Brainerd, Minnesota, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Thursday, February 20, 2025
"They Don't Always Do That..."
"When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once. They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford. They are saying, less obviously, that their present wants are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty. But in making that bargain they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they’ll figure it out. They don’t always do that.”
– Michael Lewis, “Boomerang”
“Rescreening Dr. Strangelove”
“Rescreening Dr. Strangelove”
By Hugh Iglarsh
By Hugh Iglarsh
"A friend of mine saw Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” when it first opened in Paris in 1964. He and his American army friends were rolling on the floor throughout. The French audience, however, sat in stony silence. It wasn’t a comedy to them; it was a documentary. What is it now? In general, Hollywood is America dreaming – but Strangelove is something different, a “nightmare comedy,” in Kubrick’s words. It is prophecy disguised as farce – the finest dramatic analysis we have of the paradoxes of deterrence, that strange world of interpenetrated enmity and overriding common interest. What follows is a look at Kubrick’s masterpiece as satire, history and cultural critique.
Watching the film today, one realizes that Kubrick was exaggerating only the details and personality quirks, not the fundamentals. Peter George’s somber novel "Red Alert", upon which the film is based, evolved into a comic script of its own deeper nature, almost without intervention. As Kubrick said, “The most realistic things are the funniest.” In the Strangelove universe, the serious constantly morphs into the humorous, which then reveals itself as deadly serious.
Historian Margot Henriksen, author of "Dr. Strangelove’s America," describes the movie as a kind of expose – a frontal assault on “the cherished seriousness and rationality of America’s nuclear ethos and establishment Strangelove showed the previously disguised cold war reality for what it was: immoral, insane, deadly – and ridiculous. Distinguished critic Lewis Mumford defended the film’s blackly humorous take on nuclear holocaust as an example of deadpan Swiftian wit: “It is not this film that is sick: What is sick is our supposedly moral, democratic country which allowed this policy to be formulated and implemented without even the pretense of public debate.”
Strangelove’s literary antecedents go back even further, to the Old Comedy of Aristophanes – the comedy of Periclean Athens, which was ribald and irreverent and deeply political. It’s a theater of living, participatory democracy, of a citizenry involved in every matter of state. Also, it’s a comedy grounded in the body and nature, as for instance in Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens bring the bloody and stupid Peloponnesian War to an end through a brilliantly organized sex strike, or in other plays, where the chorus of frogs or wasps or birds comments on human affairs from an ironic inter-species distance. The film’s insistent “strange love” sexual subtext places it firmly in the Aristophanic tradition.
The characters in Strangelove embody social hierarchies; they are flattened, if highly compelling, and command a very different kind of response than does the typical Hollywood character – a critical reaction, rather than an emotional identification. It is similar to what Bertolt Brecht describes as the alienation effect, forcing the viewer to see characters in terms of what they represent, coloring the subjective perception of objective reality, and creating the psychological conditions for both detachment and enlightened re-engagement.
Historically, 1963 was a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and a couple of years after the Berlin Wall crisis. It was the last moment that some Pentagon brass and nuclear strategists believed that the USA would have a significantly superior strategic position vis-à-vis the Soviets, allowing the possibility of a first strike. President Kennedy was surrounded by such thinking. From the book "JFK and the Unspeakable," by James Douglass, regarding events in 1961: “His military advisors continued to ride hard toward the apocalypse. Kennedy was appalled by Generals Lemnitzer and LeMay’s insistence at two summer meetings that they wanted his authorization to use nuclear weapons in both Berlin and Southeast Asia. His response was to walk out of the meetings. After one such walkout, he threw his hands in the air, glanced back at the generals and admirals left in the Cabinet Room, and said, ‘These people are crazy.’ ”
Only one month after the terrifying Cuban Missile crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested a buildup of strategic forces to the level of a disarming first-strike capability. On November 20, 1962, they sent a memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stating, “The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable.” Their studies showed that a first strike would kill at least 140 million Russians – but that American casualties could be kept down to a “manageable” 10 or 12 million. This is almost exactly what General Turgidson says in the movie. (“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say… no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh… depending on the breaks.”) In September 1963, Air Force General Leon Johnson said to Kennedy, “I have concluded from the calculations that we could fight a limited war using nuclear weapons without fear that the Soviets would reply by going to all-out war.”
