Friday, March 29, 2024

"Enlisting in the Military: A Very, Very Bad Idea"

Ask her if it was worth it...
"Enlisting in the Military: A Very, Very Bad Idea"
by Fred Reed

"If you are a young man wondering what to do with your life, you may consider enlisting in the military. Don’t. Yes, the military has its appeal, or seems to. You may need a job. The uniform looks good. There can be adventure. You might get laid by Asian lovelies in foreign countries. These things have their appeal. They did for me as a young Marine. But they aren’t worth being mutilated, blinded, or spending the rest of your years in a wheel chair. This can happen. It does happen. And Washington doesn’t give a damn.

Recruiters won’t tell you of this. They are liars. They lied to me. They will lie to you. At the very least, they will talk only about good things that might happen, about college money and job training you might get but probably won’t. They will make you feel welcome. You are joining a team of brothers, they will say. You are a patriot. You are defending your country.

Don’t believe it. The US military does not defend America. The last time it did this was in 1945, at the end of World War Two. Since then, American soldiers were sent for twenty years to Afghanistan. Is Afghanistan America? No. Was it, is it, important to America? No. Then Iraq, Syria, Iraq again,and Serbia, bombing helpless cities. Iraq isn’t America. In my day - I’m an old guy - it was Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, where 63,000 Americans died, and killed huge numbers of peasants who did nothing wrong - for no reason. Washington is now getting ready to start a war with China. China is on the other side of the world.

Let me tell you what the military does to young men, what Washington does. Long ago I was driving a truck near the Marine base in Danang, Vietnam. A bullet came through the windshield. The glass spatter went into my eyes, filling them with blood and blinding me for, as it turned out, several months. I lay for maybe an hour beside the road until a chopper finally came to take me to the Naval Support Activity hospital. For a couple of weeks a Viet nurse gave me a large injection of penicillin every few hours because if the blood got infected, that would be it for my vision.

Across the corridor from me were two Marines whose tank had been hit by an RPG, rocket-propelled grenade. It ruptured the hydraulic lines and the hydraulic fluid had exploded into flames. The two crewmen across from me had gotten out somehow, though horribly burned. I was told they were covered with a plastic sheet that dripped with evaporation from their burns, but I don’t know. The other two had cooked alive, burning, burning, in agony, skin sloughing off, unable to breathe in the flames, desperately trying to find the hatch. The two across from me said they could hear them screaming. It is what the military did to them. It is what the military will do to you.

A recruiter might tell you that I am an old guy, and things have changed. No. They have not. The military still uses tanks, rifles, land mines, bombs, flamethrowers, artillery. Aircraft carriers, important for the upcoming war with China, still carry large quantities of jet fuel and explosives. They are barbecues waiting to be lighted. You can have your bowels blown out, or burn alive, as easily now as then.

Did Vietnam have anything to do with America? No. It’s on the other side of the freaking world. Likewise Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq. So why does the military, why does our government do it?

Answer: So the arms industry can make money. And so Washington can try to control the world. Are you willing to die, to spend your life in a wheel chair, to wear a colostomy bag full of your own shit and never have a date because you were gut-shot – so Lockheed-Martin’s stock shares will go up? Don’t do it. Don’t let the bastards use you.

The wars never stop because the money is sweet, the profits enormous. Washington just finished twenty years of killing in Afghanistan , meaning twenty years of juicy contracts. How did this defend America? Now we have Ukraine, so far costing taxpayers over a hundred billion dollars. Is Ukraine America? The United States is falling apart as anyone can see and Washington sends money to Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, Russians and Ukrainians, have died there, for nothing. But of course most of that money going to Ukraine is used to buy weapons from the arms companies. Follow the dollar.

For Washington, for the arms industry – they are almost the same thing – long wars in distant places are desirable because companies like Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon can keep selling the Pentagon missiles, tanks, helicopters and simple things like gasoline at jacked-up prices. War is about money. Washington cares about money. It does not care about you.

Don’t let them use you.

I’ll tell you another story. I spent about a year on the eye ward, 4B, at Bethesda Naval Hospital as it was then called, just outside of Washington. In hospital wards you see what the military really does to people. There was a guy blind because a defective rifle grenade detonated on the end of his rifle. Another fellow had taken an AK round through the jaw, shattering the bone. The fragments had to be removed, leaving the flesh where his jaw had been hanging down in a formless blob like a wet sock. He ate through a nasogastric tube going through his nose. We called him Jawless.

Military wards are full of such. The one I most remember was a young Marine from Tennessee, maybe nineteen. One side of his face was grotesque hamburger. He was stone blind. I was nearby when his high school sweetheart, maybe seventeen, came to visit him. “Johnny…Johnny…Oh, Johnny.” So much for the marriage, I figured. What young high school senior wants to tie herself for life to a blind horror that she will have to lead around?

The war in Vietnam was lost, of course, but it wasn’t in vain. It made unimaginable profits for the arms industry. Why do you think American wars last so long? If America wins the war, the money stops flowing. If it loses the war, the money stops. Keep the war going, and the money flows.

