“We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbor who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.”
"Recently at the airport I overheard a father and daughter in their last moments together. They had announced her departure and standing near the security gate, they hugged and he said, "I love you. I wish you enough." She in turn said, "Daddy, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I wish you enough, too, Daddy."
They kissed and she left. He walked over toward the window where I was seated. Standing there I could see he wanted and needed to cry. I tried not to intrude on his privacy, but he welcomed me in by asking, "Did you ever say goodbye to someone knowing it would be forever?" "Yes, I have," I replied. Saying that brought back memories I had of expressing my love and appreciation for all my Dad had done for me. Recognizing that his days were limited, I took the time to tell him face to face how much he meant to me. So I knew what this man was experiencing.
"Forgive me for asking, but why is this a forever goodbye?" I asked. "I am old and she lives much too far away. I have challenges ahead and the reality is, the next trip back would be for my funeral," he said.
"When you were saying goodbye I heard you say, "I wish you enough." May I ask what that means?" He began to smile. "That's a wish that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone." He paused for a moment and looking up as if trying to remember it in detail, he smiled even more."When we said 'I wish you enough,' we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them," he continued and then turning toward me he shared the following as if he were reciting it from memory.
"I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish enough "Hello's" to get you through the final "Goodbye."
He then began to sob and walked away." My friends, I wish you enough!"
“Don’t make stuff because you want to make money - it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous - because you will never feel famous enough,” John Green advised aspiring writers. “If you worship money and things… then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth,” David Foster Wallace admonished in his timeless commencement address on the meaning of life. But what does it really mean to “have enough?”
“But I couldn't respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no color or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.”
"Problems with drugs and crime on Kensington Ave, Philadelphia's most dangerous street. In Philadelphia as a whole, violent crime and drug abuse are major issues. The city has a higher rate of violent crime than the national average and other similarly sized metropolitan areas. The drug overdose rate in Philadelphia is also concerning. Between 2013 and 2015, the number of drug overdose deaths in the city increased by 50%, with more than twice as many deaths from overdoses as homicides. Kensington's high crime rate and drug abuse contribute significantly to Philadelphia's problems.
Because of the high number of drugs in the neighborhood, Kensington has the third-highest drug crime rate by neighborhood in Philadelphia, at 3.57. The opioid epidemic has played a significant role in this problem, as it has in much of the rest of the country. Opioid abuse has skyrocketed in the United States over the last two decades, and Philadelphia is no exception. In addition to having a high rate of drug overdose deaths, 80% of Philadelphia's overdose deaths involved opioids, and Kensington is a significant contributor to this figure. This Philadelphia neighborhood is said to have the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast, with many neighbors migrating to the area for heroin and other opioids. With such a high concentration of drugs in Kensington, many state and local officials have focused on the neighborhood in an attempt to address Philadelphia's problem."
A comment: Before you unthinkingly respond, "Oh, that could never happen here!", you'd better wake up and be aware that our society and economy is totally collapsing in every way, and it's doing it right now, and life as we knew it is already gone forever. This is only the beginning. You'd better thank God this hasn't happened where YOU live...yet.
"In today's vlog, we are at Dollar General and are noticing massive price increases on groceries! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and to witness first hand how bad inflation has hurt our stores around the country!"
“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.”
"The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man."
Excerpt: "The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind. The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that : the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. I believe, that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction
I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of man’s knowledge is not to oppose and to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure .
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: Human Nature and the Heroic: Freud discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him.
The unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal . In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self- esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguised. The child is unashamed about what he needs and wants most. His whole organism shouts the claims of his natural narcissism.
We like to speak casually about “sibling rivalry,” as though it were some kind of by-product of growing up , a bit of competitiveness and selfishness of children who have been spoiled, who haven’t yet grown into a generous social nature. But it is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration , it expresses the heart of the creature : the desire to stand out , to be the one in creation. When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life .
Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious , selfish , or domineering. It is that they so openly express man’s tragic destiny: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.
It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning .
Society itself is a codified hero system , which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a "religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives .
