John Wilder, "Self-Control, Scarlett Johansson, and Cigars: The Keys To Happiness"

"Self-Control, Scarlett Johansson, and Cigars: 

The Keys To Happiness"

by John Wilder

"There’s a dirty little secret nobody in 2025 wants to hear while they’re doom-scrolling on their $1,600 iPhone in a $6 latte haze of mild caffeination in a room filled with hipsters: If everything is awesome all the time, nothing is awesome ever again.

I’ll share an example. There’s a particular Macanudo Maduro® that I love. But if I smoke it every single day, by week three it’s just a brown mouth-trash I’d light up without thinking, same as a Swisher Sweet™. That ribeye, mashed potatoes, corn and, oh, yeah, baby, gravy I used to save for my birthday? Eat it nightly and suddenly it’s just Tuesday protein.

That OnlyFans™ subscription I swore was “art”? Congratulations, I’ve turned Scarlett Johansson’s doppelgänger into wallpaper. (I’ve never been on OnlyFans©, but wanted an excuse to show a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s, um, assets.)

If I do this, my brain now reads “epic” as “baseline.” That is how luxury murders my joy. It’s inflation, but inflation of things that should be spiritually uplifting. If I flood the zone with dopamine, suddenly nothing matters anymore. I become that guy who needs a $400 bottle of wine to feel what normal people feel from a $12 Malbec on a Saturday night dinner with someone they love.

I figured this out slowly. I asked myself, “Why don’t you like that Macanudo™ as much anymore?” I mean, I’ve never treated myself like a Roman emperor with a Costco card: steak whenever, cigars whenever, and Johnny Walker Blue© whenever. But the cigar pointed me towards thinking about what sparking joy is really about.

Sunday only: the good cigar. Monday and Wednesday: a reliable but unremarkable daily drivers. Perfectly fine, but not the king.What a difference!

That Sunday Maduro® became a religious experience. I’d finish putting Monday’s post (yes, I write Monday’s post on Sunday night because I don’t have time travel), hit the hot tub, light the good cigar, and actually taste every note - cedar, cocoa, black pepper, the tears of my enemies, all of it. The other days? I enjoyed the lesser sticks more because I knew something glorious was coming. As the dead Raul Julia said, “There are two things worth living for. One is a good cigar. The other is a better one.”

It’s the same with food, but that’s a future Friday post lurking six months to a year out. I’ll just say, my Friday dinner tastes far better than yours. This is the stoic hack nobody markets because you can’t sell it in a pump bottle or an app or a subscription: deliberate deprivation creates anticipation, and anticipation is the multiplier of pleasure. I can’t recreate the first time I ever had an experience, but I can create enough anticipation to make that experience feel pretty damn good.

The problem is we are a society that is now based on hedonism. Hedonism is spiritual communism: from each according to his credit limit, to each according to his appetite. And like all communist systems, it ends with everyone equally miserable, standing in bread lines for experiences that used to be thrilling.

Look around. We are the richest society in human history and somehow producing the most miserable humans in human history. Suicide rates, antidepressant prescriptions, anxiety, porn addiction, 340% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ because vanilla life is so boring they need a new operating system to feel anything and get attention from people who are stuck with their noses in their phones.

This is all downstream of one fatal error: We removed the delay between desire and gratification.

• Want food? DoorDash in six minutes.

• Want sex? Swipe.

•Want entertainment? Infinite scroll.

• Feel bad that someone in Guatemala doesn’t have Hulu®? Invite them all the Squatamalans to come to the United States. Hell, the government will even pay.

• Want validation? Post a thirst trap, harvest likes, repeat until dead inside.

Congratulations, you’ve removed the space where soul is honed to a keen edge! You’ve eliminated the Monday through Saturday of life, the part where you suffer, anticipate, work, wait, and gone straight to an endless Sunday that, paradoxically, feels like nothing at all.

Real joy is not the peak. Real joy is the climb knowing the peak exists. That’s why lifting weights is the ultimate red-pill metaphor for life. Nobody loves the squat rack at 5:30 a.m. in January. But every man who has ever built a body he’s proud of loves having built it. The soreness, the sacrifice, the mornings you didn’t feel like it. That’s the lead up to the Sunday cigar. The physique is just the flavor that hits when you finally light it. Same with marriage, family, wealth, mastery of anything worth doing.

There is no substitute for the iron. You do not get strong without moving heavy things repeatedly while in mild to moderate discomfort.

• You do not get wealthy without years of saying no to stupid purchases.

• You do not get a great marriage without years of not banging the secretary.

• You do not raise great kids without years of being the bad guy who enforces bedtimes.