This is the military the recruiters don’t tell you about. It is the real military.

Want to know the lousy medical care the Pentagon gives the wounded? An incompetent military eye surgeon managed to destroy my remaining good eye years later. To see the kind of thing that happens, read this at the Unz Review. It will show you what you can expect.

Think what, if you enlist, you will really be doing. Let’s say that you are ordered to fire artillery at some city or village. In your impact zone, a little girl of seven, hit by shell fragments, looks down in surprise as her intestines fall from her stomach, and begins crying, then screaming. This happens, frequently. What do you think hot jagged shrapnel does to a soft young belly. She holds out her arms to mommy for help, this being instinct with the very young, before collapsing from profuse bleeding. Large blood vessels are found in the abdomen. Her mother goes stark bugf?*ck crazy, desperate to save her daughter but watching her die. It is how we defend America, see.

This is what the military is, what it does. It is what you will be used to do, directly or indirectly.

Those in Washington who will send you to kill people you have never met, and to be mutilated, do not themselves go to war. Rich young men do not enlist. Students at Harvard and Yale do not enlist. The military preys on, takes advantage of, ordinary kids, usually high-school grads, often from the South.

If you are twenty years old, what I am about to say will be ancient history, but I ask you to think about it. The same thing is going on today.

The following men were all of military age during Vietnam, and they now rule the country or did: President George Bush II, Bill Clinton, John Bolton (of whom you have probably never heard, but a major warhawk), Biden, Trump All avoided military service. All now want to send you to wars. To express it clearly, they see you as suckers. Think about it.

I tell you, as one who has been there, who has seen it, don’t let them use you."
Semper Fi, Brother!
- CP, Veteran, United States Marine Corps
MOS 0311, Infantry Rifleman, 1968

Dan, I Allegedly, "You Will Be Forced to Buy an Electric Car"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 3/29/24
"You Will Be Forced to Buy an Electric Car"
"In less than a decade, the Administration might just steer us all into driving electric cars exclusively. With the average electric vehicle ringing up at $53,500, the road ahead seems paved with both innovation and challenges. From charging station queues to the ongoing investments and bankruptcies in the EV space, I'm taking you on a cross-country journey to uncover the truth behind this potential mandate. But it's not just about cars – we're also touching on topics like restaurant charges and the evolving economic landscape."
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Adventures With Danno, "Taking A Turn For The Worst & Jess May Be Going To The Doctor!"

Adventures With Danno, AM 3/29/24
"Taking A Turn For The Worst & 
Jess May Be Going To The Doctor!"
"Our update for day 3 of being sick. As I am feeling much better, my concern is my wife as she seems to have taken a turn for the worst, and may have to see a doctor."
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"How It Really Is"

 

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 3/29/24"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up 3/29/24"
Russia Strikes Back, Bridge Disaster, FDA Ivermectin Lies
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

There was a terror attack in Moscow last week that killed at least 130 unarmed people who were out for a night of fun. Russian security services (known as the FSB) think that the US, UK and Ukraine were behind the attack. The FSB claims they paid the terrorist gunmen with crypto currency. Didn’t Sam Bankman Fried, former President of FTX, launder money through Ukraine and then give it to the DNC to use in the 2020 election? Russia is preparing for a global war against NATO. Martin Armstrong says the Deep State neocons want global war, and they are going to try to get it started between May and July, well before the 2024 Election. Money managers at JPMorgan warn Russia could strike back and push oil past $100 a barrel by Election Day. There is plenty more Russia could do to get even for this murderous attack in Moscow.

There is a lot of talk about the Baltimore bridge disaster. Many say it is terrorism, and it was possibly caused by hacking from China. No matter what you think might have caused it, the Frances Scott Key Bridge collapse is an economic disaster. The bridge carried $28 billion of goods a year, and the port, that is now closed down, imported 750,000 vehicles in 2023 alone. Maryland Governor Wes Moore said, “The bridge collapse would cause significant economic damage not only to the region but to the entire country.”

The FDA lied to the American public about the effectiveness of Ivermectin on combating Covid19. They did this so their buddies at Big Pharma could get their Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for their CV19 bioweapon shots. To get an EUA, there could be no other viable treatment for CV19, and, thus, the outright lies about one of the most effective and safest drugs ever made. The FDA was sued and settled the case. The FDA retracted all the lies they told about this lifesaving drug. At least 1 million people died because they did not get early treatment with Ivermectin at the beginning of the Covid19 Plandemic. These people are criminals, and their lies murdered people who trusted them. There is much more in the 56-minute newscast."

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble for these stories 
and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 3/29/24.

Jim Kunstler, "Oh Say Can You See?"

