"Don’t Fear The Reaper"

"Don’t Fear The Reaper"

by John Wilder

“No. Not like this. I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.”

- James T. Kirk, "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"

“Death is the only wise advisor that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet.'”

- Carlos Castaneda, "Journey to Ixtlan"

"When The Soon To Be Mrs. and I were just dating, I was cooking something or other. I think it was eggs. I like eggs sunny side up, and don’t particularly care if they’re cooked all the way. 

The Soon To Be Mrs.: “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

John Wilder: (Laughs in full Chad manifestation.)

The Soon To Be Mrs.: (Swoons.)

Seriously, she swooned. I’ve never seen it before in my life, but in that moment I think that was what sealed the deal, the moment in time that The Soon To Be Mrs. realized that this one is different. He’s not like the others. Here is a man who has zero fear of The Current Thing, and knows that salmonella won’t be the thing that punches his ticket out of having a functioning circulatory system.

No. I’m not afraid of salmonella. I would spit in its tiny little eyes or flagellum or tentacles and say, “Not today, my bacterium friend! My Danish-Scots-Germanic blood is far too strong for the likes of you!” And then I would attack Poland. Oh, wait, that’s been done.

I know I’m not going to die like Hemingway, and I’m not going to die like the comedy greats Belushi, Twain, or Nietzsche did. Nope. I think I’m gonna go out like Elvis. On a toilet after having eaten a fried peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwich covered in cheddar cheese and mayo. Nope, I’m gonna die on a toilet. I mean, after all, a king should spend his last moments on the throne, right?

A lot of people worry about dying. I suppose I did, in my 20s, when I was worried about carrying out my responsibilities as a dad. Those are serious responsibilities – because those kids are going to be the legacy that I leave on Earth. That and my writing, collection of PEZ® dispensers and velvet Elvis paintings.

Again, a lot of people worry about dying. I’m not sure why. Of things that are more-or-less predetermined, that’s the big one. We’re all going to die. All of us. And I’m not sure I care.

Oh, sure, I want to live. I have no particular desire to die. If given the preference, I suppose I’m in favor of my continued heartbeat. But I don’t fear death. I don’t go to sleep at night wondering if this pain or that pain or that thing might be the symptom I look up on WebMD® that seals the deal that Wilder is going up to irritate Jesus in Heaven with bad puns.

I don’t worry about some future point when I’m going to enjoy life. I’ve achieved nearly every goal I’ve ever set for my life. End. Full stop. It’s like when a baseball game goes into extra innings, “Hey, free baseball.” And me? Free life. I’ve done nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to do.

What do you give a man who has everything? I mean, besides another bottle of wine. You give that man: Today. I’ve got Today. The only moment I live in is right now. And right now isn’t all that bad. I’m sitting in the sitting room (question: is any room I sit in, by definition, a sitting room? Discuss.) with the cool night air blowing in the window, some songs I love playing on the laptop, a cold beer by the keyboard, and the knowledge that at this moment, everything is fine.

Literally, in my life, Every Single Thing Is Fine. I could go into details, but you already know how awesome I am. So, I live for today? Hell no.

That’s YOLO. The idea that “You Only Live Once” is a free pass to act in any fashion has corroded society. It’s really at the root of many of the problems we have today. It is, in many ways, the absolute inverse of the philosophy I’m trying to describe. YOLO seeks to elevate hedonism and the passions of the moment as the highest good. YOLO is Tinder® times Planned Parenthood© times SnapFaceGramInstaChat® times Rwanda®.

t’s the inversion of beauty: it consists of being positive about, well, any old thing that feels good. I could list these “pleasures”, but you know the list as well as I do. We see it every day, with vice being paraded as virtue, and the continual demand going out for people to celebrate it, because, “Can’t you see? This horrid abomination that no healthy society or people in the entire history of the world has tolerated, iS BeAuTIfUL!” No, I think living a life built on YOLO is one doomed to fail – inevitably it will fail based on two reasons: it is materialism or a faith based on the nihilism of the material world writ large, and it is based on needs, like youth, wealth, sensation, or, yes, even life. So, not YOLO.

One thing I’ve tried to preach is outcome independence. Indeed, since the final outcome of life on Earth is fixed, all the intermediate steps lead there. Instead, I try to focus on virtue and faith. I write not because of YOLO, and not because it’s easy. Some nights it’s hard as hell to get the post to “close” and feel right. There are dozens of posts where, even after 1600 words, I still didn’t say exactly what I meant to say. That’s okay, it’s on me. I’m learning, and if I were perfect at this, I wouldn’t have more work to do.

