What does it tell you when even Burger King and McDonalds are in such very serious trouble? At least the main stream media money-whores keep you informed, right? Right?
"The Truth About Ukraine's Future w/ Scott Ritter"
"Former UN Weapons Inspected and geopolitical analyst Scott Ritter joins the program for a discussion about Ukraine's future one year into Russia's special military operation."
"12 Major Layoffs That Have Already Been Announced
In 2023! Worst Job Cuts Since The Great Recession"
By Epic Economist
"It appears that the tsunami of layoffs that started late last year is starting to accelerate. January was a horrible month for job losses, and major layoff announcements are coming fast and furious here in February. But of course the Biden administration would have us believe that everything is just fine. Last week, the government told us that the U.S. economy “added 517,000 jobs” in January. But as I discussed in previous videos that wasn’t what actually happened. The raw, unadjusted number showed that the U.S. economy actually lost 2.5 million jobs last month. That is a terrible number, but after the bureaucrats in Washington were done with their “adjustments” it magically became a gain of 517,000 jobs. If you want to have faith that their “adjustments” are appropriate, good for you. But other sources also confirm that things have really taken a turn for the worse. For example, Challenger, Gray & Christmas just issued a report that concluded that last month “was the worst January for job cuts since the Great Recession in 2009”…
U.S. companies announced roughly 103,000 job cuts in January, the highest monthly total since September 2020, a Thursday analysis found.
Last month was the worst January for job cuts since the Great Recession in 2009, according to a report from employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Around 40 percent of last month’s job reductions came in the tech industry, where Google parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce announced plans to lay off thousands of workers. Many of the companies said they grew too quickly in recent years and must cut costs to boost profitability.
So many large companies announced staff reductions last month, and that trend has definitely continued this month. The following are 12 major layoffs that have already been announced in February…"
"Russian Owned Supermarket After 1 Year of Sanctions"
"Take a look inside a Russian owned supermarket in Moscow, Russia after 1 year of sanctions. See what it's like inside this typical Russian owned supermarket. What can you buy, what is available?"
"How did galaxies form in the early universe? To help find out, astronomers surveyed a patch of dark night sky with the Very Large Telescope array in Chile to find and count galaxies that formed when our universe was very young. Analysis of the distribution of some distant galaxies (redshifts near 2.5) found an enormous conglomeration of galaxies that spanned 300 million light years and contained about 5,000 times the mass of our Milky Way Galaxy. Dubbed Hyperion, it is currently the largest and most massive proto-supercluster yet discovered in the early universe.
A proto-supercluster is a group of young galaxies that is gravitationally collapsing to create a supercluster, which itself a group of several galaxy clusters, which itself is a group of hundreds of galaxies, which itself is a group of billions of stars. In the featured visualization, massive galaxies are depicted in white, while regions containing a large amount of smaller galaxies are shaded blue. Identifying and understanding such large groups of early galaxies contributes to humanity's understanding of the composition and evolution of the universe as a whole."
"We are in the Long Dark now. Both hope and despair are the enemies of our survival. We must live in the awareness that we might not see the light come back, without ceasing to work - with empathy, anger and knowledge - for its return.
We must be here, in the moment, experiencing its fullness (whatever its horrors or joys), yet be elsewhere, removed from the madness pouring in from every side, the avalanche of degradation. We must be here, now, but also in a future we can’t see or even imagine.
We must see that we are lost, with no clear way forward, no sureties or verities to cling to, no roots to anchor us, no structures within or without that will always keep their coalescence in the chaotic, surging flow.
We must live in discrete moments of illumination and connection, pearls hung on an almost invisible string winding through the darkness. Striving, always striving, but not expecting; striving without hope, without despair, without any certainty at all as to the outcome, good or bad.
These are the conditions of the Long Dark, this is what we have to work with, this is where we find ourselves in the brief time we have in this vast, indifferent, astounding universe. As I once wrote long ago, quoting the old hymn: “Work, for the night is coming.”
