Jeremiah Babe, 7/11/24
"Prepare For An Economic Crash Landing,
The FED Is Losing The Fight Against Inflation"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, July 11, 2024
"The Only Question..."
"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether
it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Musical Interlude: Soothing Relaxation, "Dance of Life"
Full screen recommended.
Soothing Relaxation, "Dance of Life"
Be kind to yourself, forget all the troubles
for a little while and enjoy this beautiful video...
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a mere 35 million light-years away, toward the constellation Leo. Relatively bright in planet Earth's sky, NGC 3521 is easily visible in small telescopes but often overlooked by amateur imagers in favor of other Leo spiral galaxies, like M66 and M65. It's hard to overlook in this colorful cosmic portrait, though. Spanning some 50,000 light-years the galaxy sports characteristic patchy, irregular spiral arms laced with dust, pink star forming regions, and clusters of young, blue stars.
Remarkably, this deep image also finds NGC 3521 embedded in gigantic bubble-like shells. The shells are likely tidal debris, streams of stars torn from satellite galaxies that have undergone mergers with NGC 3521 in the distant past."
"Humanity Today..."
"Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."
- Edward O. Wilson
Chet Raymo, “The Sea Grows Old In It”
“The Sea Grows Old In It”
by Chet Raymo
“The poet, like the electric [lightning] rod, must reach from a point nearer to the sky than all surrounding objects down to the earth, and down to the dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses. His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to be seen, and smelled and handled.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Ah, Mr. Emerson. This seems about as good a description of poetry as one is likely to find. I love the image. Not a hand reaching up to grasp the hand of Zeus, the hurler of bolts, but merely a pointed rod that reaches higher than any surrounding objects. A pen-point, scratching the firmament. Not a conductor reaching down to the earth, but deeper, into the wet inkpot of the soul.
Not lofty thoughts, airy philosophies, gnostic arcana. Rather, ideas that come wrapped in the stuff of the senses. Ideas that must be unwrapped the way you’d peel an orange, or pry open an oyster, or stir up from the bottom of a bowl of soup. The electric fire of the heavens captured and stored in the Leyden jar of physical self.
Take, for example, Marianne Moore’s “The Fish”, a poem that has been endlessly analyzed without ever giving up its secrets. Anyone who stands on that rocky shore with the poet, looking into the wave-washed chasm - the sea as fluid as breath, as hard as a chisel- takes away a lesson as profound as any one might learn in school, perhaps without being able to articulate exactly what the lesson is. The experience is simply there, to be seen, smelled, handled, in the weave and wave of animal bodies, in the intricate rhyme and syllabication of the poem. Truth- crow-blue, ink-bespattered, hatcheted, defiant.
I’d go further. I’d say that Emerson’s description of poetry can be equally applied to science, or to any human attempt to attract the spark of Zeus. One must lift one’s rod beyond the scratch and tumble of the everyday, while keeping its foot buried in the dark wet soil of lived experience.”
•
“The Fish”
“Wade through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave,
cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the sun,
split like spun glass,
move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices -
in and out, illuminating
The turquoise sea of bodies.
The water drives a wedge of iron through the iron edge of the cliff;
whereupon the stars, pink rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green lilies,
and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other.
All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice -
all the physical features of accident -
lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes,
these things stand out on it;
the chasm-side is dead.
Repeated evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive its youth.
The sea grows old in it."
- Marianne Moore
"The Reality Of Life..."
"Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth."
- Malcolm X
"Symbols Of The Collapse"
"Symbols Of The Collapse"
by Addison Wiggin
“A society is in decay, final or transitional,
when common sense really becomes uncommon.”
– G.K. Chesterton
"Early in the morning Wednesday, a random passerby in Fells Point witnessed a row home collapse under its own weight. Fells Point is a gentrified neighborhood in Baltimore. It's on the Patapsco River between the Inner Harbor and the Francis Scott Key Bridge that collapsed several weeks ago. We have a special interest in the neighborhood because we’ve lived there on four different occasions in our 30 year history with the city. At night, it’s kind of sketchy, but it’s also a fun place with bars, restaurants and live music.