"Oh Say Can You See?"
by Jim Kunstler

“A modern nuc can fit in the trunk of a compact car. When millions of people can walk across our border with impunity what do you think the chances are we would catch something that size?” - Sam Faddis, Retired CIA

"Who was not impressed seeing the sudden and total collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after getting its pylon bonked by the container ship Dali a few hours before the dawn’s early light in Baltimore harbor? In America’s ongoing death-of-a-thousand-cuts, that one literally severed a major artery, but it may take a while to know how badly the wounded colossus known as the USA is bleeding out.

“Joe Biden” emerged from his crypt pronto to state that the federal government would pony-up the cost of building the bridge back better, meant to reassure the public, you’d suppose. But perhaps the real reason was to obviate an otherwise requisite investigation of the crash by ship-owner Grace Ocean’s insurance company - since legal wrangling over responsibility would add more years to the already years-long estimated bridge replacement time-frame. And Gawd knows what else they might discover about how the darn thing came to pass... rumors of a Ukrainian captain at the Dali’s helm... stuff that the ruling intel blob might not want to get out there, especially given the still-murky role of the joint USA-UK black-op blobs in the Moscow Crocus Theater Massacre just a week earlier.

The Crocus op, you understand, was probably the worst clusterf*ck qua Three Stooges blob operational procedure in memory, since four of the six surviving Tajiki shooters were nabbed in a car enroute to the Ukraine border (where they would’ve been whacked into silence, since they failed to martyr themselves at the scene-of-the-crime), and by now had surely sung their hearts out to persuasive interrogators of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) - the take-away being that President VV Putin has got to be mighty pissed-off and itching for revenge. Was the FSK Bridge take-down the first repayment for that, lots of people inside and outside Blob Central were probably wondering?

You’d also have to wonder, qua the bridge disaster itself, about the implied reverberations through the insurance industry. Consider that the insurance industry is a major cog in the machinery of finance and banking, since insurance company reserves are traditionally allocated in supposedly safe sovereign treasury bonds. Liquidations anyone? Maritime insurance was already groaning under the burden of all that monkey-business in the Red Sea, thanks to Houthi rocket and drone attacks on the shipping of Western Civ. Are the banks quaking harder now? Many across Western Civ were already trembling before the FSK Bridge job.

While the awesome spectacle of the bridge collapse traumatized the country, it also brought to mind the fantastic flow of ten-thousand illegal border crossings a day, stage-managed by the “Joe Biden” Homeland Security team. Did you kind of wonder how many in that 10K-a-day flow might be the same species of Central Asian mutts who volunteered to slaughter over 150 (so far) Russian concert-goers? Nobody is checking who they are, you realize. They just step on US soil, get issued smartphones, loaded debit cards, walking-around cash money, airplane and bus tickets and, voila, there they are in your home town tomorrow, looking for something to occupy themselves. Thanks a bunch, Alejandro Mayorkas!

Are you wondering what sort of mayhem they might be capable of unleashing any place from Bangor to Burbank in the weeks and months ahead? (And, while you’re at it, think about all the food processing plant fires, train wrecks, and other mysterious tribulations around the country the past couple of years.) Consider that this very week alone, following the FSK Bridge disaster, absolutely nothing has been done by our government to stem that flow of countless potential saboteurs into the country. The news media isn’t even talking about it (of course).

The prospects might look a bit unnerving, wouldn’t you agree? Things catching fire, blowing up, and falling down here, there, and everywhere...more of those thousand cuts adding up. Just maybe, the dazed-and-confused (possibly hypnotized) American public, a.k.a., the “voters,” might put together that “Joe Biden” and the Party of Chaos that owns him, are actually responsible for the on-going take-down of our country. After a certain point - now apparently passed - sheer incompetence is no longer a plausible explanation for what you are seeing.

Oh, one other thing, look out for on-the-ground economic reverberations from the FSK Bridge disaster. For instance, Baltimore is the USA’s top port for importing and exporting automobiles. Also, earth-moving and large farm equipment, fertilizer, lumber, coal, and steel. Other arrangements must be made, for years ahead, considering the trucking links. It’s especially an interruption for trucking between the mid-Atlantic / New England states and much of Dixieland. It will affect the transport of fruits and vegetables to the Washington-Boston corridoer. Things are going to cost more and we are already in an inflationary trouble-zone. How will this thunder elsewhere through an economy which, despite the japes of “Joe Biden’s” statisticians, is actively disintegrating? The fluttering wings of this black swan already throw a chill on spring’s incoming zephyrs."

"NATO Lost it Hands Down as Russia Crushed Ukraine's Army; Terrorist Attack in Moscow"

Ray McGovern, 3/29/24
"NATO Lost it Hands Down as Russia Crushed
 Ukraine's Army; Terrorist Attack in Moscow"
"Ray came to Washington from his native Bronx in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985."
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"Don’t Forget How Strange This All Is"

"Don’t Forget How Strange This All Is"
by David Cain

"Jerry Seinfeld joked that if aliens came to earth and saw people walking dogs, they would assume the dogs are the leaders. The dog walks out front, and a gangly creature trailing behind him picks up his feces and carries it for him.

