The long march of human civilization was a process of taking
things ‘off the table.’ Murder. Rape. Robbery. Aggressive war.
Killing prisoners of war. Torture. Using force to get what you want.
by Bill Bonner
Youghal, Ireland - "Our hypothesis... as far as we know, not shared by any reputable historian, geopolitician or analyst... is that the election of Donald Trump does not represent a real change of direction. Instead, it is an intensification of an existing trend... speeding up towards the final catastrophe of bankruptcy, war and inflation. The Primary Political Trend is toward more power and wealth concentrated in the political class... the elites of both parties. Is it a trend that has been going on at least since Jimmy Carter left the White House. Now, it is becoming more flagrant... more corrupt... and more dangerous.
Just read the headlines. The Financial Times reports: "Pfizer executives descend on Mar-a-Lago resort in attempt to curry favor." Here’s another one from the same paper: "Meta reins in fact-checking as Zuckerberg builds bridges to Trump." Those fact-checking teams were there to build bridges with the last administration. They didn’t just ‘check’ the facts... they distorted them for political purposes. They massaged them to suit their federal overlords.
Why spend so much effort to curry favor with the White House? Did elite CEOs descend on Plains, GA, when Jimmy Carter was elected? Did they quickly change their policies to please him? There is no record of it. But in the intervening years, the government became much more powerful... and the favor of the man in the driver’s seat can now make - or break - a business. CNN: "Biden killed US Steel deal even though some US officials rejected national security concerns." “National security” merely masks another power grab by the political elites. So do ‘regulations.’
In the early 20th century, it took an amendment to the Constitution to make booze illegal. Yet here’s Joe Biden, attempting to ban cigarettes on his own say-so, by changing a regulation. The Washington Examiner: "President Joe Biden is seeking to regulate nicotine levels in cigarettes in a last-ditch attempt to lower national smoking rates, yet opponents of the move say it will have catastrophic, downstream effects on the economy and crime. If adopted, his Food and Drug Administration rule would set a new maximum nicotine level for cigarettes, effectively banning virtually all cigarettes currently available for commercial purchase in the United States."
And here’s Donald Trump, considering a State of Emergency declaration so he can jam a baton into the spokes of world trade. Fortune: "Trump is reportedly considering declaring a national economic emergency to make his tariffs happen. Donald Trump, the once and future president and self-proclaimed “Tariff man,” could declare a national economic emergency to provide legal justification for universal tariffs he floated on the campaign trail and since his victory, according to CNN, which cited four people familiar with the matter. One source told the outlet that Trump is a fan of the law because of how comprehensive it is, in that he can decide how tariffs are put into play without proving their necessity. “Nothing is off the table,” another person familiar told CNN.
Nothing off the table? The long march of human civilization was essentially a process of taking things ‘off the table.’ Murder. Rape. Robbery. Aggressive war. Killing prisoners of war. Torture. Generally, using force to get what you want rather than bargaining for it peacefully became a no-no. But the primary political trend turns down, from time to time; civilization retreats. Now, both Republicans and Democrats support ripping off the public with deficits and inflation... as well as more bombing in the Ukraine and the Levant. No apologies for Guantanamo.
And the Trump team says it might even invade Greenland... or Panama... or Mexico. As for Canada, if it doesn’t get on board with the Trump agenda, whatever it is, it risks ‘severe financial sanctions.’ Still on the same road, in other words. But as the Irish say, the driver is no longer just swilling Guinness; he’s moved on to Jameson."
Big Automakers Are Being Destroyed Before Our Eyes"
"The biggest players in the American auto industry are sounding the alarm for 2025: things are tipping towards disaster, and many auto companies are at risk of going under. Recently, one CEO has bluntly admitted that his company, which is one of the largest car manufacturers in the U.S. and the world, only has 12 months to live in the best case scenario. At the moment, multiple industry executives are resigning from their jobs as they realize there's little they can do to save struggling auto firms.
