Saturday, September 9, 2023

“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”

“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space,
and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”
“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”
by Maria Popova

“In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.

But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as ‘The Life of the Mind’ (public library) – the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.

In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand:

“Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego – summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s – is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls – and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them – does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.”

Echoing Thomas Mann’s assertion that “the perishableness of life… imparts value, dignity, interest to life,” Arendt adds: “Man’s finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time span set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities: it manifests itself as the only reality of which thinking qua thinking is aware, when the thinking ego has withdrawn from the world of appearances and lost the sense of realness inherent in the sensus communis by which we orient ourselves in this world… The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”

T.S. Eliot captured this nowhereness in his exquisite phrase “the still point of the turning world.” But the spatial dimension of thought, Arendt argues, is intersected by a temporal one – thinking invariably forces us to recollect and anticipate, voyaging into the past and the future, thus creating the mental spacetime continuum through which our thought-trains travel. From this arises our sense of the sequential nature of time and its essential ongoingness. Arendt writes:

“The inner time sensation arises when we are not entirely absorbed by the absent non-visibles we are thinking about but begin to direct our attention onto the activity itself. In this situation past and future are equally present precisely because they are equally absent from our sense; thus the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead.”
[…]
In other words, the time continuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present, future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himself has an “origin,” his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands at any given moment between them; this in-between is called the present. It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change – which we can conceive of cyclically as well as in the form of rectilinear motion without ever being able to conceive of an absolute beginning or an absolute end – into time as we know it.”

Once again, it is our finitude that mediates our experience of time: “Seen from the viewpoint of a continuously flowing everlasting stream, the insertion of man, fighting in both directions, produces a rupture which, by being defended in both directions, is extended to a gap, the present seen as the fighter’s battleground… Seen from the viewpoint of man, at each single moment inserted and caught in the middle between his past and his future, both aimed at the one who is creating his present, the battleground is an in-between, an extended Now on which he spends his life. The present, in ordinary life the most futile and slippery of the tenses – when I say “now” and point to it, it is already gone – is no more than the clash of a past, which is no more, with a future, which is approaching and not yet there. Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward “the quiet of the past” with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.”

This fluid conception of time, Arendt points out, is quite different from its representation in ordinary life, where the calendar tells us that the present is contained in today, the past starts at yesterday, and the future at tomorrow. In a sentiment that calls to mind Patti Smith’s magnificent meditation on time and transformation, Arendt writes: "That we can shape the everlasting stream of sheer change into a time continuum we owe not to time itself but to the continuity of our business and our activities in the world, in which we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow. In other words, the time continuum depends on the continuity of our everyday life, and the business of everyday life, in contrast to the activity of the thinking ego – always independent of the spatial circumstances surrounding it – is always spatially determined and conditioned. It is due to this thoroughgoing spatiality of our ordinary life that we can speak plausibly of time in spatial categories, that the past can appear to us as something lying “behind” us and the future as lying “ahead.”
[…]
The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent – either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent “regions” into the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself.”

This elusive gap, Arendt argues, is where the thinking ego resides – and it is only by mentally inserting ourselves between the past and the future that they come to exist at all: Without [the thinker], there would be no difference between past and future, but only everlasting change. Or else these forces would clash head on and annihilate each other. But thanks to the insertion of a fighting presence, they meet at an angle, and the correct image would then have to be what the physicists call a parallelogram of forces.

These two forces, which have an indefinite origin and a definite end point in the present, converge into a third – a diagonal pull that, contrary to the past and the present, has a definite origin in the present and emanates out toward infinity. That diagonal force, Arendt observes, is the perfect metaphor for the activity of thought. She writes:

“This diagonal, though pointing to some infinity, is limited, enclosed, as it were, by the forces of past and future, and thus protected against the void; it remains bound to and is rooted in the present – an entirely human present though it is fully actualized only in the thinking process and lasts no longer than this process lasts. It is the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man; it is somehow, to change the metaphor, the quiet in the center of a storm which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it. In this gap between past and future, we find our place in time when we think, that is, when we are sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position of “umpire,” of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world, never arriving at a final solution to their riddles but ready with ever-new answers to the question of what it may be all about.”

