"Albert Camus On How to Live Whole in a Broken World"

"Albert Camus On How to Live Whole in a Broken World"

by Maria Popova

"Born into a World War to live through another, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. Just three years earlier, he had become the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience” - problems like art as resistance, happiness as our moral obligation, and the measure of strength through difficult times.

During WWII, Camus stood passionately on the side of justice; during the Cold War, he sliced through the Iron Curtain with all the humanistic force of simple kindness. But as he watched the world burn its own future in the fiery pit of politics, he understood that time, which has no right side and no wring side, is only ever won or lost on the smallest and most personal scale: absolute presence with one’s own life, rooted in the belief that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

Camus addresses this with poetic poignancy in an essay titled “The Wrong Side and the Right Side,” found in his altogether superb posthumous collection "Lyrical and Critical Essays" (public library). In a prescient admonition against our modern cult of productivity, which plunders our capacity for presence, Camus writes:

"Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity?"

Echoing the young Dostoyevsky’s exultant reckoning with the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed (“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart,” Dostoyevsky wrote to his brother, “that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.”), Camus adds:

"What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world? What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness. I hold onto the world with every gesture, to men with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice. The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair? In spite of much searching, this is all I know."

These reflections led Camus to conclude that “there is no love of life without despair of life”; out of them he drew his three antidotes to the absurdity of life and the crucial question at its center. Couple with George Saunders - who may be the closest we have to Camus in our time - on how to love the world more, then revisit Wendell Berry’s poetic antidote to despair."

- https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/

"If You Caught A Glimpse..."

"If you caught a glimpse of your own death,

would that knowledge change the way you live the rest of your life?"

- Paco Ahlgren, "Discipline"

Free Download: Ernest Becker, "The Denial Of Death"

Full screen recommended.

"The Lie We Created to Survive Life: 

The Denial of Death"

o

"The Denial Of Death"

"The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man."

Excerpt: "The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind. The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that : the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. I believe, that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction

I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of man’s knowledge is not to oppose and to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure .

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: Human Nature and the Heroic: Freud discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him.

The unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal . In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self- esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguised. The child is unashamed about what he needs and wants most. His whole organism shouts the claims of his natural narcissism.

We like to speak casually about “sibling rivalry,” as though it were some kind of by-product of growing up , a bit of competitiveness and selfishness of children who have been spoiled, who haven’t yet grown into a generous social nature. But it is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration , it expresses the heart of the creature : the desire to stand out , to be the one in creation. When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life .

Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious , selfish , or domineering. It is that they so openly express man’s tragic destiny: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning .

Society itself is a codified hero system , which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a "religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives .

CHAPTER TWO: The Terror of Death: "Is it not for us to confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once more living psychologically beyond our means, and must reform and give truth its due ? Would it not be better to give death the place in actuality and in our thoughts which properly belongs to it, and to yield a little more prominence to that unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems indeed a greater achievement, but rather a backward step… but it has the merit of taking somewhat more into account the true state of affairs..." - Sigmund Freud

Of all things that move man , one of the principal ones is his terror of death. Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive .

These cults, as G . Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain “an immunity bath” from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. Zilboorg says that most people think death fear is absent because it rarely shows its true face; but he argues that underneath all appearances fear of death is universally present: Let sanguine healthy- mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant. The very term “ self-preservation ” implies an effort against some force of disintegration ; the affective aspect of this is fear, fear of death .

Therefore in normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality. We are intent on mastering death… A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day , but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living , and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it - but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed. Repression takes care of the complex symbol of death for most people."

“Death twitches my ear; 'Live,' he says...

'I am coming.” - Virgil

Freely download "The Denial Of Death", by Ernest Becker, here:

- https://ia803107.us.archive.org/

- https://ernestbecker.org/

"How It Really Is"

"U.S. National Debt Clock, Real Time"

"SNAP Benefits In Danger, US Government Out Of Options"

Full screen recommended.

Snyder Reports, 11/1/25

"SNAP Benefits In Danger, US Government Out Of Options"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "We Are Paying For This! The Hidden Cost of Free Benefits!"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 11/1/25

"We Are Paying For This! 

The Hidden Cost of Free Benefits!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Congressional Feeding Trough Remains Open and Well-Stocked Despite Government Shutdown"

"Congressional Feeding Trough Remains Open 

and Well-Stocked Despite Government Shutdown"

by Benjamin Bartee

“There’s hope in the words and emotion in the eyes,

It’s so easy to be misled by the savvy gentle guise.