Kennedy understood the real but unstated objective. Knowing that the Pentagon was gaming him, he responded, “I have been told that if I ever released a nuclear weapon on the battlefield, I should start a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union, as the use of nuclear weapons was bound to escalate and we might as well get the advantage by going first.” Again, it’s precisely the gambit attempted by General Turgidson in the War Room regarding the “unpublished study” about the correct (i.e., murderous) response to a nuclear “accident” – a study apparently not shared with the president.
Kubrick’s mind was legendarily omnivorous and retentive. He subscribed to the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" and had read just about every book ever written on deterrence and thermonuclear war. His imagination is so rooted in hard fact that he could intuit what was taking place behind closed doors. Lyman Lemnitzer, Curtis LeMay, Edwin Walker, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, so many others – like Kennedy, Kubrick realized it was a cast of maniacs that kept the nuclear show going. Kubrick and co-screenwriter Terry Southern encapsulate that insanity in the characters of Ripper, Turgidson and Strangelove – an alliance of the psychotic, the narcissistic and the psychopathic, each bizarre in his own way, but all ultimately collaborating in a genocidal groupthink.
Good satire goes directly for the insoluble contradictions, and Kubrick hits so many of them – for instance:
• Only those with a superhumanly developed self-restraint and sanity could be trusted to be in control of nuclear weapons – but only a madman could create and support the logic of mutual assured destruction and its associated concepts of “overkill” and “megadeath.”
• Also: The effectiveness of nuclear deterrence depends on a hair-trigger response to attack – so a system ostensibly intended for preventing war is constantly provoking fear, creating a spiral of suspicion in which defense and aggression become indistinguishable.
• Also: To deter, the system must be rigid and flexible at the same time, robotic and humanly controllable. An engineer will tell you that any system designed around fundamentally opposed qualities is an accident waiting to happen. It is a doomsday machine, an idiot system of world-destroying power.
• Also: While the rhetoric is that of war avoidance – “Peace is our profession” – the underlying mentality is that of total victory over an evil enemy. So “accidents” are programmed in, as the pretext for a first strike with “acceptable” American losses. But the extent to which the possibility of a first strike is countenanced gives the lie to any ethical superiority over the other side. The system is morally bankrupt.
• And finally: The bomb supposedly exists to protect freedom and democracy, but at moments of crisis (which in a balance of terror means every moment), we see how the system actually functions – as the ultimate expression of elitism, accepting the very real possibility of human annihilation as the cost of dominance and control. It is the apotheosis of what C. Wright Mills, writing a bit earlier, described as “crackpot realism,” the thought process of a paranoiac. The system is politically self-deconstructing, reducing itself to rubble here before our eyes, in 90 real-time minutes.
All of these contradictions are embodied in the character of Dr. Strangelove, the crippled, fragmented machine-man who hovers like a dark angel in the corner of the War Room and our consciousness. He is the ultimate accomplishment of the film: a rich and open-ended symbol – a key to understanding both an aspect of human nature and a specific moment in time. He has become a permanent part of our culture, graphically revealing the surreal, fascistic energy that permeates the inner workings of the military-industrial complex.
In the end, Strangelove walks – he regains his potency – because this Nazi technocrat has finally become the voice of authority in the putative democracy that helped defeat his first fuhrer. He no longer needs to conceal his nature and desires. These boil down to a sadomasochistic scenario of female sexual slavery, in which the sickest members of the military-industrial patriarchy are given exclusive right to the most nubile women. It is a eugenics-inspired rape fantasy, out-Hitlering Hitler. And the gathered War Room crowd salivates over the prospect.
We realize that the narrative arc of the movie is that of coitus interruptus, which begins with Turgidson’s painfully suspended tryst with his secretary and is consummated with the final orgasm of destruction. At last, with the end of the world, the sexual suspense is broken and we can breathe; the relief is palpable. The only kind of sexual satisfaction that can exist within the mechanized and disembodied world portrayed in the film involves violence and the projection of power, which compensates for the inner emptiness and lack of feeling in a militarist wasteland.
This is the crux of Kubrick’s and Southern’s irony in Dr. Strangelove: that the higher the stakes, the greater the megatons and megadeaths wielded by these nuclear warriors, the more diminished and enfeebled and grotesque they become. A system that grants godlike powers simultaneously denies real humanity. In the end, loving the bomb means losing the soul.