For me, it’s the work. It’s getting better. It’s finding ways to add value to those people around me. There are those who pull their weight in the world, and those that don’t. I want to be one that pulls his weight, who has contributed as much as I can to helping my family and the wider world.

I don’t always do it. And I’m not always right, either. I’ve produced some stuff in my life that was really, really good, but not perfect. Thankfully, that’s not my mark, either, since just like immortality here on Earth, searching for perfection is a lonely and silly pastime. I want to make the world a better place with my family (first) and my work (now second) guided by God. And I want people to laugh hard while learning and thinking about the things I write.

The beauty of this is to win, all I have to do is the best that I can do every day. To win? All I have to do is be the best person I can be every day. See? Each night, I go to bed and sleep soundly if I know, in that day, that I gave it my all. Do I take time for me? Sure. But that’s not the goal – I serve a higher purpose.

So, what do I fear? Not death. It’s coming whether I like it or not, and, honestly, I’d rather not return my body in factory-fresh condition – I’d like all the parts to fail at once. On the toilet. I think Elvis would have wanted it that way. Oh, wait... I wonder if Elvis ate eggs sunny-side-up? Hang on, I’m sure he did. Elvis ate everything."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

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Full screen recommended.

Blue Oyster Cult , "Don't Fear The Reaper"

"Congress Should Miss Their Paychecks Too"

"Congress Should Miss Their Paychecks Too"

by Tiffany Smiley

"This week marks the third week of the government shutdown – and there continues to be no end in sight. This week, millions of federal workers officially missed their first paycheck. These workers are staring down the barrel of piling bills; many are unable to put gas in the car or food on the table for their families.

The consequences of a prolonged shutdown are stacking up fast. Federal services are grinding to a halt. Veterans’ career counseling and regional offices have gone dark. Flight delays and travel disruptions are wreaking havoc across the country. And for every week this drags on, the U.S. economy takes a $15 billion hit. A month-long shutdown means 43,000 more Americans are thrown out of work.

And yet, there’s one group that hasn’t missed a single paycheck: members of Congress. While working-class families are about to miss paychecks their livelihoods depend on, fat-cat politicians in Washington continue to get paid. It’s time for Congress to feel the pain they’re inflicting on millions of Americans.

Congress should miss their paychecks. Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego displayed the hypocrisy out loud as the shutdown began. In an interview with NBC News, he defended his refusal to forgo his salary during the shutdown, saying, “I’m not wealthy, and I have three kids. I would basically be missing, you know, mortgage payments, rent payments, child support.”

Exactly, Senator. That’s precisely what millions of everyday Americans are facing right now. Ask yourself – would this shutdown even happen in the first place if members of Congress couldn’t make their own mortgage payments or pay their own rent? If they were scrambling to fill up their gas tanks or stay on their feet? Not a chance.

My heart breaks for the families who are beginning to feel this impact while their members of Congress treat this like a political game. I’ve lived this struggle myself. In 2005, my husband Scotty was blinded by an IED suicide bomb while serving our country in Iraq. While he lay in a coma at Walter Reed, I was forced to navigate a system that offered no real support – not for him, and certainly not for me. I had resigned from my job to be by his side, while facing student loan debt and mounting care expenses. There were no safety nets, no clear guidance – just bureaucracy and silence.

That was 20 years ago. Shamefully, not much has changed. While I’m thrilled and thankful to see President Trump ensure that members of our military get paid, law enforcement, air traffic controllers, and millions of moms and dads are still missing paychecks.

I know firsthand what it’s like to take on the government with no help, no roadmap, and no reward. If we’re serious about solving these systemic failures, then we must start by holding Congress accountable – not just for writing policy, but for standing behind the people they claim to serve.

Meanwhile, our Democratic politicians continue to prolong the government shutdown – voting six times to keep the government shuttered. While Democrats vote for a continued shutdown, President Trump and congressional Republicans are fighting for a clean-funding extension that will immediately open our government. Passing this stopgap funding measure gives Congress time to pass its funding bills through regular order and continue this historically bipartisan process.

I’ll be blunt: Enough is enough. If the American people have to feel the pain of a government shutdown, members of Congress should be in the foxhole with them. They should be the ones holding the empty bank account. Imagine the urgency if every member of Congress faced foreclosure notices. Some members, both Republicans and Democrats, have already pledged to forgo their pay; others, like Gallego, should join them and stand with the people they claim to represent. Withhold congressional salaries until the government is funded. And watch how fast the government gets funded.