Every single thing worth having in this life is on the far side of self-control. Which brings us to the trad-right punchline nobody wants to say out loud: our current societal upheaval is not a bug. It is a feature. We spent seventy years removing all friction from life and now we’re reaping the whirlwind of a generation that has never been told no, never waited for anything, never suffered real consequences. The result is not utopia. The result is boys who can’t change a tire, girls who think chastity and modesty are personality disorders, and an entire culture addicted to rage and victimhood because pleasure no longer works on them.

The pendulum is swinging back, hard. It’s swinging back because young men are waking up in droves, hitting the gym, deleting porn, deleting social media, reading the ancients, building families, and discovering something wild: When you voluntarily embrace the Monday through Saturday of life, the discipline, the wait, the work: Sunday actually shows up. And when Sunday shows up after six days of earning it, my God, it is glorious. This scares the GloboLeft so much they even call is fascism.

So, keep your constant luxury. Keep your endless treats, your participation trophies, your “you deserve it” culture. I’ll keep my three cigars a week, my Thursday dinner, my Sunday Macanudo™, and the deep, soul-level satisfaction that comes from knowing I earned every single drag as I stare out into the infinite horizon of the sky.

Because the secret the stoics knew, that our ancestors knew, that every man who ever built something great knew is this: Heaven is only Heaven if you’ve walked through Hell to get there. And brother, I plan on enjoying the hell out of that walk. See you on the other side. I’ll save you a seat. And a good cigar."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/18142-2/

Bill Bonner, "Everybody Loves A Ponzi"

Mugshot of Charles Ponzi, August 1920.

"Everybody Loves A Ponzi"

by Bill Bonner

"Perhaps there is still time to defeat history."

by Daniel Oliver

Baltimore, Maryland - "Mr. Oliver must be an unreconstructed optimist. An un-mugged Democrat. A man enjoying his first vote…or his second marriage. The history he is referring to is the one we know so well. It is the history of booms and busts…and of great nations laid low by the ‘fatal conceit’ of their leaders. All bubbles burst. All paper currencies become worthless. All empires decline and fall.

it is a repeatable, predictable, investable history – at least to some extent. That is, the actual course of future events – as determined by chance, ideas, culture and technology – is completely unknowable.

After all, who could have foreseen that a Serbian anarchist would have lit the fuse on the most devastating blow-up in human history…a war in which the most advanced nations on the planet fought to the death? The combatants had little to gain. And yet, they went at each other hammer and tongs…for four long years. And at the end of it, England and France were bankrupt. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was kaput. The House of the Hohenzollern was finished in Germany. And in Russia, the Tsar and his family were killed and a crackpot new creed – communism – took root.

But human action – the sturm and drang of human emotions…the cycles of greed and fear…and the pattern of life itself…from its promising beginnings to its inevitable decline and fall…blockheadishness, envy, fightin’ spirit, innovation…angels and devils - you can count on them all. They leave the footprints we know as ‘history.’ Follow them, if you can. The trouble with history is that it is unforgiving. Like double entry bookkeeping, for every credit, there’s a debit. Attached to every rise is a fall. You can’t get one without the other.

But let’s keep an open mind. The most glaring and immediate challenge for investors is the AI bubble. Moneywise: "With U.S. stocks powering higher, enthusiasm is running hot. But billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones says today’s environment is giving him flashbacks to the dot-com boom - and not in a warm, fuzzy and nostalgic way."

The historical pattern is undisputed. As more money is ‘invested’, prices rise. Investors’ gains go up. This draws in ‘momentum’ investors…and the returns go higher. So far this year, the Nasdaq has gained 28%. If you had borrowed at 5%, you’d have a 23% gain on money that you never earned or saved.

Everybody loves a good Ponzi! As it draws in more money, the excitement grows. The ‘investment’ becomes more profitable…more attractive…and appears less risky (everybody’s doing it!). And today, the CAPE ratio (cyclically adjusted price earnings) has only been at this level once before…in 1999. What next? As to the Ponzi scheme that doesn’t collapse,’ history is silent. There are none on record.

Busts trail behind bubbles…like alimony payments behind a runaway husband. The only exceptions are theoretical. Output could catch up. Then, there may be no need for a correction to return to a more normal price/earnings ratio. But it has never happened. Not with the promise of the ‘20s – internal combustion engines and electrical appliances. Nor with the promise of the ‘60s – the Nifty Fifty market dominators. Nor with the promise of the ‘90s – the dot.coms. Each time, there were successes…but not enough to avoid a broad market sell-off.