The row-home that collapsed on Wednesday was originally built as one of hundred of thousands of tenement building for shipyard workers, maritime, factory, rail and infrastructure workers, many of them Polish, Italian, Greek, Irish and African American minority communities.
Baltimore City currently owns over 13,000 vacant buildings and another 20,000+ desolate urban lots. In a recent mayoral race, as is perennially true, what to do with these city properties and the neighborhoods around them plays a central role in policy debates.
The city is effectively bankrupt. The politicians, notoriously corrupt. Fells Point is one of the more fortunate neighborhoods, because it has retained an historically economic important nightlife community. Yet, the city is somehow responsible for miles of squalor without the resources to deal with them or any interest from the private development community. “White flight” has contributed to a declining population since the post-World War II era, seen across the nation in many large cities since the 1950s.
There are 311 post-industrial cities in the United States with a population greater than 100,000 people according to the U.S. Census, 38 with a population greater than 500,000 and 9 greater than a million. Each one has a problem with aging infrastructure that includes post-industrial housing. Many of these cities are left with the crime and infrastructure issues similar to Baltimore City.
If you don’t think America is already in a state of collapse, you’re either not paying attention, or living in one of the places fortunate enough not to decline first. Just one data point we stumbled on this week helps to explain why:
Proposed: Decline is here. And it’s getting uglier. Politicians either are unwilling to do anything about it. They can’t. Or are exploiting “social justice” issues for their own self-interest. Today, Michael Snyder shows the details on how the breakdown of authority is already underway in an increasingly larger part of the country. One of the places he mentions hits close to home to me – physically. That’s because it’s only 15 or so miles from a farm that’s been in the Wiggin family for 5 generations. To see that level of collapse so close to where we’ve lived in “quaint” New Hampshire is eye opening."
The Poet: Mary Oliver, "One"
"One"
"The mosquito is so small
it takes almost nothing to ruin it.
Each leaf, the same.
And the black ant, hurrying.
So many lives, so many fortunes!
Every morning, I walk softly and with forward glances
down to the ponds and through the pinewoods.
Mushrooms, even, have but a brief hour
before the slug creeps to the feast,
before the pine needles hustle down
under the bundles of harsh, beneficent rain.
How many, how many, how many
make up a world!
And then I think of that old idea: the singular
and the eternal.
One cup, in which everything is swirled
back to the color of the sea and sky.
Imagine it!
A shining cup, surely!
In the moment in which there is no wind
over your shoulder,
you stare down into it,
and there you are,
your own darling face, your own eyes.
And then the wind, not thinking of you, just passes by,
touching the ant, the mosquito, the leaf,
and you know what else!
How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you,
even your eyes, even your imagination."
~ Mary Oliver
"When I Am Old"
"When I Am Old"
Author Unknown
"When I am old… I will wear soft gray sweatshirts… and a bandana over my silver hair… and I will spend my social security checks on my dogs. I will sit in my house on my well-worn chair and listen to my dogs breathing. I will sneak out in the middle of a warm summer night and take my dogs for a run, if my old bones will allow… When people come to call, I will smile and nod as I show them my dogs… and talk of them and about them…the ones so beloved of the past and the ones so beloved of today… I will still work hard cleaning after them, mopping and feeding them and whispering their names in a soft loving way. I will wear the gleaming sweat on my throat, like a jewel, and I will be an embarrassment to all… especially my family… who have not yet found the peace in being free to have dogs as your best friends… These friends who always wait, at any hour, for your footfall… and eagerly jump to their feet out of a sound sleep, to greet you as if you are a God, with warm eyes full of adoring love and hope that you will always stay,
I’ll hug their big strong necks… I’ll kiss their dear sweet heads… and whisper in their very special company… I look in the mirror… and see I am getting old… this is the kind of person I am… and have always been. Loving dogs is easy, they are part of me. Please accept me for who I am. My dogs appreciate my presence in their lives… they love my presence in their lives… When I am old this will be important to me… you will understand when you are old, if you have dogs to love too."
Full screen recommended.