Throughout my life I’ve had moments where I felt like one of these visiting aliens, where something I knew to be normal suddenly seemed bizarre. I remember walking home from somewhere, struck by how strange streets are: flat strips of artificial rock embedded in the earth so that our traveling machines don’t get stuck in the mud.

Everything else seemed strange too. Metal poles bending over the road, tipped by glowing orbs. Rectangular dwellings made of lumber and artificial rocks. The background noise is always the hum of distant traveling machines, and all of this stuff was built and operated by a single species of ape.

Even stranger was the fact that these strange things usually don’t seem strange. I know I’m not the only one who has felt this. A few people have shared similar experiences with me, and according to "The School of Life", it was a central theme in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel "Nausea."

Sartre apparently believed that the world is far stranger and more absurd than it normally seems. Most of the time, however, we ascribe a kind of logic and order to the world that it doesn’t really have, so that we’re not constantly bewildered by it. Sometimes we momentarily lose track of that logic, and the true strangeness of life is revealed. In these moments, we see the world as it is when it’s been “stripped of any of the prejudices and stabilizing assumptions lent to us by our day-to-day routines.” In other words, we occasionally see the world as if for the first time, which could only be a very strange experience indeed.

Although I know this experience isn’t unique to me, I had no idea whether most people could relate. So when I discovered the surprisingly popular podcast "Welcome to Night Vale," I felt that a small but significant part of my experience had been understood. Night Vale is a fictional desert town, and each episode of the podcast is about 20 minutes of broadcasts from its public radio station. The host reads public service announcements, advertisements, community news and weather, and messages from the City Council. That would be extremely boring, except that almost everything that happens in the "Night Vale" is incredibly strange, even impossible.
"Welcome To Night Vale, Episode 1"
The first announcement in the first episode is a reminder from City Council that dogs are not allowed in the dog park, and neither are citizens, and if you see hooded figures in the park you are not to approach them. In an unrelated matter, there is a cat hovering four feet off the ground next to the sink in the men’s washroom at the radio station. It cannot move from its spot in mid-air, but it seems happy, and staff have left food and water for it.

Wednesday has been canceled, due to a scheduling error. There is a glowing cloud raining small animals on a farm at the edge of town. A large pyramid has appeared in a prominent public space, apparently when nobody was looking.

I imagine that when most people hear about WTNV, they listen to five minutes of it and turn it off. It feels like a joke at first, or at best, bad art. I kept listening, thinking the weird happenings are some kind of allegory, or a code to be deciphered. But they’re not. The story stays absurd, kind of like an over-the-top "Twin Peaks", where none of the weirdness ever gets explained.

Everything is weird until it’s familiar: I was listening to the podcast on headphones, walking down our local riverside path, and I passed an older couple sun-tanning. I’ve seen people tanning a thousand times, but only then did the activity strike me as completely hilarious. In our world, people sometimes take off all their clothes—or at least as much as society will allow—so that they can get radiation burns from a glowing ball in the sky. Even though everyone knows this practice increases your chances of developing a fatal disease, people still do it because they like the color of the burned flesh. Skin burned to a certain tone confers social benefits for a few weeks.

The fact that we live on a planet at all would be unbelievable if we weren’t already used to it. Nobody could have dreamed up this setting: life is set on one of many ball-shaped rocks moving in circles around a bigger, glowing ball. And we have great affection for these other balls. When officials demoted Pluto to a minor ball, people were outraged, even though none of them had ever actually seen it. When the spaceship sent to take pictures of Pluto finally arrived, we discovered it had a giant white heart on its side. It had been loving us back the whole time!

Listening to "Night Vale" reminds us that our world is no less strange, just more familiar. If in our world, as in "Night Vale," taco shops sometimes became encased in amber, we would accept that as a fact of life after seeing it a few times. But that’s no weirder than the fact that in order to live, we must breathe a gas that combusts so easily and so violently that every city has to have specialized departments dedicated to shooting water onto anything at a moment’s notice. (Bill Bryson captures this strangeness beautifully in "A Short History of Nearly Everything.")

You can see the weirdness in almost any normal phenomenon by imagining how you’d describe it to someone not from Earth or any place like it. Water falls uncontrollably from the sky? Pop culture is obsessed with people who pretend to be other people in moving pictures? We eat fresh food grown on the opposite side of the planet? What?

The three options: So our world is really weird and chaotic, which is a helpful thing to realize, because we suffer so much insisting that it should be sensible and orderly. We have to live in a very strange place, and when we forget that it’s strange due to familiarity blindness, it can seem like something’s always gone temporarily wrong. We become preoccupied with returning society to a kind of balance or sanity that it never had, often berating or abusing certain people or certain groups in the process. It’s quite a relief to remember that life was always nuts.

Albert Camus (who is an obvious influence in "Night Vale") argued that the universe is always absurd and chaotic, yet we’re always trying to find meaning and order in it. When you listen to Night Vale, making sense is the first thing your mind tries to do with what it hears, and it can’t. When you relax that need for the events to make sense, something softens. You stop straining. You listen more for the moment and less for how each moment serves everything else. You gain a sense of humor about the whole thing, however dark it gets.