And this time, can AI pay off enough so that the markets ‘defeat history’ by not falling? ChatGPT tells us that the total invested in AI is around $1.5 trillion. Palantir, which uses AI to keep tabs on people, is selling for more than 100 times sales…and 400 times earnings. At those levels, it is not an investment; it’s a pure speculation. You are betting that other speculators will come in with more money…lifting the price even further.

In order to be a solid investment at a decent price, the company would have to increase output (earnings) by 30 times. That is what it would take to get to a ‘sustainable’ P/E. And, again, search the historical record all you want. You will find no substantial company that has ever done it. A tiny start-up can have dramatic growth in profits, sales, and its stock price; but not a company already valued at nearly half a trillion dollars. Even Apple, one of the most successful corporations in history, grew its sales by only 4x over the last 15 years.

What history shows is that normalcy is more likely to be achieved by a sharp fall in the price…rather than a spectacular rise in earnings. Defeat history? We wouldn’t count on it."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Jim Kunstler, "The Monsters' Ball"

"The Monsters' Ball"

by Jim Kunstler

"The old joke goes: A-list actor is having lunch with studio chief. Studio chief says, 'Didja hear so-and-so (well-known Hollywood agent) dropped dead this morning. His heart.' A-list actor says, 'Gee, I didn’t know he had one.'

Kind of brings to mind the late Veep Dick Cheney, who actually did have a heart, but one so grotesquely diseased that he had his first near-fatal infarction at age thirty-seven, followed by surgeries galore, and finally, at age 71, a heart transplant that, quite remarkably, kept him going another thirteen years - long enough to function behind-the-scenes as a senior Deep State cheerleader and strategist through the Trump years. Daughter Liz Cheney, of course, did the political dirty-work, most notably on Nancy Pelosi’s sketchy J-6 Committee, prior to being voted out of office in the 2022 Republican primary for Wyoming’s at-large U.S. House seat with 28.9 percent of the vote to Harriet Hageman’s 66.3 percent.

And so, yesterday, Dick Cheney’s funeral took place at Washington’s National Cathedral, the greatest assemblage of bloodsuckers since the Hammer Film Studio went out of business in 1979. Joe Biden was there, perky as all get-out for somebody with stage-four prostate cancer, shaking hands with Mike Pence, who pulled him over the finish line in 2021. John Brennan, coupster superbus was there. Ditto John Bolton (awaiting trial). Most cheekily of all, Dr. Fauci, the father of Covid-19 and its little helper, the Covid vaxx, was seated next to MSNBC’s loss-leader, Rachel Maddow, who famously declared in 2021, “The virus stops with every vaccinated person!” (Not.)

Also on hand, former president “W,” Mitch McConnell, Al Gore, Nancy P, Adam Schiff, Chief Justice Roberts, Veep-of-all-Veeps, Kamala Harris, and many more. Mysteriously absent: both Clintons and both Obamas - though Bill’s office explained that he had “a scheduling conflict.” Notably uninvited: President Donald Trump and Veep JD Vance, a downright snub, let’s be plain about it. And with it, perhaps a message: Behold the whole gang that has labored tirelessly for a whole decade to run you out of office and stuff you into a prison cell is here to gossip and plot against you some more! Nyah, nyah...

The contrast was pretty stark: MAGA against everybody else inside the DC Beltway. Mr. Trump was certainly at the funeral as a sort of spectral presence, since you can be sure that the only thing they were chattering about was how they were finally going to get him... somehow! (After years of spectacular failure and astonishing reversal-of-fortune.) You might also sense what desperation lurks behind their elitist bravado. Some of these birds are headed into court themselves, perhaps to prison. The prospect must seem acutely unreal to them.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has become the Scarlet Pimpernel of US political history, brave, intrepid, and resourceful, driven by a chivalric hatred of tyranny and injustice while seeming to be a comedian, mocking his persecutors as he escapes one plot after another. Don’t you wish you’d been a fly-on-the-wall at the funeral, and whatever after-party they were all at? The odor of fear must have been eye-watering.

The whole wicked business appears to be lurching toward crisis now as Mr. Trump works implacably to disassemble the treasonous scaffold they operate off of. At midweek, a claque of Democratic Party Senators and Congresspersons, led by former CIA-employee, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, released a social media video appearing to prompt mutiny in America’s armed forces. Their script implied that Mr. Trump was issuing illegal orders, which officers could (and should) refuse to carry out. They offered no examples of such illegal orders.

It’s probably safe to say that they want Americans to think that any order issued by Mr. Trump as Commander-in-chief is ipso facto illegal because... because... well, because Trump! And it is all of a piece with their former rallying cry “our democracy,” flaunted by the worst gang of ballot fraudsters, free speech squashers, and lawfare lizards ever seen in this land.

