"Life Is A Question, You Are The Answer: Ursula K. Le Guin On Time, Life And Meaning"

"Life Is A Question, You Are The Answer: 

Ursula K. Le Guin On Time, Life And Meaning"

The mind that watches itself transforms.

by Postanly Weekly

"Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated fantasy and science fiction authors. She won many awards, including a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Her body of work (dozens of novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and plays) explore the themes of time, life and meaning with an acute sensitivity and verbal brilliance that reveal a deep understanding of human nature.

She was prolific. Le Guin wrote 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. Le Guin’s ability to build fully realized worlds is one key to her success as a writer. These worlds are so fully realized that readers are easily transported there due to their compelling nature.

Another important factor is Le Guin’s willingness to experiment. She never stuck with any one genre for too long, instead constantly exploring new territory and building on previous successes. She was also one of the first writers to explore themes of gender and feminism in science fiction. In her work, she often used her childhood experiences to explore human nature and the roles we play as humans.

Ursula K. Le Guin is best known for her sci-fi book, “The Hainish Cycle”, which is considered one of the most important works of science fiction literature.

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end,” she once said. Le Guin’s work is profoundly scientific and philosophical at the same time and often deals with big questions about meaning and life.

Few writers have captured the human experience more than Ursula K. Le Guin. In her writing, you can find her reflecting on themes such as time, life and meaning in a way few other authors manage. She explains through her brilliant writing that you can transform your life from one full of busyness and obligation into one centered on fulfilling your purpose and leveraging every minute of your existence.

Time is a crucial part of the human experience. It is the key to understanding our world, our history, and ourselves. Time is what separates one moment from another; it is what connects them; it is what happens now; it is what will happen later; it is the sum total of history and what is yet to happen.

“The thing about working with time, instead of against it, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts,” Ursula K. Le Guin said.

We’ve become so accustomed to rushing through life that even a passing thought can feel like we’re being left behind. As a result, we’ve come to expect things to happen immediately and resent any delays that might cause us frustration or boredom. A life spent rushing through time can leave us feeling directionless and lost, seeking answers where there may be none.

Life is a question; you are the answer: “We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn’t an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.” - Ursula K. Le Guin. “The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself,” she observed. Le Guin’s works explore the conditions necessary for people to flourish, the costs of keeping such conditions constant, and what it means to be fully alive.

Anytime you find yourself facing a challenge or a choice, it is important to ask yourself some key questions: What do I want? What’s my goal? What do I value? How do I make the most my finite time? Why am I doing this in the first place? How do my present experiences help me explore myself?

These questions aren’t just tackled in her fiction; Le Guin was also interested in how we experience time and how this experience affects our sense of self, relationships with others, and ideas about purpose and meaning. She is one of the most influential authors in science fiction history because she can illuminate universal truths by exploring specific circumstances or events within broader narratives. In other words, she makes readers aware that these universal questions exist by exploring their implications with empathy and precision.

As we change and grow, so should our lives and the meaning we find in them. To thrive, we need to accept that everything changes over time and not get too attached to the idea of a permanent self or single life path. “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next,” Ursula K. Le Guin observed.

Meaning can be found in the present moment as much as in anticipating a future full of promise and in recognizing death’s finality. Enjoy the present and the suffering that comes with it. “The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means,” she asks. “If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home,” Le Guin wrote in "The Dispossessed."

Whether through art and literature or personal experience, Le Guin reminds us that no matter how strange or hard times may seem - the potential for something better lies within us all. The freedom to explore who you truly are is deeply liberating. There’s more to your life than you can ever imagine. “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people,” she writes.

It’s your duty to explore your existence as deeply as possible without fear or restrictions. Don’t build walls - pursue your true north to find meaning. Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive."

- https://postanly.substack.com/

"Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation"

"Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System:

The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation"

by Maria Popova

“We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich wrote in framing her superb definition of honorable human relationships. It is a cruelty of life that, along the way, people who once appeared fitted to the task crumble in character when the going gets hard in that natural way hardship has of visiting all human lives.

When relationships collapse under the weight of life, the crash is not merely psychological but physiological - something less and less surprising as we learn more and more about consciousness as a full-body phenomenon beyond the brain. A quarter century ago, the pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg began demonstrating how relationships affect our immune system. But there is no system they impact more profoundly than the limbic: our neurophysiological command center of emotion - something psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explore throughout their revelatory book "A General Theory of Love" (public library), which also gave us their insight into music, the neural harmonics of emotion, and how love recomposes the brain.

The profound disruption of relationship rupture, they observe, is related to our earliest attachments and the way our system processes separation from our primary caregivers - a primal response not singular to the human animal:

"Take a puppy away from his mother, place him alone in a wicker pen, and you will witness the universal mammalian reaction to the rupture of an attachment bond - a reflection of the limbic architecture mammals share. Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair.