Strangelove reveals the nuclear standoff as more than a political problem – it is also a symptom of self-alienation, of an imbalance between life and death, Eros and Thanatos. Underneath the antic surface – for instance, in the close-ups of General Ripper’s lined face and haunted eyes – there’s a tragic half-awareness of something terribly wrong. Something that may have to do with communists or fluoride or precious bodily fluids, or maybe something deeper that we no longer have the spiritual or emotional capability to understand or confront. The film is an attempt to regain that capability by seeing the situation as a whole, from a comically human perspective. The belly laughs that the movie elicits come from our core and bring us back into our full, social selves, away from the isolated, phobic, hyper-rationalized world of General Ripper and his compatriots.
Dr. Strangelove offers no solutions to the nuclear quandary. It just shows us where the logic of the system points, in terms of both origins and outcomes. By casting the nightmarish absurdity of the system in a comical light, he strips it of its metaphysical terror. Once we have seen Dr. Strangelove – the ghost in the war-making machine – as he is, we can begin the process of freeing ourselves from him."
•
Bomb run sequence...
Major Kong Rides The Bomb...
"Where Did All Of That Money Go?"
"Where Did All Of That Money Go?"
by Michael Snyder
"Apparently our government cannot explain how 4.7 trillion dollars was spent. Are you kidding me? A stack of 4.7 trillion one dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon and part of the way back. This is yet another example of why we desperately need the Department of Government Efficiency. I realize that my articles about DOGE have caused some confusion in recent weeks, and so let me try to explain. On the one hand, I have been arguing that we must crack down on waste, fraud and abuse, but on the other hand I have been arguing that what DOGE is doing is going to cause a great deal of pain. Some readers think that I have been contradicting myself, but I have not been contradicting myself at all. There are times when we must do things that are necessary even though we know that they will cause a tremendous amount of pain.
We have piled up the largest mountain of debt in the history of the entire planet, and it really is an existential threat to the future of our nation. But cutting down the size of the federal government and greatly reducing the flow of cash that is being spewed out of the giant money machine that we call the U.S. Treasury is going to cause immense chaos. Honestly, I do not know if our society will be able to handle it.
On Monday, DOGE revealed that 4.7 trillion dollars in payments that have come through the U.S. Treasury are basically impossible to trace because they lacked a very important tracking code…"The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that some $4.7 trillion in payments from the Treasury Department were missing a critical tracking code which made tracing the transactions “almost impossible.” The transactions were reportedly missing the Treasury Account Symbol, or TAS, an identification code which links a Treasury payment to a budget line item, according to DOGE, which described the use of such code as a “standard financial process.” “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” read an X post from DOGE."
This is inexcusable. We should be able to trace how every single penny has been spent. As Eric Daugherty has aptly pointed out, if you do not accurately account for every single penny of income the IRS can come after you big time…"The government will audit you, track every single dollar that went into your bank account, and hunt you down to squeeze every last penny. But once they get hold of YOUR money – they chuck it into a black hole of their choice with little to no accountability."
Two standards. If you tried to tell the IRS that you have no idea what happened to $4,700, you would not get one inch of mercy. But now we are being told that the government has no idea what happened to $4,700,000,000,000.
The good news is that from now on all government payments that flow through the U.S. Treasury will be traceable thanks to DOGE… “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE said, thanking the Treasury Department for its “great work” implementing the change. Musk touted the change as a “major improvement in Treasury payment integrity.” “This was a combined effort of [DOGE, Treasury and the Federal Reserve],” Musk tweeted. “Nice work by all.” This is a very positive change. And when good things happen in Washington D.C., we should all applaud.
Overall, reforms implemented by DOGE have saved U.S. taxpayers a grand total of 55 billion dollars…"Elon Musk’s DOGE revealed Tuesday that President Donald Trump has saved taxpayers a staggering $55 billion in less than a month. It said the savings were found through a combination of detecting and deleting fraud, canceling contracts and leases, and selling assets. The group – nicknamed the ‘nerd army’ – also ended grants, fired federal employees, changed some programs, and saved money with regulatory reforms."
So far, the biggest contract savings have come from USAID and the Department of Education…"So far, the DOGE lists the United States Agency for International Development as the number one agency for “total contract savings,” followed by the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Agriculture."
Sadly, the left is not applauding these efforts. In fact, many on the left are acting like it is the end of the world. Could it be possible that the reason why they are so upset is because they are the ones that are primarily benefitting from all of the waste, fraud and abuse? Billions of dollars in payments have already been cut off, and DOGE insists that this is just the beginning.