Alan Parsons Project, "Old And Wise"
Greg Hunter, "USAWatchdog.com Will Be on Hiatus for the Next Few Weeks"
"USAWatchdog.com Will Be on
Hiatus for the Next Few Weeks"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Since going online with USAWatchdog.com in August of 2009, we have never been off the air for any considerable time. Starting today and for the next few weeks, we will not be doing new content, but we will be posting comments. So, feel free to do some street reporting and trade information on the site. We will be tending to your comments. We will also be working on servers and improving our online security. We are attacked continuously, and we need to take the time to make improvements to keep the site viable and secure. So, feel free to comment, and remember to check out our sponsors listed below that help keep us on the air. We will be back in a few weeks delivering more great USAW content for the rest of 2024 that will be interesting and wild, to say the least."
"Your friend, brother and newsman,
Greg Hunter"
Adventures With Danno, "Massive Sales At Kroger!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 7/11/24
"Massive Sales At Kroger!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Kroger and are noticing some unbelievable sales going on. Groceries have been ridiculously overpriced, but we are seeing Kroger have some of the best deals we've seen in years! Shop with me at Kroger as we discover these great savings together!"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Why Your Favorite Restaurant is Closing - Businesses Are Doomed!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 7/11/24
"Why Your Favorite Restaurant is Closing -
Businesses Are Doomed!"
"Join me at the Orange County Zoo for a deep dive into why the commercial real estate debacle is more disastrous than ever. With businesses shifting to remote work, office buildings are bleeding money, and interest-only loans are coming due. The fallout? Restaurants, dry cleaners, and countless other businesses are getting crushed under the weight of this collapse."
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "The Most Massive Fraud In World History! People Are Being Destroyed!"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/11/24
"The Most Massive Fraud In World History!
People Are Being Destroyed!"
Comments here:
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
"Words In Pain: Letters On Life And Death"
"Words In Pain: Letters On Life And Death"
by Maria Popova
"Half a century before Frida Kahlo made her impassioned case for atheism as a supreme form of freedom and moral courage, before Robinson Jeffers insisted that the greatest spiritual calling lies in contributing to the world’s store of moral beauty, before Simone de Beauvoir looked back on her life to observe that “faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly [while] the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself,” a German-Jewish Englishwoman by the name of Olga Jacoby (August 15, 1874–May 5, 1913) — the young mother of four adopted children - took up the subject of living and dying without religion, with moral courage, with kindness, with radiant receptivity to beauty, in stunning letters to her pious physician, who had just given her a terminal diagnosis. These are more than letters - they are symphonies of thought, miniature manifestos for reason and humanism, poetic odes to the glory of living and the dignity of dying in full assent to reality.
First published anonymously by her husband in 1919 and hurled out of print by wartime want, the letters were discovered a century after their composition by the scholar Trevor Moore, who was so taken with them that he set about identifying their author. Drawing on the family dynamics unfolding in the letters and poring over the British census, he eventually uncovered Jacoby’s identity, tracked down her descendants, and teamed up with her great-granddaughter, Jocelyn Catty, to publish these forgotten treasures of thought and feeling as "Words in Pain: Letters on Life and Death" (public library).
In 1909, at age thirty-five, Jacoby was diagnosed with a terminal illness she never names in her letters. Perhaps she was never told - it was customary at the time, and would be for generations to come, for doctors to treat female patients as children and to withhold the reality of their own bodies from them. But she refers to it in her characteristic good-natured humor as a disease of having loved so hard as to have strained her heart.
With their extraordinary intellectual elegance and generosity of spirit, her letters constellate into a masterwork of reason argued with a literary artist’s splendor of expression. Early into the correspondence with her doctor, Jacoby lays out her existential credo: "We always fear the unknown. I am not a coward and do not fear death, which to me means nothing more than sleep, but I cannot become resigned to leave this beautiful world with all the treasures it holds for me and for everyone who knows how to understand and appreciate them… To leave a good example to those I love [is] my only understanding of immortality."