A lone puppy first enters the protest phase. He paces tirelessly, scanning his surroundings from all vantage points, barking, scratching vainly at the floor. He makes energetic and abortive attempts at scaling the walls of his prison, tumbling into a heap with each failure. He lets out a piteous whine, high-pitched and grating. Every aspect of his behavior broadcasts his distress, the same discomfort that all social mammals show when deprived of those to whom they are attached. Even young rats evidence protest: when their mother is absent they emit nonstop ultrasonic cries, a plaintive chorus inaudible to our dull ape ears."

Behaviorally and psychologically, the despair phase begins when fretfulness, which can manifest as anxiety in humans, collapses into lethargy - a condition that often accompanies depression. But abrupt and prolonged separation produces something much more than psychological havoc - it unleashes a full-system somatic shock. Various studies have demonstrated that cardiovascular function, hormone levels, and immune response are all disrupted. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon capture the result unambiguously:

"Relationship rupture is a severe bodily strain… Prolonged separation affects more than feelings. A number of somatic parameters go haywire in despair. Because separation deranges the body, losing relationships can cause physical illness. But harrowing as this reality of intimacy and its ruptures may be, it also intimates something wonderfully assuring in its mirror-image - just like painful relationships can so dysregulate us, healthy relationships can regulate us and recalibrate our limbic system, forged in our earliest attachments.

The solution to the eternal riddle of trust emerges as both banal and profound - simply the practice of continually refining our discernment about character and cultivating intimate relationships of the kind life’s hard edges cannot rupture, with people who are the human equivalent not of poison but of medicine, and endeavoring to become such people ourselves for the emotional ecosystems of those we love."

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon write: "A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them. This might sound simple, almost simplistic, but it is one of the most difficult and redemptive arts of living - for, lest we forget, “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”

Complement with Alain de Botton on the psychological Möbius strip that keeps us in unhealthy relationships (and how to break it) and David Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak, then revisit Hannah Arendt on what forgiveness really means."

- https://mailchi.mp/

Musical Interlude: Michael Franti, "Hey World (Don't Give Up)"

Full screen recommended.

Michael Franti, "Hey World (Don't Give Up)"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"A bright spiral galaxy of the northern sky, Messier 63 is about 25 million light-years distant in the loyal constellation Canes Venatici. Also cataloged as NGC 5055, the majestic island universe is nearly 100,000 light-years across, about the size of our own Milky Way. Known by the popular moniker, The Sunflower Galaxy, M63 sports a bright yellowish core and sweeping blue spiral arms, streaked with cosmic dust lanes and dotted with pink star forming regions. 

 Click image for larger size.

This deep exposure also reveals an enormous but dim arc extending far into the halo above the brighter galactic plane. A collaboration of professional and amateur astronomers has shown the arc to be consistent with the stellar stream from a smaller satellite galaxy, tidally disrupted as it merged with M63 during the last 5 billion years. Their discovery is part of an increasing body of evidence that the growth of large spirals by cannibalizing smaller galaxies is commonplace in the nearby Universe."

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100911.html

o

"Why Do We Look to the Stars?"

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

For as long as there has been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."

- Carl Sagan

Chet Raymo, “The Restless Heart”

“The Restless Heart”

by Chet Raymo

“In ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, Rainer Maria Rilke writes: "We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue." To which I would add, let us trust the gifts that nature has given us- curiosity, attention, reason- and if our personal lives are destined for oblivion, then know that we have made of ordinary things something grander and more enduring. We are the transformers. We are bestowers of praise. "Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them," Rilke advises the restless young poet, echoing the great Catholic mystics: "And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." 

Is it enough? In the long history of humanity, no hope has been so enduring as personal immortality. At every time and in every place men and women have assumed they will live forever. It is our solace, our balm for the restless heart. Even Neanderthals, it seems, placed flowers in the graves of their dead, presumably to grace the afterlife.

But the lesson of modern biology is clear: Death is final. Do we lapse then into morbidity? Do we rage, rage against the dying of the light? We have art. We have science. Even a rhyme can thumb its nose at death, says Seamus Heaney. We can each of us try to live our lives as poetry, to add to the world an element of graciousness that is not strictly necessary, to leave behind a spoor of rhymes that marks our passage on the Earth. 

Yes, the spirit is flesh, but the spirit is more than flesh. The spirit is flesh in interaction with a universe of almost unimaginable grandeur and complexity. The windows of the flesh are thrown open to the world. The spirit is a wind of awareness, a pool stirred by angels."

Some part of the spirit will linger after the flesh is gone, as memories in other flesh, as words, music, science, rhymes- as a world nudged slightly in its pell-mell course towards good or bad. But the self is mortal: This is the existential fact that agitates the restless heart. "We are biological and our souls cannot fly free," writes Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, summarizing what science has taught us about ourselves. He adds: "This is the essential first hypothesis for any consideration of the human condition.”

-http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

Free Download: Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only 

waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

 Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, 

something helpless that wants our love.”

