Thursday, October 24, 2024

"Why Some Are Steering Towards a Third World War - A Narrative on Ukraine"

"Why Some Are Steering Towards a Third World War - 
A Narrative on Ukraine"
by Mattias Desmet

"I want to share a few thoughts that are clearly emerging in the early morning air. Why are some people nowadays trying so hard to provoke a third world war? The dark figure of a global nuclear conflict is indeed knocking on our door. The conflict in the Middle East is intensifying, and the conflict in Ukraine threatens to escalate into a third world war. It is mainly about the latter that I want to say something today. The stories about that conflict vary quite a bit.

The story in the media sounds roughly as follows: in the icy Russia, disorganized and divided after the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, a cold dictator, a new Hitler, seized power over the last twenty years. His name is Putin. He first became director of the FSB, the successor of the KGB, the ruthless and horrific secret service of the Soviet Union. That says enough about the type of person we are dealing with.

After that, he crept in a sly and ruthless manner onto the Russian presidential throne. Even that did not satisfy his hunger for power. He wanted to expand his Russian empire without limit and become a sort of new Tsar. In 2014, he slyly conquered Crimea by manipulating the population through propaganda and using a – likely falsified – referendum as a pretext to annex Crimea. In 2022, he took his next step: the military conquest of democratic Ukraine.

But fortunately, there is the noble NATO, which under the leadership of the USA courageously opposes this cold criminal. They are trying to allow Ukraine to join their alliance, just like the other helpless Eastern European countries that have already joined earlier, in order to protect it against the Russian threat. That is one story.

There is also another story, also just a story, but a story that deserves to be heard in these ominous times. It also begins with the end of the Soviet Union in 1989 and goes as follows:

The Soviet Union didn’t really lose the Cold War. A complex interplay of internal and external factors led the Soviets to grow tired of their own totalitarian society and made them decide to dissolve the Warsaw Pact and dismantle the Soviet Union. In a sincere moment of political naivety, top Soviets like Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the young Putin believed that the West would welcome them with open arms; Russia would become their playmate in the great democratic playground of the Free Western Market. They quickly realized that the terms 'democratic' and ‘free’ are highly relative in the West.

What they encountered was a velvet totalitarianism that in some respects was as totalitarian as the Soviet Union they had just dismantled. NATO, supposedly established to counterbalance the Soviet Union, refused to disband when the Soviet Union dissolved. Even more: contrary to all implicit and explicit agreements made with Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, NATO steadily moved its borders eastward, towards Moscow.

The whole idea of NATO's eastward expansion was devised by an American power bloc with one big goal: to create a unipolar world dominated in which one superpower, the United States, controls and contains the global geopolitical situation. The main geostrategist was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a brilliant American professor born in Poland, whose visceral aversion to Bolshevism, ingrained in his blood, brought everything related to Russia to life. That is, of course, human, just as it is human and understandable that the inhabitants of Eastern European countries transform their deeply ingrained fear of Stalin and the Soviets today into a desire to belong to NATO.

Brzezinski was an advisor to several American presidents and chaired various committees set up to execute the NATO plan. From the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, he outlined his strategy in various articles and interviews: Russia must never again become a world power, and to prevent that, we must isolate the country from the Black Sea by expanding NATO to the east. In doing so, he adopted a Russian strategy that European powers had already followed in the nineteenth century.

When the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire began to lose strength in the nineteenth century, Russia prepared to fill the resulting vacuum and expand its sphere of influence through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This threatened the economic and territorial interests of the then-superpower Great Britain. In the worst case, the British could even see their access to their colonies in the Middle East and India blocked by the Russians.

It was within this tension that the Crimean War started in 1853, a conflict between Russia on the one hand and a European alliance of the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Second French Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia on the other. This war is historically significant in many ways, among other things because it was the first industrialized and heavily propagandized war.

The industrialization of the war (use of advanced firearms, supply of war materials via railroads, use of naval mines, etc.) resulted in enormous numbers of casualties, with estimates ranging from 400,000 to over 750,000 deaths in just three years. What determined the course of the war was no longer the military-tactical intelligence of the leading officers or the size and loyalty of the troops, but rather who had the most sophisticated war industry and technology, and, last but not least, who had the most effective propaganda apparatus.

It is that last point that interests us most, the importance of propaganda. After the French Revolution and the replacement of the ancien régime by the modern democracy, propaganda became an obvious instrument of power. The old elite, before the French Revolution, did not really need to manipulate public opinion that much. Public opinion didn’t matter all that much. They had to massage and manipulate the population here and there, but ultimately, the elite could impose its policy without much justification. If the elite wanted to go to war, they would simply inform the people, and they had to accept it. God had willed it so: some were born to command, and others to obey.

In the new, materialistic worldview, there was no God to be found, and leaders could no longer rely on his authority to send people to war. The only option leaders had to get the population excited about war was large-scale manipulation of public opinion through propaganda.