And like fools we trust the delivery,

But it’s all just drunk sincerity.”

- Bad Religion, "Drunk Sincerity"

"The decrepit fiends of The Swamp are out in full force putting on a big show of solidarity with all of their subjects constituents left out in the rain when the gears of state grind to a halt. What they rarely, if ever, mention is that their paychecks arrive regardless of whether the government gets shut down or not, or for how long.

Via Constitution Center: “Over in the Legislative Branch, the support staff for Congress would be affected. “During a funding gap, pay for congressional employees would not be disbursed if there is no appropriation to fund legislative branch activities,” the CRS says. Staffers deemed critical would need to work because they are needed to “support Congress with its constitutional responsibilities or those necessary to protect life and property.”

But members of Congress will still get paychecks, under two parts of the Constitution. Article I, Section 6, says that congress members “shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States.” The 27th Amendment also forbids any change in the compensation rate for Congress during a current term.”

Here is Democratic Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives, Katherine Clark, describing the denial of millions of Americans the benefits they have been conditioned to rely on, as points of political “leverage”: “Of course, there will be, you know, families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage times we have.”

One can argue about the merits of the Democrat demands; extending Affordable Care Act tax credits, although by no means a permanent solution to the ongoing controlled demolition of the middle class by neoliberal policymakers or the farce that is the so-called healthcare system, would help working-class taxpayers barely scraping by significantly in the short term.

But the essential issue is that the Congress members playing the cards don’t actually have any chips in the game; it’s all House money, as it were. The suffering of their constituents, as laid bare in the above quote, is just another point of “leverage” in the political games they play (with other people’s money).

From a broader perspective, in the same way that the CIA budget doubled in the two decades after the greatest intelligence failure of all time, 9/11, the career success of your standard Congressman is wholly untethered from whatever results he does or doesn’t produce for his constituents. As long as the august Senator plays the game right, as long as he services his actual constituency, the donor class, he wins - no matter how much his theoretical constituents suffer.

This entire spectacle is the product of a political system in which the governing authorities and the governed occupy two entirely separate castes of society, with little to no intercaste mobility. The members of the subordinate underclass who do break the mold, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, either sell their souls on arrival (like AOC) or else are quickly shunned just as soon as their colleagues catch the slightest whiff of populist sentimentality.

This is class war - but an asymmetric one, waged by the permanent governing class against the (increasingly permanent) underclass. It’s socialism for them, as they feed off of government largesse and abuse the mechanisms of state to enrich themselves, and bootstrap capitalism for you. They are the residents of the Capitol; we are the rabble of Panem.

“Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch – this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen.”

There sits in Congress a proposed constitutional amendment, championed Rep. Eli Crane, that would halt, with no backpay, all Congressional salaries during any government shutdown. Via Rep. Eli Crane (emphasis added): “As many of you are aware, the federal government officially entered a shutdown yesterday. While the House of Representatives passed a funding extension through November 21, 2025, the measure still requires 60 votes in the U.S. Senate before heading to the President’s desk. Unfortunately, only two Democrats and one Independent currently support this effort, meaning the government will remain shut down until five more Democrats vote in favor of the bill."

In the meantime, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) has requested that his pay be withheld for the duration of the shutdown. He believes it is inappropriate to receive a salary while many Americans are furloughed or facing delayed paychecks. Furthermore, Rep. Crane has cosponsored a constitutional amendment introduced by Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), which would prohibit lawmakers from receiving pay during government shutdowns. It would also preclude Members of Congress from receiving any back pay afterward.”

While laudable on its own merits, however, this bill is by no means a panacea for what ails the country; the real gold mine for these people is not their relatively paltry salaries (about $112,000/yr for rank-and-file) but all of the insider trading they’re allowed to do with impunity and all of the cushy board positions and lobbying gigs they’re awarded - and their family members; see Hunter Biden - by their donors after their loyal “public” service. Nancy Pelosi didn’t become a hundred-millionaire cashing her government checks; she made that money parlaying her government position for private gain.

The entire governing structure is broken, in that modern D.C. in no way represents anything close to what the Founding Fathers envisioned. On the contrary, it more resembles the predatory, parasitical foreign regime from which they liberated themselves at great personal peril."