CHAPTER TWO: The Terror of Death: "Is it not for us to confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once more living psychologically beyond our means, and must reform and give truth its due ? Would it not be better to give death the place in actuality and in our thoughts which properly belongs to it, and to yield a little more prominence to that unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems indeed a greater achievement, but rather a backward step… but it has the merit of taking somewhat more into account the true state of affairs..." - Sigmund Freud
Of all things that move man , one of the principal ones is his terror of death. Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive .
These cults, as G . Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain “an immunity bath” from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. Zilboorg says that most people think death fear is absent because it rarely shows its true face; but he argues that underneath all appearances fear of death is universally present: Let sanguine healthy- mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant. The very term “ self-preservation ” implies an effort against some force of disintegration ; the affective aspect of this is fear, fear of death .
Therefore in normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality. We are intent on mastering death… A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day , but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living , and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it - but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed. Repression takes care of the complex symbol of death for most people."
Freely download "The Denial Of Death", by Ernest Becker, here:
“Death twitches my ear; 'Live,' he says...'I am coming.” - Virgil
"Neuropathologist Dr. Peter Cummings was convinced everything about consciousness, including profound near-death experiences (NDEs), could be explained by science and was rooted in the brain - until he had an NDE of his own.
Cummings was a career-oriented man who was doing well in his job as a doctor and as an assistant professor at Boston University School of Medicine Dept of Anatomy and Neurobiology. “At the time [it] was really enjoyable to live for that kind of stuff in that world,” said Cummings in this video posted on the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
A trip to Costa Rica for his wife’s 50th birthday changed his outlook completely. While there, he decided to go whitewater rafting with his wife and son. Cummings was always afraid of the water, though not sure why. He often practiced holding his breath because he felt that one day it would come in handy. “I used to get really bored in school and one of the things I would do is I would hold my breath. See how long I could hold my breath and then try to beat that record. And I always thought someday I’m going to need this,” recalled Cummings.
“I always found excuses to not be in the water, because I just always felt like I was going to drown,” said Cummings. He came close that day in Costa Rica when the raft he and his family were in flipped. He bounced along in the water for a while, until he was pulled under by the current. “There was a point where I was drowning. And I knew it,” said Cummings. He was surprised at how calm he felt in the face of death. “I thought about the autopsies I’d done on people who had drowned. This is supposed to be a very peaceful way to die. And then I’m thinking well, ‘What the heck is taking so long?'”
At the bottom of the river, Cummings experienced something neuroscience probably would have called a hallucination. “At that point, everything stopped and I was next to this huge boulder and all the bubbles had stopped. And I moved my hand through the bubbles and they all just sort of moved around my hand in this very weird way. And then there was this bright light,” he said. Then he felt “an incredible feeling of love.” He heard a voice speak to him. “I got really emotional not because it’s upsetting but because I’m in that moment of that beauty. And I knew my family was going to be okay. And the voice said “they don’t need you, they’re going to be fine,'” he recalled. Somehow, he also knew that his wife and son had already been pulled out of the water. They really were alright.
Then his science brain entered the conversation. “You’re just hypoxic. Hold your breath. You have to beat your record. And at that point, the light just sort of vanished,” he said. Cummings was pulled out of the water and slowly he told himself to relax so that he could regain his breath. That night at their hotel, Cummings, who has always been vigilant of his heart rate, checked his Apple watch and found that while underwater, his heart had stopped.
“I remember looking at my Apple watch because I’m kind of a health freak and I’m kind of obsessed with my heart rate. I looked at my Apple Watch and I had eight minutes of unrecorded heart rate in that time period,” said Cummings. Electronic devices are not 100 percent accurate and they record heartbeats at intervals, but Cummings believes that in those eight minutes, there was a period when he had no heartbeat.
After the near-death experience, Cummings found that his intensive academic life was not what he wanted anymore. “I became very uncomfortable with my career pursuit. Those things weren’t important to me anymore. I say I’ve written a couple of very bad novels. And I couldn’t identify with that any of those things,” said Cummings. Sensing that he wasn’t suited for his life in Boston anymore, he and his family moved back to Maine, where he grew up.