The nineteenth-century Crimean War was the first war in which modern propaganda was of decisive importance. Emerging technology for the first time gave leaders the material means to directly and massively manipulate the population. The invention of the telegraph and the camera, along with the rise of mass media (primarily the widespread distribution of newspapers), allowed European powers to bring vivid and convincing war stories, illustrated with photos, to the home front within just five days. The Allies perfectly understood that such forms of war communication were crucial to creating public support for the war.

The real reasons for the European countries to go to war against Russia were primarily economic in nature. But those reasons alone would not suffice to overcome the population’s fear of the horrors of war, nor would they make people willing to pay the huge sums of taxes needed for the war. Therefore, the European powers decided to portray Russia as a military threat that urgently needed to be stopped. The lie is often more efficient than the truth in making a population eager for war.

The propagandists carefully spread fabricated, ominous information about the Russian enemy among the population. The Russian soldiers were portrayed as outright savages and barbarians, and Russia as a radically expansionist power. Historians agree that this was a propagandistic and false representation of the facts (see here and here). Once the war had started, the propagandists directed triumphant war stories, supplemented with photographs and neatly supervised by a military censorship apparatus: we are winning, the barbaric Russians are being defeated, humanity is triumphing, but not quite yet—keep paying war taxes for a while longer.

Russia, at that time, was inferior in terms of both industrialization and propaganda. They lost the Crimean War in 1856, and that also marked the fall of Russia as a European great power. Russia would only restore its position after the Russian Revolution and the rise of the totalitarian Soviet Union under Lenin and (especially) Stalin. That marked the point where Russia itself began to fully exploit the power advantages of industrialization, technology, and propaganda.

Now, back to the core strategy during the nineteenth-century Crimean War: the goal of the war was to deny Russia access to the Black Sea. Lord Palmerston, the then British Foreign Secretary, was the first to fully grasp the economic and strategic importance of the Black Sea for Russia and developed a military strategy around it: block Russia’s access to the Black Sea, and you block Russia’s only ice-free gateway to the Mediterranean and the rest of the world. In other words, if you can ensure that Russia no longer has access to the Black Sea, Russia will lose its economic and military power within a few decades.

The same motives are currently at play in the lead-up to the war in Ukraine. Reread the paragraphs above: the current narrative regarding the tensions between Russia and NATO is essentially a reflection of the story from the First Crimean War. We will outline a number of facts concerning the buildup to the current war in Ukraine.

A neoconservative power group in the U.S. reverted to Lord Palmerston’s strategy at the end of the twentieth century, attempting to permanently eliminate Russia as a great power: NATO would isolate Russia from the Black Seathrough a gradual expansion to the East. This strategy was developed by Brzezinski in 1989, immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, notably in his book The Grand Chessboard.

Thanks to the archival documents released after the Freedom of Information Act was enacted in the U.S. in 2017, we also know that this strategy was adopted as a strategic guideline by the Clinton administration in 1994. It was essentially followed by all subsequent American presidents, including Trump, and their administrations. Whether Trump will keep his promise to break with this “tradition” if re-elected remains to be seen.

This strategic plan was gradually implemented from the 1990s onward. In 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were added to NATO; in 2004, the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were added; in 2009, Albania and Croatia; in 2017, Montenegro; and in 2020, North Macedonia. These countries were immediately provided with temporary or permanent NATO military bases. The issue is that NATO is not a lion without military teeth. Somewhere along the way, in 1999, NATO also bombed Belgrade to establish a NATO-supervised state of Kosovo and to set up Camp Bondsteel, the largest NATO base in Southern Europe.

The final step was the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO, something that Brzezinski viewed as the crowning achievement of the entire strategy to deliver the final blow to Russia as a great power. Initially, European leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy fiercely resisted because they realized that the annexation of Ukraine made the risk of nuclear war a reality. However, at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, President Bush Jr. made it clear that there was no room for discussion: Ukraine would “have the chance” to join NATO. At that same summit, Putin also made something clear: this would be the step too far in NATO’s advance to the East.

The neoconservative faction in America, backed by the whole dismal CIA regime-change machine, was not deterred by the prospect of a war between powers, each possessing around 6,000 nuclear warheads. They began their démarche with the so-called Maidan revolution in 2014, during which President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted from power. Essentially, there is little doubt that this was not so much a popular uprising but rather a NATO-directed overthrow of a previously neutral and democratically elected president (see, among others, this interview with American top diplomat Professor Jeffrey Sachs and the documentary Ukraine on Fire by Oliver Stone). Yanukovych fled to Russia after the Maidan revolution, not because he was a puppet of Putin, but because Russia was about the only place on earth where he could be somewhat safe. After his departure, his government was replaced by a pro-Europe and pro-NATO regime.

As described above, the motives for bringing Ukraine into NATO were perhaps primarily ideological and strategic in nature. However, they intertwined with enormous economic-commercial motives. This becomes clear when considering the fate of Ukraine’s extraordinary natural wealth. Ukrainian agricultural land is among the most fertile in the world, earning Ukraine the nickname "the breadbasket of Europe."