Because it requires listeners to voluntarily open up to extreme strangeness, Night Vale has made me a less uptight about our own society’s political and cultural nonsense. I am seeing society less like a troubled person who was once sane, and more like a funny-looking animal, adorably knocking things over by accident. 

Camus thought our unreasonable demand for meaning and sense was fundamental to human beings, and that it creates a ton of pain for us. He saw only three ways to respond to life’s absurdity: we can deny it (usually by claiming that a God has designed it this way), we can end our lives, or we can embrace the weirdness and live in it wholeheartedly. The last option, he figured, was the only good one. When you stop expecting the world to be sensible, suddenly it all makes sense.

Embracing the weirdness takes the edge off of everything, even death. Whenever you’re worried about “big picture” ideas, such as war, climate change, crime, corporate greed, you can remember that this whole weird thing called life just happened, and it’s always fresh and interesting, even though nobody really asked for it. And in that light, the thought of it ending one day doesn’t seem distressing at all—when your time comes, all you can do is say, “Wow, that was odd.”

Thursday, March 28, 2024

"Wake Up, You Are Watching A Social And Economic Collapse In Real Time"

Jeremiah Babe, 3/28/24
"Wake Up, You Are Watching A Social 
And Economic Collapse In Real Time"
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"Holy Sh*t! Russia Declares 'Holy War'! Ambassador Flees Poland! Nuclear Missiles Move!"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 3/28/24
"Holy Sh*t! Russia Declares 'Holy War'! 
Ambassador Flees Poland! Nuclear Missiles Move!"
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Musical Interlude: Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb"

Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"What's that below those strange clouds? Presidents. If you look closely, you may recognize the heads of four former US Presidents carved into famous Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, USA. More obvious in the featured image are the unusual mammatus clouds that passed briefly overhead. Both were captured together by a surprised tourist with a quick camera.
Click image for larger size.
Unlike normal flat-bottomed clouds which form when moist and calm air plateaus rise and cool, bumpy mammatus clouds form as icy and turbulent air pockets sink and heat up. Such turbulent air is frequently accompanied by a thunderstorm. Each mammatus lobe spans about one kilometer. The greater mountain is known to native Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers, deities responsible for the directions north, south, east, west, up, and down."

Chet Raymo, “The Journey”

“The Journey”
by Chet Raymo

“Here’s the aboce a deep-deep sky map of the universe from the March 9, 2006 issue of Nature, in full size. The horizontal scale is a 360 view right around the sky; the vertical gaps at 6 hours and 24 hours are the parts of the universe that are blocked to our view by the disk of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The vertical scale – distance from Earth – is logarithmic (10, 100, 1000, etc.) measured in megaparsecs (a parsec equals 3.26 light-years). Across the top is the Big Bang, and the oldest and most distant thing we can see, the cosmic microwave background, the radiation of the Big Bang itself. A few relatively nearby galaxies are designated at the bottom. All that stuff in the middle that looks like smoke or dusty cobwebs are quasars and galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

A smoke of galaxies! (2 trillion galaxies according to latest estimates.- CP) A universe cobwebbed with Milky Ways! Each galaxy itself a smoke of stars, hundreds of billions of stars, many or all of them with planets. My book, “Walking Zero,” is about the human journey from the omphalos of our birth into the world of the galaxies, a journey many of us are disinclined to make. Here is how the Prologue to the book begins:

“Each of us is born at the center of the world. For nine months our physical selves are assembled molecule by molecule, cell by cell, in the dark covert of our mother’s womb. A single fertilized egg cell splits into two. Then four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Ultimately, 50 trillion cells or so. At first, our future self is a mere blob of protoplasm. But slowly, ever so slowly, the blob begins to differentiate under the direction of genes. A symmetry axis develops. A head, a tail, a spine. At this point, the embryo might be that of a human, or a chicken, or a marmoset. Limbs form. Digits, with tiny translucent nails. Eyes, with papery lids. Ears pressed like flowers against the head. Clearly now a human. A nose, nostrils. Downy hair. Genitals.

As the physical self develops, so too a mental self takes shape, not yet conscious, not yet self-aware, knitted together as webs of neurons in the brain, encapsulating in some respects the evolutionary experience of our species. Instincts impressed by the genes. The instinct to suck, for example. Already, in the womb, the fetus presses its tiny fist against its mouth in anticipation of the moment when the mouth will be offered the mother’s breast. The child will not have to be taught to suck. Other inborn behaviors will express themselves later. Laughing. Crying. Striking out in anger. Loving.

What, if anything, goes on in the mind of the developing fetus we may never know. But this much seems certain: To the extent that the emerging self has any awareness of its surroundings, its world is coterminous with itself. We are not born with knowledge of the antipodes, the plains of Mars, or the far-flung realm of the galaxies. We are not born with knowledge of Precambrian seas, the supercontinent of Pangea, or the Age of Dinosaurs. We are born into a world scarcely older than ourselves and scarcely larger than ourselves. And we are at its center.