This shutdown isn't about policy – it’s about power. Democrats are gambling with American families’ paychecks to score political points. Senate Democrats need to pass the clean funding extension or face the consequences of their own making. Let’s end this farce and stop paying Congress. And reopen the government today."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"Be Open to the Signal"

"Be Open to the Signal"

by David Cain

"There’s a timeless story trope where the hero is wandering the streets, lost in worry or despair, when the universe sends a sign. His gaze lands on a mother bird feeding her chicks, or a neon cross in a tattoo parlor window, breaking him out of his daze and awakening him to a path he didn’t see. I’m not sure whether the universe does that kind of thing on purpose. But I think we’ve all experienced similar poetic signals, and we’re affected by them whether they’re ultimately haphazard, or somehow authored for us.

On a rainy Tuesday, just when your world is feeling small and lonely, someone texts you out of the blue, reminding you that you already have a lot of wonderful people in your life, if you care to reach out to them. You’re procrastinating on an important task by making a needless walk to the corner store. On the way, you pass a box of free books, and sitting on top is a copy of "Hamlet.". A distant church bell tolls.You’re thinking in circles about whether to relocate for a new job, when the driver behind you honks. You look up and the light is green. “Go already!” he shouts.

I don’t think we should try to explain these signals. You don’t have to work into your belief system some way that the universe can summon a baby rabbit into your presence just when you need to contemplate the preciousness of life. Instead, you can just recognize that signals do happen, and that they do matter. The “signal from the universe” is currency in film and literature because sudden strokes of meaning happen to everyone. They punch through our belief systems, grabbing us by the lapels and showing us something we need to see.

Maybe I should call Mom.

The reason signals work is that they pull you out of your thinking, and the thinking mind can be a small and oppressive place. Our thought patterns are well-trodden territory, so the mind tends to lead itself in circles. I think that’s where we get the trope about the preoccupied hero leaving his apartment to wander the dreary streets. Something in you knows when you need to change the scenery. That thing is hoping you see something that jars you out of rumination.

The signal jars the mind with such force that the current train of thought derails, allowing a new idea to take over and start a train headed elsewhere. The neon cross glowing at you just when you’re feeling lost and forsaken. The baby bird appearing just when you’re feeling mean.

Cat’s in the Cradle comes on the radio.

This is why it doesn’t work to demand a signal. Signals have to come from the world, from outside the mind, so you can’t wish them into existence. But you can be open to them, and when you’re open to them, more of them reach you. If you’re open to the signal, you might find the world is constantly trying to show you things. Patient trees subsuming chain-link fences. Industrious squirrels preparing for winter’s wrath one acorn at a time. Graffiti speaking wise words or cryptic warnings. Make of these images what you will. The universe does seem to have a lot to say, whether or not it’s doing it on purpose.

Just as you’re about to call it a rain day.

Being open to the signal is just a matter of looking out into the world more, especially when the mind feels tight. Look out at the wealth of detail in the world around you, and see what’s looking back. You will be shown words, emblems, signs, animals, talkative strangers, and discarded objects. When you see them, they’re already staring right at you. Doors. Arrows. Songs. Your own name. Conspicuous rays of light. Ominous and welcoming sights. Sometimes they’re shouting at you, even physically colliding with you. Other times they’re waiting in a shaded corner for some keen eyes to land on them.

Being open to the signal only means looking out into the world as a habit, just to see what’s there outside the mind. Of course, the time we most need to be shown something is when we’re completely preoccupied and inward-looking. Openness is not a state of signal-hunting, or divination. You certainly don’t want to assume everything is a sign. What does this broken doorknob mean? Is this lamp post my father, finally telling me not to go to law school?

Signals come to you. They jump in front of your eyes and attach automatically to meaning. No wondering or divination is needed. Some of what strikes you seem to be clear hints, ideas, or guidance. Some just suggest a certain mood or tonal shift. Some are just funny. I’m furrowing my brow about some serious thing when my cat gets a Post-it note stuck to her foot, panics, and bolts out the door like a cartoon character. The wind picks up, thunder rumbles, and discarded Burger King crown rolls up to my feet.

My birthright reveals itself.

Sometimes signals are vague or absurd. Other times it’s undeniable that a billboard has the perfect advice for you, or that a belligerent seagull is rightfully calling you out. No matter how you think it all works, the universe sometimes has something to clear to tell you. You need to apologize. Life is long and your problem is small. The time to make the dream happen has arrived. If important signs sometimes strike us, that must mean they sometimes miss us. Be open to the signal.