The experience turned Cummings into a more thoughtful doctor. As a pathologist, he spoke to many family members of the deceased. “The number one question I’ve always been asked is ‘Did they suffer?’ And as a physician, you always say ‘No, of course not.’ But I always felt like a liar. Because I don’t know,” said Cummings. And after his near-death experience, he knew what it was like to die.
“I wish I could talk to those people again and say, look, this is beautiful. Even under these horrible circumstances, but horrible circumstance is a second. The process after that is incredible. And there’s nothing to worry about,” shared Cummings. In medicine, death is the end. But Cummings now felt that death was not something to avoid talking about. “We’ve made it so sterile and kept behind this curtain. That we don’t get a chance to really experience and celebrate the transformation that is happening,” he said.
After the incident, Cummings shared that it not only changed his perspective on his job, it “really helped me come to grips with who I am as a husband and a father, a human place on the planet.” Cummings’ change after his near-death experience is not a solitary one.
Dr. Bruce Greyson has done extensive research on near-death experiences (NDEs) and his observations told him that these experiences often change the person who changed them for the better. “Dr. Greyson has followed up on cases over the course of decades and found that in about 95 percent of the cases, it remains as though the NDE just happened,” Mr. Greyson told The Epoch Times in 2015.
“In one case, a man was an alcoholic and he was abusive toward his wife. After an NDE, he became an all-around good Samaritan. He didn’t drink, he was good to his wife, he helped others. For example, he rushed to New Orleans to join efforts following Hurricane Katrina,” described Dr. Greyson."
"For eight years, NATO has backed puppet rulers in Ukraine, funded attacks on Donbass, repeatedly violated the Minsk Treaties, outlawed the speaking of Russian in the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics, and has destroyed democratic opposition and free media in Ukraine, leaving it a one-party government, essentially owned and financed by the US and administrated by US operatives. Not much subtlety there. Yet, somehow, the US has managed to convince the people of the US and other Western countries that Russia is the bad boy, is out of control and must be stopped.
In spite of all the above, Russia remained stoic and sought continually to keep a lid on the situation. It did, however, state firmly that the "red line" would be if Ukraine were to go nuclear, becoming a direct threat to Moscow. That would not be tolerated. Surely, this was a sober heads-up to any sensible country that the one thing that must not happen would be for Ukraine to go nuclear. After all, once that Pandora’s Box was opened, the last barrier to possible nuclear war would be crossed.
For eight years, Russia had been goaded again and again by the West, yet they did not take the bait. Then, in February of 2022, at the annual Munich Security Conference, the President of Ukraine announced his intent to make Ukraine a nuclear country. Five days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Immediately, the US propaganda arm went into operation, and for months, even as Ukraine was consistently losing the war, at every turn, the Western media renewed its claims that the war was turning; that Russia was faltering, and the heroes of Ukraine were beating back the Great Bear.
But all the above is old news. Why, at this juncture, should we be reviewing it? Well, its continued significance is that NATO (or the US – they are virtually interchangeable at this point) has, from the beginning, behaved recklessly with the prospect of nuclear conflict. Are they mad? Or are they so foolish as to think that they have some sort of "edge" in a nuclear conflict? Or do they see this as a game of one-upmanship in which the only important concern is which antagonist has the greater bluster?
We can only speculate as to the answer to this quandary. But, setting this aside, we should be questioning, a) what is the likelihood that the West would be so foolhardy as to actually push the button and, b) what would the outcome look like?
As to the first question, considering that it’s now becoming increasingly evident that the West have been misrepresenting the progress of the war; that the trained forces are spent and replacements cannot be trained fast enough to go against the experienced Russian forces, the US is going to have to come up with another plan… and it will need to be something dramatic. At this point, the one card they have not played is the nuke card.
They’ve claimed that the Russians have been either firing on or causing explosions in the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant that they have held for some time. In essence, they’re being accused of bombing themselves in a facility that has long-since been taken. At this point, not many listeners are buying this explanation. So, what do they have left in their toolbox?
