"The Western Way of Genocide"

"The Western Way of Genocide"

by Chris Hedges

"Gaza is a wasteland of 50 million tons of rubble and debris. Rats and dogs scavenge amid the ruins and fetid pools of raw sewage. The putrid stench and contamination of decaying corpses rises from beneath the mountains of shattered concrete. There is no clean water. Little food. A severe shortage of medical services and hardly any habitable shelters. Palestinians risk death from unexploded ordnance, left behind after over 15 months of air strikes, artillery barrages, missile strikes and blasts from tank shells, and a variety of toxic substances, including pools of raw sewage and asbestos.

Hepatitis A, caused by drinking contaminated water, is rampant, as are respiratory ailments, scabies, malnutrition, starvation and the widespread nausea and vomiting caused by eating rancid food. The vulnerable, including infants and the elderly, along with the sick, face a death sentence. Some 1.9 million people have been displaced, amounting to 90 percent of the population. They live in makeshift tents, encamped amid slabs of concrete or the open air. Many have been forced to move over a dozen times. Nine in 10 homes have been destroyed or damaged. Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, universities - Israel blew up Israa University in Gaza City in a controlled demolition - cemeteries, shops and offices have been obliterated. The unemployment rate is 80 percent and the gross domestic product has been reduced by almost 85 percent, according to an October 2024 report issued by the International Labor Organization.

Israel’s banning of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East - which estimates that clearing Gaza of the rubble left behind will take 15 years - ensures that Palestinians in Gaza will never have access to basic humanitarian supplies, adequate food and services.

The United Nations Development Programme estimates that it will cost between $40 billion and $50 billion to rebuild Gaza and will take, if the funds are made available, until 2040. It would be the largest post-war reconstruction effort since the end of World War Two.

Israel, supplied with billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. Germany, Italy and the U.K., created this hell. It intends to maintain it. Gaza is to remain under siege. After an initial burst of aid deliveries at the start of the ceasefire, Israel has once again severely cut back the trucked-in assistance. Gaza’s infrastructure will not be restored. Its basic services, including water treatment plants, electricity and sewer lines, will not be repaired. Its destroyed roads, bridges and farms will not be rebuilt. Desperate Palestinians will be forced to choose between living like cave dwellers, camped out amid jagged chunks of concrete, dying from disease, famine, bombs and bullets, or permanent exile. These are the only options Israel offers.

Israel is convinced, probably correctly, that eventually life in the coastal strip will become so onerous and difficult, especially as Israel finds excuses to violate the ceasefire and resume armed assaults on the Palestinian population, a mass exodus will be inevitable. It has refused, even with the ceasefire in place, to permit foreign press into Gaza, a ban designed to blunt coverage of the horrendous suffering and death.

Stage Two of Israel’s genocide and the expansion of “Greater Israel” - which includes the seizing of more Syrian territory in the Golan Heights (as well as calls for expansion to Damascus), southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank - is being cemented into place. Israeli organizations, including the far right Nachala organization, have held conferences to prepare for Jewish colonization of Gaza once Palestinians are ethnically-cleansed. Jewish-only colonies existed in Gaza for 38 years until they were dismantled in 2005.

Washington and its allies in Europe do nothing to halt the live-streamed mass slaughter. They will do nothing to halt the wasting away of Palestinians in Gaza from hunger and disease and their eventual depopulation. They are partners in this genocide. They will remain partners until the genocide reaches its grim conclusion.

But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, the terrifying machine of industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous. These assaults will be committed, as they are in Gaza, in the name of progress, Western civilization and our supposed “virtues” to crush the aspirations of those, mostly poor people of color, who have been dehumanized and dismissed as human animals.

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law.

The message this sends is clear: You, and the rules that you thought might protect you, do not matter. We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.

Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes in “Rise and Kill First” has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” uses the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass murder and Zionist version of Lebensraum.

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”

Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany. Adolf Hitler, as Aimé Césaire writes in “Discourse on Colonialism”, appeared exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man.” But the Nazis, he writes, had simply applied “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

The German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 - then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” - along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “western civilization.” As Hannah Arendt understood, antisemitism alone did not lead to the Shoah. It needed the innate genocidal potential of the modern bureaucratic state.

“In America,” the poet Langston Huges said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

We dominate the globe not because of our superior virtues, but because we are the most efficient killers on the planet. The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, the Congo, Kenya and Vietnam are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black, Brown and Native Americans. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimised or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators.