American car companies are not only coping with production challenges, but also losing sales and market share to Chinese manufacturers, and that's pushing domestic auto manufacturers towards “breaking point,” according to a new whitepaper published by the SAE Detroit Section’s Global Leadership Conference Committee this week.
“What strange world is this? Earth. In the foreground of the featured image are the Pinnacles, unusual rock spires in Nambung National Park in Western Australia. Made of ancient sea shells (limestone), how these human-sized picturesque spires formed remains unknown. In the background, just past the end of the central Pinnacle, is a bright crescent Moon. The eerie glow around the Moon is mostly zodiacal light, sunlight reflected by dust grains orbiting between the planets in the Solar System.
Arching across the top is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Many famous stars and nebulas are also visible in the background night sky. The featured 29-panel panorama was taken and composed in 2015 September after detailed planning that involved the Moon, the rock spires, and their corresponding shadows. Even so, the strong zodiacal light was a pleasant surprise.”
“Is time something that is defined by the ticking of a cosmic clock, God’s wristwatch say? Time doesn’t exist except for the current tick. The past is irretrievably gone. The future does not yet exist. Consciousness is awareness of a moment. Or is time a dimension like space? We move through time as we move through space. The past is still there; we’re just not there anymore. The future exists; we’ll get there. We experience time as we experience space, say, by looking out the window of a moving train. Or is time…
Physicists and philosophers have been debating these questions since the pre-Socratics. Plato. Newton. Einstein. Most recently, Lee Smolin. Without resolution. What makes the question so difficult, it seems to me, is that time is inextricably tied up with consciousness. We won’t understand time until we understand consciousness, and vice versa. So far, consciousness is a mystery, in spite of books with titles like “Consciousness Explained”. Will consciousness be explained? Can consciousness be explained? If so, will it require a conceptual breakthrough of revolutionary proportions? Or is the Darwinian/material paradigm enough? Are we in for an insight, or for a surprise?
As I sit here at my desk under the hill, looking out at a vast panorama of earth, sea and sky, filled, it would seem, infinitely full of detail, so full that my awareness can only skim the surface, I have that uneasy sense that it’s going to be damnably difficult to extract consciousness, as a thing, from the universe in its totality. I think of that word “entanglement,” from quantum theory, and I wonder to what extent consciousness is entangled, perhaps even with past and future.
Who knows? Perhaps consciousness, or what I think of as my consciousness, is just a slice of cosmic consciousness, in the same way that the present is a slice of cosmic time. As a good Ockhamist, I am loathe to needlessly multiply hypotheses. But time will tell. Or consciousness will tell. Or something.”
“From emotional turmoil, hatred, and addiction the miracle of recovery begins in this Spadecaller Video entitled “Ex Obscurum” (From Darkness). Featuring original poetry narrated by the author and visual artist, Matthew Schwartz. Composer Samuel Barber’s powerful musical score, adopted for the movie Platoon, (Adagio for Strings) sets the background for this spiritual exodus “From Darkness.”
“Ex Obscurum”
“Remnants of my arrogance
Crumbles like ancient paper.
Why have me suffer this way?
Knowing I’m unable to lift myself up?
My dreams of grandeur are dead.
Glory is no mortal treasure;
Only a mirage for a lost soul.
Booze and drugs do not know my pain.
My body is failing.
My skin yellow, my vision dim.
I come to you burned and beaten.
Still clinging to these toxic vines,
The last rays of sunlight fading.
Is something or someone listening?
Hear my prayer:
Cut from me these twisted limbs.
Or, let me perish and be free at last.
I’ve failed at both life and death;
Must I wallow in this hideous morass,
Giving back nothing of any worth?
Death should have come many times past.
Why have you thwarted my retreat?
This is no pardon for a man like me.
To change I’ve tried, but look at me:
On the floor begging for eternal peace.
Begging you for one final breath.
Is this the mercy that befits your loving omnipotence?
Should I live one more moment of one more day,
Let it be free from hate.
Let it be unspoiled by fear,
Unencumbered by shameful lies.
