviations then – otherwise Tsar Nicholas II would not have wanted to return to pre-Imperial Russia, to ‘Rus’ and there would never have been 1917 – 75 years of Marxist Sovietization and 30 corrupt years of the Americanization and so oligarchisation, the transformation has far to go. There will be a great and radical refreshing and cleansing of national identity after this unheard-of period of decadence and corruption, which ultimately stretches back over 300 years. All Russian institutions, including the still Sovietized Church, together with its small branches founded by post-1917 emigres, will be transformed. The uncompromised Russian Church, freed from the moneychangers, will arise from the embarrassing ruins of the past. The past is over. The arrival of the future in 2022 has made it all so irrelevant.

The New Christian Order: As regards the current versions of Western Christianity, Protestantism (1517-2017) is largely a spent force within the Western world, its 500-year best before date is up. Just as it was launched by printing technology, it has been ended by internet technology. Puritanism preached ‘Hate the sin and especially hate the sinner’, now its just as aggressive descendant, Wokeism, preaches, ‘Love the sinner and especially love the sin’. In other words, all is permitted. The once full churches of Protestantism close down in their hundreds every year in the Western world. It was what it was, a moralizing and White Supremacist blip in history, both for good, as in keeping promises, honesty, integrity and moral uprightness, and for bad, as in the ruthless and unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources, including slavery, the obsession with money and saving money, as well as boring and iconoclastic philistinism caused by narrow-minded bigotry, and the tragic, rigid, literalist, moralizing, unnatural and pharisaical repression of human nature, causing crass hypocrisy and misogyny, to the point of the slaughter of women as ‘witches’.

As for Roman Catholicism, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it was taken over by the CIA in the early sixties to be used as a political battering ram against the USSR. And it too is also largely a spent force (1054-2054?) in the Western world. Covered-up pedophilia and the misogyny of compulsorily unmarried and frustrated clerics, some of them perverts, now exposed, are killing it off. Little wonder that some say that the present Pope is the last one. However, if Catholicism can be freed of American and European political stooges and cleansed of its inherent millennial secularism, it at least can return to roots (Protestantism as a schismatic, splintering protest opinion movement has in itself no roots to return to). Liberated from Rome, the people now called ‘Catholics’ can reflourish in new forms, especially in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, providing that Catholicism goes native, yet remains traditional, and the Global South’s clergy’s almost universal, but hypocritically concealed marriages can be recognized officially. This will mean Catholicism divesting itself of the secularist and corrupt Western Middle Ages and returning to the spirit of the pre-Roman Catholic Faith of first millennium Western Europe.

As regards the Non-Western, Orthodox Church, the 200 million in the at present fifteen local branches of the Orthodox Church, the Dewesternization revolution will be just as radical. At present there is the 7%, the 14 million of the Greek Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Once the US Establishment, which stands behind them all and meddles intensively in their affairs, has retreated, freedom will come to them at last. As for the Russian Church, the 70% or 140 million, just as for the 23% or 46 million of the other Non-Greek Churches, in Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Macedonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Albania, the revolution will also necessarily be radical. They are all going to have to be freed from the Western disease of worldliness:

‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all those who sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said to them: It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves’.

Afterword: The whole Russian policy over the last twenty-two years to move towards a multipolar/polycentric world is now coming to fruition. The Big Four, Russian, China, India and Iran, are being joined by many countries from all Continents in the Global South in huge and powerful Non-Western organizations like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), the SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organization) and the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), to form a new G20 to replace the failed American vassal one.

Now this multipolar/polycentric world, inherently anti-centralist, will be reflected in ramifications everywhere. The old and failed centralization, which has always brought corruption in its wake, will gradually disappear and people may be seen for what they are. This is a warning to all tyrants and bullies, who have promoted artificial unions and institutions all over the world. Your secrets are being found out. Your time is up. We shall not die on our knees, but live on our feet. It is time for the Deimperialization and the Resovereignization of both whole countries and of individual souls."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Welcome to 2023! Empty Shelves At Walmart! High Food Prices! Costs Rising!"

Full screen recommended.

The Real Economy, 12/31/22:

"Empty Shelves At Walmart! High Food Prices! Costs Rising!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

At Walmart?!

"Falling Into The Abyss - Things Are About To Get Worse"

Jeremiah Babe, 12/31/22:

"Falling Into The Abyss - Things Are About To Get Worse"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Predict This!"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 12/31/22:

"Predict This!"

"Everybody has submitted their predictions on where are, and where we think the economy is headed in the new year. Here are your predictions for 2023."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Happy New Year 2023!

 

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Full screen recommended.

Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Life, magnificent, precious Life...

"A Look to the Heavens"

“While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the below gorgeously detailed image was recently taken in infrared light by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in honor of the 23rd anniversary of Hubble's launch.

The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is seen above primarily because it is backlit by the nearby massive star Sigma Orionis. The Horsehead Nebula will slowly shift its apparent shape over the next few million years and will eventually be destroyed by the high energy starlight.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130422.html

"Get Your Stuff Together..."

"We all got problems. But there's a great book out called "Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart." Did you see that? That book says the statute of limitations has expired on all childhood traumas. Get your stuff together and get on with your life, man. Stop whinin' about what's wrong, because everybody's had a rough time, in one way or another." 

- Quincy Jones

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"

The Daily "Near You?"

Hinesville, Georgia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "Coming Home"

"Coming Home"

"When we are driving in the dark,

on the long road to Provincetown,

when we are weary,

when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look,

I imagine us rising from the speeding car.

I imagine us seeing everything from another place -

the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless

fields of the sea.

And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,

but which we cherish.

And what we see is our life moving like that

along the dark edges of everything,

headlights sweeping the blackness,

believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.

Looking out for sorrow,

slowing down for happiness,

making all the right turns

right down to the thumping barriers to the sea,

the swirling waves,

the narrow streets, the houses,

the past, the future,

the doorway that belongs

to you and me."

- Mary Oliver

2023: "It Has Been A Privilege..."

Full screen recommended.

2023: We're the band...

and "It has been a privilege playing with you."

o

God help us...