“These events which took place in living memory undermined the basic assumption of both religious traditions and the secular Enlightenment: that human beings have a fundamentally ‘moral’ nature,” Pankaj Mishra writes in his book “The World After Gaza.” “The corrosive suspicion that they don’t is now widespread. Many more people have closely witnessed death and mutilation, under regimes of callousness, timidity and censorship; they recognise with a shock that everything is possible, remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present, and the foundations of international law and morality are not secure at all.”

Mass slaughter is as integral to western imperialism as the Shoah. They are fed by the same disease of white supremacy and the conviction that a better world is built upon the subjugation and eradication of the “lower” races.

Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right in the U.S. and Europe dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists, including Christian nationalists, because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants.

Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

What is lacking is not knowledge - our perfidy and Israel’s is part of the historical record - but the courage to name our darkness and repent. This willful blindness and historical amnesia, this refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, this belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by the Global North against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable."

- https://chrishedges.substack.com/

"Forget Us Not"

"Forget Us Not"

by Mr. Fish

NEW YORK: "I am in the The Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center next to the St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in Manhattan. I am holding a bound, hand-written memoir, which includes poetry, drawings, and scrapbooked images, by Zaven Seraidarian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide. The front cover of the book, one of six volumes, reads “Bloody Journal.” The other volumes have titles such as “Drops of Springtime,” “Tears” and “The Wooden Spoon.” “My name will remain immortal on the earth,” the author writes. “I will speak about myself and tell more.”

The center houses hundreds of documents, letters, hand-drawn maps of villages that have disappeared, sepia photographs, poems, drawings and histories - much of it untranslated - on the customs, traditions and notable families of lost Armenian communities. Jesse Arlen, the director of the center, looks forlornly at the volume in my hand. “No one has probably read it, looked at it or even knew it was here,” he says.

He opens a box and hands me a hand drawn map by Hareton Saksoorian of Havav village in Palu, where Armenians in 1915 were massacred or expelled. Saksoorian drew the map from memory after he escaped. The drawings of Armenian homes have the tiny, inked in names of the long dead.

This could well be the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza. They too battle to preserve memory, to defy an indifferent world that stood by as they were slaughtered. They will doggedly seek to preserve scraps of their existence. They too will write memoirs, histories and poems, draw maps of villages, refugee camps and cities that have been obliterated, set down painful stories of butchery, carnage and loss. They too will name and condemn their killers, lament the extermination of families, including thousands of children, and struggle to preserve a vanished world. But time is a cruel master.

Intellectual and emotional life for those who are cast out of their homeland is defined by the crucible of exile, what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said told me is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place.” Said’s book “Out of Place” is a record of this lost world.

The Armenian poet Armen Anush was raised in an orphanage in Aleppo, Syria. He captures the life sentence of those who survive genocide in his poem “Sacred Obsession.” He writes:

"Country of light, you visit me every night in my sleep.

Every night, exalted, as a venerable goddess,

You bring fresh sensations and hopes to my exiled soul.

Every night you ease the waverings of my path.

Every night you reveal the boundless deserts,

The open eyes of the dead, the crying of children in the distance,

The crackle and red flame of the countless burned bodies,

And the unsheltered caravan, always unsure, always faltering.

Every night the same hellish, deathly scene –

The tired Euphrates washing the blood off the savaged corpses,

The waves making merry with the rays of the sun,

And relieving the burden of tis useless, weary weight.

The same humid, black wells of charred bodies,

The same thick smoke enveloping the whole of the Syrian desert.

The same voices from the depths, the same moans, soft and sunless,

And the same brutal, ruthless barbarity of the Turkish mob."

The poem ends, however, with a plea not that these nighttime terrors end, but that they “come to me every night,” that “the flame of your heroes” always “accompany my days.” “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Milan Kundera reminds us. It is better to endure crippling trauma than to forget. Once we forget, once memories are purged - the goal of all genocidal killers - we are enslaved to lies and myths, severed from our individual, cultural and national identities. We no longer know who we are.

“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history,” Kundera writes in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” “Human life - and herein lies its secret - takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.” Those who have crossed that border return to us as prophets, prophets no one wants to hear.

The ancient Greeks believed that as the souls of the departed were being ferried to Hades they were forced to drink the water from the River Lethe to erase memory. The destruction of memory is the final obliteration of being, the last act of mortality. Memory is the struggle to stay the boatman’s hand.