Moreover, enormous quantities of iron ore, coal, and rare and strategically important minerals such as uraninite (the base raw material for uranium), rutile, and ilmenite (the base raw materials for titanium), as well as lithium (crucial for battery production), are also found in Ukrainian soil. According to some estimates, about 5% of the world’s mineral reserves are located in Ukraine. Depending somewhat on market conditions, its value is estimated to be in the tens of trillions of dollars (some say about 19 trillion dollars) (!).

Immediately after the pro-NATO government came to power in 2014, lobbying began to lift the moratorium that stated foreigners could never buy more than two hectares of Ukrainian land. In an April 2021 report, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the monetary infrastructure of NATO, explicitly stated that lifting this moratorium was a necessary condition for providing funds to Ukraine. In June 2021, Ukraine capitulated and effectively lifted the moratorium. Subsequently, giant American companies like Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont bought up approximately 170 million hectares, or one-third of Ukraine’s agricultural land, in no time.

Behind these companies are the financial giants of the world: BlackRock, Vanguard, and Blackstone, asset managers of astronomical proportions. Following the rise in agricultural land prices from €2,500 to €10,000 that followed these massive purchases, these giants immediately multiplied their invested capital. That the land has now become too expensive for countless small Ukrainian farmers to earn a living from should not concern someone striving for world dominance.

In the same movement, the economic giants took another step. BlackRock, Vanguard, and Blackstone are heavily entrenched in the American military industry, and since NATO’s actions would almost inevitably lead to war, they could also prepare for a new round of monstrous profits (at the expense of the American people).

Moreover, BlackRock and Vanguard are also significant shareholders in American construction companies Bechtel and AECOM, which signed contracts at the onset of the war for the future reconstruction of Ukraine once it would have been nearly completely leveled by the war.

Adding to this is the fact that BlackRock, McKinsey, and JPMorgan Chase established a reconstruction bank for Ukraine together, leading to the staggering conclusion: the same companies that earn fortunes from buying up Ukrainian agricultural land and its natural resources also profit immensely from supplying the weapons to devastate Ukraine and will ultimately profit from rebuilding it.

The grinding gears of this money machine have meanwhile crushed more than a million young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers’ bodies; the thrum of the money press drowns out the moans of thousands of tortured bodies, the sobbing of thousands of raped women, the cries of a country bleeding from every pore of its fertile land. Trying to make money is undoubtedly human, but at the top, where it is ruthlessly elevated to the highest goal, it takes on diabolical forms.

After the Maidan power takeover in 2014 and the advancing NATO militarization of the entire Black Sea region, Putin anticipated the next step: after Ukraine, NATO would set its sights on Crimea. This meant that Russia would be cut off from its fleet in Sevastopol. Putin did not wait and annexed Crimea via a referendum, increasing Russia's military presence on the peninsula. As a side note, Putin used social media and the internet for this referendum, which would be the reason Google and social media would significantly ramp up censorship thereafter (see this interview with Mike Benz).

With the referendum, Putin scored a significant victory but also suffered an inevitable defeat in terms of image and propaganda. This step was portrayed in the free West as the definitive outbreak of an emerging dictator who was no longer satisfied with tyrannizing his own people but was now embarking on a foreign conquest. The evidence was now provided: Putin is the new Hitler who wants to conquer all of Europe. This image was further reinforced when Putin made the next counter-move on the great global chessboard: invading Ukraine.

Through this propaganda, a psychological support base was created among the European and American populations, impoverished by the corona and other crises, to gradually mobilize for a large-scale conflict with Russia, or in other words, for World War III. That global conflict is now also approaching on another front. In the Middle East, the same Brzezinski-esque geopolitical strategy is now preparing to bring another strategic line to an end, moving towards the endgame of striving for geopolitical hegemony. Everything is being readied there to level Iran.

Thanks to the work of Pulitzer Prize winner and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, we know that the list of countries to be destroyed in the Middle East was already on paper in 2001 (and perhaps even earlier). The list began with Iraq, included Syria and Libya, and ended with Iran.

We ultimately ask ourselves: what drives NATO, and particularly the American power bloc that calls the shots, to steer towards a third world war? The causes of any war are complex and usually rooted in a blind destructive and self-destructive death drive. However, at a certain level, they are also simple. The USA still has military power, but economically, it is rapidly losing its position. The USA is part of the economic power bloc of the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States); it’s economical counterpart are the BRICS countries, including its arch-enemy Russia (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

To illustrate the decline of the G7 and the rise of the BRICS countries economically: in 1950, the G7 countries accounted for about 70% of global market share, in 1990 this decreased to about 50%, and by 2020, it further dropped to 40%. It is expected to be around 30% by 2040. The BRICS countries are going in the opposite direction. Before 1990, their share was negligible; after 1990, it rose to about 15%, and in 2020 it was approximately 30%. It is expected that by 2030, the BRICS countries could surpass the G7’s share.