I’ve long felt that, as an end-run, what the West might do would rely on an old favorite technique – a false flag attack. Create a narrative and videos of an attack on, say, Kiev by Russia with a small nuclear warhead. Then announce that the warhead had been fired, killing hundreds of thousands. Then let loose the pre-prepared media blitz and invoke Article 5, justifying nuclear warfare. It just might turn the tide of sympathy. But it would also open a door that could not once again be closed.
For decades, both Russia and the US have had large numbers of nukes aimed at each other, with a system of timed releases. Once the first button is pushed, interrupting the progression is difficult. So, as to that second question – "What would a nuclear war look like?" there are many studies, but the most illustrative one I’m familiar with was produced by Princeton.
Well, each major US city would be targeted with multiple ICBMs, each big enough to destroy it. Most of the US would be carpeted with other ICBMs. The US would be destroyed within a few hours. An estimated 90 million people would be killed initially.
Those at ground zero would be vaporized. Those on the periphery of a bomb could escape if they were to get to concrete shelter very quickly. They would then need to remain sealed up for weeks, if not longer, until the majority of fallout had settled. It would be a gamble as to when exiting the building would be safe.
The northern border of the US would be destroyed, taking in Canadian border cities, such as Vancouver and Toronto. The southern border, with Mexico, would also go.
Next would be the movement of fallout. As the video shows, those who live in or near a direct target would have no hope, but as can be seen, there are locations outside the US that are not targeted at all. Those locations that have no strategic advantage would not be targeted. So, if you were located in, say, Jamaica, you would not be hit, but, just as importantly, the Caribbean weather system – the trade winds – would carry any northern fallout away from you, as would the Gulf Stream.
Better still, the world is separated at the Equator by two weather systems that do not mix. Fallout in the north will be unlikely to travel to the south. If you’re located in South America, there are very few likely targets. It’s unknown whether, say, Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires would be targets, but if not, South America may be the best place to be in the Western Hemisphere. If anything, Europe and the Middle East would fare worse than North America.
Finally, there is the question of nuclear winter. No one can know whether this would last months or years and whether it would be localized or global. Nuclear war is not a certainly, yet the West has been dangerously rattling sabres as though they are invincible and only others can be destroyed. This is quite false.
We cannot be certain that nuclear war will be undertaken, but if so, it will be quick. There will be no time to create an escape plan. You must already be in a location that you deem to be as safe as possible."
"NUKEMAP is a web-based nuclear weapons effects simulator. I created it in 2012 (and did all programming, design, and research on it). Since then it has had many updates to its effects model and capabilities. It has been used by over 20 million people globally, and has been featured in both academic and general-audience publications and television shows for depicting nuclear weapons effects"
“Here is a spectacular detail of the Eagle Nebula, a gassy star-forming region of the Milky Way Galaxy, about 7,000 light-years away. The Eagle lies in the equatorial constellation Serpens. If you went out tonight and looked at this part of the sky – more or less midway between Arcturus and Antares – you might see nothing at all. The brightest star in Serpens is of the third magnitude, perhaps invisible in an urban environment. No part of the Eagle Nebula is available to unaided human vision. How big is the nebula in the sky? Hold a pinhead at arm’s length and it would just about cover the spire. I like to think about things not mentioned in the APOD descriptions.
If the Sun were at the bottom of the spire, Alpha centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, would be about halfway up the column. Sirius, the brightest star in Earth’s sky, would be near the top. Let’s say you sent out a spacecraft from the bottom of the spire that travelled at the speed of the two Voyager craft that are now traversing the outer reaches of the Solar System. It would take more than 200,000 years to reach the top of the spire.