The genocide in Gaza mirrors the physical annihilation of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks, who feared a nationalist revolt like the one that had convulsed the Balkans, drove nearly all of the two million Armenians out of Turkey. Men and women were usually separated. The men were often immediately murdered or sent to death camps, such as those at Ras-Ul-Ain - in 1916 over 80,000 Armenians were slaughtered there - and Deir-el-Zor in the Syrian desert. At least a million were forced on death marches - not unlike the Palestinians in Gaza who have been forcibly displaced by Israel, up to a dozen times - into the deserts of what are now Syria and Iraq. There, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered or died of starvation, exposure and disease. Corpses littered the desert expanse. By 1923, an estimated 1.2 million Armenians were dead. Orphanages throughout the Middle East were flooded with some 200,000 destitute Armenian children.

The doomed resistance by several Armenian villages in the mountains along the coast of present-day Turkey and Syria that chose not to obey the deportation order was captured in Franz Werfel’s novel “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a Polish-German literary critic who survived the Holocaust, said it was widely read in the Warsaw ghetto, which mounted a doomed uprising of its own in April 1943.

In 2000, when he was 98-years-old, I interviewed the writer and singer Hagop H. Asadourian, one of the last survivors of the Armenian genocide. He was born in the village of Chomaklou in eastern Turkey and deported, along with the rest of his village, in 1915. His mother and four of his sisters died of typhus in the Syrian desert. It would be 39 years before he reunited with his only surviving sister, who he was separated from one night near the Dead Sea as they fled with a ragged band of Armenian orphans from Syria to Jerusalem.

He told me he wrote to give a voice to the 331 people with whom he trudged into Syria in September 1915, only 29 of whom survived. “You can never really write what happened anyway,” Asadourian said. “It is too ghoulish. I still fight with myself to remember it as it was. You write because you have to. It all wells up inside of you. It is like a hole that fills constantly with water and no amount of bailing will empty it. This is why I continue.” He stopped to collect himself before continuing.

“When it came time to bury my mother, I had to get two other small boys to help me carry her body up to a well where they were dumping the corpses,” he said. “We did this so the jackals would not eat them. The stench was terrible. There were swarms of black flies buzzing over the opening. We pushed her in feet first, and the other boys, to escape the smell, ran down the hill. I stayed. I had to watch. I saw her head, as she fell, bang on one side of the well and then the other before she disappeared. At the time, I did not feel anything at all.” He halted, visibly shaken. “What kind of a son is that?”' he asked hoarsely. He eventually found his way to an orphanage in Jerusalem.

“These things dig into you, not only once, but throughout life, throughout life, through these days,” he told an interviewer from the USC Shoah Foundation. “I am 98-years-old. And today, to this day, I cannot forget any of this. I forget what I saw yesterday maybe, but I could not forget these things. And yet, we have to beg nations to recognize genocide. I lost 11 members of my family and I have to beg people to believe me. That’s what hurts you most. It’s a terrible world, a terrible experience.”

His 14 books were a fight against erasure, but when I spoke with him he admitted that the work of the Turkish army was now almost complete. His last book was “The Smoldering Generation,” which he said was “about the inevitable loss of our culture.” The present is something in which the dead hold no shares. “No one takes the place of those who are gone,” he said, seated in front of a picture window that looked out on his garden in Tenafly, New Jersey. “Your children do not understand you in this country. You cannot blame them.”

The world of the Armenians in eastern Turkey, first mentioned by the Greeks and Persians in 6 B.C., has, like Gaza, whose history spans 4,000 years, all but disappeared. The contributions of Armenian culture are forgotten. It was Armenian monks, for example, who rescued works by ancient Greek writers such as Philo and Eusebius, from oblivion.

I stumbled on the ruins of Armenian villages when I worked as a reporter in southeastern Turkey. Like Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel, these villages did not appear on maps. Those who carry out genocide seek total annihilation. Nothing is to remain. Especially memory. This will be our next battle. We must not forget."

- https://chrishedges.substack.com/

The Poet: David Romano, "If Tomorrow Starts Without Me"

David Romano, "If Tomorrow Starts Without Me"

Read by Tom O'Bedlam

o

"Dog's Last Day"

- https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-JTxAIq-1K4

So sadly beautiful...

Free Download: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince"

Free Download:

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince"

by Kirstie Pursey

“‘The Little Prince’, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is a children’s story with some very profound meanings and some quotes that will really make you think. I have to admit that I never read the ‘Little Prince’ as a child. I think I wouldn’t have known what to make of it if I did. Even reading it as an adult I didn’t know what to make of it!