Freely download “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke here:

- https://kbachuntitled.files.wordpress.com/

- http://www.carrothers.com/rilke8.htm

"The Rules"

 

"Twilight of the Psychopaths"

 

"Twilight of the Psychopaths"
by Dr. Kevin Barrett

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it." - John Lennon

"When Gandhi was asked his opinion of Western civilization he said it would be a good idea. But that oft-cited quote is misleading, assuming as it does that civilization is an unmitigated blessing. Civilized people, we are told, live peacefully and cooperatively with their fellows, sharing the necessary labour in order to obtain the leisure to develop arts and sciences. And while that would be a good idea, it is not a good description of what has been going on in the so-called advanced cultures during the past 8,000 years. Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been based on slavery and "warfare." Incidentally, the latter term is a euphemism for mass murder.

Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization - the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers- was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non- psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies - especially military hierarchies. Military institutions are tailor-made for psychopathic killers. The 5% or so of human males who feel no remorse about killing their fellow human beings make the best soldiers. And the 95% who are extremely reluctant to kill make terrible soldiers - unless they are brainwashed with highly sophisticated modern techniques that turn them (temporarily it is hoped) into functional psychopaths.

In "On Killing", Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (full text at the link) has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species. The true "Revolution in Military Affairs" was not Donald Rumsfeld's move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall's discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons: "Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges."

Marshall's discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers - the 5% who are natural- born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitators- did almost all the killing. Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity's genetic endowment!)

The implication, too frightening for even the likes of Marshall and Grossman to fully digest, was that the norms for soldiers' behavior in battle had been set by psychopaths. That meant that psychopaths were in control of the military as an institution. Worse, it meant that psychopaths were in control of society's perception of military affairs. Evidently, psychopaths exercised an enormous amount of power in seemingly sane, normal society.

How could that be? In "Political Ponerology," Andrzej Lobaczewski explains that clinical psychopaths enjoy advantages even in non-violent competitions to climb the ranks of social hierarchies. Because they can lie without remorse (and without the telltale physiological stress that is measured by lie detector tests) psychopaths can always say whatever is necessary to get what they want. In court, for example, psychopaths can tell extreme bald-faced lies in a plausible manner, while their sane opponents are handicapped by an emotional predisposition to remain within hailing distance of the truth. Too often, the judge or jury imagines that the truth must be somewhere in the middle, and then issues decisions that benefit the psychopath. As with judges and juries, so too with those charged with decisions concerning who to promote and who not to promote in corporate, military and governmental hierarchies. The result is that all hierarchies inevitably become top-heavy with psychopaths.

So-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom deserve the pejorative connotation of that much-abused term, often imagine that secret societies of Jews, Jesuits, bankers, communists, Bilderbergers, Muslim extremists, papists, and so on, are secretly controlling history, doing dastardly deeds, and/or threatening to take over the world. As a leading "conspiracy theorist" according to Wikipedia, I feel eminently qualified to offer an alternative conspiracy theory which, like the alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11, is both simpler and more accurate than the prevailing wisdom: The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.

Behind the apparent insanity of contemporary history, is the actual insanity of psychopaths fighting to preserve their disproportionate power. And as that power grows ever-more-threatened, the psychopaths grow ever-more-desperate. We are witnessing the apotheosis of the overworld- the criminal syndicate or overlapping set of syndicates that lurks above ordinary society and law just as the underworld lurks below it. In 9/11 and the 9/11 wars, we are seeing the final desperate power-grab or "endgame" of brutal, cunning gangs of CIA drug-runners and President-killers; money-laundering international bankers and their hit-men, economic and otherwise; corrupt military contractors and gung-ho generals; corporate predators and their political enablers; brainwashers and mind-rapists euphemistically known as psy-ops experts and PR specialists-in short, the whole sick crew of certifiable psychopaths running our so- called civilization. And they are running scared. It was their terror of losing control that they projected onto the rest of us by blowing up the Twin Towers and inciting temporary psychopathic terror-rage in the American public.

Why does the pathocracy fear it is losing control? Because it is threatened by the spread of knowledge. The greatest fear of any psychopath is of being found out. As George H. W. Bush said to journalist Sarah McClendon, December 1992, "If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us." His statement to McClendon should be taken seriously.

Psychopaths go through life knowing that they are completely different from other people. They quickly learn to hide their lack of empathy, while carefully studying others' emotions so as to mimic normalcy while cold-bloodedly manipulating the normals. This manipulation of shame has the added benefit of making psychopathic organizations effectively invisible to normal society. Despite easily available media reports, American voters in 2004 simply refused to see that the two major-party presidential candidates had lain naked in a coffin masturbating in front of older Bonesmen in order to gain admission to "Skull and Bones" and thus become members of the criminal overworld. 