Let it be imperfectly human.
To the power of all powers I come here now.
Spirit over all spirits I need your help.
You have always known,
When like a burning match my life was flickering.
No mere accident has kept this heart beating.
Could these odds persist year after perilous year?
No! To your power I surrender. But what now?
The black spots on this leopard are many.
Only a stroke from your sacred brush could change me.
To one knee, I lift my broken body.
Salty tears wet my parched lips.
My dingy railroad flat on Second Street glows.
The fog clears from my blurry eyes.
The burden of my regrets and guilt lift away.
Loneliness and despair evaporate,
Like a dewdrop in the midday sun,
A voice within me, but not within calls.
Like thunder after a passing storm
The rumbling echo speaks softly:
“You are never alone. I love you enough to let you suffer.
"Ever wonder why people can't make the leap to real awareness of what's going on? Why do so few people seem to care about the dangers of the unreported Fukushima radiation levels and toxic debris washing across the pacific? As the Orwellian American police state sweeps into place, the economy crumbles, Americans celebrated their entry into a brave new 2025 with minimal awareness of the true dangers already dissolving their health, wealth and chances for survival in an engineered conflagration of mythic proportions that is already descending on their heads.
As the gap between reality and manipulated public perception grows, it may just be too big a leap for many at this point. Having been dumbed-down and unresponsive for so long, it's too much for them to take in. Sad, but again, that's reality. Hey, why wake up when everything's such a bummer? That's the underlying mentality. The thing is, this is a conditioned response. Overload and recoil. And it's been going on a long, long time.
Why? Like the dumbing down effect of fluoride and chemtrails and adulterated food, it eventually suppresses natural responses. When the real alert presents itself, the subject will not be able to react and protect himself. Why all the dramatic end of the world sci-fi movies? Why the emphasis on violence and horror movies and graphic, destructive wars? Why does the news major on the bad events of the day? Why the combative gladiator sports, emphasis on technology instead of humanity, and mind-numbing crass consumerism and sexualization of society? This is deliberate social engineering, and that's the biggie. It's all engineered..and that's the last thing most people want to realize. And it usually is.
The Power of Cognitive Dissonance: The world has become essentially schizophrenic in outlook. Being told one thing while the exact opposite is happening before their eyes for so long, the "dissonance" created by this conflict causes humanity to shut down. America is the perfect example. Ostensibly fighting for "freedom and liberty" we commit genocide and destroy nation after nation. To protect our liberties the government has overturned the Bill of Rights and made the Constitution a mockery. Yet the populace sits and takes it. Why? Too big of a leap. If it turned out they've been completely conned by a massive manipulated agenda they may just completely break down. And subconsciously the horror of that reality is therefore a "no". Even if it were true they're at the point they'd rather not know.
I'll Take Conscious Reality. "Why all the negativity?" is what you'll hear a lot of the time when you bring these things up. The answer, as David Icke often says, is that ignorance is negative. Truth is empowering, no matter how awful it may be sometimes. And at this point in history the more you learn the more negative it may seem, with the Controllers' agenda in full final-phase swing. But so what. Things haven't changed all that much. The purpose of life is to rediscover who you truly are, and that wonderful awakening makes everything else pale in comparison. Our mission then becomes to inform and empower, share and encourage. The same one it always has been. That it's taking this kind of extreme compression to awaken the slumbering masses is really no surprise, and ultimately a gift from the Universe to help people back into the real world....that of conscious loving awareness."
"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we do not know."
"Simply because you do not have evidence that something
exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist."
"Learn to say 'I don't know.' If used when appropriate, it will be often."
"I had lived thirty good years before enduring my first food poisoning - odds quite fortunate in the grand scheme of things, but miserably unfortunate in the immediate experience of it. I found myself completely incapacitated to erect the pillars of my daily life - too cognitively foggy to read and write, too physically weak to work out or even meditate. The temporary disability soon elevated the assault on my mind and body to a new height of anguish: an intense experience of stress. Even as I consoled myself with Nabokov’s exceptionally florid account of food poisoning, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming malaise that had engulfed me - somehow, a physical illness had completely colored my psychoemotional reality.