And now it appears that Ft. Knox will be one of the next targets for DOGE…"Tech billionaire Elon Musk has his sights set on an audit of the U.S. gold reserve at Ft. Knox through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after it was revealed there is no yearly review for the world-renowned stash. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who invited Musk to review the gold reserve on X over the weekend, joined “FOX & Friends” to discuss the need for greater transparency about the massive reserve after trying to verify it himself for a decade."
If the DOGE team actually visits Ft. Knox, what will they find? I don’t know, but I find it very interesting that “somebody” in the U.S. has been purchasing a massive amount of physical gold. This is something that Glenn Beck recently commented on…“Somebody here in the United States is buying a crapload of gold. We think (I hope) it’s the Treasury or the Central Bank,” he says. Whoever is behind the purchases - “somebody with very deep pockets” - isn’t just collecting gold notes, either. Whoever this mysterious somebody is, they’re “taking huge physical deliveries, and it’s causing shortages in London,” says Glenn."
I am just speculating here, but could it be possible that this physical gold is being used to replenish the reserves at Ft. Knox before an audit happens? Hopefully we will soon get some answers. Personally, I would love for the mystery of the missing gold at Ft. Knox to be solved after all these years. Under previous administrations, the transparency that is happening now would never have been possible. But now some of the U.S. government’s deepest and darkest secrets are being laid bare, and that is a wonderful thing."
"Wars And Rumors Of War"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/20/25
"Alert! Russian Forces On Highest Alert,
Putin Nervous, Moscow Burns, 30,000 EU Troops"
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
The Face Of War, 2/20/25
"US Loses Control In Middle East,
Iran And Russia Forge Alliance Trump Can't Stop"
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Full screen recommended.
Times Of India, 2/20/25
"Shocking! '170,000 Israeli Soldiers Suffering From...'
War Takes Toll On IDF"
"The Israeli military is grappling with a severe mental health crisis. Tens of thousands of soldiers are seeking psychological treatment after months of service in Gaza and Lebanon. A report reveals that 170,000 Israeli soldiers have enrolled in a government program, but the military is struggling to meet the growing demand due to a shortage of therapists."
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Biggest Lie Ever Told - Social Security Scam"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 2/20/25
"The Biggest Lie Ever Told - Social Security Scam"
"Get ready to uncover the shocking truth about the Social Security SCAM nobody saw coming! In this video, we expose wild figures and unbelievable fraud tied to Social Security payments. Millions of dollars are being funneled to individuals who simply don't exist - like people supposedly over 200 years old cashing checks! It's infuriating, it's outrageous, and it’s the biggest lie we've been told. Trust me, you’ll want to hear this.
I also dive into other hot topics, from the alarming rise in negative net worth across states like Nevada, to corporations like Wendy’s doubling down on AI investments. Plus, there's news on Chase Bank blocking Zelle payments and even a tuna recall affecting major retailers. There's a lot to unpack, and I’m not holding back on anything."
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "Not Cheaper by the Dozen"
"Not Cheaper by the Dozen"
by Bill Bonner
“I will very quickly deflate. We are going to take inflation, and we are going to
deflate it. We are going to deflate inflation. We are going to defeat inflation.
We’re going to knock the hell out of inflation.”
- Donald Trump, on the campaign trail.
“Inflation is back…I had nothing to do with it.”
- Donald Trump, yesterday.
Baltimore, Maryland - "Today’s inflation weather report: Three percent CPI… feels like 10%. On the radio, a call-in show: “I went to the grocery store to buy eggs. I couldn’t believe it; they were $8 a dozen.” “That was cheap,” answered another caller. “I had to pay $12… that was a dollar an egg.“ “Heck,” began a third, “I couldn’t find any eggs. The store was out of them.”
Eggs have become precious. Our chickens still produce them. But now they are all golden. This morning, we took a bag with three dozen eggs to our son who lives in the city. Street value: as much as $36 dollars. “Psst… here they are,” we said in hushed tones, opening the bag so he could see the cartons. “Not too loud, Dad… I don’t want to get robbed on the way back to the office.” Eggs are shooting up in price because of a ‘supply shortage.’ The bird flu has cut output. The price (at $5/doz.) has gone up 238% over the last four years.
Inflation is on the march. We saw last week that the feds’ inflation calculation substantially understates the real impact of inflation on household budgets. Everyday items - such as eggs - cost more than the official CPI suggests. This means that ordinary families, buying ordinary things, are getting ordinarily poorer. And the Producer Price Index is rising at a 3.5% rate - the fastest in two years.