When are you going to make it happen? You already know this, but here’s a few reminders about how the human mind works:

• You have big aspirations that are deeply important to you.

• You believe you will do them later, not now.

• Later never arrives, because life only happens now.

• When you forget this, you put off what’s most important to you, and you just get older.

If you really do want to write your book, make that career change, finish the renovations, learn the piano - it has to happen now. Otherwise life’s default activities will crowd it all out"

- https://www.raptitude.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Argyle, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"This Is Your Life..."

“This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice.

To be or not to be.

Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice.

Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume

and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?"

- Chuck Palahniuk

○

"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make,

who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?"

- Stephen Levine

The Poet: James Baldwin, "Amen"

"Amen"

 "No, I don't feel death coming.

I feel death going:

having thrown up his hands,

for the moment.

I feel like I know him

better than I did.

Those arms held me,

for a while,

and, when we meet again,

there will be that secret knowledge

between us." 

- James Baldwin

"How Modern Entertainment Created the Dumbest Generation in History"

Full screen recommended.

Philosophical Vision,

"How Modern Entertainment Created

 the Dumbest Generation in History"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Don't Wonder..."

"Don't wonder why people go crazy. Wonder why they don't.

In the face of what we can lose in a day, in an instant,

wonder what the hell it is that makes us hold it together."

- "Grey's Anatomy"

"In The Last Few Years..."

"In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth,

and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the

alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted."

- Michael Musto

"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive"

- Sir Walter Scott, "Marmion"

"The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of Perspective on How to Live with Our Human Nature"

"The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of 

Perspective on How to Live with Our Human Nature"

by Maria Popova

"When Earth first erupted with color, flowers took over so suddenly and completely that, two hundred million years later, the baffled Darwin called this blooming conquest an “abominable mystery.” When earthlings first realized that our Milky Way is not the cosmic whole but one galactic particle of the whole - one of unfathomably many galaxies, each abloom with billions of stars orbited by other worlds - the universe suddenly appeared “so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” When it became clear that a mysterious substance is holding each galaxy together, keeping each world’s orbit a perfect corolla around the stigma of its star, we gave that substance a name befitting an abominable mystery: dark matter.

Along the way, we - thinking, feeling, meaning-hungry creatures - kept trying to make beauty of the truths we found, composing poems about flowers and poems about dark matter as we composed our equations and our theories.

Reality’s ability to continually baffle us with what we don’t yet know, and our willingness to continually plumb the unknown for new truth and beauty, even as it baffles and terrifies us, is the loveliest thing about being alive. Being alive together, as members of this boundlessly inquisitive and imaginative species, is the loveliest thing about being human.

That is what Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) - a scientist, poet, and perhaps my favorite writer about the native poetics of reality - explores throughout his altogether exquisite final essay collection, "The Fragile Species" (public library).

In the opening essay, originally delivered as a talk in 1987 for the fiftieth reunion of his Harvard Medical School class, Thomas reflects on the splendid bafflements of science since he and his classmates parted ways in the prime of their lives half a century earlier. With his signature winking genius, he writes: "I cannot count the number of new items of ignorance I’ve picked up in fifty years; the list is simply too long. Instead, I have prepared another kind of list, shorter, more personally humbling, of some things I think I might have been learning more about if I hadn’t been so puzzled all those years by medicine itself. There are matters that I assume most other people my age comprehend nicely, and I never got round to studying.

The Federal Reserve System is at the top of my list. I’ve never known what it was or what it did or how it did it, and what is more I don’t want to be told. The same goes for the stock market, and for the bond market, and the word processor (one of which I actually possess and am baffled by), and the internal combustion engine, and the universe, black holes, galactic mirrors, those other universes, and space-time. Most of all, space-time. I cannot get ahold of it."