This experience, of course, is far from uncommon. Long before scientists began shedding light on how our minds and bodies actually affect one another, an intuitive understanding of this dialogue between the body and the emotions, or feelings, emerged and permeated our very language: We use “feeling sick” as a grab-bag term for both the sensory symptoms - fever, fatigue, nausea - and the psychological malaise, woven of emotions like sadness and apathy.
Pre-modern medicine, in fact, has recognized this link between disease and emotion for millennia. Ancient Greek, Roman, and Indian Ayurvedic physicians all enlisted the theory of the four humors - blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm - in their healing practices, believing that imbalances in these four visible secretions of the body caused disease and were themselves often caused by the emotions. These beliefs are fossilized in our present language - melancholy comes from the Latin words for “black” (melan) and “bitter bile” (choler), and we think of a melancholic person as gloomy or embittered; a phlegmatic person is languid and impassive, for phlegm makes one lethargic.
For nearly three centuries, the idea that our emotions could impact our physical health remained scientific taboo - setting out to fight one type of dogma, Descartes had inadvertently created another, which we’re only just beginning to shake off. It was only in the 1950s that Austrian-Canadian physician and physiologist Hans Selye pioneered the notion of stress as we now know it today, drawing the scientific community’s attention to the effects of stress on physical health and popularizing the concept around the world. (In addition to his scientific dedication, Selye also understood the branding component of any successful movement and worked tirelessly to include the word itself in dictionaries around the world; today, “stress” is perhaps the word pronounced most similarly in the greatest number of major languages.)
But no researcher has done more to illuminate the invisible threads that weave mind and body together than Dr. Esther Sternberg. Her groundbreaking work on the link between the central nervous system and the immune system, exploring how immune molecules made in the blood can trigger brain function that profoundly affects our emotions, has revolutionized our understanding of the integrated being we call a human self. In the immeasurably revelatory "The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions" (public library), Sternberg examines the interplay of our emotions and our physical health, mediated by that seemingly nebulous yet, it turns out, remarkably concrete experience called stress.
With an eye to modern medicine’s advances in cellular and molecular biology, which have made it possible to measure how our nervous system and our hormones affect our susceptibility to diseases as varied as depression, arthritis, AIDS, and chronic fatigue syndrome, Sternberg writes: "By parsing these chemical intermediaries, we can begin to understand the biological underpinnings of how emotions affect diseases…
The same parts of the brain that control the stress response… play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also play a role in depression, we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives… Rather than seeing the psyche as the source of such illnesses, we are discovering that while feelings don’t directly cause or cure disease, the biological mechanisms underlying them may cause or contribute to disease. Thus, many of the nerve pathways and molecules underlying both psychological responses and inflammatory disease are the same, making predisposition to one set of illnesses likely to go along with predisposition to the other.
The questions need to be rephrased, therefore, to ask which of the many components that work together to create emotions also affect that other constellation of biological events, immune responses, which come together to fight or to cause disease. Rather than asking if depressing thoughts can cause an illness of the body, we need to ask what the molecules and nerve pathways are that cause depressing thoughts. And then we need to ask whether these affect the cells and molecules that cause disease.
[…]
We are even beginning to sort out how emotional memories reach the parts of the brain that control the hormonal stress response, and how such emotions can ultimately affect the workings of the immune system and thus affect illnesses as disparate as arthritis and cancer. We are also beginning to piece together how signals from the immune system can affect the brain and the emotional and physical responses it controls: the molecular basis of feeling sick. In all this, the boundaries between mind and body are beginning to blur."