Even by the feds’ own figures, prices are edging up more quickly. Last Wednesday’s report showed the CPI rising at a 3% rate. Take out the outliers, in what economists call the ‘trimmed mean,’ and you get a more accurate picture. It shows inflation rising at a 5% rate. Or if you used the statistical methods of the 1980s (before the BLS changed the formula) you’d get an inflation reading of about 10%.
These ‘inflation’ figures - whichever ones you choose - clock the decline of the US dollar. Post-1971, America’s money has been unreliable. You could buy a dozen eggs in 1971… and a dozen today. Same eggs. Not noticeably better or worse. But the price has changed. They were 45 cents a dozen back then. Today, given all the innovations, tech improvements, etc… they should be much cheaper; instead, they’re at least ten times as much - in dollars.
Gold has historically been a more reliable measure of wealth. But it too is giving us a very different reading today, as opposed to 50 years ago. In 1971, an ounce of gold would have bought 44 dozen eggs. Today, it buys about 550 – if you can find them. Naturally, if people have a choice, they will spend the depreciating currency (the dollar) and hold onto the appreciating one (gold). And once this notion gains traction, gold rises even more (meaning, other things go down faster).
Reuters: "Goldman Sachs raises year-end gold price forecast to $3,100. Goldman Sachs on Monday raised its year-end 2025 gold price forecast to $3,100 per ounce, up from $2,890, citing sustained central bank demand. The bank estimates that "structurally higher central bank demand will add 9% to the gold price by year-end, which combined with a gradual boost to ETF holdings as the funds rate declines."
However, if policy uncertainty, including tariff concerns, remains high, Goldman sees the potential for gold to surge to $3,300 per ounce by year-end due to prolonged speculative positioning. Policy uncertainty seems like a certainty. So does more inflation. More tomorrow… why the price of eggs, in terms of gold, shouldn’t change. Neither should the price of stocks."
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Jeremiah Babe, "I Want My DOGE Refund"
Jeremiah Babe, 2/19/25
"I Want My DOGE Refund"
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Snyder Reports, 2/19/25
"Confirmed: $5,000 Rebate Checks
To 79 Million Americans?"
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Musical Interlude: Moby, "Love Of Strings"
Full screen recommended
Moby, "Love Of Strings"
Life, magnificent Life...
"A Look to the Heavens"
"NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a about 25 light-years across blown by winds from its central, bright, massive star. A triumvirate of astroimagers ( Joe, Glenn, Russell) created this sharp portrait of the cosmic bubble. Their telescopic collaboration collected over 30 hours of narrow band image data isolating light from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms produce the blue-green hue that seems to enshroud the detailed folds and filaments. Visible within the nebula, NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years.
The nebula's complex structures are likely the result of this strong wind interacting with material ejected in an earlier phase. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life this star should ultimately go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion. Found in the nebula rich constellation Cygnus, NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years away."
"Be Like The Bird..."
"What matter if this base, unjust life
Cast you naked and disarmed?
If the ground breaks beneath your step,
Have you not your soul?
Your soul! You fly away,
Escape to realms refined,
Beyond all sadness and whimpering.
Be like the bird which on frail branches balanced
A moment sits and sings;
He feels them tremble, but he sings unshaken,
Knowing he has wings."
– Victor Hugo
"You Are Not Alone"
"You Are Not Alone"
by Chris MacIntosh
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone." - Kurt Vonnegut
"To all my friends out there who know what’s really going on…To all my conspiracy theorist friends…Yes, sometimes it’s a curse and not always a blessing to be awake. Awakening is the most liberating, alienating, excruciating, empowering, lonely, confusing, freeing, frightening, expansive journey. If you find yourself struggling as you try to process all this insanity, you are not alone. No one talks about the darkness that accompanies awakening, or the GRIEF.
Not only grieving the life and illusions you once had but the realization that almost everything you thought you once knew, is a LIE. The beliefs you’ve held, people you’ve trusted, principles you were taught - ALL LIES. Shattering illusions is RARELY an enjoyable experience. There is a considerable amount of discomfort that comes with growth and the grieving process doesn’t stop there.
With these newfound realizations, you then find yourself grieving all over again. Grieving the loss of many relationships with people who just don’t “get it”. Feeling alone; being ridiculed and shamed, not only by the masses but for many of you, your very own family and friends too. Feeling like you no longer have much in common with the people you are surrounded by.