The Hubble Space Telescope cost a lot of money to build, deploy, and operate. It has done a lot of good science. But perhaps the biggest return on the investment is to turn on ordinary folks like you and me to the scale and complexity of the universe. The human brain evolved, biologically and culturally, in a universe conceived on the human scale. We resided at its center. The stars were just up there on the dome of night. The Sun and Moon attended our desires. “All the world’s a stage,” wrote Shakespeare, and he meant it literally; the cosmos was designed by a benevolent creator as a stage for the human drama. All of that has gone by the board. Now we can travel in our imagination for 200,000 years along a spire of glowing, star-birthing gas that is only the tiniest fragment of a nebula that is only the tiniest fragment of a galaxy that is but one of hundreds of billions of galaxies we can potentially see with our telescopes.
Most of us still live psychologically in the universe of Dante and Shakespeare. The biggest intellectual challenge of our times is how to bring our brains up to speed. How to shake our imaginations out of the slumber of centuries. How to learn to live purposefully in a universe that is apparently indifferent to the human drama. How to stretch the human story to match the light-years.”
So, you look around in horrified astonishment at how totally insane it all really is, how the never ending bad news is everywhere you look, how truly hopeless it really is, and know there's nothing at all you can do about it, can't save anyone, can't even save yourself. So you remember what they said and how you need to be, and carry on...
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority,
but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
- Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
“That millions of people share the same forms of
mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
- Erich Fromm, "The Sane Society"
“Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing
yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.”
- Jim Butcher, "Changes"
And yet, sometimes, at the end of another long day,
your defenses are just worn out and it feels like you're losing your mind,
and you lose control and feel like this...
Full screen recommended.
The Trashmen, "Surfin Bird - Bird is the Word," 1963
"Hope is with you when you believe The earth is not a dream but living flesh, That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie, That all things you have ever seen here Are like a garden looked at from a gate. You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there. Could we but look more clearly and wisely We might discover somewhere in the garden A strange new flower and an unnamed star.
Some people say we should not trust our eyes, That there is nothing, just a seeming, These are the ones who have no hope. They think that the moment we turn away, The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist, As if snatched up by the hands of thieves."
"100 Laws of Life So You Don't Screw Your Life Up Like I Did"
"Unearth 100 life-changing laws distilled from the mistakes of those who came before us. These are the lessons hard-earned through the school of knocks. These laws are your roadmap to avoiding missteps and leading a more meaningful life."
“How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.”
- Charles Caleb Colton, “Lacon”
o
"The problem is, you think you have time."
- Buddha
o
“There Is No Reality Anymore…”
by Thad Beversdorf
“I‘d love to change the world, but I don‘t know what to do,
so I’ll leave it up to you…”
“What a great lyric that is from the late 60′s, early 70′s English band “10 Years After.”* I believe this describes that uneasy feeling of discontent that sits deep in the stomach, beneath the day to day exteriors, of so many people today. The world is like a black hole in that it seems to be getting smaller and smaller as the years go by but also heavier and heavier with each passing day.
When I was a teenager and my friends and I were taking reality obscuring substances, one of my buddies (this means you Nichol) would stop us at certain points throughout the night for a reality check. This was just a few moments where we ‘d all gather our senses to make sure the world was still right and then we’d venture back into obscurity. I feel that reality is an old world term. There is no reality anymore. With advances in technology came unending possibilities of if you can dream it they can make it so. The ubiquitous flow of information ensures that the truth is always available but never known with certainty. It means there is no such thing as a reality check. It’s like that dream inside a dream inside a dream. Which reality is real anymore? How deep does the rabbit hole go?
We are raised with pretty standard ideals of what the world is meant to be but these ideals seem to take place only in the movies. It must be incredibly difficult for our young people to reconcile the two worlds, I know it is for me. That which they learn as a child and that which they find has replaced it as a young adult. Our leaders are despicable, arrogant and egotistical fools who pretend we elect them because we don’t see them for what they are. But we elect them because we feel we have no choice. We know what we want the world to be. We know what it should look and feel like. And we know it is not the world in which we live today. I know I’d love to change the world but I don’t know how and so I’ll leave it up to you. And so we continue to move forward down this path, each step uneasy as though something ungood is lurking just around the next corner.