However, it is clear that “The Little Prince” touches on some very deep themes about the nature of life, love, friendship and more. The following Little Prince quotes show just how many philosophical themes are discussed in this small, but profound work.

The story tells of a pilot who crashes into the Sahara desert. He is attempting to fix his damaged plane when a little boy appears as if from nowhere and demands that he draws him a sheep. Thus begins a strange, enigmatic friendship that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. The Little Prince, it turns out, comes from a small asteroid where he is the only living being apart from a rather demanding rose bush. The Little Prince decides to leave his home and visit other planets to find knowledge. The story tells of these encounters with rulers of strange worlds and de Saint-Exupéry has opportunities to demonstrate some philosophical themes that will make readers think.

On earth, as well as meeting the pilot, The Little Price meets a Fox and Snake. The fox helps him to truly understand the rose and the snake offers him a way to return to his home planet. But his return journey comes at a high price. The book’s bittersweet ending is both thought-provoking and emotional. I would definitely recommend that you read “The Little Prince” if you haven’t already.

It is one of the most beautiful and profound children’s books there are. If you have older children, then you might like to read it with them as it can be a little overwhelming for them to read alone. In the meantime, here are some of the best and most thought-provoking Little Prince quotes:

• “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

• “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

• “All grown-ups were once children… but only a few of them remember it.”

• “Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”

• “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”

• “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

• “It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.”

• “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

• “I am who I am and I have the need to be.”

• “No one is ever satisfied where he is.”

• “One day, I watched the sun setting forty-four times……You know…when one is so terribly sad, one loves sunsets.”

• “People where you live, the little prince said, grow five thousand roses in one garden… Yet they don’t find what they’re looking for… And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose.”

• “But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.”

• “What matters most are the simple pleasures so abundant that we can all enjoy them…Happiness doesn’t lie in the objects we gather around us. To find it, all we need to do is open our eyes.”

• “Where are the people?” resumed the Little Prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.”

• “What makes the desert beautiful,’ said the Little Prince, ‘is that somewhere it hides a well…”

• “For me, you are only a little boy just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you have no need of me, either. For you, I’m only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we’ll need each other. You’ll be the only boy in the world for me and I’ll be the only fox in the world for you.”

• “To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.”

• “Only the children know what they are looking for.”

• “Sometimes, there is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day.”

• “I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words.”

• “Nevertheless he is the only one of them all who does not seem to me ridiculous. Perhaps that is because he is thinking of something else besides himself.”

• “The one thing I love in life is to sleep.”

• “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”

• “And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me.”

Closing thoughts: I hope you have enjoyed these ‘Little Prince’ quotes. Admittedly, they are sometimes difficult to fathom at first. However, like many things in life, the more you think about them, the more they begin to make sense. This is not an easy book to read and the bittersweet ending may leave you feeling a little heartbroken. However, the book offers so many insights into the human condition that it is well worth the time spent thinking about the philosophical ideas contained between the covers.”

- https://www.learning-mind.com/

○

Freely download “The Little Prince”, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, here:

- https://blogs.ubc.ca

"How It Really Is"

 

"Hell..."

"Many people don't fear a hell after this life and that's because hell is on this earth, in this life. In this life there are many forms of hell that people walk through, sometimes for a day, sometimes for years, sometimes it doesn't end. The kind of hell that doesn't burn your skin; but burns your soul. The kind of hell that people can't see; but the flames lap at your spirit. Heaven is a place on earth, too! It's where you feel freedom, where you're not afraid. No more chains. And you hear your soul laughing."

- C. JoyBell C.

I believe it was Sartre who said, "This is Hell, cleverly disguised just enough

 to keep us from escaping." Look at the world... look around closely. What do you see?

I believe he may have been right...

"Look At The Extreme Social Insanity That Is Spreading All Over America"

Full screen recommended.

"Look At The Extreme Social Insanity 

That Is Spreading All Over America"

by Epic Economist

"If you want to know how extreme is the social decline that is spreading all over the United States, all you need to do is walk the streets of our biggest cities. You don’t even have to go to the “bad areas” to see the absurdities that are eating away our communities and destroying them from within. As we will show you in this video, even in the best parts of Washington D.C., filth, squalor, and disease are everywhere. New images show that only a couple of blocks away from the White House, countless needles can be seen on the ground, homeless encampments are taking over national parks, and the rate of delinquencies has spiked to the highest levels in history. The same is true for many other areas that used to be prosperous and economically and socially stable. Unfortunately, their decay is happening at a frightening pace and will only continue to accelerate as economic conditions go from worse to catastrophic.