So do we counsel fatalism, a dark, defeated surrender, a retreat into bitter, curdled quietude? Not a whit. We advocate action, positive action, unstinting action, doing the only thing that human beings can do, ever: Try this, try that, try something else again; discard those approaches that don't work, that wreak havoc, that breed death and cruelty; fight against everything that would draw us down again into our own mud; expect no quarter, no lasting comfort, no true security; offer no last word, no eternal truth, but just keep stumbling, falling, careening, backsliding, crawling toward the broken light.
And what is this "broken light"? Nothing more than a metaphor for the patches of understanding – awareness, attention, knowledge, connection – that break through our darkness and stupidity for a moment now and then. A light always fractured, under threat, shifting, found then lost again, always lost. For we are creatures steeped in imperfection, in breakage and mutation, tossed up – very briefly – from the boiling, chaotic crucible of Being, itself a ragged work in progress toward unknown ends, or rather, toward no particular end at all. Why should there be an "answer" in such a reality?
What matters is what works – what pulls us from our own darkness as far as possible, for as long as possible. Yet the truth remains that "what works" is always and forever only provisional – what works now, here, might not work there, then. What saves our soul today might make us sick tomorrow.
Thus all we can do is to keep looking, working, trying to clear a little more space for the light, to let it shine on our passions and our confusions, our anger and our hopes, informing and refining them, so that we can see each other better, for a moment – until death shutters all seeing forever."
"Analyst and financial writer John Rubino says we’re are in a “debt and death spiral” that will force dramatic changes on the world. Rubino explains, “The debt spiral part of this means things from here continue to get worse and worse for the big currencies of the world until they die. In other words, until people lose faith in them, refuse to use them and hold them anymore until their value falls to their intrinsic value, which is zero. That manifests to hyperinflation. The value of the currency falls as opposed to the things you buy with it. Things feel basically okay for a long time as long as governments could force interest rates down to really low levels. The side effects of that are massive money creation and, eventually, inflation. That’s what we are dealing with now. So, here we go. Welcome to the end game for the world’s big currencies.”
Rubino contends things have gotten so out of control that there is no stopping what is coming. Rubino says, “We are in the part of the cycle now where things just get worse, and there is nothing we can do about it. You are going to see companies that have borrowed huge amounts of money to buy back their stock, and now they see their interest costs explode. Governments around the world have the same problem, and there is nothing central banks can do about this.
The next stage of this is when everybody realizes that there is no fix. Daddy is not going to come home and take care of all of this, and there is no adult supervision. The financial markets are basically on their own with so much debt that there is nothing left to do. You either have mass bankruptcies or inflate away the currencies of the world, and we’re there - finally. 2023 is going to be an amazing year, and we make the decision about what kind of a crisis we fall into. We have a 1930’s style deflationary depression, which is what happens if we keep raising interest rates. Or, a Weimar Germany kind of hyperinflation, which is what happens if we try to inflate our way out of our current debt problems. And that’s it. This is not something on the distant horizon anymore. It’s something right here staring us in the face.”
Rubino talks about the threat of global nuclear war and contends our extreme financial problems will seem timid if the nukes fly. In the nuclear war scenario, the global population could get cut in half with “radiation and starvation.” Rubino also talks about ways to be more resilient, and that starts with shedding as much debt as you can. It also includes food, water, cash, defensive investments and precious metals.
Rubino thinks the economy is so weak, with so many different financial bubbles, that one bubble pop could bring the entire system down rapidly. Rubino says look out for big European banks to go insolvent as a warning sign of trouble if the trillion-dollar derivative complex blows up." There is much more in the 52-minure interview.
"The deep state part of the Pentagon has been laying the groundwork to use a catalyst for war. The globalists spent all weekend scaring us about UFO attacks worldwide and trying to prepare us for a major confrontation with China and Russia. We are watching a disinformation campaign of the highest order being carried out right before our eyes."
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out."
~ Anne Sexton
o
"Don't let fear keep you quiet. You have a voice so use it. Speak up. Raise your hands. Shout your answers. Make yourself heard. Whatever it takes, just find your voice, and when you do, fill the damn silence."
"Plato was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning on the European continent."
"Your home for analysis of breaking news and in-depth discussion of current geopolitical events in the United states and the world. Geopolitics. No ego descriptions. No small talk. Straight to the point. Calls with the relevant analysis only."
revised inflation figures and 40 centuries of history...
by Bill Bonner
“Soldiers, remember that from the top of these
pyramids, 40 centuries of history contemplate you.”