A human life is a journey into the grandeur of a universe that may contain more galaxies than there are cells in the human body, a universe in which the whole of a human lifetime is but a single tick of the cosmic clock. The journey can be disorienting; our first instincts are towards coziness, comfort, our mother’s enclosing arms, her breast. The journey, therefore, requires courage – for each individual, and for our species.

Uniquely of all animals, humans have the capacity to let our minds expand into the space and time of the galaxies. No other creatures can number the cells in their bodies, as we can, or count the stars. No other creatures can imagine the explosive birth of the observable universe 14 billion years ago from an infinitely hot, infinitely small seed of energy. That we choose to make this journey – from the all-sustaining womb into the vertiginous spaces and abyss of time – is the glory of our species, and perhaps our most frightening challenge.”

The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, “Sunset”

“Sunset”

“Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,
leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs -
leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Daily "Near You?"

Wayland, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"At Last..."

“At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.”
- Richard Bach, “Nothing by Chance”

Bill Bonner, "Don't Cry for Argentina...Just Yet"

"Don't Cry for Argentina...Just Yet"
Milei's remarkable progress at the end of the world...
by Bill Bonner

“The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be... if measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.”
~ Javier Milei

Dublin, Ireland - "Argentina…down at the bottom of the world…upside down in almost every respect. But it is also the home of the world’s most interesting and most promising political/economic experiment. Governments follow the ‘institutional imperative,’ along with everything else. They grow…they expand…they take more and more of the nation’s resources…and their elites become more parasitic. But eventually…they ‘hit bottom.’

If you’ll recall, over the 75 years or so since the socialists (Peronists) won power, Argentina had seen pointless wars…2,000% inflation…mass murder…insurrection…and social and political chaos. It had also dropped from around 6th or 7th place among the world’s richest nations down to, currently, 65th place, behind Kazakhstan and Bulgaria. Argentinians, in the 1960s, had about 40% of Americans’ wealth per capita. Now, they have barely half that much.

‘La Motosierra’: We have a hypothesis. As the weight of government debt and resource misallocation becomes heavier…its elites become more corrupt and incompetent…and real output goes down. Sooner or later, there’s little juice left in the orange. In the case of the Soviet Union, the elite saw that they could get more wealth and power by taking up new careers as oligarchs rather than continuing as government functionaries.

In Argentina, too, many of the ruling elites must have thought it was time to let capitalism rebuild the country’s wealth; that way, there will be something to steal later on. Besides, the Argentine people themselves were ready for a change.

Javier Milei campaigned for president with a chainsaw in his hands…vowing to cut out all unnecessary expenses and state-granted privileges. It looked like a stunt. And many people thought his campaign pledge would end up in the huge Library Of Unfilled Promises, along with so many others.

But Milei is not a typical politician. He sees government through the unsympathetic eyes of Hayek, Rothbard…or Ron Paul. As he told the movers and shakers at Davos, the ‘values of the West’ are in danger. And the path – towards more and more government control of the economy and the society – ‘inevitably leads to socialism…and therefore to poverty.’

Remarkable Progress: Milei promised to free the economy from the fetters that keep it from operating properyl, and, crucially, to reduce the cost of government. His main aim is to get rid of deficits, which force the government to print additional money and cause prices to rise.

Last year the ‘fiscal deficit’ was about 5%. For reference, in the US it was over 6%. The difference is that investors will still lend to the US at reasonable rates. And the US can ‘print’ any money it needs to pay off creditors. Argentina can’t. Nobody wanted to lend to the gauchos and get paid back in pesos. So Argentina borrowed in dollars and became the IMF’s largest debtor. It can’t print dollars. So now, it needs to raise more dollars on the open market to stay current with its debt.

It’s not going to be easy. But so far, Milei has made remarkable progress. He has proposed a balanced budget – reducing the 5% deficit down to zero. Unfortunately, he does not control the legislature; it will be a challenge to get the politicians on board with his program.

The End of the World: Even so, after just 100 days in office, the inflation rate has apparently been cut in half. Chris Wood reports: "CPI inflation has already slowed from a peak of 25.5% MoM in December to 13.2% MoM in February." Joel sees it in the shops: "Now, stores and restaurants – which literally couldn’t ticket items on menus and upon shelves a few months ago, with prices changing by the day – are suddenly awash with discount signs and 2x1 specials."

Our daughter, meanwhile, offers a sobering personal insight. Inflation is moderating, but many prices are still just now catching up: "I got my hair done in Salta last month for 5,000 pesos. This month, it cost me 10,000. (About $9 US)."

It will not be smooth sailing for Milei. The ship is still headed for the bridge. So far, he’s slowed it down. And pointed the way to a safe passage. But it will not turn easily or immediately. Stay tuned."