With so fetching a wink, Thomas turns to the real object of his meditation: our native inability to comprehend how the same processes that begot these remote abstractions also begot the fleshy, feeling concreteness of us. There is something incredibly lovely about Thomas’s warm humor - here is man of extraordinary intellect, scientific erudition, and uncommon human sensitivity, inviting the rest of us, far more ordinary and modestly lettered, to join him in his gladsome bafflement at the seeming miracle of life:

"I even have troubles of my own with evolutionary biology. Not first principles, mind you, not the big picture, mostly just the details. I understand about randomness and chance, and election, and adaptation, and all that, and I now know better than to talk, ever, about progress in evolution, never mind purpose. My problems come when I think about the earliest form of known life, those indisputable bacterial cells in rocks 3.7 billion years old, our Ur-grandparents for sure, then nothing but bacteria for the next two and one-half billion years, and now the chestnut tree in my backyard, my Abyssinian cat Jeoffry, the almost-but-not-quite free-living microbes living in all our cells disguised as mitochondria, and, just by the way, our marvelous, still-immature, dangerous selves, brainy enough to menace all nature unless distracted by music."

Leaning on his training as an etymologist - that is, an evolutionary biologist for the living organism of language - Thomas adds: "We need a better word than chance, even pure chance, or that succession of events, while still evading any notion of progress. But to go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness.

I like the word stochastic better, because of its lineage in our language. The first root was stegh, meaning a pointed stake in the Indo-European of 30,000 years ago. Stegh moved into Greek as stokhos, meaning a target for archers, and then later on, in our language, targets being what they are and aiming arrows being as fallible as it is, stokhos was adapted to signify aiming and missing, pure chance, randomness, and thus stochastic. On that philosophical basis, then, I’m glad to accept all of evolution in a swoop, but I’m still puzzled by it."

With great subtlety and sensitivity, Thomas then pirouettes to observe that this stochastic miracle of life across time exists only because death too exists. A generation before Richard Dawkins made his poetic point about the luckiness of death and an epoch after the grief-stricken Darwin, having lost his most beloved child, found personal solace in the scientific fact that the death of the individual is what fine-tunes evolution to ensure the survival of the species - “there is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin wrote - Thomas dismantles the central logical fallacy beneath our species’ fantasies of immortality, be they retro-religious or techno-futuristic.

With an eye to various speculative proposals - which have grown all the more various and more unsoundly speculative in the decades since - about hacking the entropy that frays at all matter in order to attain long-term preservation of information systems, including the information system of us, Thomas considers the inherent syllogism of such hopes: "If it had been arranged that way, we’d all still be alive forever but, in the nature of things, we would still be those same archaebacteria born 3.7 billion years ago, unable to make molecular errors, deprived of taking chances, and therefore never blundering into brains. That is, if we could be immortal, we could not exist; if we were already perfect, we could not exist. It is only because we are mortal and imperfect, you and I and Dickinson and Darwin, that the sum of us, the galaxy of humanity drifting through impartial stars, goes on."

Although he had art on his mind, Van Gogh was contouring a deep scientific truth, a truth both existential and evolutionary, when he observed how inspired mistakes propel us forward. With his pliant logic and playful love of the human condition, Thomas considers the reflexive conclusion to which this awareness might lead the inattentive: "Nature is an immense mechanism, operating itself in accordance with the laws of physics. We, and our brains, are working parts of the machinery, having made our appearance here and having our existence because of the operation of those laws, set in place on what we like to see as the pinnacle by the beneficent operation of chance and quantum mechanics. Pure luck, indeterminate and intentionless, all the way."

But this, of course, is Lewis Thomas. And this, therefore, is not a case for vacuous materialism. This is Lewis Thomas, who often makes the deepest point by caricaturing its shallow opposite: "This view takes us a long distance toward understanding our place in nature, but not quite the full distance. We are still stuck with the problem of consciousness, and because of this not-quite-settled matter, we are stuck as well with the incessant questions with which our consciousness continues to plague us and disturb our sleep (for which also, by the way, we do not have a good explanation). Questions like: Are we the only creatures on the whole planet with real consciousness? Why is being being; why not nonbeing? Why should there be something, instead of nothing? How do you organize a life, or a society, in accordance with physical laws that forbid purpose, causality, morality, and progress, especially when you have to do so with brains that stand alive with these very notions? Where’s the fun in it?"

In another essay from the book, in a passage from which the entire book borrows its title, Thomas writes at the peak of the Cold War and its menacing specter of nuclear catastrophe, which has since only changed costume as the ecological catastrophe menacing our own time: "This is a very big place, and I do not know how it works, or how I fit in. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error-prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that."