Exactly one block behind the White House, dozens of homeless encampments were scattered throughout city streets and even into national parks. Severe sanitation issues, including human waste, used needles, and trash piling up everywhere left Johnson in disbelief. At D.C. Sparkle street, glass from smashed car windows posed a threat to everyday citizens walking by. Even in front of St. Johns Cathedral, garbage dominated the landscape.

Until 2017, Johnson said he didn’t see a single tent near public buildings. As he interviewed local residents, it became clear that people don’t feel safe and they say that new problems emerge on a daily basis. “Disease, decay, and people that don’t care about this nation running things, and running them directly to the ground. This is an apt metaphor for a country in decline” Johnson stressed. On the West Coast, things are no different. In recent years, Portland, once considered one of the finest cities in America, has become something short of a dystopia, where shop owners sleep with self-defense tools behind their pillows, and citizens must act as law enforcement agents.

This crisis is unfolding at a pace that is just breathtaking. According to Joel Kotkin, the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, the social decay that is rotting the foundations of U.S. cities is systemic and getting worse over time.

“The old saying that “the city air makes one free” all too often means freedom to be poor, to experience endemic homelessness, collapsing public infrastructure and rising neglect,” Kotkin says. “As cities slowly fall to pieces, they are increasingly becoming no-go zones for investors and business. Barely ten percent of US companies are interested in investing in large urban areas,” the expert reveals.

Sadly, it appears that our leaders are not too worried about restoring the economic and social balance this country needs to start thriving again. Year after year, our social decline intensifies, and our major cities continue to collapse all around us. If you love America, you should be completely disgusted by what is happening to our country. What do you think our founders would say if they could see what our cities have become? They would certainly be deeply ashamed of us. And we should be deeply ashamed of ourselves too because we should have never allowed our beloved country to sink so low."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "Living Broke in 2025 – Here’s the Proof"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 2/1/25

"Living Broke in 2025 – Here’s the Proof"

"Walmart’s secret struggle is out in the open, and the economy’s state shows just how tough things are getting for all of us. Inflation is hitting hard, and Walmart is seeing a massive increase in “trade-downs” - shoppers choosing cheaper brands for essentials like food, paper products, and meat. On top of that, we’re diving into the insurance crisis, skyrocketing costs, and the shocking rise in canceled policies. It's clear families are stretched thin, struggling to make ends meet.

The big picture? From Amazon layoffs to electric school bus failures and even car theft at dealerships, it feels like everything around us is shifting. And don’t get me started on the wildfires, green energy setbacks, or even the bizarre chocolate recalls. It’s all connected, and it’s impacting every part of our lives."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"I Visited The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces"

Full screen recommended.

Travelling with Russell, 7/27/24

"I Visited The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces"

"Park Patriot in Moscow, Russia has one of the most famous Churches in all of Russia. The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces is a spiritual symbol of Russia, glorifying the greatest victory of life over death."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Oh my God...

"Trying New Russian Metro - The Best Transport In The World?"

Full screen recommended.

Lisa With Love, 2/1/25

"Trying New Russian Metro - 

The Best Transport In The World?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Incredible what a sane, civilized society can achieve, isn't it?

o

Full screen recommended.

Travelling with Russell, 2/1/25

"Russian Typical Elite Apartment Tour: 

Could You Live There?"

"Join me on a tour of an apartment listed for rental in Moscow. What makes 

this an Elite Apartment? What is it like to rent a typical Russian apartment?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Greg Hunter, "AI Goal to Kill Human Race"

"AI Goal to Kill Human Race"

by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Karen Kingston is a biotech analyst and former Pfizer employee who is back with a new warning about artificial intelligence (AI) and deadly and debilitating mRNA “vaccines.” Let’s start with the horrible mid-air collision that happened in Washington D.C. The question that is not being asked is what is the vax status of all involved with this deadly accident? It is now a well-known fact that both Covid 19 and the CV19 vax are bioweapons that cause “catastrophic neurological damage” and cause “cognitive impairment.” Kingston says, “The number one symptom is cognitive decline. This is similar to Alzheimer’s and dementia. There is lack of memory, responsiveness, fatigue and exhaustion. Another symptom of both the CV19 injections and Long Covid is vision decline, as well. I think it would make sense that anyone involved in aviation to have a full cognitive test and a vision test to make sure their eyesight is still sharp.”