Mr. Trump responded a bit intemperately on his Truth Social platform, telling the claque that their seemingly seditious act could be answered with the death penalty. He was in error on that. That is the penalty for treason outright. The law on “seditious conspiracy,” US Code Title 18 § 2384, calls for a fine of not more than $250,000 ((adjusted for inflation under 18 US Code § 3571), and a maximum prison sentence up to twenty years.

Anyway, that stunt was not exactly a win for Party of Chaos, but it does make you wonder what their next move is going to be. A "Seven Days in May" style military coup, perhaps? More likely this was a lame rearguard action by a party in retreat and disarray. The angels of justice are coming for them and they know it, despite the machinations of their allied judges to gum up every earnest Article II effort attempted since 1/20/25 to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Even while the people try to settle into the cradle of Thanksgiving hearth and harvest, the wicked creep around setting their traps."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

"The US Economy Is In Big Trouble, Consumers Are Broke"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 11/20/25

"The US Economy Is In Big Trouble, 

Consumers Are Broke"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Grocery Stores Selling Fake Food Products As Prices Explode All Around America"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 11/20/25

"Grocery Stores Selling Fake Food Products 

As Prices Explode All Around America"

"Something's not right with our food in America and people are finally starting to notice. From cloned meat and lab grown products in grocery stores showing up without our knowledge, to declining food quality and prices that keep exploding, our food system is changing in ways most people don't even realize. In this video, we look at what's really happening with our food supply, the lack of transparency, the quality issues people are experiencing, and the rising costs that are making it harder to feed our families every single week. If you've felt like something's off when you're shopping, or you've wondered why food doesn't taste like it used to, you're not alone. It's time we start asking questions about what we're eating and where it comes from."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Mike Oldfield, "Tubular Bells Finale"

Mike Oldfield, "Tubular Bells Finale"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Wisps like this are all that remain visible of a Milky Way star. About 7,000 years ago that star exploded in a supernova leaving the Veil Nebula. At the time, the expanding cloud was likely as bright as a crescent Moon, remaining visible for weeks to people living at the dawn of recorded history. Today, the resulting supernova remnant, also known as the Cygnus Loop, has faded and is now visible only through a small telescope directed toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

The remaining Veil Nebula is physically huge, however, and even though it lies about 1,400 light-years distant, it covers over five times the size of the full Moon. The featured picture is a Hubble Space Telescope mosaic of six images together covering a span of only about two light years, a small part of the expansive supernova remnant. In images of the complete Veil Nebula, even studious readers might not be able to identify the featured filaments."

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

Chet Raymo, “Non-overlapping?”

“Non-overlapping?”

by Chet Raymo

“Let me posit a difference between religion and science:

Religion: Future>Present>Past

Science: Past>Present>Future.

Let me explain. Religion, as it has traditionally been understood in its institutional guise, begins with the dream of a comforting future. An escape from the apparently inescapable reality of death. Which impacts our daily lives in the present. Determines, for example, codes of morality, inspires great deeds of goodness or mayhem. Mandates rites and rituals. Appease the gods and live forever. Which requires a story to satisfy the human need for context. So we look to past reports of foundational miracles. Christ rising from the dead. Muhammad's night flight to Jerusalem. Joseph Smith's encounter with the angel Moroni.

Science, on the other hand, begins with the past. With sequences of events that appear to be causally related. The causal connection is affirmed or refuted by experiment. If such-and-such occurred in certain circumstances in the past, does it also occur in the present? We devise quantitative "laws of nature" that express our consistent experience with the past. Which can be extrapolated to predict probable futures.

Stephen Jay Gould called religion and science "non-overlapping magisteria." But they run in opposite directions in our minds. The a priori future of religion is not the same as the a posteriori future predicted by science. Nor is the a posteriori past promulgated by religion susceptible to the a priori examination of science. The opposing intellectual streams of religion and science may be non-overlapping, but the "real" worlds they hypothesize are sharply divergent. Some folks manage to hold both worlds in their minds simultaneously. To me this smacks of cognitive dissonance. For those who can pull it off, more power to them - as long as they don't restrict my freedom to dissent.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Live All You Can..."

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much

matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.

If you haven't had that, what have you had?"

- Henry James

Col. Larry Wilkerson, "Hezbollah Rising - Israel Is In Serious Trouble"

A brutally horrifying must-view, and YOU, 

Americans, are paying for it all!

Col. Larry Wilkerson, 11/20/25

"Hezbollah Rising - 

Israel Is In Serious Trouble"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Hell..."