- https://armageddonprose.substack.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Well, It Begins... Be Ready"

Adventures With Danno, 11/1/25

"Well, It Begins... Be Ready"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Time Of India, 11/1/25

"'Riots' In Washington DC:  American Capital In Chaos, 

2400 National Guard Deployed"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Alert! Pentagon Tomahawks! White House Lockdown! Moscow Blackout!"

Full screen recommended.

Prepper News, 10/31/25

"Alert! Pentagon Tomahawks! 

White House Lockdown! Moscow Blackout!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"You Won’t Survive, Shutdown Causes People To Do The Unthinkable"

Full screen recommended.

Snyder Reports, 10/31/25

"You Won’t Survive, 

Shutdown Causes People To Do The Unthinkable"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

57 Percent Of Americans Expect The Economy To Get Even Worse Than It Is Right Now

"57 Percent Of Americans Expect The Economy 

To Get Even Worse Than It Is Right Now"

by Michael Snyder

"After many years of steady economic deterioration, a very dark cloud of economic pessimism hangs over our country. The cost of just about everything has been rising faster than paychecks have been, thousands of stores are closing all over the nation, and large corporations are conducting mass layoffs on a scale that we haven’t seen since the Great Recession. Most of the population is just barely scraping by in this very harsh economic environment, and I have been hearing from so many people that are quite frightened about what is going to happen next.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just a small segment of the population is that is scared about the future. According to a survey that was recently conducted by Deloitte, a whopping 57 percent of U.S. adults expect the U.S. economy to get even weaker during the year ahead…"As the peak holiday shopping season approaches, most U.S. consumers have a downbeat outlook on the economy, according to an annual Deloitte survey published Wednesday.

Most consumers surveyed - 57% - said they expect the economy to weaken in the year ahead, the consulting firm found in a poll of roughly 4,000 respondents. That compares with 30% who expected a weaker economy ahead of the year-ago holiday season and 54% in 2008, one of the years of the Great Recession."

It marks the most negative economic outlook since Deloitte began tracking that in 1997. Read that last sentence again. Americans were not even this pessimistic during the dark days of 2008 and 2009. That is stunning.

As we move into the month of November, there was a tremendous amount of concern that food stamp benefits were about to be cut off. But two federal judges just ruled that the federal government must use an emergency fund to keep food stamp payments going…"Two federal judges said Friday that the Trump administration must tap into billions of dollars in emergency funds to at least partially cover food stamp benefits for tens of millions of Americans in November. The rulings from judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island reject a controversial US Department of Agriculture claim that it could not use a contingency fund, which the agency says has $5.3 billion remaining in it, to help cover the benefits amid the month-long government shutdown."

The SNAP program costs roughly $9 billion a month, so the orders will not cover all of the needed payments for November. The emergency fund does not have enough money to pay full benefits for the month of November, but at least those that are relying on food stamps should be able to get some money this month.

Meanwhile, those that purchase health insurance through the ACA exchanges are about to be hit with absolutely massive premium hikes…"Congress has yet to extend the enhanced subsidies that make insurance premiums cheaper for about 22 million of the 24 million Americans who buy insurance over the ACA exchanges. Recipients’ health premiums are set to increase by 114% in 2026, on average, without the enhanced subsidies, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group." Of course those that don’t get their health insurance through the ACA exchanges are being hit by dramatically higher health insurance premiums too.

Our system is deeply broken and that isn’t going to change any time soon. For those that simply cannot afford health insurance at this point, my advice is very simple. Try not to get sick. Because if you do get sick, they will try to squeeze every single penny out of you that they possibly can. In fact, just about every industry is trying to squeeze as much out of us as they possibly can, and we are just about squeezed out at this point.

And now here come more layoffs. On Wednesday, General Motors announced that it will be laying off a large number of workers as we head into the holiday season…"General Motors (GM) said Wednesday it is laying off 1,750 workers indefinitely in the coming months and temporarily cutting 1,670 others as it scales back electric vehicle production. The Detroit-based automaker said it is scaling back production plans and realigning electric vehicle capacity at Factory Zero, its flagship electric vehicle assembly plant in Michigan, in response to the slower near-term electic vehicle adoption and an evolving regulatory environment. In a regulatory filing from earlier this month, the automaker indicated it would incur a $1.6 billion loss for the third quarter of 2025 that is connected to a plan to scale back or adjust its electric vehicle production and factories.