A year into her diagnosis, she magnifies the sentiment with feeling: "Whatever we cannot know let us simply and truthfully agree not to know, but no one must be expected to take for granted what reason refuses to admit. More and more to me this simplest of thoughts seems right: Live, live keenly, live fully; make ample use of every power that has been given us to use, to use for the good end. Blind yourself to nothing; look straight at sadness, loss, evil; but at the same time look with such intense delight at all that is good and noble that quite naturally the heart’s longing will be to help the glory to triumph, and that to have been a strong fighter in that cause will appear the only end worth achieving. The length of life does not depend on us, but as long as we can look back to no waste of time we can face the end with a clear conscience, with cheerful if somewhat tired eyes and ready for the deserved rest with no hope or anxiety for what may come. To me all the effort of man seems vain, and his ideal thrown ruthlessly to the ground by himself, when, after a life of free and joyful effort, he stoops to pick up a reward he does not deserve for having simply done his duty."
Emanating from her letters is evidence of how Jacoby lived her values - her reverence for beauty, her devotion to generosity - in the minutest details of her life. One day, perturbed by the fact that her doctor didn’t have his own volume of Shelley’s poems, she spent two hours hunting the West End of London for the perfect copy that “can be put in your pocket when you go on a lonely ramble amongst the mountains.” Triumphant, with the perfect edition in tow, she told her doctor: “I don’t think any man or woman who has once been happy can read some of his small pieces without feeling all aglow with the beauty of them.” A dying woman, fully alive by the braided life-strands of beauty, generosity, and poetry.
Without the forceful self-righteousness with which fundamentalists impose their views on others, she came to see the fear of death as “only a misunderstanding of Nature.” She writes:
"Not to be afraid when you are all alone is the only true way of being not afraid. Where does your courage come in, when you cannot find it in your own self but always have to grasp God morally?"
When her doctor insists that she must turn to “God” for salvation, Jacoby responds with an exquisite manifesto for what can best be described as the secular spirituality of humanism and the reverence of nature:
"My Dear Doctor,
Like you I believe in a higher power, but, unlike yours, mine is not a kind fatherly one. It is Nature, who with all its forces, beauties and necessary evils, rules our destinies according to its own irrevocable laws. I can love that power for the beauty it has brought into the world, and admire it for the strength that makes us understand how futile and useless it would be to appeal to it in prayer. But towards a kind and fatherly God, who, being almighty, prefers to leave us in misery, when by his mere wish he could obtain the same end without so much suffering, I feel a great revolt and bitterness. Nature makes us know that it cannot take into individual consideration the atoms we are, and for her I have no blame; no more than I could think of blaming you for having during your walks stepped on and killed many a worm (it was a pity the worm happened to be under your foot); but if during these walks your eyes were resting on the beauties of skies and trees, or your mind was solving some difficult problem, was that not a nobler occupation than had you walked eyes downwards, intent only on not killing.
I think that Nature is striving towards perfection and that each human being has the duty to help towards it by making his life a fit example for others and by awaking ideals which will be more nearly approached by coming generations. In this way life itself offers enough explanation for living; and believing our existence to finish with death, we naturally make the most of our opportunities… Unable to appeal to a God for help, we find ourselves dependent only on our own strong will - not to overcome misfortune, but to try to bear it as bravely as possible. Religion having for an end the more perfect and moral condition of humanity, I truly think that these ideas are as religious as any dogmatic ones."
With a parent- or teacher-like magnanimity, Jacoby extends extraordinary patience to her doctor. To his self-righteous and patronizing remark that he pities her children on account of her atheism, she responds with a humble, generous reflection on how she hopes her nonreligious morality and spirituality would sculpt her children’s character:
"I always feel that we, who are better off, are responsible for having let the poor get so low, and that it is duty, not charity, to help. Charles [her young son], the farmer that is to be, has promised always to keep a cow, to call it by my name, and let the milk of that cow go to the poor around his farm. Should he choose another profession, he will find that the idea of the cow can be worked differently. I hope he will follow my lead in living happy and dying content."
Jacoby takes particular issue with the idea of original sin, with which young minds are so ruthlessly branded and scarred under Christian dogma: "Why start an infant’s life with ideas of fear and sin? Let love be their only religion - a love they can understand and handle. With so many people hungering for love, why give so great a part up to Deity? Acknowledge, Doctor, if you had not had your good share of human love, a mother’s, a wife’s, and your children’s, you would not so well understand the other. A child, I think, is taught untruthfulness when you make him say that he loves God.
[…]Have you ever come across a baby whose eyes were not all innocence and inquiry? And from the first you crush that innocence with those terrible biblical words. Mind you, they are words only. A sincere man will never agree to them when it comes to his own children, and a generous heart must repel them as strongly when they apply to others."