Struggling with carrying on bullsh*t, shallow conversations that lack substance with those who are still fast asleep. Even feeling disconnected from your entire support system because they can’t see what you see. Some even grieve the loss of their ignorance- because “ignorance is bliss” and reality is harsh. Awakening can be a lonely road and you will often find yourself journeying alone.
There is no way to sugarcoat it - awakening to the realities of this world is brutal. It will have you running through the entire gamut of human emotions. You have to master the art of diving down the darkest of rabbit holes only to come out and still function in daily life, and that’s a skill people don’t talk about enough. Some of you are struggling with feeling disconnected from family and friends, it’s as though they exist in another world.
Please know you are not alone, and not only are you not alone, you have an entire tribe standing with you. We may be separated by miles, but we are DEEPLY connected; in purpose and in spirit."
o
"When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you." - Maria Popova
"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"
"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour
and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"
by Maria Popova
“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; tomorrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease - for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude.
The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit - James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) - explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.
In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon - an old high school friend of his - to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book "Nothing Personal" (public library). Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits - of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age - and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope - are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”
At no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes:
"Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed."
It is a fearful speculation - or, rather, a fearful knowledge - that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.
Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives and a century after Tchaikovsky found beauty amid the wreckage of the soul at 4AM, Baldwin adds: "Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it - life - one more time?"
After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay - lyrics from “Long Old Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” - Baldwin continues: "I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."
That alone, Baldwin insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a “yea-sayer” to life - to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill this blink of existence bookended by nothingness with the courage of a bellowing aliveness.
In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem “Wait,” composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, Baldwin writes: "For, perhaps - perhaps - between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct - I believe -causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death."
And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith - so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, Baldwin argues, at four AM: "At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor - the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self - death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. And many of us perish then."
What then? A generation after "Little Prince" author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart, Baldwin offers: "But if one can reach back, reach down - into oneself, into one’s life - and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality - oneself - which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again."
Baldwin - whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in introducing his last public appearance before his death - wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try - we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves.
Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that “we must believe, without fear, in people,” Baldwin adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours: "Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost."
More than half a century later, "Nothing Personal" remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before Baldwin, on how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit, then revisit Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority, how he learned to truly see, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, his advice on writing, his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book."
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Freely download "Nothing Personal",
by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, here:
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Bessie Smith "Long Old Road"
June 11, 1931
"The World..."
“The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever;
but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter;
and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.”
- George Santayana
"If You Want To See..."
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"If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of the prairie or the plain, witness the reaction of a modern suburban family, nearly ready for bed, when the doorbell rings or the door is rattled. They will stop where they stand, or sit bolt upright in their beds, as if a streak of pure lightning has passed through the house. Eyes wide, voices fearful, they will whisper to each other, "There's someone at the door," in a way that might make you believe they have always feared and anticipated this moment - that they have spent their lives being stalked."
- Alice McDermott
Judge Napolitano, "Col. Douglas Macgregor: Israel, Egypt, and Riyadh"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/19/25
"Col. Douglas Macgregor: Israel, Egypt, and Riyadh"
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Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/19/25
"Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Can Riyadh Bring Peace?"
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"Thousands of Bankers Just Got Fired From JP Morgan Chase"
Full screen recommended.
Market Gains, 2/19/25
"Thousands of Bankers Just Got Fired From JP Morgan Chase"
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Full screen recommended.
Market Gains, 2/19/25
"Meta Is Firing Everyone as 150,000 Tech Jobs Disappear"
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Dan, I Allegedly, "Here Comes Massive Fraud - Huge Scandal"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 2/19/25
"Here Comes Massive Fraud - Huge Scandal"
"California’s INSANE insurance scandal is making waves! In this video, I break down the shocking new policy that forces insurance companies to cut checks for 100% property coverage - no itemization required. This wild move could lead to MASSIVE fraud and skyrocketing premiums for everyone. What’s going on in California’s insurance world, and how will it impact homeowners, renters, and you? Plus, we’ll touch on the state’s $50M fund for fire debris removal, the fallout from these fires, and what this means for the future of insurance in the Golden State. Buckle up - this is a must-watch!"