Dan, I Allegedly, "Never Ignore These Warnings"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 3/28/24
"Never Ignore These Warnings"
"We are diving deep into the alarming trend of loan denial and Insurance claims denied/ These warnings are signaling an economic crisis looming on the horizon. Plus we are seeing lenders turn people down at a rate of almost 50%. Big problems."
Comments here:

"How It Really Is"

"A Much Needed Interlude From Reality"

"A Much Needed Interlude From Reality"
This is some of the most incredibly beautiful work 
I've ever seen. Multiple pages, sound on.
View here, full screen:
o
Hat tip to DBG for this material!

"World War III Prelude: Geopolitics 3/28/24"

Full screen recommended.
"Douglas Macgregor Shock Revelation: 
The Dark Agenda Behind the Ukraine Conflict - The Untold Story!"
"Dive into the hidden truths behind the global power play as Douglas Macgregor unveils deep and previously undisclosed analysis of the Ukraine conflict, Putin's real strategy, and the shadowy financial games at play. This revelatory interview uncovers the intricate web of geopolitical strategies, the manipulation of media narratives, and the stark realities of global financial dominance that have been kept from public knowledge. Prepare for a journey into the depths of global politics and power struggles where the stakes are higher than ever before, and the truths more startling."
Comments here:
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Scott Ritter, AM 3/28/24
"Ukraine's Army is Done and Destroyed;
 Terrorist Attack in Moscow"
Comments here:
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Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 3/28/24
"Lt Col. Tony Shaffer: 
If French Troops Fight Russians"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 3/28/24
"Patrick Lancaster : Ukrainian Shelling - 
LIVE from Belgorod, Russia"
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "AM/PM 3/28/24"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/28/24
"The New One World System Revealed! 
This Is What's Next For All Of Us"
Comments here:
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Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/28/24
"Incredible! Seeing Is Believing! 
The Economic Freefall IsWorsening Faster"
Comments here:

Adventures With Danno, "The Flu, Day 2: Body Aches & My Nyquil Nightmare!"

Adventures With Danno, AM 3/28/24
"The Flu, Day 2: 
Body Aches & My Nyquil Nightmare!"
"In today's vlog, we are discussing our flu symptoms, dealing with body aches, 
and having a crazy nightmare after taking NyQuil before bed."
Comments here:

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

"WW III D-Day Approaches; Russia Preps For Nuclear War With NATO"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 3/27/24
"WW III D-Day Approaches; 
Russia Preps For Nuclear War With NATO"
Comments here:

Jeremiah Babe, "They's Passing Out Free Money While Americans Go Hungry And Homeless"

Jeremiah Babe, 3/27/24
"They's Passing Out Free Money While 
Americans Go Hungry And Homeless"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"

Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Magnificent island universe NGC 2403 stands within the boundaries of the long-necked constellation Camelopardalis. Some 10 million light-years distant and about 50,000 light-years across, the spiral galaxy also seems to have more than its fair share of giant star forming HII regions, marked by the telltale reddish glow of atomic hydrogen gas. The giant HII regions are energized by clusters of hot, massive stars that explode as bright supernovae at the end of their short and furious lives.
A member of the M81 group of galaxies, NGC 2403 closely resembles another galaxy with an abundance of star forming regions that lies within our own local galaxy group, M33 the Triangulum Galaxy. Spiky in appearance, bright stars in this colorful galaxy portrait of NGC 2403 lie in the foreground, within our own Milky Way.”

"The Sane Who Know..."

“Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have first pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.”
- W.H Auden

"A dog might feel as majestic as a lion, might bark as loud as a roar, might have a heart as mighty and brave as a Lion's heart, but at the end of the day, a dog is a dog and a lion is a lion."
 - Charlyn Khatero

"The Story Of Man"

“The sands of time blew into a storm of images... images in sequence to tell the truth! Glorious legends of revolutionaries, bound only by a desire to be true to themselves, and to hope! Parables of colliding worlds, of forbidden love, of enemies healing the wounds of circumstance! Projected myth of persecution through greed and selfishness... and the will to survive! The Will to survive! And to survive in the face of those who claim credit for your very existence! We survive not as pawns, but as agents of hope. Sometimes misunderstood, but always true to our story. The story of Man."
- Scott Morse
“Do you believe," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?" 
"Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?" 
"Yes, without doubt," said Candide. 
"Well, then," said Martin, "if hawks have always had the same character why should you imagine that men may have changed theirs?”
Voltaire, "Candide"
“Murderers are not monsters, they're men.
And that's the most frightening thing about them.”
- Alice Sebold, "The Lovely Bones"
And so it is...
o
“What a chimera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?”
- Blaise Pascal
o
o
Vangelis, "Alpha"
This song always suggested the relentless March of Mankind through
 the ages to our unknown destiny. In spite of ourselves, always... we go on.