In a passage of extraordinary prescience, precisely in the context of our present ecological precariousness and what its only solution might be, Thomas adds as he considers our place in the family of life: "We are different, to be sure, but not so much because of our brains as because of our discomfiture, mostly with each other. All the other parts of the earth’s life seem to get along, to fit in with each other, to accommodate, even to concede when the stakes are high. They live off each other, devour each other, scramble for ecological niches, but always within set limits, with something like restraint. It is a rough world, by some of our standards, but not the winner-take-all game that it seemed to us awhile back. If we look over our shoulders as far as we can see, all the way past trillions of other species to those fossil stromatolites built by enormous communities of collaborating microorganisms, we can see no evidence of meanness or vandalism in nature. It is, on balance, an equable, generally amiable place, good-natured as we say.

We are the anomalies for the moment, the self-conscious children at the edge of the crowd, unsure of our place, tending to grabbiness… But we are not as bad a lot as some of us say… At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of a species’ adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like. Growing up is hard times for an individual but sustained torment for a whole species, especially as brainy and nervous as ours. If we can last it out, get through the phase…. we might find ourselves off and running again."

What might save us from ourselves, Thomas intimates, is not our maturity but our mutuality: We are more compulsively social, more interdependent and more inextricably attached to each other than any of the celebrated social insects… One human trait, urging us on by our nature, is the drive to be useful, perhaps the most fundamental of all our biological necessities. We make mistakes with it, get it wrong, confuse it with self-regard, even try to fake it, but it is there in our genes, needing only a better set of definitions for usefulness than we have yet agreed on."

Complement this fragment of "The Fragile Species" - which remains one of the finest, most fiercely humanistic and scientifically perspectival books I have ever read - with philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and the forgotten visionary William Vogt, writing half a century before his ideas shaped the modern environmental movement, on our interdependence resilience, then revisit Lewis Thomas on our wiring for mutuality and his science-rooted existential meditation on the medusa and the snail - still the subtlest, sanest thing I have read about the eternal mystery of the self."

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

"How It Really Is"

Yeah, we remember...

"I Cannot Believe..."

"I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be “happy.” I think

the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate.

It is, above all, to matter and to count, to stand for something,

to have made some difference that you lived at all.”

- Leo C. Rosten

Bill Bonner, "Colossal Wrecks"

The left foot of Ozymandias, engraving by Louis-Pierre Baltard

"Colossal Wrecks"

by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "Is the US repeating the mistakes of past empires? Its pomp? Its vanity? How about this, the New York Times: "Trump publicly unveiled his plans for the arch last week, during a dinner for the wealthy donors who are funding the $200 million ballroom addition to the White House. He showed off renderings and presented three models in different sizes, all of which looked similar to the Arc de Triomphe, France’s neoclassical monument that was finished in the 19th century. “Small, medium and large - whichever one, they look good,” Mr. Trump said, holding out the models. “I happen to think the larger one looks, by far, the best.”

Arcs of Triomphe are conceived and built when the nation is triumphant. France’s Arc de Triomphe was designed in 1806. Then it must have seemed as though nothing could stop the victorious French under its Big Man, Napoleon. In 1805, the Grande Armee, beat the combined Russian-Austrian forces at Austerlitz. Bonaparte feigned retreat and then circled around to crush the enemy. It was such a superb victory that it put the Corsican in the same small group of geniuses as Hannibal and Alexander the Great. In 1806, France was on top of the world…her ‘big battalions’ ready to march…and her leader unmatched. Surely an arch….in the style of Titus’s arch in Rome…seemed appropriate.

They don’t ring a bell at the top of the stock market. But when they put up triumphal arches you might hear the faint jingle of soon-to-be-forgotten glories. Only six years after beginning the arch, the French, angry with the Tsar for failing to respect their trade sanctions, attacked Russia. The campaign was a disaster. Three years on and France’s European empire was finished. Napoleon, perhaps the greatest military man of his generation, had made too many enemies. Two of the biggest of them - England and Prussia - trapped him at Waterloo. And the triumphs were over. Bonaparte spent the rest of his life exiled on Saint Helena, fighting rats.

The Arc de Triomphe is modeled after the Arch of Titus in Rome. It too was built near the very peak of Rome’s glory - in 81 AD - by Domitian to commemorate his brother, Titus. It was Titus who led the siege of Jerusalem, in which he did to the Jews more or less what they now do to the Gazans. He leveled their city, destroyed their temple, and dispersed and enslaved the survivors.

These triumphs were incredibly appreciated by the masses. They got to participate, if only by proximity, to the loot…got to look over the slaves who would later be put to auction…and got the pleasure of watching their enemies (at least, they were told they were enemies) get publicly executed.