“The Life of the Mind” is one of the most stimulating packets of thought ever published. Complement this particular portion with Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, Dan Falk on how our capacity for mental time travel made us human, and T.S. Eliot’s poetic ode to the nature of time.“

"I'd Still Swim..."

"If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told
the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim.
And I'd despise the one who gave up."
- Abraham Maslow

"Chemtrails: The Planetary Catastrophe Caused by Chemical Geo-engineering"

"Chemtrails: The Planetary Catastrophe
 Caused by Chemical Geo-engineering"
By State Of The Nation

Editor’s Note: "The following photo-documentary is perhaps the best of its kind on the Internet today which proves the existence of chemical geoengineering programs conducted around the globe 24/7.

Chemical geoengineering is just one prong of a multi-pronged weather warfare strategy designed to radically alter climate patterns and produce catastrophic weather events. It there is one secret war being waged against all of humanity that’s having increasingly calamitous effects, it’s the nonstop weather warfare occurring worldwide today. All folks need to do is look up at the sky to understand how they are being chemically attacked and biologically assaulted.

The evidence of this weather weaponry in action is as compelling as watching a perfectly blue sky and sunny day, as forecasted by the local weatherman, suddenly transformed into a heavy overcast due to an out-of-nowhere chemtrail spraying operation that rapidly produces a massive chemcloud cover…right in front of your eyes.

For example, Florida used to be known as the Sunshine State. However, with the inauguration of POTUS Imposter Joe Biden, the amount of chemtrail spraying has seen a dramatic and alarming uptick. There are several reasons for this which are beyond the scope of this short ed. note; but, suffice to say, that people across Florida are now quickly waking up to this weather modification scheme in great numbers.

In addition to the irrefutable photographic proof shown below, these three scientific research papers provide categorical evidence of the massive chemical engineering operations taking place across the USA."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
o
"Lahaina Incineration is Deadly Weather Warfare" 
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Climate engineering researcher Dane Wigington says the total incineration of Lahaina in Hawaii was caused by man-made weather modification called geoengineering. Wigington says this is really an attack using “weather warfare.” According to Wigington, they used climate engineering to create a “wind tunnel effect right over Lahaina” with wind speeds up to 100 miles per hour to superheat the fire. Wigington explains, “This creates a bellows effect, and that escalates temperatures exponentially over what they would have otherwise been. They have been melting steel around the world by exactly that manner for thousands of years by feeding air in. That’s the bellows effect. This is the same as an acetylene torch. If you burn just the acetylene, you have 1,500 degrees. When you add oxygen, now you get 6,000 degrees. People are not considering this. They don’t need Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs). There is a 140-page U.S. military document that we found and posted at GeoEngineeringWatch.org. It is titled “Wildfires as a Military Weapon.” It describes surface preparation prior to their commencement of the surface firestorm incineration. That’s exactly what we saw in that region of Hawaii. We cannot prove the source of ignition in Lahaina, but what we can say is the template for this event to happen cannot be separated from climate engineering operations.”

Wigington says weird and deadly weather events are going to intensify. Wigington points out millions of acres are burning in Northern Canada. It looks like somebody wanted Lahaina burned to the ground no matter how many people had to die. Wigington contends, “We have the disaster capitalists trying to profit off any cataclysm, but I would argue the stakes are much, much more grave. These people know that the planet’s life support system is failing. They should know because they are a party to bringing us to this dark place. There are much bigger powers in play. Climate engineering is a covert weapon because they can bring populations to their knees without the population ever realizing they are under assault. They mire populations in difficulty, and that makes them easier to control. Climate engineering is far too dignified a term. This is weather warfare. We at GeoEngineeringWatch.org are focused on the biggest hole in the bottom of the boat. Whatever people are worried about, political theater or whatever concern they have, none of it will matter if we continue on the current course. I mean, in the very near term, none of it will matter.”