Chet Raymo, “The Silence”

“The Silence”
by Chet Raymo

“The hiding places of my power
Seem open; I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all, and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel…”

“These few lines from Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” leapt off the page at me. They capture well enough what my life has become. All those years of teaching, of writing in the Boston Globe, were years of sharing public knowledge, knowledge that had been vetted by the scientific community. The work was not about me. The teacher was me, the writer was me, but what I taught and wrote was reliable, consensus knowledge of the world. A student in my classes or a reader of my newspaper columns would have been hard pressed to know my politics or my religion or the nature of the questions that came in the darkest hours of the night. And that is the way it should have been; that was my homage to objectivity.

Those were valuable years, years of building up a sturdy polder in the sea of mystery, a place to stand with a firmness of foot. And now, in retirement, with time on my hands- and on my mind- I find myself more inclined to explore what Wordsworth called “the hiding places of my power.” I approach. They close. I touch with my hand the surface of the pond that Pat wrote about the other day; my hand comes out of the depths to meet me. I see by glimpses. It is, I suppose, a kind of forgetting. With the forgetting comes a certain freshness. My fingertip touches the surface of the world from above and from below, and concentric circles spread outwards, rippling, like a soundless sound, and I struggle, in words, as best I can, to give a substance and a life to what I feel.

This does not mean, I trust, that I am going soft, finding supernaturalist religion or getting all New Age squishy as “age comes on.” I keep my feet planted on solid fact and read my weekly “Science” and “Nature” along with my Wordsworth. No, it is rather a simple freedom to explore the hiding places, attending to private particulars as opposed to public universals, listening for the small voice that whispers from the nooks and crannies of yet unassimilated reality.

There is a passage in “The Prelude” where a young Boy (the poet?), standing in evening air by the glimmering lake, makes a mimic hooting with his hands to his mouth and the owls answer. Twooo-twooo. And the reply. Twooo-twooo. Then, unaccountably, the answers cease. And in the silence the boy becomes more keenly aware than ever of water, rocks, and woods, and mountain torrents, “that uncertain heaven, received into the bosom of the steady lake.” Thoreau has something similar. He rejoiced in owls; their hoot, he said, was a sound well suited to swamps and twilight woods. The interval between the hoots was a deepened silence, suggesting, to Thoreau, “a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.” It is that that I now attend: the deepened silence between the hoots.”

"Only Human..."

And, of course, the universal and inevitable excuse…
“A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably
excuses himself to himself by saying, “I’m only human, after all.”
- Sydney J. Harris
I've always wondered...
Everyone says “I'm only human…” compared to what?

The Daily "Near You?"

Loveland, Colorado,USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"World War III Prelude, 3/27/24"

Full screen recommended.
Danny Haiphong, 3/27/24
"Scott Ritter: NATO Just Made A Fatal Mistake as 
Russia Prepares for War with France and Germany"
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Danny Haiphong, 3/27/24
"Scott Ritter: Putin has Destroyed 
NATO's Plan and Ukraine is Doomed"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Douglas MacGregor: "NATO-Russia's Most Dangerous 
Standoff Ever – Global Annihilation Imminent!"
Comments here:

Judge Napolitano, "Phil Giraldi: Israeli Descent Into Depravity"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 3/27/24
"Phil Giraldi: Israeli Descent Into Depravity"
Comments here:
o
WARNING! Absolutely Horrifying!
Full horrifying screen recommended.
"Everyone in the World Needs to See This:
 Footage Shows IDF Drone Killing Gazans"
By Jessica Corbett

"An Israeli army drone pursued four civilian youths who attempted to reach their destroyed homes and killed them with missiles in Khan Younis at the start of last February. "There is no way they could have been considered combatants," said one writer and analyst. "This is unreal."

Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month. Those killed by the unmanned aerial vehicle in the rubble of the southern Gaza city appear to be unarmed teenagers or young men. According to a translation of the coverage, they were not identified in the reporting.

"Outrageous even after months of outrages," declared Palestinian American political analyst Yousef Munayyer. "This video shows an Israeli military drone literally stalking four unarmed civilians posing no threat and eliminating them one after the other!"

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka's U.S. policy fellow, said: "This is among the worst footage I've seen. Not only were these boys clearly unarmed and present no threat whatsoever, but they were struck multiple times even after stumbling/crawling away. There is no way they could have been considered combatants. This is unreal."
o
"Israel is Evil personified. Israel is Evil embodied."
- Scott Ritter

A Comment: OMG...33,000 men, women, old people, and 14,000 CHILDREN slaughtered, 76,000 wounded, with 8,000 more missing and buried under the rubble caused by 29,000 2,000 lb. bombs from America! THIS is what these bloodthirsty psychopathically genocidal monsters are! I've never allowed profanity on this blog over 16 years and 90,000 posts, but oh I want to, I'm filled with a ferocious, hate filled rage at this horror! And YOU, Americans, hang your goddamned heads in shame and total disgrace because YOU paid for every bullet, all of it, and allow and support it continuing...
- CP, that's my opinion and I don't give a damn who doesn't like it!

"Stipendium peccati mors est," Israel.