We are able to put that feeling out of our minds for the most part but our subconscious is always aware that things are off. We have all kinds of self help books and new age theories that attempt to make sense of it all and explain why we just aren t happy the way we envision happy should be. Perhaps the only reality is the reality that the world isn’t what we had hoped it would be and we don’t know how to make that right. I’d love to say that if we just stand up and do the right thing, act from our hearts and have good intentions that it could change the world. But quite honestly there are ill-intentioned people that are constructing this new world in which we sub-exist.It is them and us, but they’d never say it that way. Certainly though their intention is not for us to co-exist along side them.
But so we carry on and we, move forward, to the best of our abilities. We accept the good with the bad and acknowledge that everything is a trade off. We believe that if we go to college we stand a better chance in life and so we borrow our first 10 years of post college wages to get an edge over the next guy who is doing the same. When we get out of school we know that it is time to buckle down and get serious. We put our lives on hold in order to focus on the future with the idea that one day we will be sitting on the porch with the person we love, the one we put on hold for all those years, and we will then enjoy our life’s work then.
But then we get further in debt because we need a sleeker car and we need a bigger house but it’s ok because we can just work a little more. And then the kids come and as far as we got to know them they are great, I think. But it’s ok because they just finished college and now they’ve moved back in as the job market is tough out there and so we’re paying off their student loans. Eventually they get away and begin their life’s journey and they take their debt with them. And then we realize, god I’m almost 60. But it feels great because that means soon I’ll be there on the porch getting to know the one I love again and life will be grand at that point.
But then we turn 65 and we realize all those policies that were implemented by all those well-intentioned decision makers have actually left us with very little. And we say it’s ok because we’d be bored anyway just sitting on the porch. And so we take a job waving at people in Walmart but feel like OMG how did I get here. But the shift ends and we go home anxious to spend time with the one we love because, although it’s a terrible thought, we are aware we’re both getting long in the tooth. And so we arrive home only to realize the one we love is now sick and that it’s too late for our days sitting on the porch getting to know each other again. We do everything we can but we cannot afford to help that person who stood quietly behind us all those years as healthcare costs are unrealistically out of touch with reality. And then it hits us that despite taking all the right steps to ensure we have a great life we failed to ever really be happy, to really love and to really accept love. And then it really hits us, this world provides but one shot.
Well, then that feeling of uneasy discontent that shadowed us when we were young is now an intense pain in our heart. And we look out at the world and we ask ourselves how could this have happened? I did everything they told me I was supposed to do, I did everything right! And it becomes clear that life was a chance to change the world, but we didn’t know what to do, and so we left it up to…”
"From one day to the next everything changes. Yesterday we were told that we were not going to enter Recession. Now we’re told that it’s inevitable, and that things are crumbling all around us."
“When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show.
When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.”
– George Carlin
"The phoniest trope in American life goes like this: We must find the cause of X so that it never happens again. Of course, it will happen again. We only pretend that the cause is a mystery. Let’s count the ways that school massacres happen.
American schools are fantastically depressing places. They are designed to look like medium security prisons and insecticide factories. They send the message: Enter here and be psychologically brutalized. They are too big, overwhelmingly alienating, ugly, devoid of visible symbolism signaling the value of being human. The interiors of the schools are designed for the convenience of janitors, hard surfaces of tile and linoleum that can be hosed down easily like the quarters of zoo animals. Children act accordingly.
The “facilities,” as we call them, are deployed in the illegible landscape of a demolition derby, separated from all the other activities of daily life, which themselves have reached a culminating state of meaninglessness: big box shopping, national chain franchise food installations, strip malls of empty storefronts, parking lot wastelands, nothing that will excite a child’s imagination with emotions other than bewilderment, anxiety, and aversion.
The “teaching” that supposedly goes on in schools is a broken remnant of preparation for an economy that no longer exists. We’re no longer a society of people who do things, but rather a society of people to whom things are done, many of them harmful, humiliating, and arbitrary. America’s demoralized teaching corps is so unhinged by their own anomie that they resort to imposing sadistic fantasies on the children in their charge.