She turns to another damaging aspect of religious dogma - its stunting of children’s natural curiosity about how the world works by keeping certain scientific truths from them or deliberately displacing those truths with mythic fictions: "As to children’s inquiries, they are often wrongly answered, and the higher the subject, the more you think yourself justified in lying to them. From these same children you expect in return truly felt love, good acts, truthfulness and a desire to learn… You absolutely cripple a child by not allowing him to think clearly on all subjects - and no dogmatic religion will stand thinking.
Jacoby proceeds to offer a lucid and luminous vision for what our moral and spiritual life could look like without religious delusion: "My idea is not a life without religion; it is a nobler religion I want. Of course, very good men have lived and are living, to whom your religion has been a help, but science is progressing daily, and in harmony with it our moral standard should be higher - high enough to do right simply because it is right. A religion that has helped mankind to get somewhat better should be resigned to let a still better one take its place. Like a growing child, humanity must outgrow its infancy, must stand alone one day and be able to stand straight without support.
In a sentiment our modern spiritual elder Parker Palmer would echo a century later in his lovely insistence that “wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life,” she adds: "To me a good man with his failings seems a better ideal than a perfect God. We feel nearer to him and nearer to the possibility of attaining his standard. This kind of ideal actually helps people to improve, and is therefore of more value to the world.
I do believe strongly in universal good, but not in individual good. As I ask for no help from God, I ask for no explanation from him of my sufferings. I just try to suffer the least possible, and still get a fair part of my aim in life - happiness. You see, I am not ashamed to say that to be happy seems to me a reason for living - as long as you don’t make others unhappy."
When her doctor condemns and insults her credo as a weakness, she responds with a passionate defense of what the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell termed our native “hunger of the mind,” which is the supreme strength of our species: "It is knowledge we want, the better and better understanding of magnificent Nature with its powerful laws that forces our soul to love, admire and submit. That is religion! My religion! How can you call it a weak and godless one?
[…]Science is turning on the light, but at every step forward dogmatic religion attempts to turn it out, and as it cannot succeed it puts blinkers on its followers, and tries to make them believe that to remove them would be sin. This is the only way in which I can understand their continual warning against knowledge."
Four years after her terminal diagnosis, as two world wars staked on religious ideology lay in wait for her children, after four savaging surgeries and a heart attack had left her in constant acute pain, the 38-year-old Olga Jacoby died by self-induced euthanasia, intent to “go to sleep with a good conscience,” a pioneer of what we today call the right-to-die movement - another fundamental human right stymied only by the legal residue of religiosity. Inscribed into her letters is the beautiful source-code of a moral and spiritual alternative to religion - a courageous case for the right to live by truth, beauty, and altruism rather than by dogma and delusion, the heart of which beats in a passage from a letter she penned in the dead of winter two years into her diagnosis:
"Charles may have to suffer from too tender a heart, but the world will be the richer for it, and because of that for his life.
[…]
Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give. Once given out love is set rolling for ever to amass more, resembling an avalanche by the irresistible force with which it sweeps aside all obstacles, but utterly unlike in its effect, for it brings happiness wherever it passes and lands destruction nowhere.
Complement the thoroughly inspiriting "Words in Pain" with Jacoby’s contemporary Alice James - William and Henry James’s brilliant younger sister - on how to live fully while dying, then revisit Tolstoy and Gandhi’s forgotten correspondence from the same era about love as humanity’s only real spiritual foundation."
Scott Ritter, "NATO Vs. Russia, Big War Has Begun"
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 7/10/24
"NATO Vs. Russia, Big War Has Begun"
Comments here:
"15 Cheap Foods People Can't Afford Anymore"
Epic Economist, 7/10/24
"15 Cheap Foods People Can't Afford Anymore"
"You’re not imagining it – it's much more expensive to stock up your fridge and pantry now than ever before. Even if you pick the cheapest options or purchase the same products as always, your final grocery bill is probably higher than it was a few months ago. And it's safe to say that the difference is much more pronounced when comparing to one or two years ago. In fact, before the pandemic hit, Americans were paying about 36% less for food. And even though official inflation numbers have been falling, there are many manifestations of the painful reality that the cost of living is rising, and food prices are one of them.