A few days ago, I listed a bunch of other major corporations that are also conducting mass layoffs. We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Recession. Of course some areas of the country are already experiencing recession conditions. According to Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, the list of states that have fallen on hard times is rapidly growing…According to Zandi, the following states are in a recession: Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Kansas, Massachusetts, Washington, Georgia, New Hampshire, Maryland, Rhode Island, Illinois, Delaware, Virginia, Oregon, Connecticut, South Dakota, New Jersey, Maine, Iowa, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

It’s more sobering news for the economy, as last week U.S. hiring plans fell to their lowest level since 2009. And just like we witnessed during the Great Recession, home values are taking a very alarming turn…"Of the 20 major metros tracked by Case-Shiller, nine recorded outright price declines, while 13 rose more slowly than the national average. ‘August’s data shows US home prices continuing to slow,’ Nicholas Godec, head of fixed income tradables and commodities at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told Realtor.com. ‘For the fourth straight month, home values have lost ground to inflation, meaning homeowners are seeing their real wealth decline even as nominal prices inch higher.’ Florida and Texas were hit hardest. Tampa saw the steepest drop - down 3.3 percent year-on-year - and has now notched ten straight months of falling prices.

I believe that we have reached a very significant turning point. In some areas of the nation, I expect that home prices will fall substantially during the months ahead. I also expect foreclosures to surge like they did in 2008 and 2009 as many more Americans lose their jobs.

The U.S. economy eventually recovered from the horrifying days of 2008 and 2009, but the truth is that we are moving into a much different scenario this time around. All of the elements of “the Perfect Storm” are coming together, and I am convinced that the months ahead will be extremely chaotic."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Courting the Moon"

Full screen recommended. Beautiful!

2002, "Courting the Moon"

"A Mayan legend says that the hummingbird is actually the sun

 in disguise, and he is trying to court a beautiful woman, who is the moon."

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Why doesn't the nearby galaxy create a gravitational lensing effect on the background galaxy? It does, but since both galaxies are so nearby, the angular shift is much smaller than the angular sizes of the galaxies themselves. The featured Hubble image of NGC 3314 shows two large spiral galaxies which happen to line up exactly. The foreground spiral NGC 3314a appears nearly face-on with its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. Against the glow of the background galaxy NGC 3314b, though, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust can also be seen tracing the nearer spiral's structure. Both galaxies appear on the edge of the Hydra Cluster of Galaxies, a cluster that is about 200 million light years away. 

Gravitational lens distortions are much easier to see when the lensing galaxy is smaller and further away. Then, the background galaxy may even be distorted into a ring around the nearer. Fast gravitational lens flashes due to stars in the foreground galaxy momentarily magnifying the light from stars in the background galaxy might one day be visible in future observing campaigns with high-resolution telescopes."

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

Chet Raymo, “At Home In An Infinite Universe”

“At Home In An Infinite Universe”

by Chet Raymo

“They are questions that bedeviled thinkers for thousands of years: Is the universe infinite or finite, eternal or of a finite age?  It is certainly hard to imagine a universe that extends without limit in every direction, or a universe without a beginning or end. It is equally difficult to imagine a finite universe; what is beyond the edge? Or a beginning or end in time; how can something come from nothing? how can what is cease to be?

The problems are so intractable philosophically that their resolution has generally been left to the theologians, which from a philosophical (or scientific) perspective offers no solution at all. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for proposing a philosophical resolution (an infinite universe) that offended theology.

An escape from befuddlement is provided by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which- for example- can describe a finite universe without a boundary, as the "two-dimensional" surface of a sphere is finite and without an edge. Unfortunately, multi-dimensional curved space-time is so counterintuitive that it is difficult to get one's head around it without mastery of the mathematics. Given a choice between the ancient myths of your local preacher and the obtuse mathematics of the physics professor, it's not hard to guess what most folks will opt for.

Meanwhile, I'm reading a meditation on infinity by physics professor Anthony Aguirre, in a collection of essays called "Future Science." He discusses contemporary cosmological theories based on general relativity, and in particular the rehabilitation of the idea of an infinite and eternal universe, or, more precisely, that our universe might be just one of an infinity of infinite universes. He writes in conclusion: “What seems clear, however, is that infinity can no longer be safely ignored; beautifully constructed, empirically supported, self-consistent theories have brought infinity from idle curiosity to central player in contemporary cosmology. And if correct, the worldview these theories represent constitutes a perspective shift unlike any other: in comparison to the universe, we would be not just small but strictly zero. Well, I can't imagine many folks racing to embrace that conclusion.

Oh, but wait. Aguirre adds one final sentence: "Yet here we are, contemplating- if not quite understanding- it all.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

○

Full screen recommended.