What about the recent news of the mRNA AI cancer vaccine? Kingston says, “These mRNA AI cancer vaccines are locked and loaded. The patents say you are going to be injected with a biosensor that is going to read the cells in your body to tell what kind of cancer you have. When you look at the patent, it shows the mRNA AI cancer vaccines don’t cure cancer. This is absolute insanity. They recode your cell, including your white blood cells, to not attack the cancer cells but to find the cancer cells and feed them with blood vessel growth factors so they turn into turbo cancers, and they don’t die.”

When it comes to this new big push for artificial intelligence, Kingston says, “There is this initiative to merge the human body with technology. This also includes our brain and our neurological system and to replace our normal functions with artificial intelligence technology. This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a global effort to replace how God created us with technology. If we replace our bodies with technology, then we sever our connection to God. We need to face this head on. The only words that came to my mind when I read this master patent is that this technology is demonically inspired. It is an attack on God’s greatest creation and his greatest love, which is humanity and mankind. AI is demonically inspired technology. The patents say they are customizing these AI cancer injections to accelerate cancer growth. They don’t even really cover up that they are trying to kill you. This is about the survival of this new hybrid artificial intelligence human species, which is not human anymore. It’s our extermination.” There is much more in the 75-minute in-depth interview.

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with renowned biotech analyst Karen Kingston as she gives a dire warning about mRNA AI “vaccines,” including the latest mRNA cancer scam and the ongoing AI attack on the human race.

- https://rumble.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "A Collapse That Will Change The World Will Reset America"

Jeremiah Babe, 1/31/25

"A Collapse That Will Change 

The World Will Reset America"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Alert! 24 Hours Until Crash Begins; The Dark Truth About Tariffs; Another Plane Crash?"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 1/31/25

"Alert! 24 Hours Until Crash Begins;

 The Dark Truth About Tariffs; Another Plane Crash?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable: w/Johnson & McGovern - Weekly Wrap"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 1/31/25

"INTEL Roundtable: w/Johnson & McGovern - Weekly Wrap"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"America Just Entered “The Great Firing,” Millions to Lose Their Jobs"

Full screen recommended.

ThisisJohnWilliams, 1/31/25

"America Just Entered “The Great Firing,”

 Millions to Lose Their Jobs"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"A Little Soul..."

 

"I’m tired. I’m dragging my body around. My soul is fatigued. I’m tired of living life. I’m tired of protecting my heart. I’m tired of being strong. I’m tired of being the teacher, the alpha mare and my own leader. I’m exhausted from the lack of sustenance to my heart. I’m starved and my soul feels small, invisible, atrophied. I don’t have my own person. Not someone who loves me - mind, heart and body. I am in a bubble of untouched existence. My skin is lonely. I’m tired of this matrix and the constant competition. I’m tired of keeping score and staying even. I’m tired of living to pay bills. There must be another reason I exist. I’m tired of being lonely and alone. I’m tired of being misunderstood and misrepresented. Does anyone get me? Anyone understand me? Is anyone out there on my path? I am an alien amongst my overcrowded species. A foreigner in my own home. I watch it all with a detached eye, revolving and spinning, blah, blah, blah, it’s all static. Am I the only one who notices?"

- Payne Hawthorne

Musical Interlude: Vangelis, “Beautiful Planet Earth”

Full screen recommended.

Vangelis, “Beautiful Planet Earth”

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across. Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the chemical constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is a dominant member of the well-studied Fornax galaxy cluster. 

Click image for larger size.

This sharp color image shows intense star forming regions at the ends of the bar and along the spiral arms, and details of dust lanes cutting across the galaxy's bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers think NGC 1365's prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy's evolution, drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole. Discovered on October 27, the position of a bright supernova is indicated in NGC 1365. Cataloged as SN2012fr, the type Ia supernova is the explosion of a white dwarf star.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121124.html

"Life Is Inconvenient..."

"One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference."

- Robert Fulghum

Life is inconvenient, yes, but the alternative is distinctly less appealing...

"When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' 

I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'"

- Sydney J. Harris.

Free Download: T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets,"

“Little Gidding”, Excerpt

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time. 

When the last of earth left to discover 

Is that which was the beginning; 

At the source of the longest river 

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree.

Not known, because not looked for 

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always - 

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded 

Into the crowned knot of fire 

And the fire and the rose are one.”