Not only we're paying more, but we're taking home less for our money. Many food producers are shrinking the size of their products because they realized they can't keep raising prices without experiencing a decline in sales. For that reason, these companies have started to sell a smaller amount of product for the same price, so that they can optimize profits without making consumers face sticker shock. Several items that used to be considered cheap have skyrocketed in price this year, becoming a luxury only a few can afford. Today, we listed some examples and the reason why these popular foods are getting out of the reach of many Americans.
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Jeremiah Babe, "WW3 Is Very Close, War Is Coming To America; Buying $200K Tiny Homes In A Texas Prison Camp"
Jeremiah Babe, 7/10/24
"WW3 Is Very Close, War Is Coming To America;
Buying $200K Tiny Homes In A Texas Prison Camp"
Comments here:
Judge Napolitano, "Extreme Fear in Israel - IDF Exhausted & Scared to Fight Hezbollah"
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano, 7/10/24
"Larry Johnson Exposes: Extreme Fear in Israel -
IDF Exhausted & Scared to Fight Hezbollah"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Matt Simons, "After The Landslide"
Full screen recommended.
Matt Simons, "After The Landslide"
Oh yeah, we're in the landslide alright...
"A Look to the Heavens"
"These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars. The colors in this remarkably deep composite image clearly show the star forming galaxies with a blue tint and galaxies with older stellar populations with a yellowish cast.
The sharp picture spans about 3/4 degree across the cluster center, corresponding to over 6 million light-years at the cluster's estimated distance. Diffraction spikes around brighter foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy are produced by the imaging telescope's mirror support vanes. In the cosmic vista many galaxies seem to be colliding or merging while others seem distorted - clear evidence that cluster galaxies commonly interact. In fact, the Hercules Cluster itself may be seen as the result of ongoing mergers of smaller galaxy clusters and is thought to be similar to young galaxy clusters in the much more distant, early Universe. "
o
Full screen recommended.
"The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D"
o
A Universe of 2 Trillion Galaxies"
"In 2016, a study published in The Astrophysical Journal and led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham using 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope concluded that there are more than two trillion galaxies in the observable universe."
o
"In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three billion Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, 2 trillion galaxies like this. And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us."
- "Dr. Leonard McCoy"
"What to Say When You Meet the Angel of Death at a Party"
"What to Say When You Meet
the Angel of Death at a Party"
by Kate Bowler
"Every 90 days I lie in a whirling CT machine, dye coursing through my veins, and the doctors look to see whether the tumors in my liver are growing. If they are not, the doctors smile and schedule another scan. The rhythm has been the same since my doctors told me I had stage IV colon cancer two and a half years ago. I live for three months, take a deep breath and hope to start over again. I will probably do this for the rest of my life. Whatever that means.
When my scan is over, I need to make clear to my friends and my family that though I pray to be declared cured, I must be grateful. I have three more months of life. Hallelujah. So I try to put the news in a little Facebook post, that mix of sun and cloud. I am trying to clear the linguistic hurdles that show up on my chart. Noncurative. Stage IV. I want to communicate that I am hoping for a continued durable remission in the face of no perfect cure, but the comments section is a blurry mess of, "You kicked cancer's butt! " and "God bless you in your preparations. "
It feels impossible to transmit the kernel of truth. I am not dying. I am not terminal. I am keeping vigil in the place of almost death. I stand in the in-between where everyone must pass, but so few can remain.
I was recently at a party in a head-to-toe Tonya Harding costume, my blond wig in a perfect French braid, and a woman I know spotted me from across the dance floor. "I guess you're not dying! " she yelled over the music, and everyone stopped to stare at me. I'm working on it! " I yelled back, after briefly reconsidering my commitment to pacifism.
We all harbor the knowledge, however covertly, that we're going to die, but when it comes to small talk, I am the angel of death. I have seen people try to swallow their own tongue after uttering the simple words, "How are you?" I watch loved ones devolve into stammering good wishes and then devastating looks of pity. I can see how easily a well-meaning but ill-placed suggestion makes them want to throw themselves into oncoming traffic.