 Vangelis, “Cosmos: A Tour of the Universe”

"Could Be Worse...

"I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."

- Jim Butcher

Dig your way out, they said...

"Food Stamp Apocalypse Avoided, For Now? Why Are 42 Million Americans On Food Stamps?"

Jeremiah Babe, 10/31, 25

"Food Stamp Apocalypse Avoided, For Now?

 Why Are 42 Million Americans On Food Stamps?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

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

The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"

"The Winter of Listening"

"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.

What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."

- David Whyte,

"The House of Belonging"

"The Psychology of an Addict"

Full screen recommended.

The Psyche, 8/30/25

"The Psychology of an Addict"

What if addiction isn't the problem… but the symptom? What if it’s not a sign of weakness - but a silent cry for help? In this deep psychological exploration, we unravel the truth about addiction through the lens of two groundbreaking thinkers: Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology, and Dr. Gabor Maté, a leading voice on trauma, healing, and human suffering. In this video, you'll discover:

• Why addiction is not about substances, but about pain.

• How childhood trauma shapes emotional coping patterns.

• The spiritual thirst behind compulsive behavior.

• Why disconnection is at the root - and connection is the cure.

• How to begin the journey of healing through honesty, compassion, and self-inquiry.

This is not just a story about addicts - it’s a mirror for all of us. Because addiction wears many masks: workaholism, perfectionism, people-pleasing, endless distraction. This video is a call to return to yourself - to reclaim your story, your wholeness, and your truth. Comment below: What are you addicted to? What pain are you ready to face?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

“Mirror Neurons: Mirrors In Your Brain”

“Mirror Neurons: Mirrors In Your Brain”

by Casey Kazan

“A recent paradigm-shattering discovery in neuroscience shows how our minds share actions, emotions, and experience - what we commonly call "the monkey see, monkey do" experience. When we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing.

Only recently, however, with the discover of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerful sharing of experience is realized within the human brain. In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action. These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the the world's leading experts to predict that 'mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'.

Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" writes that "Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma has elegantly explored the properties of neurons- the so-called "mirror" neurons, or "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. His research indicates that any given cell in this region will fire when a test monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, picking up, grasping, etc. In addition, it appears that different neurons fire in response to different actions."

The astonishing fact is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action. "With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: imitation learning, intentionality, "mind reading," empathy- even the evolution of language." Ramachandran writes.

"Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."

Mirror neurons may also help explain the emergence of language, a problem that has puzzled scholars since the time of Charles Darwin, he adds. "Is language ability based on a specially purposed language organ that emerged suddenly 'out of the blue,' as suggested by Noam Chomsky and his disciples? Or did language evolve from an earlier, gesture-based protolanguage? No one knows for sure, but a key piece of the puzzle is Rizzolatti's observation that the ventral premotor area may be a homologue of "Broca's area"- a brain center associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language. Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California suggest that mirror neurons may also be involved in miming lip and tongue movements, an ability that may present the crucial missing link between vision and language."

To test his idea, Ramachandran tested four Broca's aphasia patients - individuals with lesions in their Broca's areas. He presented them with the sound of the syllable "da," spliced to a videotape of a person whose lips were actually producing the sound "ba." Normally, people hear the "da" as "ba" - the so-called "McGurk effect" - because vision dominates over hearing. To his surprise, he writes, "we found that the Broca's patients did not experience this illusion; they heard the syllable correctly as 'da.' Even though their lesions were located in the left frontal region of their brains, they had a visual problem - they ignored the lip movements. Our patients also had great difficulty with simple lip reading. This experiment provides a link between Rizzolatti's mirror neurons and the evolution of human language, and thus it calls into question the strictly modular view of language, which is currently popular."

Based on his research, Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: "they will provide a unifying framework and possibly even explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."

- http://www.dailygalaxy.com/

o

Related:

"The Mind's Mirror", Excerpts

"For years, such experiences have puzzled psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers, who've wondered why we react at such a gut level to other people's actions. How do we understand, so immediately and instinctively, their thoughts, feelings and intentions?"

"The mirror neurons could help explain how and why we "read" other people's minds and feel empathy for them. If watching an action and performing that action can activate the same parts of the brain in monkeys- down to a single neuron- then it makes sense that watching an action and performing an action could also elicit the same feelings in people."

"This neural mechanism is involuntary and automatic," he says. "With it we don't have to think about what other people are doing or feeling, we simply know. It seems we're wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different," Gallese says. "At the root, as humans we identify the person we're facing as someone like ourselves."