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

- C. JoyBell C.

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

enough to keep us from escaping." Look at the world... look right around you.

I believe he may be right...

Dan, I Allegedly, "America Can’t Afford to Eat - What’s Next?"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 11/20/25

"America Can’t Afford to Eat - What’s Next?"

"The shocking truth about food prices right now is hitting everyone hard. In this video, I’m sharing insights on how inflation, tariffs, and the current economy are making everyday essentials unaffordable for many. From skyrocketing grocery bills to restaurants struggling to keep customers, these are the challenges we’re all facing. Plus, I’ll break down what recent government actions mean for you and why relief is still weeks away."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Philadelphia’s Homeless Crisis 2025: Inside Kensington’s Hidden Collapse & Broken Lives"

Full screen recommended if you can stomach it.

US Homeless Stories, 11/20/25

"Philadelphia’s Homeless Crisis 2025:

 Inside Kensington’s Hidden Collapse & Broken Lives"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"US Unemployment Rises As Americans Prepare For A Recession"

Full screen recommended.

Snyder Reports, 11/20/25

"US Unemployment Rises 

As Americans Prepare For A Recession"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

@RD-ce6bb: "We have been in a recession since 2022, 

we are now approaching Depression."

The Daily "Near You?"

Georgetown, Maine, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Paulo Coelho, "Walking the Path"

"Walking the Path"

by Paulo Coelho

"I reckon that it takes about three minutes to read my text. Well, according to statistics, in that same short period of time 300 people will die and another 620 will be born. It takes me perhaps half an hour to write a text: here I sit, concentrating on my computer, books piled up beside me, ideas in my head, the scenery passing by outside my window. Everything seems perfectly normal all around me; and yet, during these thirty minutes, 3,000 people have died and 6,200 have just seen the light of the world for the first time.

Where are all those thousands of families who have just begun to weep over the loss of some dear one, or else laugh at the arrival of a son, grandson or brother? I stop and reflect for a while: perhaps many of these deaths are reaching the end of a long, painful sickness, and some persons are relieved that the Angel has come for them. Besides these, in all certainty hundreds of children who have just been born will be abandoned in a minute and transferred to the death statistics before I finish this text.

What a thought! A simple statistic that I came upon by chance – and all of a sudden I can feel all those losses and encounters, smiles and tears. How many are leaving this life, alone in their rooms, without anyone realizing what is going on? How many will be born in secret, only to be abandoned at the door of shelters or convents? And then I reflect that I was part of the birth statistics and one day I will be included in the toll of the dead. How good that is to be fully aware that I am going to die. Ever since I took the road to Santiago I have understood that although life goes on and we are eternal, one day this existence will come to an end.

People think very little about death. They spend their lives worried about really absurd things, putting things off and leaving important moments aside. They risk nothing because they believe that is dangerous. They grumble a lot, but act like cowards when it is time to take certain steps. They want everything to change, but they themselves refuse to change. If they thought a little more about death, they would never fail to make that telephone call that they have been putting off. They would be a little more crazy. They would not be afraid of the end of this incarnation – because you cannot be afraid of something that is going to happen anyway.

The Indians say: “today is as good a day as any other to leave this world”. And a sorcerer once remarked: “may death be always sitting beside you. That way, when you have to do something important, it will give you the strength and courage you need.” I hope, reader, that you have accompanied me this far. It would be silly to let the subject scare you, because sooner or later we are all going to die. And only those who accept this are prepared for life."

- http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"

"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour 

and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"

by Maria Popova

“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease - for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude.

The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit - James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) - explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.

In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon - an old high school friend of his - to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book "Nothing Personal" (public library). Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits - of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age - and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope - are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”

At no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes:

"Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed."

It is a fearful speculation - or, rather, a fearful knowledge - that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.

Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives and a century after Tchaikovsky found beauty amid the wreckage of the soul at 4AM, Baldwin adds: "Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it - life - one more time?"

After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay - lyrics from “Long Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” - Baldwin continues: "I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."

That alone, Baldwin insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a “yea-sayer” to life - to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill this blink of existence bookended by nothingness with the courage of a bellowing aliveness.

In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem “Wait,” composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, Baldwin writes: "For, perhaps - perhaps - between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct - I believe -causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death."

And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith - so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, Baldwin argues, at four AM: "At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor - the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self - death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. And many of us perish then."

What then? A generation after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart, Baldwin offers: "But if one can reach back, reach down - into oneself, into one’s life - and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality - oneself - which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again."

Baldwin - whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in introducing his last public appearance before his death - wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try - we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves.

Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that “we must believe, without fear, in people,” Baldwin adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours: "Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost."

More than half a century later, "Nothing Personal" remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before Baldwin, on how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit, then revisit Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority, how he learned to truly see, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, his advice on writing, his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book."

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

o

Freely download "Nothing Personal", 

by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, here:

- https://monoskop.org/

o

Bessie Smith, "Long Old Road" (1931)

“7 Best Shakespeare Insults”

“7 Best Shakespeare Insults”

by The Huffington Post

"You should be women and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so." Shakespeare employs this biting insult in "Macbeth" to establish the complete and utter repulsiveness of the three witches. Their "withered and wild" features cause Macbeth and Banquo to question if the sisters are even human beings.

"Methinks thou art a general offence, and every man should beat thee. I think thou wast created for men to breathe themselves upon you." In "All's Well That Ends Well," Lafeu hits infamous liar and coward Porolles with this blunt put-down after being finally fed up with his antics. Although, knowing Porolles and his mischievous ways, he probably deserved the jab.

"I must tell you friendly in your ear, sell when you can, you are not for all markets." Beggars can't be choosers is the modern way of getting this point across, but Shakespeare's version is far more biting. "As You Like It" showcases Shakespeare's gift of saying the meanest of things in the most eloquent ways in this insult Rosalind doles out to Phebe.

"Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver'd, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way." Possibly the most elaborate jab he has ever written, Shakespeare pulls out all the stops in "King Lear" when the Earl of Kent replies to Oswald's innocent question of, "What dost thou know me for?" with nearly every insult in the book. And if that verbal attack wasn't enough to put Oswald down, the Earl of Kent proceeds to physically beat him!

"I'll beat thee, but I should infect my hands." In Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens," protagonist Timon and his least favorite dinner companion, Apemantus, insult each other to no end in a verbal smack-down that lasts half of the scene. While Apemantus tries to rally with comebacks as cruel as, "A plague on thee! Thou are too bad to curse," it seems Timon reigns supreme with this precise one-liner.

"Away, you cut-purse rascal! you filthy bung, away! By this wine, I'll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps, an you play the saucy cuttle with me. Away, you bottle-ale rascal! you basket-hilt stale juggler, you!" This put-down was said by prostitute Doll Tearsheet, who was notorious for having a sharp tongue, to Pistol in Act II of "Henry IV Part II."

"Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood." King Lear calls his daughter, Regan, these terrible names only to revoke his insult and promise not to punish her. Regardless of how fast he apologizes to her for his spiteful words, it's still a grade-A insult.”

- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

"How It Really Is"

MORALS? This is 'Murica, fool! "Morals? We ain't got no morals. 

We don't need no morals. I don't have to show you any stinking morals!"

Concept gleefully stolen from here:

"All Earthly Empires Die"

"All Earthly Empires Die"

by Bill Bonner

"'Amor fati' was Nietzsche’s famous expression. It is a Latin phrase with connections to the Stoic writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Literally translated, it means “love of fate.” It is a white shoe yearning for mud. It is a turkey looking forward to Thanksgiving. Or an investor stoically preparing for a bear market.

We use the term to describe the grace and courage you need to meet a complex, unknowable, and uncontrollable future. You don’t know whether the Earth is warming or cooling… whether it is good or bad… or whether you can do anything about it. You don’t know who’s doing “equal work.” You don’t know what equality is… how to measure it… or what to do about it. You don’t know who the bad guy is. It may even be you. It recognizes that we are all God’s fools, living in a world of ignorance, headed towards we don’t know where. Using our brains, we can make progress in our physical, material world. Technical thinking yields pyramids and Eiffel Towers.

Ignorance Everywhere: But there is another part of life, which has a mind of its own. It does not bend readily to our desires or yield to our intelligence. It is the part of life whose purposes are unknown. The first and most important Commandment, according to Jesus, was not to fight it, but to love it.

But ignorance can be a charm. You just have to take it seriously. And appreciate it. Recognizing your own ignorance will inform your newfound modesty. You will be aware of it. And fiercely proud. Nobody will be humbler than you are! And since you are so chummy with ignorance, you will see it everywhere – in every headline, every public announcement, every speech on the floor of the Senate… and every crackpot comment from every dummy voter in the empire.

In private affairs, you reduce uncertainty by getting as close to the subject as possible. That is, you avoid secondhand “news” and try to find out for yourself. The more you know about a company, for example, the more confident you can be about investing in it. That’s why the insiders always have the inside track, an advantage that is increased by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s phony “level playing field” propaganda. In public affairs – policy discussions, economics, politics – as you get closer, you become less cocksure. That is, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

In an interesting university study, people were asked to pick out Ukraine on a map… and whether they approved of military intervention in that country. Curiously, the further off they were on the geography (the average guess was 1,800 miles off), the more they favored forceful intervention. In public affairs, ignorance and confidence vary inversely.