Wigington says more and more people are waking up to the dire problems that weather engineering is causing. If there is a critical mass of awakening, many lives could be saved, and at least part of the planet’s life support system can be salvaged. Wigington says, “It’s far easier to kill a million people that to control them. The U.S. population especially is a rapidly increasing liability to those in power. Many U.S. citizens are armed, and they are not happy about what’s going on. Those in power don’t want to get to a point that these citizens take to the street with their proverbial pitchforks and torches looking for them. So, they are going to debilitate, control and reduce that population as fast as they can. Anyone who can’t see that at this point has their eyes wide shut. So, of course, they are using weather as a weapon. Why wouldn’t they?” There is much more in the 55-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with
 climate researcher Dane Wigington, founder of GeoEngineeringWatch.org.

The Daily "Near You?"

Loveland, Colorado,USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Travelling with Russell , "Moscow Metro: Travelling From Moscow City to Vnukovo Airport"

Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell , 9/9/23
"Moscow Metro: 
Travelling From Moscow City to Vnukovo Airport"
The first airport in Russia with a Metro Station opened recently connecting Moscow City with Vnukovo Airport. Concidered Impossible, the Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya line of the Moscow Metro is the first Metro line in Russia to take you directly to Vnukovo Airport.
Comments here:

Just like where you live, right, Good Citizen?
I'm absolutely astonished, speechless...Comments?

"Amusing Ourselves to Death: Orwell vs. Huxley in 2023"

Full screen recommended.
Truthstream Media,
"Amusing Ourselves to Death: 
Orwell vs. Huxley in 2023"
Comments here:
o
"Huxley vs. Orwell"
by Neil Postman

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
 What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to
 ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one...
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those 
who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism...
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance...
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we 
would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent
 of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy...
As Huxley remarked in 'Brave New World Revisited', the civil libertarians and the rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In '1984,' Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In 'Brave New World,' they are controlled by inflicting pleasure...In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."

Huxley was quite obviously correct...

"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death. The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"

"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death.
The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"
By Dr. Gary G. Kohls

“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.”  - Roger Waters

“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund

“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.” – Dresden James

“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill

"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.

The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.

But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.

SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,

“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.

Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”

Postman ended his book by writing: “What afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
“Amused To Death”
by Roger Waters

"Doctor, Doctor what’s wrong with me?
This supermarket life is getting long.
What is the heart life of a color TV?
What is the shelf life of a teenage
queen?
Ooh western woman,
Ooh western girl,
News hound sniffs the air
When Jessica Hahn goes down
He latches on to that symbol of
detachment
Attracted by the peeling away of
feeling
The celebrity of the abused shell
of the belle
Ooh western woman
Ooh western girl
And the children of Melrose strut
their stuff
Is absolute zero cold enough?
And out in the valley warm and clean
The little ones sit by their TV screens
No thoughts to think
No tears to cry
All sucked dry down to the very
last breath.

Bartender what is wrong with me,
Why I am so out of breath?
The captain said excuse me ma’am,
This species has amused itself to death
We watched the tragedy unfold,
We did as we were told.
We bought and sold,
It was the greatest show on earth.
But then it was over,
We oohed and aahed,
We drove our racing cars,
We ate our last few jars of caviar,
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah.

And when they found our shadows,
Grouped ‘round the TV sets,
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test,
They checked out all the data in
their lists.
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed.
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise,
They logged the only explanation left.
This species has amused itself to death.
No tears to cry,
No feelings left,
This species has amused itself to
death…"
Freely download “Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, by Neil Postman, here:

"How It Really Is"

“We'll know our disinformation program is complete 
when everything the American public believes is false.”
- William Casey, former director of the CIA

"Aldi Buys Out Winn-Dixie! What They Don't Want You To Know!"