Likewise, many Americans have long refused to see that hawkish elements of the overworld, operating through the CIA, had obviously been the murderers of JFK, MLK, RFK, JFK Jr., Malcolm X, ChÈ, AllendÈ, Wellstone, Lumumba, Aguilera, Diem, and countless other relatively non-psychopathic leaders. They refuse to see the continuing murders of millions of people around the world in what amounts to an American holocaust. They refuse to see the evidence that the psychopaths' guilds running America's most powerful institutions use the most horrific forms of sexualized abuse imaginable to induce multiple-personality-disorder in child victims, then use the resulting mind-control slaves as disposable drug-runners, prostitutes, Manchurian candidates, and even diplomatic envoys. And of course they refuse to see that 9/11 was a transparently obvious inside job, and that their own psychopath-dominated military-intelligence apparatus is behind almost every major terrorist outrage of recent decades.

All of this psychopathic behavior at the top of the social hierarchy is simply too shameful for ordinary people to see, so they avert their gaze, just as wives of husbands who are sexually abusing their children sometimes refuse to see what is happening in plain view. If deep, deep denial were a river in Egypt, American citizens' willful blindness would be more like the Marianas Trench.

Truly, we are witnessing the twilight of the psychopaths. Whether in their death throes they succeed in pulling down the curtain of eternal night on all of us, or whether we resist them and survive to see the dawn of a civilization worthy of the name, is the great decision in which all of us others, however humbly, are now participating.”

- http://rense.com/general83/twi.htm

•

About the writer: Dr. Kevin Barrett, co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance for 9/11 Truth, has taught English, French, Arabic, American Civilization, Humanities, African Literature, Folklore, and Islam at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. Barrett became a 9/11 truth activist in 2004 after reading David Griffin's "The New Pearl Harbor" and conducting follow-up research that convinced him Griffin had accurately summarized evidence indicating 9/11 was an inside job.

Freely Download "The New Pearl Harbor", from the official CIA website, here:

- https://www.cia.gov/library/

The Daily "Near You?"

La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"There Comes A Time..."

"I make no bones about being partisan for my country. I also feel no shame whatever because of it. I absolutely disagree that "great thinkers don't let that affect the thoughts". I would say exactly the opposite: someone who refuses to let love-of-country affect their thoughts is a moral cripple irrespective of their intellectual prowess. I can look dispassionately at the situation, and I have done so repeatedly. But I will never forget which nation I love and support.

We Americans have a saying: “It’s more important what you stand for than who you stand with.” I do not rely upon peer opinion to decide what is right and what is wrong. I make those decisions for myself, and even if I discover that every other human alive chose differently, that doesn’t mean I was wrong.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to choose sides. I have chosen my side. I am comfortable with my decision. I do not think everyone on my side is a saint, but I know that those on the other side are much, much worse.

Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows. That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and “great thinking”. It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice.”

- Steven Den Beste

○

“Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and unexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.”

- Mark Twain

"Holy $%#^! Biden's Top Secret Plan For Global Nuclear War Leaked! Day X Approaches In Middle East!"

Canadian Prepper, AM 8/21/24

"Holy $%#^! Biden's Top Secret Plan For Global Nuclear 

War Leaked! Day X Approaches In Middle East!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "Auto Industry Collapse - A Crisis Unfolds"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, AM 8/21/24

"Auto Industry Collapse - A Crisis Unfolds"

"Join me as we dive deep into the unfolding crisis in the automotive world. From cyber attacks crippling dealerships to Stellantis and GM facing massive challenges, the industry is in turmoil. Revelations about the EV market's struggles and shocking environmental infractions add to the chaos. The once thriving auto industry is a shell of what it once was."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly PM 8/21/24

"Is This The End for Wells Fargo?"

"Wells Fargo's shocking exit from commercial real estate has everyone talking, and today, I'm diving deep into what this means for the economy. From the massive $725 million handover to Trimont to builders' struggles in Texas and Florida, we're connecting the dots. Are you ready for the truth?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Warning! Forget About A Stock Market Crash! Something Much Bigger Is Coming!"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/21/24

"Warning! Forget About A Stock Market Crash!

 Something Much Bigger Is Coming!"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Vitae Summa Brevis"

"Vitae Summa Brevis"

"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses;

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream."

- Ernest Dowson

 "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam" 

is a quotation from Horace's "First Book of Odes": 

 "The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes."

"How It Really Can Be"

Full screen recommended.

Pet Shop Boys, "Numb"

"Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad"

"Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know

What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad"

by Edward Curtin

“With a click, with a shock

Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch

Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . . “

– “Something’s Coming,” lyrics by S. Sondheim, 

music by L. Bernstein – "West Side Story"

Shock should not be the word, but when World War III breaks fully loose many who are now sleeping will be shocked. The war has already started, but it’s full fury and devastation are just around the corner. When it does, Tony’s singular fate in West Side Story will be the fate of untold millions. It is a Greek tragedy brought on by the terrible hubris of the United States, its NATO accomplices, and the genocidal state of Israel and the Zionist terrorists who run it.