Indeed, the relationship between memory, emotion, and stress is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Sternberg’s work. She considers how we deal with the constant swirl of inputs and outputs as we move through the world, barraged by a stream of stimuli and sensations:
"Every minute of the day and night we feel thousands of sensations that might trigger a positive emotion such as happiness, or a negative emotion such as sadness, or no emotion at all: a trace of perfume, a light touch, a fleeting shadow, a strain of music. And there are thousands of physiological responses, such as palpitations or sweating, that can equally accompany positive emotions such as love, or negative emotions such as fear, or can happen without any emotional tinge at all. What makes these sensory inputs and physiological outputs emotions is the charge that gets added to them somehow, somewhere in our brains. Emotions in their fullest sense comprise all of these components. Each can lead into the black box and produce an emotional experience, or something in the black box can lead out to an emotional response that seems to come from nowhere."
Memory, it turns out, is one of the major factors mediating the dialogue between sensation and emotional experience. Our memories of past experience become encoded into triggers that act as switchers on the rail of psychoemotional response, directing the incoming train of present experience in the direction of one emotional destination or another.
Sternberg writes: "Mood is not homogeneous like cream soup. It is more like Swiss cheese, filled with holes. The triggers are highly specific, tripped by sudden trails of memory: a faint fragrance, a few bars of a tune, a vague silhouette that tapped into a sad memory buried deep, but not completely erased. These sensory inputs from the moment float through layers of time in the parts of the brain that control memory, and they pull out with them not only reminders of sense but also trails of the emotions that were first connected to the memory. These memories become connected to emotions, which are processed in other parts of the brain: the amygdala for fear, the nucleus accumbens for pleasure - those same parts that the anatomists had named for their shapes. And these emotional brain centers are linked by nerve pathways to the sensory parts of the brain and to the frontal lobe and hippocampus - the coordinating centers of thought and memory. The same sensory input can trigger a negative emotion or a positive one, depending on the memories associated with it."
This is where stress comes in - much like memory mediates how we interpret and respond to various experiences, a complex set of biological and psychological factors determine how we respond to stress. Some types of stress can be stimulating and invigorating, mobilizing us into action and creative potency; others can be draining and incapacitating, leaving us frustrated and hopeless. This dichotomy of good vs. bad stress, Sternberg notes, is determined by the biology undergirding our feelings - by the dose and duration of the stress hormones secreted by the body in response to the stressful stimulus. She explains the neurobiological machinery behind this response:
" As soon as the stressful event occurs, it triggers the release of the cascade of hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal hormones - the brain’s stress response. It also triggers the adrenal glands to release epinephrine, or adrenaline, and the sympathetic nerves to squirt out the adrenaline-like chemical norepinephrine all over the body: nerves that wire the heart, and gut, and skin. So, the heart is driven to beat faster, the fine hairs of your skin stand up, you sweat, you may feel nausea or the urge to defecate. But your attention is focused, your vision becomes crystal clear, a surge of power helps you run - these same chemicals released from nerves make blood flow to your muscles, preparing you to sprint.
All this occurs quickly. If you were to measure the stress hormones in your blood or saliva, they would already be increased within three minutes of the event. In experimental psychology tests, playing a fast-paced video game will make salivary cortisol increase and norepinephrine spill over into venous blood almost as soon as the virtual battle begins. But if you prolong the stress, by being unable to control it or by making it too potent or long-lived, and these hormones and chemicals still continue to pump out from nerves and glands, then the same molecules that mobilized you for the short haul now debilitate you."
These effects of stress exist on a bell curve - that is, some is good, but too much becomes bad: As the nervous system secretes more and more stress hormones, performance increases, but up to a point; after that tipping point, performance begins to suffer as the hormones continue to flow. What makes stress “bad” - that is, what makes it render us more pervious to disease - is the disparity between the nervous system and immune system’s respective pace. Sternberg explains:
"The nervous system and the hormonal stress response react to a stimulus in milliseconds, seconds, or minutes. The immune system takes parts of hours or days. It takes much longer than two minutes for immune cells to mobilize and respond to an invader, so it is unlikely that a single, even powerful, short-lived stress on the order of moments could have much of an effect on immune responses. However, when the stress turns chronic, immune defenses begin to be impaired. As the stressful stimulus hammers on, stress hormones and chemicals continue to pump out. Immune cells floating in this milieu in blood, or passing through the spleen, or growing up in thymic nurseries never have a chance to recover from the unabated rush of cortisol. Since cortisol shuts down immune cells’ responses, shifting them to a muted form, less able to react to foreign triggers, in the context of continued stress we are less able to defend and fight when faced with new invaders. And so, if you are exposed to, say, a flu or common cold virus when you are chronically stressed out, your immune system is less able to react and you become more susceptible to that infection."