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Youghal, Ireland - "What a weekend. Unidentified flying objects. The Super Bowl. And December’s inflation reading, previously reported as going down, was adjusted; now it’s up. Yahoo Finance: "New seasonal adjustments released by the BLS on Friday also switched December's initial reading of a 0.1% monthly drop in headline inflation to an increase of 0.1% in the year's final month." But all of the weekend’s noise was drowned out by the news from the week before. Let’s begin with the blockbuster, Seymour Hersh:
A Real Coup: It’s not every day that the US commits an act of war – against two of the most powerful nations in the world. It’s not every day that the US attacks its own allies, either. In this case, blowing up the Baltic pipeline was directed, not only against Russia, but against Germany too. Germany got its energy from Russia. It’s what fueled the German economy. Germany is also a US ally…and a member of NATO.
The report, from Seymour Hersh, a renowned investigative reporter, came out early last week. Hersh is no stranger to controversy. He won a Pulitzer Prize for blowing the whistle on the Mai Lai massacre. He also reported the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. In both cases, the feds denied it.
Later, Hersh was proven correct. Where this story will go – revealing an illegal, unconstitutional act of war by a sitting US president, clearly cause for impeachment – we don’t know. Probably nowhere. By Friday, there was still no mention of it from the mainstream press, neither the New York Times, the Washington Post, nor the Wall Street Journal.
But what a bold move! What audacity! How proud of themselves the elite foreign policy ‘experts’ must have been. Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and the ‘Big Man,’ Joe Biden himself; they pulled off a real coup, so to speak. With one swing of the saber, they cut Germany off from Russia…making it dependent on US sources of fuel, and they cut Russia off from its export revenue, effectively hobbling and humiliating them both.
Lest We Forget: It must have been similar to the rush of pride felt when George W. Bush invaded Iraq. Jack Wheeler called Bush a “geo-political genius,” because he had planted a US-style democracy right in the heart of the Muslim world. Jack must have imagined that the grimy coffee shops of Baghdad would all become Starbucks, with budding entrepreneurs working on their laptop computers…and housewives (wearing shorts and tee-shirts) taking money out of ATMs and going to malls to have their nails done. The thought of it made all the think-tank war-fighters giddy with joy. Pity the way it turned out.
And then, there were the ‘experts’ on the Wehrmacht staff. By invading Russia, they said, Hitler could seize much needed resources for Germany…and deny them to its Bolshevik rival in the East. Shame how that worked out too.
And don’t forget Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign. He thought he could capture the key supply line from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and thus be able to menace Britain’s possessions in India. What a stroke of genius that was too...until Horatio Nelson’s fleet intervened, cutting the French off from their own supplies…and their line of retreat. Napoleon was famous for his audacity…and for losing armies. He misplaced them…putting them in harm’s way while attempting a bold move. Spain, Egypt, Russia…he lost them all. Finally, he lost France itself.
Here at BPR we are only interested in politics and foreign policy as a source of entertainment…or insofar as it affects the economy. Watching Congress in action is a little like going to an insane asylum and gawking at the half-wits and nutjobs. It may be amusing; but it is a sick pleasure. They are for the most part, morons; but it’s not their fault.
Necessary but not Sufficient: Sadly, stupidity isn’t enough to make a good member of Congress. It also requires a preternatural ability to lie…and, it helps to be blind. As a member of the elite, there are two things you’re never supposed to see…or discuss. Those are the things that are likely to do the most damage – war and inflation.
The US Constitution clearly gives the people’s representatives the exclusive authority in both matters. Congress is supposed to control the money. Yet, the Fed brought about the worst inflation in 40 years – with nary a word about it in Congress. As for blowing up the Nord Stream Pipeline, a clear act of war, the peoples’ elected representatives, such as they are, were never consulted, never debated it, knew nothing about it…and don’t want to know anything about it. So, the bold move was undertaken by the White House on its own say-so alone...