Adventures with Danno, AM 9/9/23
"Aldi Buys Out Winn-Dixie!
 What They Don't Want You To Know!"
Aldi buys out Winn-Dixie, and we are exposing the
 truth of what they don't want you to know about this.
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Wendover Productions, 9/7/23
"How Dollar Stores Quietly Consumed America"
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"Banking Crisis Update 9/923"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 9/9/23
"A Small Bank With A Big Problem"
Everyone is focused on the big banks. But what happens when a small bank starts to have the problems with liquidity and with losing money? This problem is going to continue and it’s only going to spread to other banks.
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 9/9/23
"Is Wells Fargo About To Go Out Of Business?"
A debate inside Wells Fargo over what to do with the mortgage franchise has been heating up for months, with a consensus starting to take shape in recent weeks. Banks dominated the home-loan market heading into the 2008 financial crisis. After the bust, many large lenders faced tens of billions of dollars in losses from mortgage-related operations and retreated. Wells Fargo held itself out as the exception. The firm avoided an annual loss in the crisis and then rode a surge in refinancings, making mortgages a key part of its identity.
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
The Economic Ninja, 9/9/23
"JP Morgan Chase Bank Warning (Bank Branches Closing)"
Comments here:

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Romania Border Evacuation; UK Jets Face Off With Russia"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 9/8/23
"Alert! Romania Border Evacuation; 
UK Jets Face Off With Russia; Bunker Network Being Built"
Comments here:

Friday, September 8, 2023

"15 Signs That Social Insanity Is Eating Away At America Like A Cancer Is Visible All Around Us"


Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 9/8/23
"15 Signs That Social Insanity Is Eating Away 
At America Like A Cancer Is Visible All Around Us"

"The fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams, and you can see it with your own eyes. If you live in a major city, all you have to do is walk around, and you'll find many signs that our core urban centers are decaying, and just about every sort of evil that you can possibly imagine is exploding all around us. Our so-called leaders continue to make stupid decisions, and now we are all going to reap the consequences. Predators are roaming our streets. American families are collapsing. Traditional moral values have been completely discarded. Young people are running wild in the streets, lawlessness is growing, and our system of government is melting down in plain sight.

Analysts with ZeroHedge pointed out that there’s a sudden panic leading Americans to search for a way out of our society. Research has shown that the number of people in the U.S. searching for the term “live off-grid” on the Internet has hit the highest level in five years. The driving force behind finding a rural piece of land for dirt cheap, buying or building a tiny home, installing solar panels, and sourcing your own food and water might have to do with the worst inflation storm in a generation, the experts noted. The worst housing affordability crisis in history and the deterioration of people’s confidence in our institutions are driving many to try to become independent from our system because they can already feel that it is only a matter of time before everything starts crumbling down.

As economic conditions get worse, people are becoming more desperate. This is fueling a shoplifting wave all over the country, and some grocery stores are being forced to implement extreme measures right now. A new report by the Washington Post reveals that Giant Food stores are taking all Tide, Colgate, and Advil products off the shelves completely because theft has become an enormous problem. The grocer is also clearing its beauty and health aisles of all national labels. Shoppers also will have to present their receipts to an employee before exiting the store. Executives said the decision was made to prevent the stores from shutting down.

Moreover, when people can’t trust our major institutions, it’s just a matter of time before they start breaking down. And a new Gallup poll shows that Americans do not believe in those that are currently running our country. The study found that only 8% of Americans trust Congress, while just 14% trust Big Business, and the rate same said they believe in Television news. Worryingly, the poll uncovered that only 17% of Americans trust the justice system. About 26% trust in the federal government, and only 32% believe in the church. In other words, the majority of the population can tell that the foundations of our society are solid enough at this point in time.

If we stay on this path, our future will be doomed. As a society, we need to turn around and reverse course immediately. We are literally destroying ourselves, but things have been wrong for so long, that many people don't even notice it anymore. Deep changes must happen soon. Otherwise, we are going to see things happen in the years ahead that will completely shock all of us.

Today, we compiled several facts and stats that help to illustrate the social insanity that is going on all over America. Some of the things we're about to share with you can be disturbing, but we must look at our issues to understand what is happening to our country. Here are '15 Signs That Social Insanity Is Eating America Like A Cancer.'"
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Addison Wiggin, "Garbage In, Garbage Out"

"Garbage In, Garbage Out"
by Addison Wiggin

"Garbage In, Garbage Out: “Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.”
– Michael Crichton

“There’s not much doubt about ‘climate change’,” responds reader D Shultz, “it has been going on for eons.” “Some 15,000 years ago,” agrees G Pisauro, “we had an ice age, and sea levels were much, much lower. The earth has been warming ever since. Mankind barely survived the last ice age, and now we are thriving precisely because the climate is warmer."