The aforementioned American power bloc knows that the loss of economic power inevitably leads to the loss of military power. The only way to maintain power is to use the remaining military superiority to crush the emerging economic power of the BRICS countries and thus restore economic dominance. In other words: to provoke a third world war. The total destruction of humanity and humanity itself does not deter some from relinquishing their grip on power.

To unleash this third world war, the war machinery, again, needs the consent of the populace and must manipulate public opinion. As again: what brings people to war is a highly complex dynamic, yet there are people involved, people who take the lead. This is happening abundantly in light of the war in Ukraine. Thera are people who are blowing up a pipeline or dam here and there, people who produce propaganda in all its diversity. People who are proposing a NATO Secretary-General (the Dutch Mark Rutte) who has already convincingly demonstrated that he is willing to fully escalate the conflict with Russia. The man in question employs a kind of war rhetoric that suggests he is not genuinely inclined to empathize with the hundreds of thousands of war victims that NATO’s strategy in Ukraine has already caused, nor with the billions of potential victims that it could still create. I hope he changes his mind. A human is always a human. It is an ethical duty to assume that he can still turn for the better.

In a sense, all world powers are players on the same ‘Grand Chessboard’ of Brzezinski. The rules of this chess game are set by the symbolic structure within which our global society currently operates: the materialistic-rationalistic worldview. No one escapes the power of this symbolic framework, neither Russia nor America, Europe nor China. They all use propaganda, they all participate in the arms race, and they are all caught in the relentless logic of a market that is only free in appearance.

Ultimately, the enemy is not a Russian or an American or any other person. The enemy lies in an ideology, a way of thinking, in a certain metaphysical force or spirit. The real problem, the actual enemy, is situated in a worldview that reduces the entire world and existence to a material phenomenon, in which human beings are no more than biological machines, biochemical processes devoid of Spirit or Soul. In such a context, biological survival and the pursuit of absolute dominance without any ethical or moral limits easily become the ultimate goal. Within that worldview, this is also perfectly logical: in a purely material world, ethics and morality are nothing more than an illusion arising somewhere in the biochemical machinery of our brains. Why should we allow ourselves to be hindered in the great game of survival of the fittest? Anyone who views life through that lens is already an instrument of destructive drive.

As I type the last letters of this article, I see the sun sending its light through the morning mist, a golden gift at the start of a new day. The trees in the castle park exude a majestic power through the tenderness of their autumn leaves. Their meter-wide trunks fearlessly send their roots into the depths of the dark autumn ground; their branches lift their trembling twigs high above the mists into the sparkling morning light.

I am ready to give a workshop, a workshop in which I will practice the art of sincere speaking with the participants, an art that requires exploring the unfathomably dark depths of the human being, an art that elevates humanity to its highest heights, a strand of words that connects darkness with light, an art that is the opposite of the practice of propaganda. While the thudding of the propaganda drum sets the war machine in motion, I feel people everywhere becoming aware that only the Act of sincere speaking offers a way out of the hopelessness of humanity that has lost itself in appearance and manipulation.

Do not remain silent, stay true to the ethical duty to speak as a human in times when society blindly follows a discourse that leads to ruin. Speak calmly, speak steadily, try not to convince too much, but rather to testify; speak from your belly rather than your head. I hope this article can be a small spark, a small contribution to the rise of a group of people united by the act of sincere speaking, a group where the opinion itself does not take precedence but the right of every person to express their opinion; a group that does not get lost in the narcissism of a collective ideal image and enemy image but cherishes the love for the uniqueness and singularity of each individual; this is the group that can provide a counterweight to the death drive of the propagandized masses."

"The Kazan Catastrophe"

"The Kazan Catastrophe"
by The ZMan

"Back in the ancient times, if you wished to buy product from someone you arrived at their location with money, or they arrived at your location with product. The product was inspected, and the money was inspected. Once both sides were satisfied, the exchange was made, and the deal was done. It did not take long for a class of middlemen to turn up who brokered such deals. They inspected the goods, arranged transportation and safeguarded the product and the money.

World trade has not changed much since the ancient times. Middlemen still facilitate most of the trade. They are called banks, insurance companies, freight brokers, shipping companies and so forth, but they are all part of this vast and essential middleman economy that makes it possible for the local Walmart to have shelves stuffed with goods from Asia. It is what makes it possible for the Chinese company selling dog food to get paid by Walmart.

One thing to note about this setup is the two greatest seafaring nations in the history of the planet, the United States and Britain, do very little shipping. Instead, they control the flow of goods around the world through control of the insurance markets and the financial system used in global trade. If you are involved in global trade, you are certainly using the American financial system and either directly or indirectly the British maritime insurance system.

The dollar being the world’s reserve currency has been to this point the main driver of the explosion in global trade. The buyer in South America can do business with a seller in China, because his bank is connected to the American financial system through his country’s central bank. He does not have to get RMB from his bank to pay the Chinese vendors, because the exchange is done automatically through the dollar dominated global financial system.