Caesar himself brought back the rebel, Vercingetorix, and had him strangled before a cheering Roman mob. Maduro, are you paying attention? But Rome’s clock was ticking too. Until around 100 AD, Rome’s history was one conquest after another. Each time, the winning general was accorded a ‘triumph,’ in which he marched through the streets ahead of the booty, slaves and captives he brought back. After 100 AD, however, Rome was on the defensive. Thereafter, it was a long, bumpy, downhill slide…with no more conquests…and few triumphs.

Bubble markets have their moments of triumph too… just before they fall apart. It is then too when prices get furthest removed from real values. Chris Mayer, who runs Woodlock House Family Capital out of our office in Ireland, sends this remarkable news flash: ‘Since early September, companies with positive earnings on the Russell 5,000 index have gone approximately nowhere. But companies with negative earnings - that is, those that lost money - are up 17%.’

And what about OpenAI, now said to be worth about $500 billion? Does the business plan bring back memories of 1999? Sam Altman explained it: "The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen." That interview was in 2019. And today, OpenAI is still losing money, about $5 billion last year.

What do we make of it? The feds’ arches and the investment milestones…tell us what passions their designers read. And we…we just await the ‘decay of those colossal wrecks.’ Stay tuned…"

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Michael Bordenaro, "Empty Tables: The New Normal For Restaurants"

Full screen recommended.

Michael Bordenaro, 10/23/25

"Empty Tables: 

The New Normal For Restaurants"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Michael Bordenaro, 10/23/25

"Unemployment and Inflation

 Prove The Economy is in Freefall"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Multiple Items at Kroger You Should Be Buying Right Now!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 10/23/25

"Multiple Items at Kroger You 

Should Be Buying Right Now!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Orlando Miner, "Food Stamps Cancelled! People Are Losing It!"

Full screen recommended.

Strong language alert!

Orlando Miner, 10/22/25

"Food Stamps Cancelled! People Are Losing It!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"This Shutdown Could Push Millions Into Poverty - Here’s How"

Full screen recommended.

Snyder Reports, 10/22/25

"This Shutdown Could Push Millions 

Into Poverty - Here’s How"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "Freakouts Over Losing Food Stamps, Grocery Snatching Coming Soon"

Jeremiah Babe, 10/22/25

"Freakouts Over Losing Food Stamps, 

Grocery Snatching Coming Soon"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Vangelis, “Hymn”

Full screen recommended.

Vangelis, “Hymn”

"A Look to the Heavens"

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

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

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

Chet Raymo, “Cosmic View”

“Cosmic View”

by Chet Raymo

“When writing about Philip and Phylis Morrison’s “Powers of Ten” I found I had made the following notation in the flyleaf, perhaps a dozen or more years ago:

Britannica
 32 volumes
 1000 pages per vol
 1200 words per page
 5 letters/wd
 = 200 million letters. So, 200 million letters in the 32 volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Why was I making that estimate? I can think of several possibilities. Perhaps…

1. I was making a comparison with the number of nucleotide pairs in the human DNA; that is, the number of steps- ATTGCCCTAA, etc.- on the double-helix. If the information on the human genome- an arm’s length of DNA in every human cell- were written out in ordinary type, it would fill 15 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Nearly 500 thick volumes of information labeled YOU. Think of that for a moment. Fifteen 32-volume sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica in every invisibly-small cell of your body. And every time a cell reproduces, all of that information has to be transcribed correctly. Did I say the other day that it took a semester to stretch the imagination to grasp the universe of the galaxies? It could take another semester to stretch the imagination to grasp the scale of the molecular machinery that makes our bodies work.

Or maybe…

2. I was trying to give an insight into the complexity of the human brain. There are something like 100 billion nerve cells in the brain. That’s equivalent to the number of letters in 500 sets of the Britannica! Each many-fingered neuron connects to hundreds of other neurons, and each synaptic connection might be in one of many levels of excitation. I’ll let you calculate the number of potential states of the human brain. We’ve left behind the realm of Britannica. Even talking of libraries would be insufficient. I was marveling here recently about the amount of digital memory Google must command to store all of those 360-degree Street View images from all over the planet, all of it instantly retrievable by anyone with access to a computer and the internet. I imagined banks and banks of electronics in some cavernous building in California. Big deal! I’m sitting here right now in the college Commons and I can bring to mind street views of every place I’ve lived since I was three or four years old.