Senor Pisauro continues: "Tonga erupted in early 2022 and spewed into the environment an enormous amount of water vapor, affecting the weather and climate in the short term. If the glaciers in Iceland are melting, may the cause be all of the heat from the earth and all of the volcanoes on Iceland, heating and melting the glaciers from underneath?"

It’s clear to any kindergarten scholar… even at the freezing point–32 degrees Fahrenheit–water melts ice. Plop a cube in your glass, soon it’ll be gone and the water level will have risen. Glaciers and icebergs melt faster underwater than they do in air. Sea level rises.

“It would just be nice if politicians actually followed the science,” D Shultz continues. “What a concept, I know! They’d learn Co2 emissions contribute about 1/100th to the ‘greenhouse effect' than the amount water vapor does. “A little learning would go a long way to help prevent the financial destruction of world economies, and deal with the impacts of climate change by learning the real cause.”

We’re aware readers like Pisauro and Schultz have studied the climate science v. policy conundrum longer and with greater intent than ours. Mr. Shultz recommends a couple of books to help: 'Hot Talk/Cold Science' by Fred Singer and 'Global Warming: The Great Deception' by Guy Mitchell. To the list we’d add Michael Shellenberger’s 'Apocalypse Never'.

It never hurts to hear both sides of the “debate,” if we dare call it that. “In all the discussion about climate policies,” reader D Darley writes, “what is the impact of shutting down perfectly good and useful systems like coal and gas power plants has on GDP? Looking at entire cities, industries, agricultural infrastructure – these all rely on cheap energy.” Darley then asks: 'What will be the negative impact on GDP of willingly and with forethought, shutting down perfectly useful assets? The big GDP plus is the trillions spent on replacement, most financed by borrowing. When do we view the true cost of these ‘climate’ boondoggles?'

And further down the rabbit hole we go… We set out online with good intentions. At first blush, Darley’s question regarding the cost of implementing climate policies to reach ‘Net Zero by 2050’ seemed like a natural one to answer if you’re a policy wonk and your goal is to radically, rapidly, reinvent the global economy. You’d think. But not so fast.

What I discovered is far more pernicious. We thought digital censorship was bad. What about unwitting collective delusion? You can try this search experiment at home if you like. Type in this sentence: “What are the costs of implementing climate change policy?” It’s actually hard to find an answer.

We found one. But without fail, some versions of the answer include this qualifier “the costs of not doing anything far outweigh the costs of doing something ‘now!’.” It’s fait accompli. Without any way of actually calculating the impacts of climate change from now into the future, politicians, pundits, journalists begin with the assumption that “climate change is here and it’s going to get worse.” The drag on global GDP is expected to be somewhere around 1%-2% per year until Net-Zero 2050. But the cost of “doing nothing” could reach 20% of global GDP by 2100.

Those stats appear frequently. “Global GDP” in this case is, of course, a placeholder for those countries who are in a position to finance the policies by going further into debt. Ahem. Most articles also end with some version of the assumption “the only way to mitigate the effect of climate change is for policy makers to spend [a sh$t-ton of your money.]” [***] emphasis added.

Bloomberg NEF, Bloomberg’s green-energy research team, puts the price tag at $200 Trillion. Okay, we’re getting somewhere. But then continues “which would be a bargain!” Not only would it be cheaper for rich Western countries to invest the $200 Trillion to preserve life as we know it on the planet, but we have to shell it out by 2030 or the price tag will rise. That or we’ll all die. Oh boy.

Even “Bard” – Google’s slick AI competitor to ChatGPT – gets in on the action. When I asked the Bard: “Have any studies been done on the negative impact of climate policy on GDP?” The Bard replied: “I'm designed solely to process and generate text, so I'm unable to assist you with that.” Hmn.