- T.S. Eliot

The "Little Gidding" is the last of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," 

which you may freely download here:

- http://www.paikassociates.com/pdf/fourquartets.pdf

"The Universe as Pool Hall"

"The Universe as Pool Hall"

by Fred Reed

"We will start this magisterial explanation of everything with the time-honored approach of the philosopher, beginning with the things we know beyond doubt and then reasoning from them to suitably astonishing truths. As we know, Descartes began by saying, “Cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am.” (Ambrose Bierce, a more profound thinker, said, “Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum. Cogito.” But this way lies madness.) So with what certain knowledge can we begin our quest?

Our only certain knowledge is that we don’t have any. Acceptance of this condition will diminish the world’s output of philosophy, or so we may hope, but this column faces reality with a brave front. We may now list our certainties: We don’t know where we came from, where we are, why, what if anything we should do while we are here, and where if anywhere we go when we die.

On this bedrock we shall construct our philosophy of everything. However, before we begin thinking about these profound matters, we need to take into account one more certainty: Thinking is impossible. I will explain. But what it comes to is that while we know nothing about which to think, it doesn’t matter because we couldn’t think about it if we did know something.

Why? Consider the brain. It is an electrochemical mechanism, blindly obeying the laws of physics and chemistry (chemistry being the physics of the interactions of atoms). For example, consider a nerve impulse propagating along a neural fiber, depolarizing, sodium in, potassium out. Pure chemistry and physics. When the impulse comes to a synapse, a neurotransmitter diffuses across the gap, pure chemistry and physics. It can’t do anything else. Even chemicals with long, imposing names cannot make choices. The neurotransmitter then binds to receptor sites, because it has to. Textbooks of neurophysiology state it thus: “A brain has less free will than a wind-up clock.” Or at least if it were so stated, it would be. This is close enough for philosophy.

Putting it precisely, the state of a physical system is determined entirely by its previous state. This establishes beyond doubt that we have no free will, and that what we think are thoughts were determined at the time of the Big Bang, if any.

Now, no philosophical essay can be held in repute unless it contains words ending “ism.” The reigning creed today is materialism, the philosophy of the wantonly inattentive. Many who believe in materialism are of high intelligence, and so can only be sufficiently inattentive by great effort. Anyway, a materialist believes than nothing exists but space, time, matter, and energy, however hyphenated. That is, physics. As the physicist Joe Friday said, “The physics, ma’am, just the physics, and nothing but the physics.”

This means that the Big Bang, if any, was set up, or I suppose I should say, set itself up, like one of those billiard-table trick shots. You know the kind: The balls seem randomly placed on the table but bounce around a lot before miraculously running into the pockets like birds returning to their nests. In the Bang, if any, all those subatomic whatsamajigggers erupted forth at exactly the right angles and velocities so that, billions of years later, they formed Elvis, San Francisco, and Hillary. (This had to be by chance, since no one in his right mind would form Hillary on purpose. QED.)

Next, consider plane geometry as taught in high school. (You may wonder why we have to consider it. Well, we just do.) Plane geometry deals with planes, lines, points, angles, and nothing else. It is useful and interesting, but it cannot explain a cheeseburger, Formula One race, or political hysteria. Why? Because cheeseburgers exist in three dimensions, which plane geometry doesn’t have. Formula One races involve matter, energy, and motion, which plane geometry also doesn’t have. Hysteria is an emotional state associated with liberal co-eds in pricey northern colleges who, thank God, do not exist in mathematics.

What it comes to is that a logical system is defined by its premises, and all downstream results are mere elaboration. (Of course, as established in the beginning of this luminous essay, we have no premises except the lack of premises, but philosophy readily overlooks such minor hindrances.) Plane geometry is not wrong. It is just incomplete. To state it in mathematical terms, you cannot flatten a cheeseburger enough to fit into a plane.

Physics, the foundation of the current official story of everything, also depends on its premises. Physics is just mathematical materialism. From its equations one may derive all manner of fascinating and useful things, such as planetary motion, npn transistors, smartphones, nerve gas, and hydrogen bombs. (Some of these may be more useful than others.)

But, just as you cannot get strawberry milkshakes from plane geometry, because they are not implicit in it, there are things you cannot derive from the equations of physics: Consciousness, free will, beauty, morality, or curiosity – the whiches there just ain’t in physics. This would not worry a rational thinker. He (or, assuredly, she) would simply state the obvious: Physics is not wrong, but incomplete. It does what it does, and doesn’t do what it can’t. Not too mysterious, that.