A friend came back from Australia with a year's worth of adventures to tell and ended with a breathless, "You have to go there sometime! " He lapsed into silence, seeming to remember at that very moment that I was in the hospital. And I didn't know how to say that the future was like a language I didn't speak anymore.
Most people I talk with succumb immediately to a swift death by free association. I remind them of something horrible and suddenly they are using words like pustules at my child's fourth-birthday party. They might be reminded of an aunt, a neighbor or a cousin's friend. No matter how distant the connection, all the excruciating particularities of this person's misfortune will be excavated.
This is not comforting. But I remind myself to pay attention because some people give you their heartbreak like a gift. It was a month or so into my grueling chemotherapy regimen when my favorite nurse sat down next to me at the cancer clinic and said softly: "I've been meaning to tell you. I lost a baby." The way she said "baby," with the lightest touch, made me understand. She had nurtured a spark of life in her body and held that child in her arms, and somewhere along the way she had been forced to bury that piece of herself in the ground. I might have known by the way she smoothed all my frayed emotions and never pried for details about my illness. She knew what it was like to keep marching long after the world had ended.
What does the suffering person really want? How can you navigate the waters left churning in the wake of tragedy? I find that the people least likely to know the answer to these questions can be lumped into three categories: minimizers, teachers and solvers.
The minimizers are those who think I shouldn/t be so upset because the significance of my illness is relative. These people are very easy to spot because most of their sentences begin with, "Well, at least.." Minimizers often want to make sure that suffering people are truly deserving before doling out compassion.
My sister was on a plane from Toronto to visit me in the hospital and told her seatmate why she was traveling. Then, as she wondered when she had signed up to be a contestant in the calamity Olympics, the stranger explained that my cancer was vastly preferable to life during the Iranian revolution.
Some people minimize spiritually by reminding me that cosmically, death isn't the ultimate end. It doesn't matter, in the end, whether we are here or there. It's all the same, said a woman in the prime of her youth. She emailed this message to me with a lot of praying-hand emoticons. I am a professor at a Christian seminary, so a lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home before me. Maybe now?
Atheists can be equally bossy by demanding that I immediately give up any search for meaning. One told me that my faith was holding me hostage to an inscrutable God, that I should let go of this theological guesswork and realize that we are living in a neutral universe. But the message is the same: Stop complaining and accept the world as it is.
The second exhausting type of response comes from the teachers, who focus on how this experience is supposed to be an education in mind, body and spirit. "I hope you have a Job experience", one man said bluntly. I can't think of anything worse to wish on someone. God allowed Satan to rob Job of everything, including his children's lives. Do I need to lose something more to learn God's character? Sometimes I want every know-it-all to send me a note when they face the grisly specter of death, and I'll send them a poster of a koala that says, "Hang in there! "
The hardest lessons come from the solutions people, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself. There is always a nutritional supplement, Bible verse or mental process I have not adequately tried. "Keep smiling! Your attitude determines your destiny! " said a stranger named Jane in an email, having heard my news somewhere, and I was immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.
There is a trite cruelty in the logic of the perfectly certain. Those people are not simply trying to give me something. They are tallying up the sum of my life - looking for clues, sometimes for answers - for the purpose of pronouncing a verdict. But I am not on trial. To so many people, I am no longer just myself. I am a reminder of a thought that is difficult for the rational brain to accept: that the elements that constitute our bodies might fail at any moment. When I originally got my diagnosis at age 35, all I could think to say was, "But I have a son." It was the best argument I had. I can't end. This world can't end. It had just begun.
A tragedy is like a fault line. A life is split into a before and an after, and most of the time, the before was better. Few people will let you admit that out loud. Sometimes those who love you best will skip that first horrible step of saying: "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry this is happening to you. " Hope may prevent them from acknowledging how much has already been lost. But acknowledgment is also a mercy. It can be a smile or a simple, "Oh, hon, what a year you've had. " It does not ask anything from me but makes a little space for me to stand there in that moment. Without it, I often feel like I am starring in a reality program about a woman who gets cancer and is very cheerful about it.
After acknowledgment must come love. This part is tricky because when friends and acquaintances begin pouring out praise, it can sound a little too much like a eulogy. I've had more than one kindly letter written about me in the past tense, when I need to be told who I might yet become.