Tony felt a miracle was due, but it didn’t come true for him except to briefly love Maria and then get killed as result of a false report, and only a miracle will now save the world from the cataclysm that is on the way, whether it is initiated by intent, a false report, an accident, or the game of nuclear chicken played once too often.

Let us hope but not be naïve. The signs all point in one direction. The gun on the wall in the first act of this tragic play is primed to go off in the final one. Every effort to avoid this terrible fate by seeking peace and not war has been rejected by the U.S. and its equally insane allies. Every so-called red line laid down by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, and their allies has been violated with impunity and blatant arrogance. But impunity has its limits and the dark Furies of vengeance will have their day.

“It is the dead, not the living,” said Antigone, “who make the longest demands.” Their ghostly voices cry out to be avenged.

I wish I were not compelled by conscience to write this, but it seems clearly evident to me that we stand on the edge of an abyss. The fate of the world rests in the hands of leaders who are clearly psychotic and who harbor death wishes. It’s not terribly complex. Netanyahu and Biden are two of them. Yes, like other mass killers, I think they love their children and give their dogs biscuits to eat. But yes, they also are so corrupted in their souls that they relish war and the sense of false power and prestige it brings them. They gladly kill other people’s children. They can defend themselves many times over, offer all kinds of excuses, but the facts speak otherwise. This is hard for regular people to accept.

The great American writer who lived in exile in France for so many years and who was born 100 years ago this month, James Baldwin, wrote an essay – “The Creative Process” – in which he addressed the issue of how becoming a normal member of society dulls one to the shadow side of personal and social truths. He wrote: "And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history." And lie and suppress we still do today.

Imagine, if you will, that Mexico has invaded Texas with the full support of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments. Their weapons are supplied by these countries and their drone and missile attacks on the U.S. are coordinated by Russian technology. The Seven Mile Bridge in Florida has been attacked. The U.S. Mexican border is dotted with Russian troops on bases with nuclear missiles aimed at U.S. cities.

It’s not hard to do. That is a small analogy to what the U.S./NATO is doing to Russia. Do you think the United States would not respond with great force? Do you think it would not feel threatened with nuclear annihilation? How do you think it would respond?

The U.S/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is accelerating by the day. The current Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has upped the ante dramatically. After denying it knew in advance of this Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the demented U.S. President Joseph Biden said the other day when asked about the fighting in Kursk, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days. And it’s - it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin. And we’ve been in direct contact - constant contact with - with the Ukrainians.” Do you think Kamala Harris was kept in the dark?

Now how do you think the Russians are going to respond? How many red lines will they allow the U.S. to cross without massive retaliation? And what kind of retaliation?

Switch then to the Middle East where the Iranians and their allies are preparing to retaliate to Israel’s attacks on their soil. No one knows when but it seems soon. Something is coming and it won’t be pretty. Will it then ignite a massive war in the region with the U.S. and Israel pitted against the region? Will nuclear weapons be used? Will the wars in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East join into what will be called WW III?

While the U.S. continues to massively arm Israel, Russia is arming its ally Iran and likely training them in the use of those weapons as the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The stage is set. We enter the final act. Natanyahu wants and needs war to survive. So he thinks. Psychotic killers always do. The signs all point in one direction. No one should be shocked if the worst comes to pass. “Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch.” If you have time."

- https://www.lewrockwell.com/

o

"There are a multitude of fuses affixed to dozens of powder-kegs and little kids with matches are on the loose. I don’t know which of the fuses will be lit and which powder-keg will blow, but someone is bound to do something stupid, and then all hell will break loose. It could happen at any time. One military miscue. One assassination. One violent act that stirs the world. And the dominoes will topple, setting off fireworks not seen on this planet since 1939 – 1945. I can see it all very clearly." - Jim Quinn

"What Milton Friedman Said 5 Decades Ago About Government Spending Still Holds True Today" (Excerpt)

"What Milton Friedman Said 5 Decades Ago 

About Government Spending Still Holds True Today"

By John Robson

Excerpt: "A friend’s mother was fond of saying there’s no good way to do a bad thing, and no bad time to do a good one. It’s true of public policy as of life generally, which is why both the public and politicians should talk more about principles and less about motives or tactics. And just as I was wrestling with applying this maxim to the current fiscal mess, someone Xed the classic Milton Friedman line to “Keep your eye on how much the Government is spending, because that is the true tax.” I’m not sure when Friedman said it. But he died in 2006 aged 94, and the clip shows him in middle age, so it was around half a century back. We should have listened, because it has applied consistently since and still does.

In fact, I’d just read a column by my former colleague Randall Denley about an administration of ostensibly conservative inclinations touting its “prudent, responsible” fiscal management while “tracking a clear path” back to a balanced budget from its current massive scary deficit. As Denley added tartly, “As it turns out, tracking a balanced budget is like tracking a unicorn. The tracking is easy, but finding one is hard.”