Thus, all the inappropriate curricula around adult preoccupations with sex, such as the Drag Queen Story Hour, for which mentally ill men are invited to act-out impersonations of women-as-monsters for young people who can’t possibly be expected to make sense of the spectacle. (I suspect that even six-year-olds, hard-wired to function as successful animals in this world, understand it as some kind of affront to reality.) Otherwise, American teachers are out of ideas, and are themselves damaged by the same forces in culture that they are now asked to direct.
America has become a malfunctioning pageant without feasible roles that children can realistically project themselves into. What ten-year-old longs to become the Burger King fry-o-later boss in a brown apron and an asinine cardboard crown? Rather, they are prompted to aspire to become sports star millionaires, of which there are perhaps fewer than 5,000 positions in a land of 340-million. By age twelve, they probably comprehend the unlikelihood of that outcome, or of becoming the next Kardashian… or Spiderman. (Superheroes are supplied by the entertainment cartels to occupy the imaginative realm of children because American culture is bereft of reality-based roles worth aspiring to.)
In this tumult of cultural impoverishment, psychotic grandiosity creeps in. Be big if you can’t be anything else. Hence, one achievable role for young persons in American life is mass murderer. It is a way of becoming important, of having an effect on other people and society in general. Your name may be forgotten, but the act itself will endure in the collective memory of a people. It will be some kind of a mark in history, even better remembered, perhaps, than whoever played third-base for the Atlanta Braves in 1994… or the woman who once capered down the red carpet at the Oscars in a dress fashioned on a slaughtered swan.
The mayhem unleashed in a school shooting is just the rectified essence of the manifold derangements in our national life. Everything is out-of-whack, including our perception of what’s going on and what it means. There is almost nothing left of childhood in this land, in the way of young, unformed creatures assisted by adults who love them into a future worth being part of. We have forgotten how to be grateful for having come into this world at all, leaving us unworthy of being here. The quality of virtue, meaning that some things and some doings are recognizably better than others was deceitfully replaced by the equity of nothing being allowed to be better than anything else. Truth and beauty have gone outlaw. Bad faith and wickedness rule, led by the Party of Chaos. So, really, what do you expect? And what do you deserve?"
Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great.
Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”
Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.
Fast-forward to today’s drive by the Biden administration to extend American military power against Russia and, behind it, China. The president asked for advice from today’s analogue to antiquity’s Delphi oracle: the CIA and its allied think tanks. Instead of warning against hubris, they encouraged the neocon dream that attacking Russia and China would consolidate U.S. control of the world economy, achieving the End of History.
After eight years of provocation, a new military attack on Russian-speaking Ukrainians was conspicuously prepared, ready to drive toward the Russian border in February 2022. Russia protected its fellow Russian-speakers from further ethnic violence by mounting its own Special Military Operation. The United States and its NATO allies immediately seized Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves held in Europe and North America, and demanded that all countries impose sanctions against importing Russian energy and grain, hoping that this would crash the ruble’s exchange rate. The Delphic State Department expected that this would cause Russian consumers to revolt and overthrow Vladimir Putin’s government, enabling U.S. maneuvering to install a client oligarchy like the one it had nurtured in the 1990s under President Yeltsin.
A byproduct of this confrontation with Russia has been to lock in America’s control over its Western European satellites. The aim of this intra-NATO jockeying was to foreclose Europe’s dream of profiting from closer trade and investment relations with Russia by exchanging its industrial manufactures for Russian raw materials. The United States derailed that prospect by blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, cutting off Germany and other countries from access to low-priced Russian gas. That left Europe’s leading economy dependent on higher-cost U.S. Liquified Natural Gas (LNG).
In addition to having to subsidize domestic European gas to prevent widespread insolvency, a large proportion of German Leopard tanks, U.S. Patriot missiles and other NATO “wonder weapons” are being destroyed in combat against the Russian army. It has become clear that the U.S. strategy is not simply to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” but to fight to the last tank, missile and other weapon being deleted from NATO stocks.