Full article is here:

- http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.aspx

"How It Really Might Be"

Be very careful out there, folks...

Dan, I Allegedly, "Some People Got Rich on Welfare!"

An Unbelievable Must-View!

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 10/31/25

"Some People Got Rich on Welfare!"

"This will make you very angry! Believe it or not, there are people that are taking advantage of the system. Get ready for an unbelievable story! In today’s video, we uncover the jaw-dropping case of the so-called "Welfare Queen" and her $30K fraud scandal. This woman’s outrageous lifestyle - funded by taxpayer dollars - has taken social media by storm, exposing just how far some people will go to exploit the system. From luxury cars to staggering welfare benefits, it’s a wild ride that will leave you shaking your head. We dive deep into how she managed to milk the system for over a decade, racking up thousands in food stamps, cash assistance, and disability checks. But her bragging online caught up with her! DHS, audits, lawsuits, and repossessions - it's a cautionary tale of what happens when entitlement meets reality. Whether you’re frustrated or fascinated, this video lays it all out."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

And THIS is what we're paying for:

"I Will Live Off The Government Forever"

11 kids by 11 different fathers so she never has to work...

I'm shocked and speechless. Oh, there's lots I could say but not here...

Comments, please.

"SNAP Update: Millions Could Lose SNAP Benefits Today!"

Full screen recommended.

Snyder Reports, 10/31/25

"SNAP Update: 

Millions Could Lose SNAP Benefits Today!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "The World May Literally End Tomorrow!"

Dan, I Allegedly, 10/31/25

"The World May Literally End Tomorrow!"

"Are we on the brink of an economic crash? In today’s video, I sit down with Bob Kudla from Trade Genius to uncover the hidden signs of a potential economic meltdown - and how these shifts could impact YOU. From The Fed’s rate cuts and Bitcoin’s future to real estate struggles and skyrocketing food stamp usage, we’re breaking down the trends shaping our financial future. Plus, Bob shares tips on navigating the stock market during these uncertain times and making strategic moves to protect your wealth."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Grocery Items At Meijer You Should Buy Right Now!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 10/31/25

"Grocery Items At Meijer You Should Buy Right Now!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Oh, SNAP: The Waste, The Fraud, The Envy, And You’re Not Alone" (Excerpt)

"Oh, SNAP: The Waste, The Fraud, 

The Envy, And You’re Not Alone"

by John Wilder

Excerpt: "Each time the Trump Administration does something, they bubble things up to the public consciousness that The Powers That Be would rather people not think about. Yeah, Trump is part of The Powers That Be, but this .gov shutdown is exactly what I voted for. What have you missed during the shutdown? Oh, nothing? What if it went on for two months? Four? What if only the “essential” parts (ICE, the actual warfighting part of .mil, and... wait, I’m running out of essential) restarted?

It seems like we have discovered (this is not an original idea, /pol/ discusses this frequently) that SNAP (Sheer Nonsense And Plunder) is a program that works like this: Infinity illegal aliens are encouraged to come to the country to make cheap carbohydrates to feed to minorities so that Herculean medical efforts are expended to solve the problems caused by the cheap carbs.

Who profits?

 • Illegals.

• Farmers.
• Big Agribusiness, Big Soda, and Big Sloppa.
• Minorities (short term, until the untimely heart attack).
 •Hospitals.
• Doctors.
•Insurance Companies.

Is it all just a machine to turn your tax dollars into illegals, obesity, and corporate profits? You decide. Regardless, I think the Democrats will blink. Maybe. I sure hope not, I mean, this is what I voted for."

Full, extensively illustrated and most highly recommended article is here:

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

"National Guard Readies Reaction Forces For Riots In America, SNAPocalypse"

Jeremiah Babe, 10/31/25

"National Guard Readies Reaction Forces 

For Riots In America, SNAPocalypse"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Bill Bonner, "A Great Crime"

Click image for larger size.

Price-to-earnings rations for Nasdaq 100 stocks,

 including Palantir at 669, Source: Finviz.com

"A Great Crime"

by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "Boo! One of the ‘Best Costume’ prizes for this Halloween should go to Alex Karp, Investors’ Business Daily: "Palantir Stock Hits New Record High. Wedbush Analyst Says Split ‘Highly Likely.’ Investors are eyeing a stock split for Palantir Technologies [PLTR] amid its lofty valuation, said a Wall Street analyst in a third-quarter earnings preview. Palantir stock has gained 161% in 2025 and hit a record high on Wednesday. Palantir now trades with a P/E over 600. In what world does that make sense? Well...maybe in the sinister world of spooks, bubbles and AI.