By the way…

3. The number of letters in 500 sets of the Britannica is about the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

And…”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Everything We Assume Is Permanent Is Actually Fragile"

"Everything We Assume Is Permanent Is Actually Fragile"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"The great irony of the past 75 years of expanding consumption is the belief that all these decades of success prove the system is rock-solid and future success is thus guaranteed. The irony lies in the systemic fragility that's built into the large-scale industrial production that generates endless surpluses of energy, food, fresh water, etc. and the global financial system that delivers endless surpluses of capital and credit to be distributed by public authorities and private owners of capital.

The key driver of increasing efficiencies has been scaling up production by concentrating ownership and capacity into a few quasi-monopolies/cartels. In industry after industry, where there were once dozens of companies, there are now only a handful of behemoths with outsized market and political power which they wield to retain their dominance.

For example, where there were dozens of large regional banks in the U.S. not that long ago, relentless consolidation has led to a handful of supergiant too big to fail banks which can take extraordinary risks (and undertake criminal skims) knowing that the federal government will always bail them out and leave the banks' corporate criminals untouched.

Two of these too big to fail banks recently paid fines in the billions of dollars, yet no one went to prison or even faced criminal charges. This highlights the systemic problem with concentrating capital and power in the hands of the few: too big to fail means corporate wrongdoers have a permanent get out of jail free card while the small-fry white-collar criminal will get a fiver (five-year prison sentence) for skimming a tiny fraction of the billions routinely pillaged by the too big to fail banks.

The net result is a two-tier judicial/law enforcement system: the too big to fail "essential" companies get a free hand and the citizenry get whatever "justice" they can afford, i.e. very little.

This concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few corporations is of course state-cartel socialism in which the public good has become subservient to the profits of corporate owners and insiders, and the skims paid to the state's insiders. The state enables and enforces this concentration of private wealth and power in a number of ways: regulatory capture, the polite bribery of lobbying, the revolving door between government and private industry, and so on.

The public good would best be served by competition and transparent markets and regulations, but these are precisely what's been eliminated by relentless consolidation and the paring down of the economic ecosystem to a handful of too big to fail nodes which work tirelessly to eliminate competition, transparency and meaningful public oversight.

This ruthless pursuit of efficiencies and profits has stripped the economy of redundancies and buffers. Production supply chains have been engineered to function in a narrow envelope of quality, quantity and time. Any disruption quickly leads to shortages, something that became visible when meatpacking plants were closed in the pandemic.

Supply chains are long and fragile, but this fragility is not visible as long as everything stays within the narrow envelope that's been optimized. Once the envelope is broken, the supply chain breaks down. Since redundancies and buffers have been stripped away, there are no alternatives available. Shortages mount and the entire system starts breaking down.

Quality has been stripped out as well. When markets become captive to cartels and monopolies, customers have to take what's available: if it's poor quality goods and services, tough luck, pal, there are no alternatives. There are only one or two service providers, healthcare insurers, etc., and they all provide the same minimal level of quality and service.

The moral rot in our social, political and economic orders is another source of hidden fragility. I'm constantly told by readers that corruption has been around forever, so therefore nothing has changed, but these readers are indulging in magical nostalgia: things have changed profoundly, and for the worse, as the moral rot has seeped into every nook and cranny of American life, from the top down.

There is no "public good," there is only a rapacious, obsessive self-interest that claims the mantle of "public good" as a key mechanism of the con.

As I discussed in "Everything is Staged", everyone and everything in America is now nothing more than a means to a self-interested end, and so the the entirety of American life is nothing but 100% marketing of various cons designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. That America was a better place without endless marketing of Big Pharma meds and "vaccines", and colleges hyping their insanely costly "product" (a worthless diploma) has been largely forgotten by those indulging in magical nostalgia.

What few seem to realize is all the supposedly rock-solid permanent foundations of life are nothing more than fragile social constructs based on trust and legitimacy. Once trust and legitimacy have been lost, these constructs melt into the sands of time.

A great many things we take for granted are fragile constructs that could unravel with surprising speed: law enforcement, the courts, elections, the value of our currency -- these are all social constructs. Once legitimacy is lost, people abandon these constructs and they melt away.

It's clear to anyone who isn't indulging in magical nostalgia that trust in institutions is in a steep decline as the legitimacy of these institutions, public and private, have been eroded by incompetence, corruption, dysfunction and the rapacious self-interest of insiders.

What we've gotten very good at is masking the rot and fragility. Masking the rot and fragility is not the same thing as strength or permanence. The nation is about to discover the difference in the years ahead."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"The World..."

"The world is a comedy to those that think,

a tragedy to those who feel. "

- Horace Walpole, In a Letter, 1770