The great English writer, G.K. Chesterton, once wrote up a clever report on "Twenty Ways of Killing a Wife." One was hung. Another decapitated. And so forth. It was no doubt great fun for him…a real triumph of the imagination. But God forbid he actually put it into practice. By treating it as an intellectual exercise, rather than a business plan, he was able to enjoy the challenge, while still retaining the affections and services of his good wife, Frances. Had he tried to carry out the plans, on the other hand, he would have had the trouble of disposing of 20 corpses…and almost certainly ended his days in prison.
Alas, our ‘foreign policy’ jefes put into practice…in real life…something that should have remained a James Bond fantasy. They blew up the pipeline. And now America will have to answer, in one way or another, sooner or later, for a remarkably obtuse act of aggression against two nations that had done it no harm.
And what would we say if our internet connections mysteriously failed? Suppose an ‘accident’ suddenly crippled the power grid? Imagine the banking system…and all the nation’s ATMs…going dark? Is all the world’s infrastructure now at risk?"
"In today's vlog we take you with us shopping at Kroger! We also take you back home with us, where Jessica shows how she makes her famous homemade appetizers!"
op to pull the civil/military’s collective chain.”
- Thomas L. Thomas
"Didn’t you get the feeling this weekend that we’re living in the HG Wells’ classic tale of the earth invaded by sinister alien spacecrafts? Our government is playing the story like a bassoon concerto. “American officials do not know what the objects were, much less their purpose or who sent them,” The New York Times reported, poaching a line from every horror movie of the 1950s. When do the giant ants show up on Fremont Street in Las Vegas?
Looks like they’ll keep up the suspense as long as possible, too. Oh, we can’t retrieve that thing up in Alaska due to white-out weather conditions… Oh, that other thing - the eight-sided silver tic-tac - it fell into Lake Huron, glug glug… and that first one, the big balloon payload, lies deep in Davy Jones’ Locker now. You’ll have to stand by, folks….
Let’s face it, all the other mindf**ks set in motion by the folks-in-charge are not just losing their mojo - they’re generating a lot of nasty blow-back in the way of widespread distrust of authority and institutional collapse. Even Woked-up Democrat voters begin to suspect that the vaxxes they greeted like a holy deliverance might not be so good for you after all. I’m waiting for Rob Reiner’s head to explode when he starts to notice how many young SAG-AFTRA members are waking up dead in West Hollywood.
More to the point, you are now correct to suspect that the entire Covid-19 episode, from the design of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus to the gene-modification shots put out by Pfizer and Moderna (erroneously labeled “vaccines”), was a joint Intel-DOD operation, not really a public health crisis. The abiding mystery is… why? Why turn Western Civilization upside down and inside out and then try to pound the whole thing down a rat-hole?
Frankly, the only angle that makes sense is that our government is captive to a hostile force. The WEF, the WHO, and the UN are the most obvious culprits, certainly the most talked-up, the most active on-the-scene. But until a few years ago these organizations had no real influence on the world. They were bad jokes… only pretending to protect the global community’s interests… actually completely incapable, utterly incompetent. Klaus Schwab, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus? Please! What Muppet factory were they made in? The UN was a mere collective of Third World hustles and rackets. And everybody knew it, but the developed world played along as a sop to these sad-sack nations and their greedy officials because the grift was chump-change.
You’d have more reason to suspect that those outfits were fronting for something else, and that something might be the CCP. The Marxist culture war against American manners and values is unmistakably a re-play of China’s cultural revolution, with all its insults against reason, tradition, custom, common sense, and due process of law. The titanic wave of Woke lunacy was hatched in the universities over many decades - places easily infiltrated by malign agents - and seeded into political activism on the Left, especially among the Democratic Party - which now has a figurehead president implicated in bribery and treason.
How and why else has the evidence of those crimes been so sedulously suppressed when it should have been served up to a grand jury post-haste in 2019, as soon as Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced. The darn thing was absolutely stuffed with a rich documentary record of crime from the lowest (drugs and whores), to the highest (payoffs from foreign actors). The extraordinary lengths that the DOJ and FBI went to hide it, or pretend to not look inside it, is one of the most transparently degenerate acts ever seen in US history - and continues to this day.