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
John Wilder, "Bad Luck, Diversity, And Bank Robbers"
"Bad Luck, Diversity, And Bank Robbers"
by John Wilder
"There is such a thing as bad luck. A neighbor of mine told me a story of when he was a kid. He and his friends were throwing dirt clods at another group of kids. Now, I remember doing exactly that. Dirt clods were perfect for throwing because when they hit the ground, they exploded in a puff of dirt that I pretended was a grenade. Pretending I was blowing up my friends. Huh, sounds like a Unabomber childhood when I put it that way, doesn’t it?
Regardless, my neighbor said that one of the other kids got a dirt clod in the eye. Who threw it? I don’t think they ever figured that out, but my friend was the only one sued. Why? His dad owned a bank. As I recall from the story, his dad’s insurance company ended up settling the claim. No one said, “Oh, bad luck.” There certainly doesn’t seem to be a place for bad luck in our world, but sometimes bad luck really does happen. I mean, once upon a time a fortune teller that I would have to suffer with eight years of bad luck.
“And then things get better?” “No, you stop suffering because you get used to it.” To me, this seems unfair, but remember Law School Lesson 101: never sue poor people. It’s a variation of the Willie Sutton school of law, when he responded to the question of why he robbed banks with the answer of “Because that’s where the money is.”
That’s one part of the equation, but the second part makes it really rough: massive damage awards. Ask Alex Jones about the nonsensical $1 billion jury award against him. Why not a trillion? It’s not like Alex Jones has a billion dollars, and it’s not like they can strip being “Alex Jones” from Alex Jones, so if they take Infowars™, well, he’ll be in business the next day with a new company. And if they take that, yet a new company.
Poor people are lawsuit-proof because they don’t have money. Alex Jones is lawsuit-proof because (like James O’Keefe) his company is him. Since most companies can’t hide behind the idea of being Alex Jones, they have to have a defense. The defense? Standards.
If a company does the same thing the same way all of the time, and if every other company does that exact same thing the same way every time, it’s now a Standard. While a company can certainly be sued if they screw up, it’s a pretty good defense to say what Ma Wilder described as a weak excuse, “Well, everybody else is doing it.”
So, if you ask Proctor and Gamble™ if they would jump off a cliff if everyone else was doing it, the answer is probably something like: “If that would help us actualize projected profits in the near term and help build organic growth in the sector, that would be a strategy we would engage with.” Or, in human terms, yes, yes they would jump off a cliff if everyone does it. Sadly, this throttles innovative products.
This also leads to a herd mentality in large companies. “Does Disney™ have DEI? Well, looks like we need DEI, too.” These companies realize that there is safety in numbers. Sure, they want to be different, but they all want to be different in the exact same legally non-actionable way.
This (in part) has led to the extreme pliability of the companies to Woke propaganda, and their quick rebound once Trump was elected. Was Google© all in for Kamala? You bet. Has Google™ swapped their maps to “Gulf of America” at the same time removing Black History Month©, Pride Month™ and scrapped targets to not hire white guys? Yes, yes they have.
This surprised me. I was expecting these companies to keep being part of the ResISTanCe since they actively opposed Trump during his first term. Either they were neutered during and by the pandemic, or they’re horribly afraid of Trump and Elon. Or they’re worried about the inevitable wrath of Barron when he reaches his full height of 6'5" feet (1 kiloliter).
In the end, there really is “bad luck”. Now, I don’t think that everything is bad luck, I mean, when that double amputee tried to rob a bank? That wasn’t bad luck. After all, he wasn’t even armed."
Bill Bonner, "How Many Divisions Does Elon Have?"
Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference,
January 1945,
"How Many Divisions Does Elon Have?"
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - "The question was framed, according to some historians, by Josef Stalin at the Potsdam Conference. Winston Churchill had suggested that the Pope might be brought in to provide moral backing to the Allies’ campaigns against Hitler. Stalin must have wondered how morality would hold up against Panzer tanks. "How many divisions does the Pope have?” he allegedly asked. We wish we could be in the room when the question comes again.
Of all the bloated bureaucracies…among all the corrupt and self-serving federales… and all their boondoggle programs - the military stands out. It fails every audit. It spends trillions, and claims not to know where the money goes. But it goes somewhere. And those who get it know where it went. They’ve bought and paid for almost every member of the House and the Senate. They’ve put on countless half-time shows…and granted ‘access’ only to toady journalists. They expect to get their money’s worth.
In ancient Egypt, the surplus production of the Nile Valley was spent building monuments to dead rulers. In China, under the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, much of the surplus output was spent building a Terracotta Army of more than 8,000 soldiers, intended to protect him in the afterlife.