Extended exposure to stress, especially to a variety of stressors at the same time - any combination from the vast existential menu of life-events like moving, divorce, a demanding job, the loss of a loved one, and even ongoing childcare - adds up a state of extreme exhaustion that leads to what we call burnout.
Sternberg writes: "Members of certain professions are more prone to burnout than others - nurses and teachers, for example, are among those at highest risk. These professionals are faced daily with caregiving situations in their work lives, often with inadequate pay, inadequate help in their jobs, and with too many patients or students in their charge. Some studies are beginning to show that burnt-out patients may have not only psychological burnout, but also physiological burnout: a flattened cortisol response and inability to respond to any stress with even a slight burst of cortisol. In other words, chronic unrelenting stress can change the stress response itself. And it can change other hormone systems in the body as well.
One of the most profound such changes affects the reproductive system - extended periods of stress can shut down the secretion of reproductive hormones in both men and women, resulting in lower fertility. But the effects are especially perilous for women - recurring and extended episodes of depression result in permanent changes in bone structure, increasing the risk of osteoporosis. In other words, we register stress literally in our bones."
But stress isn’t a direct causal function of the circumstances we’re in - what either amplifies or ameliorates our experience of stress is, once again, memory. Sternberg writes: "Our perception of stress, and therefore our response to it, is an ever-changing thing that depends a great deal on the circumstances and settings in which we find ourselves. It depends on previous experience and knowledge, as well as on the actual event that has occurred. And it depends on memory, too."
The most acute manifestation of how memory modulates stress is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. For striking evidence of how memory encodes past experience into triggers, which then catalyze present experience, Sternberg points to research by psychologist Rachel Yehuda, who found both Holocaust survivors and their first-degree relatives - that is, children and siblings - exhibited a similar hormonal stress response.
This, Sternberg points out, could be a combination of nature and nurture - the survivors, as young parents for whom the trauma was still fresh, may well have subconsciously taught their children a common style of stress-responsiveness; but it’s also possible that these automatic hormonal stress responses permanently changed the parents’ biology and were transmitted via DNA to their children. Once again, memory encodes stress into our very bodies. Sternberg considers the broader implications:
"Stress need not be on the order of war, rape, or the Holocaust to trigger at least some elements of PTSD. Common stresses that we all experience can trigger the emotional memory of a stressful circumstance - and all its accompanying physiological responses. Prolonged stress - such as divorce, a hostile workplace, the end of a relationship, or the death of a loved one - can all trigger elements of PTSD."
Among the major stressors - which include life-events expected to be on the list, such as divorce and the death of a loved one - is also one somewhat unexpected situation, at least to those who haven’t undergone it: moving. Sternberg considers the commonalities between something as devastating as death and something as mundane as moving:
"One is certainly loss - the loss of someone or something familiar. Another is novelty - finding oneself in a new and unfamiliar place because of the loss. Together these amount to change: moving away from something one knows and toward something one doesn’t. An unfamiliar environment is a universal stressor to nearly all species, no matter how developed or undeveloped."
In the remainder of the thoroughly illuminating "The Balance Within," Sternberg goes on to explore the role of interpersonal relationships in both contributing to stress and shielding us from it, how the immune system changes our moods, and what we can do to harness these neurobiological insights in alleviating our experience of the stressors with which every human life is strewn."
“Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves. So here’s a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth. Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one’s health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.
Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck. The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.