Moral Certainty: When we first moved to Baltimore in the 1980s, we noticed this phenomenon in another context. Baltimore was a disaster. Crime, drugs, poverty, venereal disease, broken homes, unwed mothers, corruption – name a social problem; Baltimore had it. And while its leaders had been noticeably unable to solve any of these problems right in their own back yard, the city’s politically correct politicians were loud and clear on one issue: apartheid had to end… in South Africa. Had they ever visited South Africa? Could they find it on a map? Probably not. But they were sure they knew how to make it a better place.

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority,” wrote Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken. “The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”

“I am not too sure,” would eliminate many of the world’s myth-driven, self-inflicted ills – pointless wars, dumb arguments, pogroms, persecutions, and lynchings. And reckless spending of other people’s money.

Imagine a wise Hitler entertaining the idea of building Auschwitz as a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” “Hmmm… I’m not too sure that would solve it… In fact, I’m not too sure there is a problem!”

Imagine Simon de Montfort readying to attack the town of Albi to exterminate the “heretics.” When told that half the people in the town were good Catholics, de Montfort replied: “Kill them all. God will recognize His own.” Suppose he had thought twice… “Hmmm… Maybe this is not such a good idea… Maybe killing people is not what Christianity is all about… Maybe the heretics aren’t so bad… Maybe I’ll take the afternoon off.”

Unwarranted Confidence: The barroom blowhard… so sure he is right about everything… is generally the dumbest guy in the place. And the most dangerous. He’s the one who will stir up a mob… and get himself elected president. The whole system of modern public policy is built on false knowledge and unwarranted confidence. The elite claims to know what is best for you. That is how every politician can claim his proposals would “benefit the American people.” But the only program that would benefit the American people would be to let them decide for themselves what would benefit them. Give them back their money. Stop bossing them around. End the wars. Stop the empire. But who would suggest such a thing?

A book that appeared in 2018, "Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy", by political scientist Christopher Fettweis, argued that power really does corrupt, and that when a nation or an empire gets too much power, its elite develops new opinions.

Rather than seeing itself as one of many nations that must get along with each other, its elites begin to see that they have a special role to play. They become the one, “indispensable” nation, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it. They are the world’s only hope in combatting evil, which they do, as current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo elaborated, with “the righteous knowledge that our cause is just, special, and built upon America’s core principles.”

Thus endowed with a special mission and special powers, and subject to the special rules of the only nation with a trillion-dollar-per-year military/empire budget, the elite develop, in Fettweis’s judgment, a fatal combination of unrestrained hubris, unrealistic paranoia, and unrepentant ignorance. They see danger everywhere, without undertaking any serious study (they assume knowledge comes automatically with raw power). And they think they have not only the right, but the means, to do something about it, even if the danger is largely fantasy.

Damned to Hell: But people always come to think what they need to think when they need to think it. “All earthly empires die,” wrote St. Augustine in 413, a few years before the Vandals destroyed his city and finally brought down the Roman Empire in the West.

The elite contribute, by taking up the myths that help it die. Certainty and ignorance vary proportionally, both on the individual and on a national level. The surer a nation is of its myths… its exceptionalism… its manifest destiny… its policies… and its position at the right hand of God… the more it is damned to Hell."

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

by Charles Hugh-Smith

"Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people. This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the Antonine Plague of 165 AD.

The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests which reduced the caloric intake of most people, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague which swept Europe in 1347.

I’ve mentioned the book "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire" a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization. It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.

In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor. The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Kondratieff and others, and Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations. All three are playing out globally in the present.

In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues: the rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.

Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma. Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 30 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.

Now the plan–for lack of any real plan–is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.

Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.

Which brings us to luck. As a general rule, historians seek explanations which leave luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and action and cycles. Yes, cycles and human action influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.

If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors, then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history. It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power in the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse. That was good judgement by Pius but also good luck.

As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs. (A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud but without the water vapor/steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of sea water, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.) That was bad luck for the dinosaurs, and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.

The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)

In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us. We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control–technology, wise investments and policies, etc. The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.

We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.

I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, "Born Under a Bad Sign" (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” The next few years might have us singing this line with feeling."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com

o

Albert King, "Born Under a Bad Sign"

"The Ice Baron's Lament"

"The Ice Baron's Lament"

by Stucky

"The drums are silent. The instruments are tarnished. The band no longer plays. Only hubris is triumphant. Once upon a time there were ice barons who made vast fortunes from Maine and Great Lakes ice. Some moved on. Others did not. The ones who did not lost everything.