And now, all of it unwinds rapidly, all the organized deception and lying. You could argue, perhaps, that US government agencies, this aggregation of interests we call the Deep State, just went plumb insane from guilt, fear, and shame over its own long-running, rampant criminality, but even that fails to answer how come, for instance, the CDC is still pushing booster shots of a toxic bio-engineered cocktail that maims and kills people. Are they aiming to reduce the US population on-purpose - at the same time that the DHS is ushering millions from other countries across the border illegally? Is the Deep State working China’s will against us and the rest of the West? Did we collaborate with our adversaries in our own collapse?
All the usual totemic tropes the Deep State employs to intimidate its opponents - Russia, white supremacy, right-wing extremism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, blah blah - have lost their power to scare the non-insane. Fewer Americans believe the official bullshit about keeping America “safe” from “misinformation.” It’s perfectly obvious now that “misinformation” is a synonym for “the truth.” So, what have they got left? A UFO invasion? Is that what it’s come to? I guess so.
Forces are aligning now to shake this creaking system down to its foundation. The moment of criticality will most likely come when the financial markets crater and the US dollar gets broken by international ridicule to a near-worthless token of decrepitude. The public can apparently take an awful lot of gaslighting, double-dealing, and derogation. But that all changes when you can’t buy food anymore. The Superbowl is over. Here we are now, in the heart of the heart of winter, waiting for the ground to shift. Reality is out there howling against a cold moon, fixing to run our enemy down, like so much frightened prey. Before long, you’ll see blood on the snow."
"Today’s 65-year-olds can expect to live another 20 years, according to the Social Security Administration. Meanwhile, Baby Boomers — the generation born between 1946 and 1964 — are heading into retirement in droves. And even though higher longevity can be exciting after decades of hard work, it comes with a hefty price tag. Unlike their parents and grandparents, pre-retirees and retirees face a totally different retirement security landscape nowadays. Insufficient financial resources paint a gloomy picture for many of them, who are likely to face a nightmarish personal financial crisis as they age. But they won’t be the only ones. The vast majority of Americans are going to be impacted by the looming retirement crisis, too. According to researchers’ projections, the bottom 80% will be left to pick up this expensive bill. This means that with Social Security funds drying up, workers will be forced to pay increasingly higher taxes to fund retirement benefits for millions of elderly Americans that are at risk of falling below the poverty line. The outlook is scary – especially as we move towards another deep recession, which can prevent even more people from start building their nest eggs for the years ahead. That’s why in today’s video, we gathered very important information about the state of retirement security in the United States that everyone should know.
A new study released by The New School of Social Research shows that as the U.S. wealth gap widens, more and more households with older adults face financial risks. Their updated analysis revealed that most older Americans have made little to no progress toward financial security over the past three decades. In 2018, 47 million households with older adults, or 80%, — were financially struggling or at risk of falling into economic hardship. Moreover, this trend is worsening over time, as 90% of older households experienced decreases in income and net value of wealth between 2019 and 2022.
Furthermore, most of the gains in net wealth recorded until 2018 were due to increases in the net value of older adults’ primary residence. Non-housing financial assets, however, remained relatively flat for the bottom 60% of older adults. This shows that home ownership is still an important vehicle for wealth accumulation in the United States, but as we’re warned about the burst of the greatest housing bubble in history and a devastating stock market crash happening almost simultaneously, the real possibilities for workers to boost their gains and increase their assets are virtually null.
On the other hand, over the past few years, high inflation has forced savers to limit or altogether suspend contributions to retirement plans. Household wealth has taken a severe beating in 2022 amid worsening economic volatility brought on by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes. In fact, the loss of household wealth is estimated at as much as $10 trillion last year
With federal funds drying up, in a not-so-distant future, the bottom 80% of U.S. workers will be facing tax hikes of 25 up to 40% to pay for these scheduled benefits. In essence, to guarantee the retirement of older generations, younger Americans risk being left with not enough resources to start saving for their own retirements.
In other words, the retirement crisis is looming over everyday Americans like a dark cloud, ready to unleash a storm of financial insecurity and hardship. The harsh reality is that many will have to continue working for as long as they possibly can, just to survive. This is a ticking time bomb that will ultimately disrupt all of our lives and tear apart what is left of our economy."
"The CEO of Ford had a Townhall meeting and basically threatened everyone at the company with their job. You need to do better. The car industry is in deep trouble."