This is about to change with the launch of an alternative payment system that was announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan Russia. The Russians and the Chinese have been working on creating an alternative to SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is the platform that networks the world’s banks to facilitate the flow of money around the world. The new system seeks to replace SWIFT for trade among the BRICS countries.

For most people this is an eye-glazing topic, but in the fullness of time it could be an event that generations of historians study as an inflection point. What the BRICS countries are seeking to do is wrest control of the global financial system from the West, specifically the English-speaking countries, at least for the members of BRICS and those countries willing to trade with BRICS. By extension, it is an effort to reduce the power of the dollar and thus the power of the American empire.

What this new system proposes to do is make it easier for participating countries to conduct business in the currency of other participating countries. Instead of China needing dollars to buy oil from the Saudis and therefore preferring dollars from other countries for Chinese goods, the Chinese will be able to buy oil in RMB and the Saudis will be able to buy Chinese goods in whatever currency they possess. The new system would handle the conversion and exchange rates instantly.

As an aside, that last part is interesting. In the United States, a business does not get paid by the credit card company for a few days. Often, the delay is longer. Of course, there are fees for taking credit card payments. In Russia and China, the movement of money is instant. The system is treated as a public utility, so fees are relatively small compared to what we see in the West. This is owing to much better and newer technology and a different attitude toward banking.

That aside, the significance of this proposal is enormous. The BRICS countries represent half the world’s population. The Arab oil countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, are onboard for this new system. The Saudis let expire the fifty-year-old deal with Washington that established the petrodollar. China, India and Russia are the driving force behind this new arrangement and represent three of the most important economic powerhouses in the world at the moment.

What this means for the West is far less influence over the rest of the world through the control of the financial system. The main reason China, Russia and India have pushed for this new system is they have grown weary of Washington abusing its position to bully the rest of the world. The sanctions war unleashed by Washington against Russia in 2022 was the final straw. If Washington would use the dollar to try regime change in Russia, it would do it to anyone, especially China.

What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington. Ten years ago, it was inconceivable that these important countries would come together to create a parallel financial system, as all of them were committed to the dollar and the Western system. They were committed to the “rules-based order” because they assumed it served their interests, but decades of abuse by Washington has convinced them otherwise.

What this means for the West is clear. What we see forming up is a trading and cooperation block that includes all the countries outside the West, representing the bulk of the world’s population and the majority of economic activity. Add in the fact that the West has let its manufacturing base shrivel and seems to be at war with its agricultural base and you can see the problem. Economies based in providing services tied to the financial system are facing a cliff now.

For the United States, this could not come at a worse time. Debt is already at staggering levels and is accelerating. The productive and innovative portion of the population is aging, while the unproductive portion is exploding. Add in decades of infrastructure neglect, the demographic and cultural catastrophes, and now is not a good time for a decline in the dollar. America is an empire that debased its currency via the perfidious subversion of its own rules.

Contrary to some claims, the dollar is not about to collapse, but what Kazan signals is the steady decline in the dollar. As the rest of the world begins to trade outside the dollar, it means dollars and instruments denominated in dollars, like debt, will lose value on the global market. This means the American banking system must slow the creation of dollars to prevent inflation. This means the cost of borrowing dollars must go up and stay up in anticipation of declining dollar demand

The steady decline of the dollar means a steady decline in the American standard of living, baring a revolution in Washington. Being the world’s mint and banker only works if the world accepts what you are minting. A rentier economy reliant on skimming from every transaction is only possible if you control the currency. The parasitism that has become a feature of our economy is going to become more obvious. That will bring political consequences as well."

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Something Big Is Going Down! US Military Prepares For Civil War! Ukraine Gets $50 Billion!"

Canadian Prepper, 10/24/24
"Alert! Something Big Is Going Down! 
US Military Prepares For Civil War! Ukraine Gets $50 Billion!"
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Musical Interlude: Peder B. Helland, "Sunny Mornings"

Full screen recommended.
 Soothing Relaxation, "Sunny Mornings"

"I am a composer from Norway and I started this channel with a simple vision: to create a place that you can visit whenever you want to sit down and relax. I compose music that can be labeled as for example: sleep music, calm music, yoga music, study music, peaceful music, beautiful music and relaxing music. I love to compose music and I put a lot of work into it.

Thank you very much for listening and for leaving feedback. Every single day I am completely astonished by all your warm support and it really inspires me to work even harder on my music. If you enjoy my work, I would be very happy if you decided to subscribe and join our community. Have a wonderful day or evening!"
- Peder B. Helland, composer for Soothing Relaxation

Absolutely beautiful...

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex.
About five light-years "tall", the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.”

Chet Raymo, “A Sense Of Place”

“A Sense Of Place”
by Chet Raymo

“It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together. As far as I know, that never happened. But let’s imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty’s essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944) and from Abbey’s essay “The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them.

“This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.”

“This desert, all deserts, any deserts.”

“On the shady stream banks hang lady’s eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging.”

“Oily growths like the poison ivy – oh yes, indeed – that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.”

“All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats.”

“Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.”

“Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias.”

“Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.”