Uncle Sam sits by the river, gaunt and hollow-eyed, his knees drawn up beneath threadbare clothes that once spoke of dominance. The brim of his tattered top hat curls in the wind, frayed at the edges like the promises that built him. Behind him, a shrinking block of ice melts into trickles - his fortune washing back into the eternal water that gave it birth. He was once worth millions. Certain of his vision. Master of winter itself.

He kept to his industry even as it polluted the waters, even as the ice turned dark and filthy with the same progress that made him rich, even as refrigeration arrived quietly in distant cities to render his empire obsolete. He built warehouses to hold millions of tons, employed armies of workers who cut geometric patterns across frozen surfaces, and watched his wealth compound until it seemed as eternal as the seasons. But he couldn’t see - or refused to see - that he was harvesting something temporary and calling it forever.

Now he gazes at the river with hollow eyes, defeated by life, knowing there is nothing left but the past to comfort him. His workers are gone. His warehouses stand empty. His expertise is worthless. All that remains is memory and the bitter knowledge that he was right about everything except the one thing that mattered: nothing lasts.

This is the human story. This is the story of the United States. For two centuries, he built empire after empire on extraction and innovation - each cycle making him great while containing the seeds of its own destruction. Agriculture to textiles to steel to automobiles to electronics - each wave created fortunes, employed millions, and seemed permanent until it wasn’t. Each time, something new arose to catch the falling workers, making the destruction feel creative rather than terminal.

But now he sits by the river watching the ice melt, and there is nothing left to become. The jobs being destroyed outnumber the jobs being created for the first time in his history. He polluted his own rivers - financially, politically, socially - through the same industrial ambition that built his wealth. He believed scale and dominance meant permanence. He refused to adapt when the warnings became obvious, doubling down on systems already failing, convinced that tradition and might would defeat innovation.

The drums are silent. The instruments are tarnished. The band no longer plays. Only hubris is triumphant - but it came from the gods. The Greek curse, the truth of humanity: we mistake a moment’s dominance for eternal power, build empires on shifting ice, and convince ourselves the cold will never break. We see the melting, feel the fortune trickling away, and still we sit - knees drawn up, clothes threadbare, hat brim tattered - gazing at water that once froze reliably and now barely chills.

Behind Uncle Sam, the chunk of ice that represented industrial dominance, middle-class prosperity, and global supremacy dissolves into the river. Trickle by trickle, his fortune returns to water. He built an empire on ice and refused to believe in thermodynamics. Now he sits among the ruins, and all that remains is the past to comfort him.

The ice baron’s fate is America’s fate - watching our fortune melt back into the river, knowing this time it’s not coming back, understanding too late that we harvested something temporary and called it forever. We doubled down when we should have pivoted. We polluted what sustained us. We mistook our moment for eternity.

That is the human story. That is the Greek curse. That is the truth of hubris triumphant - until the gods demand their price, and winter refuses to freeze, and empires built on ice return to water.

The river flows on, indifferent and eternal. The ice shrinks behind him. Uncle Sam sits motionless, gaunt and defeated, watching his reflection ripple in the current - a ghost of glory, a monument to the illusion that dominance is destiny. The cold has broken. The empire melts. And there is nothing left but the haunting silence of drums that will never sound again."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Background: the Knickerbocker Ice Company, the Hudson Valley’s dominant ice empire. Knickerbocker controlled massive operations - three ice houses at Rockland Lake alone held nearly 100,000 tons when Thomas Edison filmed them in 1902. They hung on through the 1910s and early 1920s, watching their industry slowly die as home refrigerators replaced iceboxes and dry ice emerged as a superior transport method. By 1909, pollution had become so severe that the state Department of Health condemned 41 ice houses around Albany, Troy, and Rensselaer. Unlike Morse, who saw the writing on the wall and diversified, Knickerbocker’s owners remained committed to natural ice - and watched their empire melt into the river that had built it."

o

Full screen recommended.

"Ice Harvesting at Rockland Lake"

"Rockland Lake, near the Hudson River about 25 miles north of New York City, was the largest natural ice harvesting operation of the Knickerbocker Ice Company, which was the most prominent ice purveyor at the turn of the 20th Century, when these Thomas Edison films were shot. The three ice houses stored close to 100,000 tons of ice, which were loaded onto barges that made their way down the Hudson to New York City. Today, Rockland Lake is a New York State Park, and the home of the Knickerbocker Ice Festival."