And in America, circa 2025, ‘national defense’ is a sacred myth. Having US troops all over the world…meddling in one foreign conflict after another…trying to replace independent leaders with puppets - all in, it costs over a trillion dollars a year…and almost surely makes Americans less safe.
But now, the US firepower industry may be coming under attack. According to the Washington Post, Musk’s shock troops have crossed the Potomac: "The Trump administration has directed defense agencies to turn over a list of their probationary employees by the end of Tuesday, with the expectation that many could be laid off as soon as this week, according to five people familiar with the matter.
The directive coincides with the arrival at the Pentagon of personnel from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which has overseen the firing of thousands of probationary employees in other federal agencies and coordinated the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“Uh… you want to see our records?” the brass will ask…stunned and confused as Elon and his band of callow nerds arrive at the Pentagon. “That’s classified,” they will reply. “We’re here to root out waste,” Elon will explain. “No useless aircraft? No easily sunk ships? Close unnecessary bases? Stop useless weapons development? Fire some of the three million people who get our paychecks? Tighten our belts? Cancel our beach-house plans?”
“Yeah… that’s right,” Elon might reply. “What about our enemies?” they’ll ask. “What enemies?” Elon will reply. “You know perfectly well that there is no country on earth capable of crossing the ocean with a viable armada. They’d be wiped out by missiles and bombers before even leaving port.” “Uh… what about Russia… China… terrorists?” “Are you kidding? Russia has a tiny economy. China’s economy depends on selling stuff to Americans, not attacking them. And terrorists have never been anything more than a fake enemy.””
But it’s one thing to reduce spending by USAID. It’s another to reduce it for the US Army, Navy and Air Force. The last time the Pentagon had to cut its budget was after WWII. The troops came home. Soldiers were ‘de-mobed.’ Eisenhower (who knew more about the military than any president since) peeled nearly 30% off the Department of Defense outlays. That was then…before firepower became the nation’s defining industry, with effective control over both political parties. Today, for appearances sake, the warfighters are likely to shed a few ‘probationary’ employees. Maybe they’ll sacrifice some weapons that they never wanted anyway.
But why should the world’s ‘most lethal’ fighting force take its orders from an immigrant from Africa? Sooner or later, whether voiced or tacit, the question is bound to come up: “And how many divisions do you have, Elon?”
"Central Banks Are About To Enter A New Phase Of World Debt Expansion On A Massive Scale"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 2/19/25
"Central Banks Are About To Enter A New Phase
Of World Debt Expansion On A Massive Scale"
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Gregory Mannarino, PM 2/19/25
"Expect A Rapid Slowing Of The Economy
Starting Now, And Worsening"
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○
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
Adventures With Danno, "Spilling My Guts About Disney"
Adventures With Danno, 2/19/25
"Spilling My Guts About Disney"
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Full screen recommended.
Travelling With Russell, 2/19/25
"Russian Typical Electronics &
Home Appliance Store in 2025"
"What does a Russian typical electronics store in Moscow, Russia look like? Join me on a tour of M-Video. Russia's most well-known and popular home appliance and electronics store. What brands will we find? What sort of prices are being offered on phones, televisions and fridges."
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Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Canadian Prepper, "It's All Falling Apart! Ukraine Panics, False Flag Incoming!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/18/25
"It's All Falling Apart! Ukraine Panics, False Flag Incoming!"
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"Walking Through The Retail Apocalypse - Thousands Of Stores Closing - Grocery Prices Soar"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 2/18/25
"Walking Through The Retail Apocalypse -
Thousands Of Stores Closing - Grocery Prices Soar"
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Gerald Celente, "Money Is Power. We Run The World. Shut Up And Do What You're Told!"
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 2/18/25
"Money Is Power. We Run The World.
Shut Up And Do What You're Told!"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
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Musical Interlude: "Bad Moon Rising"
Creedence Clearwater Revival,
"Bad Moon Rising"
Look around, doesn't that describe now?
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Messier's famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse's large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. Assembled from 51 exposures recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope in the 20th and 21st centuries, with additional data from ground based telescopes, this mosaic spans about 40,000 light-years across the central region of M101 in one of the highest definition spiral galaxy portraits ever released from Hubble.
The sharp image shows stunning features of the galaxy's face-on disk of stars and dust along with background galaxies, some visible right through M101 itself. Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 25 million light-years away.”
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