Karp’s personal share of Palantir is worth $17 billion. ‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime,’ said Balzac. So, on this Halloween, let’s look at the monstrous thing Karp has done. From Karp’s book, "The Technological Republic": "In one experiment that tested the capabilities of GPT-4, the language model was asked how one could stack a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle, and a nail “onto each other in a stable manner”...The computer explained that one could “arrange the 9 eggs in a 3 by 3 square on top of the book, leaving some space between them,” and then “place the laptop on top of the eggs with the bottle going on top of the laptop and the nail on top of the bottle cap.” Wait a minute, he must have thought: ‘I bet the feds will pay a lot of money for this.’

Even in its most docile and domesticated form, AI can be put to destructive uses as well as beneficial ones. Could AI have helped Jeffrey Epstein blackmail more people? Could it have helped Hitler take Moscow or Madoff fleece more investors? What can it do for the ‘casta politica’ now? Palantir is a company that patriotically, profitably...and shamelessly...works for the feds. Some people even think it is a CIA front. Farrel Corcoran: "Palantir is now creating a surveillance nightmare for the future...At full stretch, Palantir Maven Smart Systems technology has its surveillance and intelligence-gathering capabilities fine-tuned in the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza and applied to finding human targets across the Strip. ICE can use it to track in real time the movements across the US of immigrants-of-interest. It fulfills the old dream of J Edgar Hoover to have complete dossiers on every citizen available to FBI field offices at a moment’s notice."

Alex Karp believes Silicon Valley has wasted its genius by providing customers with what they wanted. Laptops...apps...TikTok... ‘6-7’...he thinks these things are trivial...ephemeral...a ‘shallow engagement with the potential of technology.’ “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West,” he writes, disguising himself as a visionary hero. He thinks the West is marked by a ‘loss of national ambition’ and that it can be restored with more AI-assisted surveillance and firepower.

“The software industry should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face. The market...often fails to deliver what is most needed at the right time,” he explains. The ‘market’ is, of course, the aggregated wishes of everyone in it. How does it ‘fail?’ Says Karp: it does not make “any serious attempt to advance society, to ensure that human civilization [keeps] inching up the hill.”

And there you have it. All of those billions of people who express their own hopes and desires, through honest bid and ask - they are wasting their time. They don’t really know how to ‘advance society.’ But Karp does. Did society advance when Sparta burnt Athens to the ground? When Sherman burnt Atlanta? Was civilization inching up the hill, or sliding down it, when Candy Crush was developed? It’s because we have no way of knowing what represents an ‘advance’ or a ‘retreat’we have learned (since the days of Moses) to stick to the rules. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ was the order coming down from Mount Sinai.

Palantir uses AI to do what the KGB, the Stasi and the Gestapo used to do. It helps the feds keep track of people. It gathers ‘intel’ and analyses it. Its algorithms tell the feds who the ‘bad guys’ are and where to find them. Finally, it helps the feds get rid of their ‘troublesome priests,’ by providing “target identification.”

Karp looks back fondly on America’s greatest tech moment...the Manhattan Project. In that glorious frenzy of ‘national purpose,’ scientists, engineers and politicians came together to identify a target - Hiroshima – and turn it into a cinder. People go crazy from time to time. Sometimes, you have to stop them. But you need to be on guard, lest you go crazy too. Stay tuned."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Dark Tidings"

"Dark Tidings"

by Jim Kunstler

"The fake news isn’t reporting on Operation Arctic Frost. It’s not that they’re 

trying to cover it up but that they actually think it was totally normal and legitimate." 

-  Hans Mahncke

"Surely you’ve noticed in recent years just how gruesome the Halloween townscape has become with our competitive yard displays of giant skeletons, shrieking ghouls, corpses seeming to emerge from the crabgrass, and miscellaneous body parts strewn about the property. The symbolism seems pretty overt: America yearns to become a death cult.