“The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place.”

“In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don’t. In the Mojave Desert, it’s Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise…”

“The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned – they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood.”

“…the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers.”

“Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people’s faces are good.”

“Californicating.”

“To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee.”

“Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?”

“I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen.”

“Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.”

“Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking.”

“In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving.”

“There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.”

“A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see – only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.”

“Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.”

“In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable…”

“New life will be built upon these things.”

“…an unrequited and excessive love.”

“It is this.”

“That’s why.”

"In Human Society..."

"When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair."
- Nadezhda Mandelstam

“As I’ve Aged”

“As I’ve Aged”
- Author Unknown

“You ask me how it feels to grow older. I’ve learned a few things along the way, which I’ll share with you…

As I’ve aged, I’ve become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself. I’ve become my own friend. I don’t chide myself for eating that extra cookie, or for not making my bed, or for buying that silly cement gecko that I didn’t need, but looks so avante-garde on my patio. I am entitled to a treat, to be messy, to be extravagant.

I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging. Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until 4 AM and sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of many years ago, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love… I will.

I will walk the beach in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body, and will dive into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set. They, too, will get old.

I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And I eventually remember the important things. Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody’s beloved pet gets hit by a car? But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.

I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.

As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don’t question myself anymore. I’ve even earned the right to be wrong. So, to answer your question, I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. And I shall eat dessert every single day (if I feel like it). May our friendship never come apart especially when it’s straight from the heart!”

The Daily "Near You?"

Englewood, Ohio, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Jeremiah Babe, "This Ain't California - Home Shopping In Alabama"

Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 10/24/24
"This Ain't California - Home Shopping In Alabama"
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Adventures With Danno, "McDonald's E-Coli: This Is About To Get Much Worse"

Adventures With Danno, PM 10/24/24
"McDonald's E-Coli: 
This Is About To Get Much Worse"
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Gerald Celente, "Gloom And Boom: It's All Going Down"

Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 10/24/24
"Gloom And Boom: It's All Going Down"
The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times.

"How It Really Is"

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
- H.L. Mencken, "On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe"

"Every Normal Man..."

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands,
hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
 - H. L. Mencken

"What JP Morgan Bank CEO Jamie Dimon Just Said Is Frightening, And It's The Truth!"

Gregory Mannarino, 10/24/24
"What JP Morgan Bank CEO Jamie Dimon Just 
Said Is Frightening, And It's The Truth!"
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"On The Wrong Track: This Is What An Imploding Economy Looks Like"

"On The Wrong Track: 
This Is What An Imploding Economy Looks Like"
by Michael Snyder

"One of the main reasons why Americans are in such a foul mood right now is because the economy is in really bad shape and it just keeps getting worse. This is very good news for the Trump campaign, because most Americans don’t want things to remain the same. A desire for change is in the air, but our economy is unraveling so rapidly that it won’t be easy for anyone to turn things around. We have built up a tremendous amount of momentum in the wrong direction, and it appears that the months ahead are not going to be pleasant.

Just look at what is happening to home sales. Last month, sales of previously existing homes fell to the lowest level that we have seen since October 2010. Of course in October 2010 we were dealing with the aftermath of a global financial crisis. Overall, we are on pace “for the worst year since 1995” for sales of previously existing homes…"Sales of existing homes in the U.S. are on track for the worst year since 1995 - for the second year in a row.

Persistently high home prices and elevated mortgage rates are keeping potential home buyers on the sidelines. Sales of previously owned homes in the first nine months of the year were lower than the same period last year, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. Existing-home sales in September fell 1% from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.84 million, NAR said, the lowest monthly rate since October 2010."

Let those numbers sink in for a moment. We haven’t seen anything like this for a long time, and nobody can deny that the market for residential real estate is in a depressed state right now. And it appears that this month could be even worse than last month, because the number of mortgage applications being submitted is absolutely plummeting…"Mortgage applications decreased 17% from one week earlier as mortgage rates surged, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) weekly application survey for the week ending October 11, 2024. The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 17% on both a seasonally adjusted and an unadjusted basis from one week earlier."

Meanwhile, our nationwide commercial real estate crisis just continues to intensify. If you can believe it, an office building in Manhattan that sold for 332 million dollars in 2006 just sold for 8.5 million dollars…"The sale of a nearly 1 million-square-foot Manhattan office building listed on the online auction site Ten-X was completed Tuesday for only $8.5 million. That’s 97 percent less than the $332.5 million that the seller, Swiss bank UBS, paid for the Midtown property in 2006. The loss on the building at 135 West 50th Street was minimally offset by a $6 million gain UBS realized by buying and selling the ground beneath it in the interim.

UBS and its brokers at JLL listed the 920,000-square-foot building for sale on the online platform. The two-day auction kicked off July 30 with a starting bid of $7.5 million. The sale ended the next day after Ten-X lowered the reserve price. The winning bidder, whose identity has yet to hit property records, closed about 70 days later." That is insane! Commercial real estate prices have been crashing all over America, and this crisis is not getting the attention that it deserves from the media.