According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date. In fact, listening to that one song- “Weightless”- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants’ overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates. That is remarkable.
Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created “Weightless”, Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener’s heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza.
In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you’ve got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.
Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, “‘Weightless’ was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous.” So don’t drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:
"At least once a year, I completely burn out: exhausted, I no longer have the energy or will to care about anything but the bare minimum for survival. Everything not essential for survival gets jettisoned or set aside. This goes with the territory if you're trying to accomplish a lot of things that are intrinsically complex and open-ended - for example, running a business, being a parent, juggling college, work, family, community commitments, etc.
I am confident many if not most of you have experienced burnout due to being overwhelmed by open-ended, inherently complex commitments.
I don't think burnout is limited to individuals. I think entire organizations and institutions can experience burnout, especially organizations devoted to caring for others or those facing long odds of fulfilling their core purpose. I even think entire nations can become exhausted by the effort of keeping up appearances or navigating endless crises. At that point, the individuals and institutions of the nation just go through the motions of coping rather than continue the struggle. Perhaps Venezuela is a current example.
I have long suspected that in many ways America is just going through the motions.John Michael Greer (the Archdruid) has brilliantly described a process he calls catabolic collapse, which I would characterize as the stairstep-down of overly complex, costly systems as participants react to crises by resetting to a lower level of complexity and consumption.
Just as ecosystems have intrinsic carrying capacities, so too do individual humans and human systems. When our reach exceeds our grasp, and the costs of complexity exceed the carrying capacity of the underlying systems, then we have to move down to a lower level of complexity and lower cost-structure/energy consumption.
This sounds straightforward enough, but it isn't that easy in real life. We can't offload our kids and downsize to part-time parenting or magically reduce the complexities of operating a small business (or two). These tasks are intrinsically open-ended. Reductions in stress and complexity such as quitting a demanding job (and earning one-third of our former salary) require long years of trimming and planning.
So what can we do to work through burnout?Since I'm designed to over-commit myself, burnout is something I've dealt with since my late teens.I like to think I'm getting better at managing it, but this is probably illusory.(It may be one of those cases where the illusion is useful because it's positive and hopeful.) I find these responses helpful:
1. Reduce whatever complexity can be reduced.Even something as simple as making a pot of chili or soup to eat for a few days (minimizing daily meal prep) helps. Reduce interactions and transactions.
2. Daily walks - two a day if possible.If there is any taken-for-granted magic in daily life (other than sleep, dreaming and playing music), it's probably walking - especially if you let your mind wander rather than keep working.
3. More naps, more sleep.
4. Avoid the temptations of overly fatty/sweet/carbo comfort food, digital distractions, etc.
5. Keep to positive routines (stretching, walking, etc.), no matter how tired and down you feel.
6. Set aside time to play your musical instrument of choice, preferably improvisation rather than practice.
7. Do whatever calms your mind, even if it requires effort.
8. Do stuff you enjoy and set aside as much of the stuff you actively dislike doing as possible.
9. Set aside solitary time to "do nothing." Lowering the barriers raised by conscious effort, focus and thought may well be critical to our well-being.
This is one conclusion from research cited by Sherry Turkel in "Scientific American": "For the first time in the history of our species, we are never alone and never bored. Have we lost something fundamental about being human?"
I think the answer is an unequivocal yes.Our minds need periods of solitude, aimless wandering (i.e. boredom), time to integrate thoughts and feelings, time to question things and time for introspection. Without these restorative periods, we end up just going through the motions, on an autopilot setting of keeping overly complex lives and systems duct-taped together. This leads to burnout, and eventually to some measure of catabolic collapse/system reset.”
"The results of the third annual “2024 Worldwide Embalmer Blood Clot Survey” are out, and the findings are both gruesome and scary. Retired Airforce Major Tom Haviland has been doing this survey ever since he was fired from his job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 2021 for NOT taking the CV19 bioweapon vax. Haviland is the only one in the world doing a survey of embalmers from around the world to reveal the “unusual phenomenon of large, grotesque ‘white fibrous clots’ in the veins and arteries of corpses.” Haviland got the idea to start the survey of embalmers after seeing the movie “Died Suddenly.” Haviland explains, “About half the movie is about six or seven embalmers that started to find these white fibrous clots in the corpses they were embalming.