This depletion of NATO’s arms was expected to create a vast replacement market to enrich America’s military-industrial complex. Its NATO customers are being told to increase their military spending to 3 or even 4 percent of GDP. But the weak performance of U.S. and German arms on the Ukrainian battlefield may have crashed this dream, while Europe’s economies are sinking into depression. And with Germany’s industrial economy deranged by the severing of its trade with Russia, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the Die Welt newspaper on June 16, 2023 that his country cannot afford to pay more money into the European Union budget, to which it has long been the largest contributor.
Without German exports supporting the euro’s exchange rate, the currency will come under pressure against the dollar as Europe buys LNG and NATO replenishes its depleted weaponry stocks by buying new arms from America. A lower exchange rate will squeeze the purchasing power of European labor, while lowering social spending to pay for rearmament and provide gas subsidies is plunging the continent into a depression.
A nationalist reaction against U.S. dominance is rising throughout European politics, and instead of America locking in its control over European policy, the United States may end up losing – not only in Europe but most crucially throughout the Global South. Instead of turning Russia’s “ruble to rubble” as President Biden promised, Russia’s balance of trade has soared and its gold supply has increased. So have the gold holdings of other countries whose governments are now aiming to de-dollarize their economies.
It is American diplomacy that is driving Eurasia and the Global South out of the U.S. orbit. America’s hubristic drive for unipolar world dominance could only have been dismantled so rapidly from within. The Biden-Blinken-Nuland administration has done what neither Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi could have hoped to achieve in so short a period. Neither was prepared to throw down the gauntlet and create an alternative to the U.S.-centered world order. But U.S. sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China have had the effect of protective tariff barriers to force self-sufficiency in what EU diplomat Josep Borrell calls the world “jungle” outside of the US/NATO “garden.”
Although the Global South and other countries have been complaining about U.S. dominance ever since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, they have lacked a critical mass to create a viable alternative. But their attention has now been focused by the U.S. confiscation of Russia’s official dollar reserves in NATO countries. That dispelled the thought of the dollar as a safe vehicle in which to hold international savings. The Bank of England’s earlier seizure of Venezuela’s gold reserves kept in London – promising to donate them to whatever unelected opponents of its socialist regime U.S. diplomats designate – shows how sterling and the euro as well as the dollar have been weaponized. And by the way, what ever happened to Libya’s gold reserves?
American diplomats avoid thinking about this scenario. They rely to the one unique advantage the United States has to offer. It may refrain from bombing them, from staging a color revolution to “Pinochet” them by the National Endowment for Democracy, or install a new “Yeltsin” giving the economy away to a client oligarchy.
But refraining from such behavior is all that America can offer. It has de-industrialized its own economy, and its idea of foreign investment is to carve out monopoly-rent seeking opportunities by concentrating technological monopolies and control of oil and grain trade in U.S. hands, as if this is economic efficiency, not rent-seeking.
What has occurred is a change in consciousness. We are seeing the Global Majority trying to create an independent and peacefully negotiated choice as to just what kind of an international order they want. Their aim is not merely to create alternatives to the use of dollars, but an entire new set of institutional alternatives to the IMF and World Bank, the SWIFT bank clearing system, the International Criminal Court and the entire array of institutions that U.S. diplomats have hijacked from the United Nations.
The upshot will be civilizational in scope. We are seeing not the End of History but a fresh alternative to U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism and its junk economics of privatization, class war against labor, and the idea that money and credit should be privatized in the hands of a narrow financial class instead of being a public utility to finance economic needs and rising living standards.
The irony is that America’s historical role has been that although it itself was not able to lead the world forward along these lines, its attempts to lock the world into an antithetical imperial system by conquering Russia on the plains of Ukraine and trying to isolate China’s technology from breaking the U.S. attempt at IT monopoly have been the great catalysts pushing the global majority along these lines."
"In today's vlog, we are at Kroger and are showing our massive grocery haul and how we saved over $80 by doing some extreme couponing. Grocery prices keep rising all around the world, and we are showing some techniques we use on how you can save the most money possible!"
“It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they’re not intelligent enough. It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry - or laugh.”