Indeed. Or at least indeed re: the finding. The tracking isn’t as easy as it ought to be, because government budgets are infamously tangled forests of accounting conventions, focus-grouped prose, economic projections, and jiggery-pokery regarding long-term liabilities. And because neither the authors nor most of the audience adhere to Friedman’s wise words about what exactly we should be keeping an eye on as we navigate these deep dark woods.

As was his wont, Friedman compressed much potentially complex truth into short, clear, vivid words, immediately adding, “There is no such thing as an unbalanced budget.” Which is not addled but Chestertonian in its paradoxical brilliance because, Friedman went on, “You pay for it either in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of inflation or debt.”

Full article is here:

- https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion

"Harris' Unrealized Gains Tax Would Obliterate The U.S. Economy"

"Harris' Unrealized Gains Tax Would Obliterate The U.S. Economy"

The reasoning is so simple, a fifth grader could understand it -

which is probably why Kamala Harris doesn't...

by Quoth The Raven

"On Tuesday, it was announced that Presidential candidate Kamala Harris would be supporting President Joe Biden’s tax proposals for 2025, which include a 44.6% capital gains rate and a 25% tax on unrealized gains. Having used up all of the rest of the batshit, insane, counterintuitive economic dirty tricks left in the "we'll literally do anything but cut spending" bag, the Biden administration began pushing this tax idea in April 2024 when I first wrote about it. Unrealized gains taxation could be the most destructive idea for our country since prohibition, I joked at the time.

As part of its budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year, the Biden administration was trying to raise an addition $4.3 trillion over 10 years in the worst way possible: imposing a minimum tax equal to 25 percent of a taxpayer’s taxable income and unrealized capital gains less the sum of their regular tax, for taxpayers with wealth over $100 million.

Putting aside the fact that this high-risk idea only amounts to a pittance, $430 billion per year, the introduction of taxing unrealized gains could be one of the worst slippery slopes we ever dare to roll our country’s economy down.

I mean, shit, we could save $1 trillion just by not sending $100 billion a year to other nations for starters. But I digress. For an outline of exactly what an unrealized gains tax is, here's the American Institute on Economic Research: "A tax on unrealized capital gains means that individuals are penalized for owning appreciating assets, regardless of whether they have realized any actual income from selling them.

If you purchased a stock for $100 this year, for example, and it increased to $110 next year, you would pay the assigned tax rate on the $10 capital gain. You didn’t sell the asset, so you don’t realize the $10 appreciation, but must pay the tax regardless.

Taxing unrealized capital gains contradicts the basic principles of fairness and property rights essential for a free and prosperous society. Taxation, if we’re going to have it on income, should be based on actual income earned, not on paper gains that may never materialize."

AIER notes that implementing such a tax not only deeply infringes upon personal liberty and private property rights - but I can’t help but think about how it also sets a destructive wrecking ball rolling down a slippery slope for the first time in our nation's history. And, given the precarious state of our nation's finances, it doesn't seem like the best time to start spitballing about new risky ideas that may or may not catch on only because they sound like they are addressing the problem of a widening wealth gap that Federal Reserve policies created and continue to exacerbate to begin with.

If the administration really wanted to address the problem of wealth inequality, it would be setting its sights on the central bank that sacrificed price stability so it could spray trillions of dollars in "stimulus" toward financial assets, while cutting American families paltry checks of just $600, during COVID. When I did the math during COVID, the total amount spent to bail out the country when we decided to shut down the economy and have the Federal Reserve replace it with a fiat house of cards amounted to something like $17,500 per every citizen in the United States.

Except, again, only $600 of that went to each individual. The rest went to the financial sector, in turn widening the inequality gap further as billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos saw tens of billions of dollars added to their net worth in a matter of months. And so now, rather than take tangible, decisive action to actually address the problem, the Harris administration is putting forth a plan that won’t just be negative for the country, it could very well be the hill that our country’s economy dies on. And to be honest, I’m not being hyperbolic.

Over the last few years, we have seen an extraordinary exodus from places like New York and California, to places like Florida and Texas, because the former states were essentially taxing far too much relative to the benefits of what they were providing for citizens.

Ergo, places like California have seen people like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk move to Texas, while states like New York have seen businesses like Ken Griffin's Citadel move to Florida. There’s nothing to read between the lines about when it comes to this capital flight out of one state and into another. It is simple cause and effect: at some point, people simply don’t think it is worth living in these states due to the taxes being too high.

It’s a quintessential example of the Laffer Curve. Tax too much, people are disincentivized to generate productivity, or in this case, live in your state.

Harris’ proposal to raise regular capital gains taxes is one thing, albeit still egregious; it is far lesser noxious of the two proposals. Taxing unrealized gains is an exponentially worse type of taxation that introduces not just a higher tax rate and a 3rd type of income tax, but a completely new system for taxation – one that taxes people's assets as they appreciate, not just when they realize the gains of said appreciation.

“But it will only be against people worth more than $100 million,” proponents of the idea will exclaim. Hell, I’m not worth 1% of that, so why should I even care?