At the 13-minute mark, an amazing statement is made. An embalmer from Indiana, Wallace Hooker, was lecturing at an Ohio embalmer’s conference in Columbus, Ohio, on the 26th of October in 2022. He was lecturing to a room of about 100 embalmers. He showed them photographs of the white fibrous clots he had been pulling out of his corpses for the last year or so, and he asked by a show of hands how many of you are seeing these white fibrous clots? He said almost the entire room of 100 embalmers raised their hands and said yes. He then asked when did you start seeing them? They all said about six months after the Covid vaccines rolled out.”
So, Haviland started his own worldwide survey of embalmers three years ago. In his latest 2024 survey of embalmers from around the world, “white fibrous clots appeared in a weighted average of 27.5% of corpses.” Also, in the 2024 survey of embalmers, 83% are seeing these long fibrous clots. Haviland says this year’s 2024 survey shows the trend is increasing and not decreasing. Haviland says, “This is a phenomenon that the embalmers never saw before 2020. Prior to 2020, they only saw two types of clots. One is called ‘grape jelly’ clots, and they look like dark grape jelly. They dissolve easily in your hand like grape jelly does. There is also something called ‘chicken fat’ clots that are much smaller, yellow and tear very easily. They are much different than these large, long white fibrous clots. They can grow up to two feet long, and they are tough, rubbery and elastic. Embalmers in my survey have never seen these before. They are very, very unusual.”
Haviland says many in the embalmer community do NOT want to participate in his survey. This year, Haviland got 301 embalmers to participate out of thousands of requests to take the clot survey. Haviland says, “We only got about 300 responses to this year’s survey because there is a reluctance of funeral directors and funeral directors associations to talk about this, which is very interesting. This is not a rare phenomenon that clots are prevalent. There is no way around this. These things are causing strokes and heart attacks. The embalmers are insistent that the clots are forming before death. They are picking up bodies that have not been refrigerated yet, an hour or two old, and they are finding them littered with clots. No way the clots could have formed in the hour or two after the person passed.”
These white fibrous clots are for the living, too. Haviland says, “I have been in touch with a cardiologist and vascular specialist in Jacksonville, Florida, who says he has been pulling these white fibrous clots, the very same ones, out of living people in the last three years. Another doctor I know who said he is pulling anywhere between 3 to 10 of these white fibrous clots out of his patients every week. These doctors do have the CV19 vax records, and they say every time they pull one of these long clots out of people, 99% of the time they have been vaccinated with between 1 to 8 CV19 shots. Doctors I talk with say it seems the more shots they have taken, the worse the clotting seems to be.”
In closing, Haviland reminds us that his survey results are sent to the FDA, NIH and the CDC. Haviland says, “The tragedy here is, here I am a retired major, and the last three years I have done these surveys, I immediately submit all results to the FDA, CDC and NIH. Would you believe in the 3 years I have done this, I have not gotten a response from them on these embalmer surveys. It’s just crickets back from them. I also did a special survey from catheterization lab workers, for doctors, to see what they were seeing in their patients. I submitted that to the Society for Vascular Surgeons in the United States, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. None of those responded. I did get an email back from the US Society for Vascular Surgery in Rosemont, Illinois, and they said they decline to participate. They have 6,300 members, and they chose not to distribute the survey to their 6,300 vascular surgeons to ask what is going on.” There is much more in the 48-minute interview.
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with Tom Haviland to do a deep dive into the “2024 Worldwide Embalmer Blood Clot Survey: Embalmers Keep Finding Fibrous CV19 Vax Clots"
There is lots for free information on Laura Kasner’s Substack called “Clotastrophe.” This is where Tom Haviland posts his survey work. There is zero charge to visit this site.
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