The banking industry is headed for big trouble as well. In fact, the government shut down another bank on Friday…"Friday, The First National Bank of Lindsay was closed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) appointed as receiver. The OCC acted after identifying false and deceptive bank records and other information suggesting fraud that revealed depletion of the bank’s capital. The OCC also found that the bank was in an unsafe or unsound condition to transact business and that the bank’s assets were less than its obligations to its creditors and others."

The OCC is referring the matter to the United States Department of Justice, which has a wide variety of tools to hold individuals accountable for criminal acts and focuses on victims in all of its matters. Some experts are projecting that hundreds of more banks will soon fail. If that actually happens, it will be a complete and utter nightmare.

The “restaurant apocalypse” that I have written about so much also continues to roll on. Sadly, we just learned that Denny’s has decided to shut down 150 locations…"Denny’s is closing 150 restaurants over the next year, and the 71-year-old diner chain is mulling a major change to its 24/7 operating hours. Fifty locations are set to close by the end of 2024, while the remaining 100 will shutter in 2025, Denny’s announced in an earnings call Tuesday. That amounts to a tenth of its restaurants, leaving 1,375 locations once completed. A specific list of closing restaurants weren’t immediately announced."

Needless to say, lots of other chains are slimming down as well. Right now, thousands upon thousands of restaurants are being permanently closed from coast to coast. If the economy was heading in the right direction, this would not be happening. Speaking of closures, another major retailer has announced that it will be closing all stores

"Buybuy Baby is shuttering all of its stores roughly a year after new owners tried to revive the brand. The company announced on its website that it is transitioning to an online-only model after recognizing the need for a “a strategic reset.” “With this shift, we’ve come to the difficult decision of closing our physical stores by the end of this year,” the company wrote. “We understand this may be disappointing news, and we want all our customers to know this wasn’t a choice we took lightly.” Most retailers that are experiencing difficulties will try to hang on until at least the end of December. But once we get into 2025, expect a huge wave of new store closures.

As I discussed the other day, U.S. consumers are really hurting at the moment. You can’t get blood out of a stone, and a staggering percentage of U.S. cardholders have already maxed out at least one credit card…"Nearly 2 in 5 cardholders (37%) have maxed out a credit card or come close since the Fed started raising interest rates, Bankrate’s Credit Utilization Survey found. That includes 20% who have maxed out a credit card and 17% who have come close to maxing one out."

This is what an imploding economy looks like. Bubbles are bursting all around us, and the outlook for 2025 and beyond is absolutely horrible. Our leaders kept the game going for a long time by injecting trillions of dollars into the system and by going into unprecedented amounts of debt. But despite all of their efforts, the economy is coming apart at the seams anyway, and so I hope that you are prepared for a very hard landing."

Adventures With Danno, "Kroger Items Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 10/24/24
"Kroger Items Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now"
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Dan, I Allegedly, "A Bad Week Getting Worse"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 10/24/24
"A Bad Week Getting Worse"
"Boeing's $6B disaster has set off alarm bells in the aerospace industry, and in today's video, I dive into the chaotic financial unraveling. From a massive $6 billion loss in just one quarter to a catastrophic satellite explosion, Boeing's week has gone from bad to worse. And it's not just them - Apple and Goldman Sachs face their own financial fiascos with the Apple Card debacle. Join me as I explore these corporate disasters and what they mean for the economy."
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Wednesday, October 23, 2024

"18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian"

"18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian"
by Maria Popova

"Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life - not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness - that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.

This is all to say: Ever since I first began reflecting on what I have learned about living with each passing year of writing The Marginalian (because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life), these learnings have always been profoundly personal - not overt advice to anyone else, but notes to myself about what I have needed to learn and keep relearning. I write them and share them for the same reason I read - so that we may feel less alone in our individual experience, which is just a commonplace fractal of the total human experience. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin reflected in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)

On this 18th anniversary of the birth of The Marginalian, here are all of these learnings so far as they were originally written in years past, beginning with the present year’s - the most challenging and most transformative of my life.

18. How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability - and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability - but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.

17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:

"Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)"

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern -  the antipode of wonder.


14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” - and what an everything he lived through - then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus - an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

"So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance."

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing "Figuring" (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable - incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism - fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis - in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture - which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands - give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” - a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial - in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit - it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that - a myth - as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living - for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night - and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right - even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself."

"The Most Important War: The War Between The Sexes"

"The Most Important War: 
The War Between The Sexes"
by John Wilder

"While we spend a lot of time reading about the war in Ukraine or the war that Israel is involved in and realize that right now the only winners are Raytheon®, Boeing™, and Lockheed Martin©. I mean, it must be a relief for Boeing™ to try to design something that’s supposed to experience kinetic failure at high impact killing dozens. Sadly, their new Nerf™ ClusterBomb© isn’t having the combat impact they had hoped for. I think, however, that those wars distract us from a much more important war: the war between the sexes.