"The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the orange emission nebula at the far right of the featured picture. The horse-head feature is dark because it is really an opaque dust cloud that lies in front of the bright emission nebula. Like clouds in Earth's atmosphere, this cosmic cloud has assumed a recognizable shape by chance. After many thousands of years, the internal motions of the cloud will surely alter its appearance.
The emission nebula's orange color is caused by electrons recombining with protons to form hydrogen atoms. Toward the lower left of the image is the Flame Nebula, an orange-tinged nebula that also contains intricate filaments of dark dust. Two prominent reflection nebulas are visible: round IC 432 on the far left, and blue NGC 2023 just to the lower left of the Horsehead nebula. Each glows primarily by reflecting the light of their central star."
“A passage from the "Pensees" of Teilhard de Chardin: "Though the phenomena of the lower world remain the same - the material determinisms, the vicissitudes of chance, the laws of labor, the agitations of men, the footfalls of death - he who dares to believe reaches a sphere of created reality in which things, while retaining their habitual texture, seem to be made out of a different substance. Everything remains the same so far as phenomena are concerned, but at the same time everything become luminous, animated, loving..."
Whatever we think of Teilhard's Christocentric phenomenology, however much we are baffled by his vague and gushy prose, it is clear from his writing that he was a man who was in love with the world and experienced it as luminous, animated, and loving. Certainly, the experience he describes is not restricted to "he who dares to believe," by which Teilhard means a specifically Christian faith, or at least a faith which for him involved an image of the "cosmic Christ." No, I would suggest that the interior experience of the world he describes- as luminous, animated, and loving- is an predisposition of the human condition, part of our evolutionary makeup. It finds expression in religion, certainly, but also in art, music, poetry, scientific discovery, and in even in the quiet contemplation of a single flower or grain of sand.
It is an experience we all consciously or unconsciously seek, with varying degrees of success. For certain people- an artist like Kandinsky or a mystic like Teilhard- the interior rhapsodic state seems more or less permanent. For most of us, its achievement is a struggle against the humdrum and superficial, the "habitual texture" of things.
The challenge is not to abjure the world of immediate sensation, but to experience the world as fully as our present knowledge allows- not just earthworms and nematodes, wind and weather, Sun, Moon and stars, but also the ineffable flow of atoms, the ceaseless dance of the DNA, the whirling of the myriad galaxies, the infinite and the infinitesimal- to see in the mind's eye and feel in the mind's heart the fire and the flow that animates all things. We may not experience the universe as "loving," but we might certainly find it lovable.
"The whole universe is aflame," wrote Teilhard. His vision was partly informed by his science and partly by his religious faith. And partly, surely, because he was born with a particularly acute sensitivity to the ineluctable wholeness of things. Those of us of a less sensitive nature will settle for the occasional moments when the gates of our senses unaccountably fling themselves open to the unspeakable and unspoken mystery of the world."
An emotional and profound speech from poet, activist and singer Maya Angelou on finding the ultimate courage. Remember - "You can't get so high somebody won't try and bring you down", advice from Billy Holiday.
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because
without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
“The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth,” the visionary Elizabeth Peabody, who coined the term transcendentalism, wrote in her timeless admonition against the trap of complacency. “The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth.”
A century and a half after her, contemplating how to keep life from becoming a parody of itself, Simone de Beauvoir observed: “In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”
Moving through the stages of life and meeting each on its own terms is the supreme art of living - the ultimate test of self-respect and self-love. Often, what most blunts our vitality is the tendency for the momentum of a past stage to steer the present one, even though our priorities and passions have changed beyond recognition.
How to honor the unfolding of life without a punitive clinging to past selves is what Nick Cave explores in a passage from "Faith, Hope and Carnage" - one of my favorite books of 2022. At sixty-five, he reflects: "We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self - This is me! Here I am! - in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces."
Then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person - I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world.
"Causes do matter. And the world is changed by people who care deeply about causes,about things that matter. We don't have to be particularly smart or talented. We don't need a lot of money or education. All we really need is to be passionate about something important; something bigger than ourselves. And it's that commitment to a worthwhile cause that changes the world."
- Steve Goodier
"Find the things that matter, and hold on to them,
“Knowing can be a curse on a person’s life. I’d traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn’t know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”