However, the true-believing physics-is-all Neo-Darwinian matter-monger cannot admit that anything – anything at all – exists outside of physics. Since some things obviously do, the only-physics enthusiasts have to resort to contorted logic. I think of kite string in a ceiling fan. Or simple denial.

For example, sometimes they say that consciousness is merely an “epiphenomenon.” Oh. And what does that mean? Nothing. (Actually it means, “I don’t know, but if I use a polysyllabic Greek word, maybe nobody will notice.”) Epiphenomenon of what?

Sometimes they will say, “Well, consciousness is just a by-product of complexity.” But if consciousness is a byproduct what is the primary product? A computer is somewhat complex, so is it somewhat conscious? Is a mouse less conscious than a human or just, in some cases, less intelligent? A materialist ignoring consciousness is exactly equivalent to a geometer ignoring cheeseburgers.

We will now examine the question, where did we come from? The answer is ready to hand: We don’t have a clue. We make up stories. The physics-only folk say, see, there was the Big Bang and all these electrons and protons and things flew out and just by chance formed Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in the most motingator a-stonishing pool-table trick shot ever set up. Just by accident. Damn! Who would have thought it?

Of course any sane person, to include materialists when they are thinking of something else, would say that TSMC was designed by hordes of Chinese engineers. But of course designing anything requires mind and intelligence (or a computer designed to simulate these things), But Mind cannot be derived from the equations of physics. Therefore we are all mindless. In general human behavior supports this.

Of course other stories exist. Yahweh created the world, or maybe Shiva, or Allah, and I think some remote tribes believe that it just appeared on the back of a giant turtle. I have no information on the matter, though frankly I incline to the turtle story, but will let the reader know the instant I find out.

The weakness of creation myths from Bang to Turtle is the question of the five-year-old, “But Mommy, where did God come from?” or “Who made God?” Fifteen years later in dorm-room bull sessions he will phrase it differently, “Well, what came before the Big Bang?” Same question.

A sort of second-echelon creation myth now in vogue is Darwinian evolution, also a subset of physics and therefore completely determined. Mutations are chemical events following the laws of chemistry. Thus trilobites had no choice but to form, and so they did. Metabolism is physical from the level of ATP to animals eating each other.

There is of course no such thing as a sex drive, teenagers notwithstanding, since no sort of drive can be derived from physics. (This will no doubt devastate Pornhub.) From this the inevitable conclusion, proven by physics, A that we cannot reproduce. Therefore we either have always existed or do not exist at all.

To give oneself an aura of overwelling wisdom, one may say things like ontology, epistemology, entelechy, and teleology, but these do not detract from mankind’s underlying and perfect ignorance. It’s all a trick shot, I tell you."

- https://www.unz.com

○

Food for thought...

"Existence from Nothing? What You Are And The Creation of the Universe"

"The Way You Carry It..."

"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it."

- Lena Horne

The Daily "Near You?"

South Jordan, Utah, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"I Hope I End Up..."

“I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, “Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case.” I will turn and say to them, “It is you who are the basket case! For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!” And maybe, the passersby will drop a coin into my cup.”

- Henry Rollins

Some have suggested I have indeed achieved that goal... ;-)

"The Dangers of Propaganda, Language Manipulation, and Thought Crimes" (Excerpt)

"The Dangers of Propaganda, 

Language Manipulation, and Thought Crimes"

by Chris MacIntosh

Excerpt: "At two hours in length, it’s not the shortest interview, but I would wave my hands, jump up and down, and urge anyone with curiosity about events, both past and present, that are charting the course of our future, to sit down, grab a coffee, and watch professor Jeffrey Sachs talk with Tucker Carlson, below. If, like me, you’re constantly short on time, then watch it at 1.5x speed if you must… but watch it.

The reason I suggest this is because in order to understand much of what has happened in our lives as well as what is likely to take place going forward requires an understanding of the truth. Jeffrey provides a decent 101 of that in this interview. On a side note, I do hope Jeffrey doesn’t… ahem, “succumb to suicide.”

A Lesson in Mind Control: “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” - Gustave Le Bon, "The Crowd"

It is now four years since operation COVID. Let’s spend 11 minutes with what is a fabulous lesson and then move on to a real time situation where we will analyze what we’re being pushed and why. Learning to think critically is of extreme importance in times of crisis, and we are definitely in a crisis, a global one."

Full, most highly recommended article is here:

-  https://internationalman.com/

o

"Jeffrey Sachs: The Inevitable War With Iran, 

and Biden’s Attempts to Sabotage Trump"