But the impulse to offer encouragement is a perfect one. There is tremendous power in touch, in gifts and in affirmations when everything you knew about yourself might not be true anymore. I am a professor, but will I ever teach again? I'm a mom, but for how long? A friend knits me socks and another drops off cookies, and still another writes a funny email or takes me to a concert. These seemingly small efforts are anchors that hold me to the present, that keep me from floating away on thoughts of an unknown future. They say to me, like my sister Maria did on one very bad day: "Yes, the world is changed, dear heart, but do not be afraid. You are loved, you are loved. You will not disappear. I am here. "
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"Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be."
- Orson Scott Card
The Poet: Robert Bly, "Things to Think"
"Things to Think"
"Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.
When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die."
- Robert Bly, “Morning Poems”
"Denzel Washington's Life Advice Will Leave You Speechless"
Full screen recommended.
"Denzel Washington's Life Advice
Will Leave You Speechless"
"Denzel Washington shares his greatest wisdoms, telling us his life story, and journey to becoming the man he is today. This Powerful Motivational Speech to a graduating class in 2020 will change your future and leave you speechless! Denzel Hayes Washington Jr. is an American actor, director, and producer. He has been described as an actor who reconfigured "the concept of classic movie stardom", associating with characters defined by their grace, dignity, humanity, and inner strength."
"Hope In a Time of Hopelessness"
"Hope In a Time of Hopelessness"
by Washingtons Blog
"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage;
anger at the way things are, and courage
to see that they do not remain the way they are."
- Augustine of Hippo
"Several long-time activists have told me recently they are overwhelmed, worried, and think that we may be losing the struggle. One very smart friend asked me if there is any basis for hope.
Hope is an act of will, not a passive mood. Admittedly, things are easier when circumstances bring hope to us, and we can just receive the hopeful and inspiring news. But if we care about winning, we have to be able to decide to have hope even when outer circumstances aren't so positive.
I have children who are counting on me to leave them with a reasonably safe and sane planet. As I've said elsewhere, I care too much about my kids and my freedom to be afraid. I care enough about them that it gets my heart beating, connects me to something bigger than myself, and that gives me courage, even when the chips are down.
If I allowed myself to lose hope about exposing falsehoods, about protecting our freedom and building a hopeful future, I would be dropping the ball for my kids. I would be condemning them to a potentially very grey world where bigger and worse things may happen, where their liberties and joys are wholly stripped away, where every ounce of vitality is beholden to joyless and useless tasks.
Many of us may be motivated by other things besides kids, and only you can know what that is. But we each must dig down deep, and connect with our most powerful motivations to win the struggle for freedom and truth.
I don't know about you, but I don't have the luxury of giving up hope. When I get depressed, overwhelmed or exhausted by the stunning acts of savagery, treason, and disinformation carried out by the imperialists, or the willful ignorance of far too many Americans, I will myself into finding some reason to have hope. Because the struggle for life and liberty is too important for me to give up."
Sadly this blog has been deleted...
"Living Paycheck To Paycheck Statistics 2024" (Excerpt)
"Living Paycheck To Paycheck Statistics 2024"
By Emily Batdorf
Excerpt: "As living expenses in the U.S. continue to rise and wages struggle to keep up, it’s unsurprising that Americans of all generations are having a hard time financially. For many, this means living paycheck to paycheck. But what does it really mean to live paycheck to paycheck, and what underlying factors are driving this trend?
The term “living paycheck to paycheck” gets thrown around a lot when talking about money. But what does it mean? For the purposes of this survey, living paycheck to paycheck describes a financial scenario in which an individual or family’s income barely covers essential living expenses like housing, utilities, groceries and transportation. One missed paycheck would put someone living paycheck to paycheck in a difficult spot. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, it’s difficult or impossible to save, let alone invest. This makes you even more vulnerable in times of emergency or lost income.
How Many Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck? A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses. Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or - even more concerning - reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%)."
Full article here:
"They Don't Always Do That..."
"When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once. They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford. They are saying, less obviously, that their present wants are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty. But in making that bargain they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they'll figure it out. They don't always do that."
- Michael Lewis, "Boomerang"
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