When I asked the language model where and when Greta Thunberg screamed “I don’t want you to be positive. I want you to panic!”... then followed it with “where and when did Al Gore admonish the world that “We’re boiling the oceans!”... I learned they were both addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, in 2019 and 2023 respectively.

Thankfully, I also got some unsolicited clarification from the robot. With respect to Thunberg. Bard summed Greta’s tantrum thus: "Thunberg’s speech was met with mixed reactions. Some people praised her for her passion and urgency, while others criticized her for being too alarmist. However, there is no doubt that Thunberg’s speech has helped to raise awareness of the climate crisis and the need for urgent action….Thunberg's message is simple: the climate crisis is real, it is urgent, and we need to act now. She is a powerful voice for change, and she is helping to make the world a better place."

Bard praised the diminutive hobgoblin: “There is no doubt that Thunberg's speech has helped to raise awareness of the climate crisis and the need for urgent action. She has also inspired a global movement of young people to demand action on climate change.” We witnessed a bit of Thunberg’s army of mutant teens last night when some knucklehead glued his bare feet to the cement floor in the upper deck of Arthur Ashe stadium during a women’s semi-final match at the US Open. He and a couple other ‘useful idiots’ (Lenin’s term, not ours) were wearing t-shirts that read “End Fossil Fuels.” Yeah, smart. Their protest interrupted the match for 48 minutes while security guards figured out how to use their bottle of Goo Gone to free the schmuck.

Regarding Gore’s “boiling oceans” the minstrel was apologetic. Bard: "It is important to note that the term ‘boiling’ is not literally accurate. The oceans are not actually boiling, but they are getting warmer… and… It is clear that climate change is a serious threat to the planet and to human society. We need to take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change."

We’re surprised that Bard could have opinions, emotions and bias; it’s a soulless machine, after all. Computer programmers have an acronym we find useful daily when reviewing our own writing: GIGO. It stands for ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Bard and ChatGPT scrub the Internet for responses to your queries. They can only assemble what they find there.

When I was studying philosophy at St. John’s College, one of the biggest crimes you could commit in a seminar is known as ‘tautology.” Roughly speaking, you construct your argument to lead your opponent to a predetermined conclusion. In other words, you set up a straw man, just to see him burn. A tautology is a crime because it’s intellectually dishonest. What’s an even greater crime is when the tautology becomes accepted as truth.

You’ll find “the scientific community agrees” or “the scientific consensus is” that climate change is real and it’s only going to get worse as the starting and ending point of most articles on the subject. “The matter has already been settled,” the consensus says. Those who challenge the “consensus” are immediately, and quite vehemently, dismissed as “deniers.” (Another popular t-shirt online reads “Denial Is Not A Policy.” You can find it alongside your Ukrainian flag and ‘Love is Love’ lawn posters.)

In August of this year, the Nobel prize winning physicist John Clauser caused some consternation in the scientific community when he signed the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) ‘s World Climate Declaration. Mr. Clauser is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and won his Nobel Prize for contributions that have paved the way for the development of new technologies in quantum computers and quantum cryptography. By signing CLINTEL’s Declaration, he joined fellow Nobel anointed physicist Ivan Giaever.

The declaration makes some bold statements that sit like a boil on the arse of the scientific consensus. Among them, these top assertions:

• Natural as well as [human] factors cause warming.
• Warming is far slower than predicted.
• Climate policy relies on inadequate models.
• Co2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth, Co2 is not a pollutant.
• Global warming has not increased natural disasters.
• Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities.

Far from denying climate change is afoot, the signatories of CLINTEL’s declaration encourages scientists to follow the real data. What they take umbrage with is the interpretation of the data and policy response to what scientific data actually suggest.

There are over 1600 scientists on the list hailing from the far corners of the earth. As part of the declaration, they advocate adaptation over mitigation. To prove their point, the CLINTEL founders point to Oslo, Norway and the city state of Singapore.

Let us look at today’s difference in mean temperature between Oslo (one of the big cities near the North Pole) and Singapore (one of the big cities near the Equator), see Figure 2. Measurements show that the difference is as much as 22C, twenty times bigger than the global warming between 1850 and 2020 and almost 14 times bigger than the so-called ‘scary’ global warming between 1850 and 2050.