The world has seen this before and it generally doesn’t end well. Something in their equivalent of the zeitgeist drove the Aztecs to sharply ramp-up the scale of their human sacrifices in the years just before Hernán Cortés came to their capital city, Tenochtitlán. Bernal Diaz, a foot-soldier in Cortés’s legion, later wrote: “I remember that they had in a plaza, where there were some shrines, so many places of dead skulls, which could be counted, according to the concert as they were set, that when they appeared they would be more than one hundred thousand; and I say again about one hundred thousand. And in another part of the square were as many rows of bones without meat, bones of the dead, that could not be counted; and they had in many beams many heads hanging from one part to another. And keeping those bones and skulls were three priests, who, as we understood, were in charge of them...“

Cortés had arrived in Mexico in April of 1519 with an expeditionary force of about 500 soldiers and by August of 1521, it was all over. He defeated the empire of a million Aztecs and commenced the systematic demolition of their monuments, including the horrifying great rack-of-skulls (tzompantli) where they displayed their thousands of trophies.

Sculpture of the skull rack in the Zocolo, 

site of the great Aztec temple, Mexico City.

Something - more precisely, some cabal of somebodies - is attempting to systematically demolish the social scaffold of our country now. It can’t just be the Soros network of NGOs. The best we can do to identify the central animating agent is the Deep State or Blob, a malignancy within our own organs of national management. It’s shaping up as a kind of American Armageddon, a battle between the forces of darkness and light, death and life. The battle has been going on for at least ten years, since Mr. Trump invaded the body politic - rather like when Cortés entered Mexico and set off a chain of events that ended the cruel and despotic culture embedded there. We’re acting out something along those lines now.

The death cult is vividly on display in our time and place. Minneapolis is poised to elect the skeletal-looking Somali Omar Fateh as its next mayor. The once-emblematic city of Garrison’s Keillor’s “above average,” relentlessly “nice” prairie folk was wrecked in 2020 in tribute to BLM’s patron saint, George Floyd, and has never recovered, written off as a national sacrifice zone for the sake of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Omar Fateh styles himself as a “Democratic Socialist.” This is the next new thing.

Omar Fateh on Right

Likewise, New York City is about to elevate the Ugandan Marxist Jihadi (and self-styled Democratic Socialist) Zohran Mamdani into the top job at city hall. As usual with this brand of insurrectionists - that is, persons bent on destroying our society - the label is yet another language game meant to scramble your brain.

You have probably not failed to notice the incessant recital of the phrase “our democracy” by Democratic Party field marshals starting with “Joe Biden” in the final months of his, uh, late performance. “Our democracy” has nothing to do, really, with citizen participation in governance. The phrase is a cover for their desperate power-seeking - for instance, the “nomination” of Kamala Harris with zero democratic voting procedure - in the service of preserving a vast empire of rackets that siphon taxpayer dollars into multitudinous NGOs and countless government programs that provide jobs and free stuff to an ever-growing class of parasitic dependents in the party’s thrall.

So, the next ploy upcoming will be the sequel to the “No Kings” demos of recent months: “The Fall of the Trump Fascist Regime” mass protest event planned for Washington, DC, on November 5, following election day. The stated idea is to surround the White House with millions of shrieking “Resistance” warriors to exorcise President Trump. The unstated idea is to provoke the president to invoke the Insurrection Act and thus, supposedly, demonstrate that he is a tyrant to their satisfaction.

More likely, if things get out of hand and violence erupts, the Resistance warriors and their Antifa shock troops - sure to be on-hand - will only prove that they are the actual insurrectionists. In which case, this time, expect arrests and indictments of the folks behind the extravaganza, with the prospect of pretty harsh penalties. (Are you listening, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, and friends?)

Meanwhile, the emerging scandal around the “Arctic Frost” scheme executed under “Joe Biden’s” DOJ to harass and persecute his admin’s political adversaries, takes shape as “worse than Watergate,” in the words of Senate Judiciary Committee chair Charles Grassley. Fresh evidence about this nefarious activity only reinforces the developing seditious conspiracy case that will be prosecuted out of the Southern District of Florida encompassing the entirety of treasonous acts from RussiaGate forward amounting to a long-running coup that never did manage to succeed, no matter how they keep at it.

You know the names of most of the major players involved, and ever more members of the supporting cast, lodged in the Deep State, are being revealed daily. Think of them when you see the ghouls and skeletons on display in America’s yards this Halloween eve."

- https://www.kunstler.com/p/dark-tidings

"Alert! Officials Moved To Safe Locations, Nuclear Detonation Planned, Russians Prepare Nuke Tests!"

Full screen recommended.

Prepper News, 10/30/25

"Alert! Officials Moved To Safe Locations, 

Nuclear Detonation Planned, Russians Prepare Nuke Tests!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/