This is Wednesday, so obviously we’ll be talking about the economic costs as well as the social costs, so we might as well start talking about that right now: The root of the problem is that women are working. This was seen back in the day as a mechanism to get more cheap labor for business. Oh, that wasn’t the main point of Women’s Lib, just a nice byproduct. No, Women’s “Liberation” was first and foremost a tool of the GloboLeftElite to try to break apart the true atom of society, the family.

And it worked, swimmingly. They knew it would, of course. When Edward Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to get more women to smoke, he paid a lot of women to smoke during one Easter Day Parade in NYC. He tipped off the press that women suffragettes would be smoking “torches of freedom” and they took it from there. 99% of women over 45 at that day and time didn’t smoke. Thankfully, for Marlboro®, the women were very susceptible to propaganda.

Just like at work. The progression went from, “get out and work” to “you don’t need no man” to “go to college and get an education and make big bucks”. Now, as the meme goes, women are taught that devoting themselves to a husband and their children is slavery, but going to work at a faceless corporation for a man, which is, I guess, empowerment.

Women can be very capable and driven, so those that apply themselves early in their career (like men used to be taught to do) and push the long hours can reach success, in many cases, more easily than a man. And there are multiple problems embedded in this.

When women are working fifty-hour weeks, regardless of if they’re in a relationship, they defer having children. When they defer, that often means that their window of fertility closes without even a FedEx® envelope showing up marked, “Urgent, your chance to have a baby expires in 28 days.” I recall one article I read about a fortysomething who had frozen a plethora of her eggs in anticipation that one day she’d have enough, that she’d be where she wanted to be to have those children that she had neglected to have when she was 23.

Oops. I can’t quote it exactly, but she talked about “raging, screaming like an animal” when she found out that her frozen eggs were about as viable as a Bernie Sanders presidential run. Although I’m not completely evil, I did enjoy a bit of epicaricacy at the thought. I know, it’s a bad habit, but in this case I was hoping that some 23-year-old read the news and decided to not become a regretful wine aunt.

But just the mechanism of women wanting to have great jobs is killing them. Women are (as far as I can see) programmed to find men that are better than them. They want a man who makes more money, but they also want to be high powered corporate lawyers, which takes, at minimum, enough effort to push to and through 35.

And those men that make more money than the women? They’re not looking for 35-year-old lawyer women, they’re looking for a 23-year-old Stacy who isn’t cynical after spending over a decade climbing the ladder. Women in that position have rendered themselves simultaneously undesirable and incapable of finding a man.

The Mrs. and I were having a conversation. Her thesis was that women were monogamous – they just had to find the right man. That would make sense. Again, from the newspaper, another 40 something woman (there are a lot of these stories), blows up her marriage of fifteen or twenty years. Leaves it to find and reconnect with the man that had been The One that she had dated for a month or six before she met her husband. In my favorite version, the man has no, absolutely zero, recollection of the woman. She is an Alpha Widow, forever pining for that Alpha she had back in the day.

The probability that a woman becomes an Alpha Widow increases with every sex partner that she has. Whether or not The Mrs. is right, the facts show that if a woman spends her 20s in dissolute sex, the chances that she’ll be psychologically able to remain faithful to man number thirty or sixty plummets to zero. For women who view that their sexual worth is not determined by massive numbers of partners, I’d ask who wants to buy a pair of shoes that have been worn by 126 dudes?

Almost any woman can have an Alpha for a night, but the problem is that once they’ve had one, they feel that’s what they deserve. All of this, together, is what I call The Big Lie that women have been told.

This has consequences. The first is that the average Alpha loves it. He can get as much sex as he wants, when he wants it. The Beta, though, is getting wise, and having an Alpha Widow isn’t what he’s interested in. The consequences are lowered male investment and engagement in society. Women expect to be protected by men on the subway, but elect the District Attorney that turns the rapists back to the street, and sit on the juries that convict men attempting to protect them.

Additionally, men are shying away from doing the things that make them high value. Why engage in those behaviors if they can’t attract the attention of a decent woman? Despite modernity’s challenges, what men really want is a marriage and children. That’s it. It’s wickedly simple.

Women ask, “Where have all the good men gone?” The answer is simple. They’re either married to someone else, or the men never chose the path of radical self-improvement required to make them better. Why work fifty hours and then work out when the prospect of a family is raising Chad’s kid with Chad’s Alpha Widow?

Outside of the political consequences, this has also created a sharp political divide. The younger groups are skewing away from each other, based on sex. Women seek the party of least responsibility so they can kill babies at will and thus make the big bucks making PowerPoints™. Men are tired of the game, and are seeking what has been lost to them, which they see being fulfilled through nationalism and populism. It’s a train wreck ready to happen.

Again, the good news is we always win this one. Will it be horrible and difficult? Yes. But it is a battle that has been fought for centuries, and always, the family ends up winning in the end. Otherwise? None of us would be here. Which will also be the outcome if someone doesn’t stop Boeing®. Seriously. These guys need to be stopped before... oh, too late."