Despite of this huge mean temperature difference of 22C, both cities are very prosperous and the citizens in both cities are enjoying life. So, why do the media tell us that a global warming of 1.6oC or more will lead to a disaster (“the end is near”), while 22C difference between Oslo and Singapore turns out to be no problem whatsoever?
Click image for larger size.
Global mean temperature from 1850-2050, together with the average temperature of the prospering cities Oslo and Singapore in 2020. Note that the global warming of 1.6 °C is marginal with respect to the difference of 22 °C between the two cities (almost factor 14) (Source: CLINTEL)

The answer is adaptation! Mankind shows an impressive history, having survived many big changes in its living environment, including big changes in the Earth’s climate. Thanks to our ingenuity, human beings have always found clever solutions to cope with all past challenges, again and again. If you visit Oslo and Singapore, you see an impressive demonstration of human’s capability to adapt to climate differences of 22oC.

To believe the outcome of a climate model, is to believe what the model makers have put in. This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. Should not we free ourselves from the naive belief in immature climate models?

What was the phrase? Oh, yeah. Garbage in, garbage out. “In the past decades the public has been flooded with fear-mongering stories,” Berkhout says, “telling them that global temperatures will rise to catastrophically high levels.” Guus continues: “Climate activists claim that the cause of all this impending doom is the increasing amount of CO2 produced by human activities. The proposed solution is the so-called net-zero emission policy, aimed at lowering human net CO2-emissions to the levels of the pre-industrial era of the late 1700s.”

Granted, reading history is a hobby, but even a cursory knowledge of it suggests that life, when the Colonies were still an appendage of the British Empire, was a tad more brutish and short then than it is today. No matter.

Policy makers prefer the immature climate models because in mitigation lies the honey pot at the end of the rainbow. Recall the $130 trillion raised for net-ero policy at COP26 in 2021. That money is going somewhere. Let’s not forget the craven political class get their rocks off, too, from the clout and influence when a growing global mob of useful idiots vote.

Journalists will go along with just about anything. That is, as long as it doesn’t rock their own boats. Identifying and repeating the consensus is what they’re paid to do. And they have deadlines to meet! God bless ‘em. There’s more to climate science, of course. For our part, we don’t like being told what to think… or do. We encourage you to visit CLINTEL’s site and make up your own mind. Happy Friday"
o
"Rapid Intensification"
"A $130 trillion plan to enforce regulations for a Net-Zero 2050 agenda. What could go wrong? Financial and economic forecasts for the “climate change” impaired."

Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Balance (Galaxies)"

Full screen recommended.
Liquid Mind, "Balance (Galaxies)"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.
Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."

The Poet: David Whyte, “The Sea”

“The Sea”

“The pull is so strong we will not believe
the drawing tide is meant for us,
I mean the gift, the sea,
the place where all the rivers meet.

Easy to forget,
how the great receiving depth
untamed by what we need
needs only what will flow its way.
Easy to feel so far away
and the body so old
it might not even stand the touch.

But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside
toward the place to which we go
washing over our worries of money,
the illusion of being ahead,
the grief of being behind,
our limbs young
rising from such a depth?

What would that be like
even in this century
driving toward work with the others,
moving down the roads
among the thousands swimming upstream,
as if growing toward arrival,
feeling the currents of the great desire,
carrying time toward tomorrow?

Tomorrow seen today, for itself,
the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,
unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface
of a great silence, the movement of a moment
left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,
safe in our unknowing, our very own,
our great tide, our great receiving, our
wordless, fiery, unspoken,
hardly remembered, gift of true longing.”

~ David Whyte,
“Where Many Rivers Meet”

Viktor Frankl, "Life Changing Quotes"

Full screen recommended.
Viktor Frankl, "Life Changing Quotes"
 ("Man's Search For Meaning")
"Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of the logotherapy method and is most notable for his best-selling book Man's Search for Meaning."
Freely download "Mans Search For Meaning", by Viktor Frankl, here:
Highest recommendation:

"A Refining Process..."