First off, it can’t be understated how earth-shattering it is to put this terrible idea into motion, regardless of who it is going to affect. You can’t justify a stunning overreach on people's constitutional rights and civil liberties just because they sit in a certain tax bracket. And it is a line that, once crossed, the government won’t backtrack on. Once taxing unrealized gains makes its way into the zeitgeist, it sticks around for good. And, if it sticks around, it’ll only be another meaningful step moving the U.S. economy closer to an anemic corpse of a state-planned economy.

A tax of this nature creates a vacuum that does nothing but suck the vibrancy out of an economy. In addition to setting a new moral hazard standard, the tax directly targets the people with the most capital at work in our country. By specifically targeting the people that have the means to create new enterprises and invest using this capital, and then driving them out of the country, the tax is a surefire way to suck the lifeblood out of what’s left of the United States economy.

Make no mistake: it will be a clarion call for billionaires to simply move out of the United States and into tax havens. And think about it - these are the people that have the means to up and simply leave the country and relocate anytime they want. For them, if it makes financial sense, they will do it. Implementing this unrealized gains tax will set the ball in motion, you can mark my words. The rich will be as good as gone.

And when billionaires decide to up and leave the United States, all of the tax revenue they were generating otherwise - not just the unrealized gains tax - leaves with them. In other words, an unrealized gains tax will push them past their limit and result in catastrophic consequences for the country's tax revenue as a whole. It’ll literally do far more harm than good. If I can understand why, a fifth grader can. That means the ultra-rich, who are much smarter than I am, definitely understand it. They’re not going to be interested in hanging around and forking over this much more cash “for the good of the cause”. They already likely have a plan in such case this tax is passed, and - as a hint - it isn’t to happily hand over a check to the Harris administration and say “thanks for being such great stewards of my capital, keep up the good work”.

In reality, it likely involves yachts, dual passports, “investments” in places like Bermuda and Mauritius, attending F1 races and tennis matches, expensive champagne and Eastern European escorts (hereinafter referred to as: “The Hunter Biden Experience”).

But seriously, setting aside the billionaires for a moment, the tax is going to dampen everybody’s incentive to try and earn and invest to begin with. Who wants to invest in the market if they’re going to be taxed on their gains the very next day?

Possibly the worst part of this idea is its timing. The country is running a massive deficit now that looks to continue to widen because of our government's refusal to cut spending on both sides of the aisle. As a reminder, you can only push the tax base so far before they turn tail and run. I know I’ve made jokes in the past (read: yesterday) about our government going through all of the solutions mandatory before arriving at any solution that works in the slightest, but this would be the granddaddy of all examples if implemented.

The timing of this proposed solution couldn’t be worse. We are at a point in our country's fiscal history where we need balance more than ever. We have the largest deficit and the most debt relative to GDP we have had in recent history.

The BRICS nations, including Russia, China, and India, are actively pursuing ways to break off of the Western banking system and challenge the U.S. dollar.

Inflation is running rampant and high interest rates are more than likely to cause our economy to slow down in marked fashion.

We’re running deficits, but we need the tax revenue we are currently bringing in if we have any hope of cutting spending to balance our budget and right the country's ship economically. The loss of tax revenue as a result of capital flight from the United States responding to this proposed unrealized gains tax would be catastrophic and would accelerate the country's financial and monetary demise, not help it."

- https://quoththeraven.substack.com

"So Hundreds Of Thousands Of Those 'Jobs' Were Completely Fake?"

"So Hundreds Of Thousands Of Those

'Jobs' Were Completely Fake?"

by Michael Snyder

"Every month, it is almost always the same story. The government releases a number that indicates that the U.S. economy has been creating plenty of “jobs”, and then later on that number is dramatically revised lower. But by the time it is revised lower, nobody really cares anymore. The fake numbers that are initially released month after month have given the American people the impression that the economy is performing far better than it actually is. Now we are about to get another major revision to the employment numbers which only happens once per year…

"Once a year, the BLS benchmarks the March payrolls level to a more accurate but less timely data source called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which is based on state unemployment insurance tax records and covers nearly all US jobs. The release of the latest QCEW report in June already hinted at weaker payroll gains last year.

On Wednesday, everyone is expecting that we will be told that hundreds of thousands of fake “jobs” that were originally reported never actually existed at all…"Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. economists expect the government’s preliminary benchmark revisions on Wednesday to show payrolls growth in the year through March was at least 600,000 weaker than currently estimated - about 50,000 a month. While JPMorgan Chase & Co. forecasters see a decline of about 360,000, Goldman Sachs indicates it could be as large as a million."

Why don’t they just try to give us an accurate number in the first place? By now, everybody pretty much realizes that the initial monthly employment numbers are usually grossly overstated. So why not just tell us the truth? Of course telling us the truth would destroy the carefully crafted illusions that they have worked so hard to create.