“Life is a refining process. Our response to it determines whether we’ll be ground down or polished up. On a piano, one person sits down and plays sonatas, while another merely bangs away at “Chopsticks.” The piano is not responsible. It’s how you touch the keys that makes the difference. It’s how you play what life gives you that determines your joy and shine.”
- Barbara Johnson

Gregory Mannarino, "Situation Critical! Warning! Warning! Warning! Expect Multiple Bank Failures"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/8/23
"Situation Critical! Warning! Warning! Warning! 
Expect Multiple Bank Failures"
Comments here:

Dan, I Allegedly, "Evictions Are Back In A Big Way"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly PM 9/8/23
"Evictions Are Back In A Big Way"
"You would think it would just be in the big cities, but you would be wrong. Evictions are back with a vengeance. It makes no difference which part of the country, the numbers are getting bigger than ever."
Comments here:

The Daily "Near You?"

Durand, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The War Against Will"

"The War Against Will"
by Paul Rosenberg

"The modern world will allow you to join any of a thousand collectives, but it will punish you for standing on your own, as a self-willed entity. People who commit this crime understand that they are outlaws in the present world. And if at first they don’t understand that, the world makes sure they know.

The world as it is, then, is the enemy of will. This is nothing new, of course, governments have been at war against will since they began: How else can you get people to blindly obey you, to hand over half their income, and to thank you for it? People who possess a full and active will must be convinced to do things, and governments couldn’t function if they had to do that.

The present world is built around the restraint of will, and not just on the government level. Advertising, for example, is more or less devoted to implanting subconscious desires and subverting the will with them. In dysfunctional families, manipulating one another – whether by guilt, ridicule, being left out of Papa’s will or whatever – is the currency of the realm.

And so obedience, consumption and acquiescence have become cardinal virtues, and the avoidance of immediate pain the prime directive. As we might paraphrase an old apostle, this world’s God is the belly.

The Willful, For Whom Heaven And Earth Were Created: All human creativity functions on individual will. Everyone interested in creativity knows this, and here are just a couple of passages to make the point:

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is 
created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
- Albert Einstein

"This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the
 individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."
- John Steinbeck

It is the active will of individuals that has created everything good in this world. Really, life comes down to a choice between creativity and entropy:

• The world (the realm of officialdom, acquiescence and so on) is an incarnation of entropy, winding down and collapsing once the fuel left to it by creative men and women of the past is burned out.

• The creatives, who are willing to take blows in defense of their willfulness, and who bless the world in myriad ways

The willful, then, are creativity incarnate; the universe is and ought to be dedicated to beings of their type. It should also be populated by beings of their type, and I think someday shall be.

This is not to say that entropic people can’t make their way out of entropy and join the creatives; in fact they can, and do, on a daily basis. Still, it is a gulf that must be crossed, and the only way across is to act on one’s own will, alone, and for purely self-generated reasons. That is the price.

The Automated War On Will: The great threat of the modern world is a system I call Descartes’ Demon, the Big Data/AI personalized manipulation system that is already in daily use. I held back talking about this for years, seeing that it was too much for people to bear, but the beast has progressed so far that I can’t see holding back any further.

The Matrix, as it turns out, was all too true, and its world is now the world of Facebook, Twitter and especially Google. The real-life version of The Matrix is functional, right now. (See here for explanation, or here for illustration.) What personalized manipulation is really all about is the subversion of individual will. And if you don’t think it’s happening, pull up YouTube on your smart phone, then ask your friend to pull it up on his or hers: You’re already receiving personalized pages. The world is deeply committed to passing this off as trivial and ridiculing those that don’t. But it isn’t trivial; it’s a present and actual war against free will.

We Are Inherently Creative: Humans are inherently creative beings. We cannot create matter out of nothing, but we can mold it to an infinite number and variety of uses. We are the fountains of new and beneficial action in the universe. And we ought to function that way.

I’ll leave you with a few words from Albert Schweitzer: "Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it… It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals." This is what we need… and we need it now."
"They Live"

"There Are Simply No Answers..."

“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
- Barry Lopez