Even though large corporations are conducting mass layoffs all over the nation, we are supposed to believe that everything is just fine. Unfortunately, we have reached a point where even the official government numbers are starting to show signs of trouble. It takes about 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with population growth, and the initial number that we were given for last month was well below that level…"Employers added 114,000 jobs last month, which was far below the Dow Jones estimate of 185,000. The unemployment rate also edged higher to 4.3 percent – the highest level since October 2021."

It should be obvious to everyone that more Americans are unemployed these days. In fact, most of you probably know someone personally that is looking for a new job right now. According to a survey that was recently conducted by the New York Federal Reserve, an all-time record high 28.4 percent of all U.S. adults are currently looking for work…"The New York Federal Reserve’s latest poll of consumers found 28.4% of respondents were looking for a job — the highest reading since March 2014 and up from 19.4% a year ago. That includes both individuals already out of a job and ones currently employed but seeking new roles.

The readings, from the New York Fed’s thrice-annual Survey of Consumer Expectations Labor Market Survey, add to evidence that the U.S. economic outlook is worsening, even as some economists dial back their odds of a recession."

A 9 percent increase in one year is absolutely terrible. Why aren’t more people talking about this? We are definitely moving in the wrong direction very rapidly, and many are concerned that this could have troubling implications for the financial markets. If the employment revision that we get on Wednesday is large enough, it could potentially spark another round of selling on Wall Street…"While the stock market has now recovered, a data revision showing a large decline could reignite fears that the economy is headed for a downturn.

‘Markets, having recently experienced a growth scare that led to concerns that the Fed is behind the curve, will be monitoring Wednesday’s release of the benchmark revision to see if the market’s initial reaction was, in fact, correct,’ Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist at LPL Financial, told Bloomberg."

It is getting very difficult for even the most blind optimists to deny where things are heading. The Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has been falling for 29 months in a row. You would think that just about everyone would be getting the message by now.

At the same time that economic activity is slowing down, most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet due to our seemingly endless cost of living crisis. According to a brand new survey that was just released, 82 percent of Americans believe that “their money does not go as far as it used to”…"A growing number of Americans are pumping the brakes on spending as they continue to face elevated prices for everyday necessities like food, rent and auto insurance.

New findings published by Empower show that 62% of Americans feel their purchasing power and income in relation to prices is decreasing due to persistent inflation. Another 82% said their money does not go as far as it used to. Additionally, 79% of respondents noted that many household goods like cereal and chips are dwindling in terms of serving sizes."

Our standard of living has been going down. Everyone can see that. When our leaders started creating, borrowing and spending money like crazy during the pandemic, I relentlessly warned my readers that this would create tremendous inflation, and that is precisely what happened.

Now I am warning that a truly terrifying economic horror show is in front of us. The people that are running the system literally do not know what they are doing, and now all of us will get to suffer the very bitter consequences of their very foolish decisions."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "The Economy Is Coming Unglued, People Will Lose Everything"

Jeremiah Babe, 8/20/24

"The Economy Is Coming Unglued,

 People Will Lose Everything"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Runrig, "Running to the Light"

Full screen recommended.

Runrig, "Running to the Light"

"Contact"

"You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You are capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone. Only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing that we've found that makes the emptiness bearable... is each other."  - "Contact"

Full screen recommended.

"Contact"

Ellie meets her long dead father after travel across space 

via an intricate transportation system of wormholes.

"Contact"

"We are not alone..." Two-time Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster and Hollywood's brightest new star, Matthew McConaughey, shine in this spellbinding drama of a dedicated astronomer's quest to make first Contact. Despite scorn from her colleagues, "Ellie" Arroway devoutly eavesdrops on the universe. And then, one fateful morning, she hears a cryptic signal. As the world's scientists scramble to decode "the message," Ellie must struggle to become Earth's single emissary on a journey beyond theory or experience. Seeking support, she turns to top-level government advisor, Palmer Joss . Separated by very different beliefs, they reunite in their passion for knowledge and truth. From Academy Award-winning director Robert Zemeckis and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan's best-seller comes the story of a visionary scientist's unshakable conviction that somewhere in this boundless universe an intelligence yearns for Contact."

Watch on YouTube, Full screen recommended. 

Full movie free with ads:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"A Look to the Heavens"

"In silhouette against a crowded star field along the tail of the arachnalogical constellation Scorpius, this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower.

In fact, clumps of dust and molecular gas collapsing to form stars may well lurk within the dark nebula, a structure that spans almost 40 light-years across this gorgeous telescopic portrait. Known as a cometary globule, the swept-back cloud, is shaped by intense ultraviolet radiation from the OB association of very hot stars in NGC 6231, off the upper edge of the scene. That energetic ultraviolet light also powers the globule's bordering reddish glow of hydrogen gas. Hot stars embedded in the dust can be seen as bluish reflection nebulae. This dark tower, NGC 6231, and associated nebulae are about 5,000 light-years away."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210715.html